luka

Well-known member
Maybe he met a lot of vampiric women. woops has met a lot like that. One of them gives all her boyfriends cancer. (Woops escaped somehow)
 

luka

Well-known member
I talk to version about this sometimes. The very narrow bandwidth of the benevolent universe
 

luka

Well-known member
That we depend on a very fragile golidilocks state to suStain the impression of a tolerably benign universe
 

luka

Well-known member
And it doesn't take much to throw that off kilter and leave us stranded and afraid in a very different, oppressive, threatening universe. One that, as Mark says, is cheap, flimsy. Leering carnival faces from an Ensor painting.

A night or two on speed or coke and hurl me into those places sometimes for months so I'm not surprised Dick lived there full time.
 

version

Well-known member
One thing that really struck me back when I went on a big PKD reading binge in my teens was how vitriolic his dislike of (some) women was. He's a bit like D. H. Lawrence in that: some of his most psychically villainous characters are women who are portrayed as total energy vampires, poisonous neurotics, a menace to the well-being of all around them. It's something other than standard or straightforward misogyny (although I think it is misogynistic), because it meshes in a particular way with the paranoiac worldview. That which was supposed to be a source of comfort and nurture in the world has become its opposite, an intensely localised symptom of the wrongness of reality in general.

That went beyond the page, iirc. I've heard he was a wife beater.
 

other_life

bioconfused
No
A self crystallises around
No
A self is a discipline
A refusing

אַיִן: Name of the Highest Level, Above Height and Above Level. The pregnant emptiness, above even the very negation of limits. "We forget that the spaces between people and things are empty."

וְאָדָם אַיִן לַעֲבֹד אֶת-הָאֲדָמָה (Genesis 2:5)
"W'Adam Ayin" - "And the Earthling is Nothing..."

וַיִּפֶן כֹּה וָכֹה וַיַּרְא כִּי אֵין אִישׁ וַיַּךְ אֶת-הַמִּצְרִי וַיִּטְמְנֵהוּ בַּחוֹל (Exodus 2:12)
"Wa'yar'e ki Ayin 'Ish" - "and he sees that Not is the Mortal..."

וְאִם-אֵין לָאִישׁ גֹּאֵל (Numbers 5:8)
"W'im-'Ein la'Ish Go'el" - and if Not to the Mortal is there a Redeemer..."

no alien gods, no mysteries. show and prove that it is you.
 

version

Well-known member
"Dick was a schizophrenic. Dick was a paranoiac. Dick is one of the ten best American writers of the 20th century, which is saying a lot. Dick was a kind of Kafka steeped in LSD and rage. Dick talks to us, in The Man in the High Castle, in what would become his trademark way, about how mutable reality can be and therefore how mutable history can be. Dick is Thoreau plus the death of the American dream. Dick writes, at times, like a prisoner, because ethically and aesthetically he really is a prisoner. Dick is the one who, in Ubik, comes closest to capturing the human consciousness or fragments of consciousness in the context of their setting; the correspondence between what he tells and the structure of what’s told is more brilliant than similar experiments conducted by Pynchon or DeLillo."
 
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version

Well-known member
Started 'Valis' today. Miles better than 'Do Androids...' (the only one I've read) thus far. Love the way he's inserted bits of the exegesis into it. Not entirely sure how much of it's autobiographical and how much is fiction. There's a bit in the first chapter where he stops and says he's Horselover Fat and talking in the third person for objectivity and at first I wasn't sure whether it was yet another layer and he was saying the narrator was Horselover Fat so it went "HF -> Nameless Narrator -> PKD" or whether he was talking as himself so there's just Horselover Fat and PKD. I'm pretty sure it's the latter now.

The stuff about Rome, the plasmate etc is bonkers. The last bit I read was him in the psych ward talking to Dr. Stone who seems to know what he's on about and starts talking about the Gnostic library, Xenophanes, The Logos and stuff and ends up reinforcing his 'insanity'.

Also noticed the name 'Wintermute' cropping up at one point. I'm assuming this is where Gibson got it from.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I really like Valis.. and agree with the fiction/real overlap, it's in that book it becomes overt but I think a lot of the time Dick thought he was writing autobiographically.
 

version

Well-known member
I know he was hospitalised irl and experienced the pink light and wrote the exegesis and all that, but I don't know whether he started thinking, speaking and reading Latin on acid in the 60s or whether the stuff about common Greek's true.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Me either, but I think in general, regardless of whether or not x or y was true, he thought it was, which gives the books a certain urgency that other, more brainy, abstract, sci-fi doesn't possess.
 

version

Well-known member
Read a bit more earlier. Actually reminds me of 'Inherent Vice' quite a bit. Wonder how much PKD Pynchon's read. They're both heavily into that 60s/70s California paranoia. The last bit I read was Fat being berated by his Israeli ex-commando and gun runner therapist.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Interesting, I never really thought of them as similar but they do both have paranoia arguably behind everything - Dick especially.
I read some interesting stuff about him trying to link up with Lem but his paranoia and grasping for money ruined that one.
 

version

Well-known member
There's some weird sci-fi stuff in 'Inherent Vice' that's absent from the film and which people seem to forget's in the book too. There's a whole bit about Doc being an alien who can pass through walls, also lots of stuff about the lost continent of Lemuria rising up out of the sea.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I have read it but you're right I don't remember the thing about being an alien, do remember the Lemuria stuff though. Vaguely.
 

version

Well-known member
I read some interesting stuff about him trying to link up with Lem but his paranoia and grasping for money ruined that one.
Yeah, @droid posted a link about that in one of the older threads. He thought Lem was a collective of agents or something and reported him to the FBI.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
What a wanker! You would think that would be a betrayal of everything he stood for.
I think I read something more from Lem's perspective, quite sad really as enthusiasm turned to disillusionment.
 

version

Well-known member
I have read it but you're right I don't remember the thing about being an alien, do remember the Lemuria stuff though. Vaguely.
There's also a section about these things called 'zomes' in the desert which people enter and never return from, supposedly falling through time, space, other dimensions, who knows.
 

version

Well-known member
There's loads of great stuff in 'Inherent Vice' tbh. It's underwhelming next to stuff like GR at first, but reveals more and more over time: counterfeit bills pulled out of the sea with Nixon's face on, a sex ring that leads back to the governor, COINTELPRO, Doc being an alien, Lemuria, the rot beneath the surface of the whole wellness thing in California, police assassinations, FBI involvement in Vegas and all sorts. A lot of it real.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
But - correct me if I'm wrong - isn't the Lemuria stuff part of some kind of extended hallucination or something rather than a literal part of the story? Either way, I can why it had to be snipped from the film.
That bit about Zomes reminds me of (your favourite) Neil Stephenson's book The Diamond Age - there is this weird cult called The Drummers and people get sucked into one of their bases where they spend years having orgies and become part of this sort of organic computer, passing viruses to each other which, when they emerge a decade later and (I think) in a different place, they can then transfer to other bases.
 
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