Speaking as someone with an undergraduate degree in Economics and a PhD in Sociology, the world would be far better off if we called those disciplines a “humanity”. They both have been captured by neoliberal number crunchers and used to cause far more harm than good upon society (the former almost completely, the latter to a much lesser degree).
4 Likes
You don’t like the guys books because he had psychological issues and a drug problem because he was most likely “self medicating”? Sheesh.
5 Likes
You lost me at “NeoLiberal”
I haven’t read it in about 16 years, but I thought he more-or-less acknowledged this in Valis, where it was actually part of the story.
Radio Free Albemuth’s the one that’s really stuck with me, though.
7 Likes
No, I really do like his books. But I felt like maybe reading them was like pointing and staring at someone with severe problems. He was laying his life bare on the pages and I thought it was just fun fiction. I don’t like to know that he was suffering.
2 Likes
Maybe I’m wrong, but most of us “”artists” are kind of “wrought” if you will. I can think of numerous “tortured souls” across the entire spectrum of arts that have given the world countless gifts. It’s ok to appreciate that we can lay life bare. It can be very difficult to mange, but exploring the depths of humanity is important work and it can’t all be simply imagined. The truly “real” stuff has come from personal experience.
1 Like
As Terry Pratchett would say, you’ve gone down the wrong trouser leg of time.
3 Likes
They had a shipment in at my local Safeway, but they sold out almost immediately.
5 Likes
Yes, perhaps being good at writing doesn’t guarantee that one is good at living.
I’ve checked out other worlds. Hard to breathe there but we’ll get Earth in the same state pretty soon. When Earth gets bad enough, humanity will HAVE to migrate off-planet, maybe before the next extinction-event asteroid strike. Doesn’t matter – with or without humanity, Earth will abide. All hail our cockroach successors!
I don’t really disagree. I think the shock was to me, I thought I knew which authors were tortured souls and which ones were just having a good time, so finding out about PKD was kind of hard for me.
3 Likes
It’s more like a Mira Grant. Have I mentioned she’s fond of the “everybody dies” ending. But there’s a very real Kingdom of Needle and Bone about our current reality.
That’s depressing to me. I mean, i guess the Matrix was written as a metaphor, but it’s no wonder that “Red Pill” was adopted by reactionaries who wanted to deny reality rather than people who wanted to actually see it. Unless I’ve lost my mind, Baudrillard wasn’t writing about Simulation Hypothesis, their writing was about the way we build simulations for ourselves out of the actual reality we share as a way of justifying political philosophies that plainly don’t accord with that actual reality.
Specifically Baudrillard wrote about what Philip K Dick said above, the destruction of history. But not by some computer-scientist-God who programmed reality, by us.
8 Likes
I haven’t been able to finish Valis because of that. I first tried to read it when a close friend was drifting away into madness and some of the things they described experiencing were unsettlingly similar to the transcendental beam of pink light that fried the main characters early on. Coupled with the self-destructive habits of some characters, I was struck by the question what if this kind of madness is contagious? and, having seen firsthand what that can do to people, I put the book down and haven’t been able to return to it. Maybe there’s wisdom or peace later on in the novel, but the bleak cynical paranoia of the first 20% was too pervasive to have much hope of an optimistic outcome.
2 Likes
All other comments aside, it is worth reading Stanislaw Lem’s thoughts on PKD:
https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
The space that that he’s writing about isn’t supposed to be futuristic or realistic, but human experience.
3 Likes
Seems to me PKD read very widely. He may not have had the hard science chops, but he experienced the philosophies firsthand in altered states… but man does his V.A.L.I.S talk ever sound like he’s channeling the love child of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Makes me wonder why the hell people followed L. Ron Hubbard when PKD was clearly already giving plot spoilers of the film Tenet, which wouldn’t be shown in theatres for over 40 years.
2 Likes
Elon Musk just endorsed Kanye West for president
2 Likes
Have you checked out the 2010 film? Alanis Morrrisette as the gnostic revolutionary pop singer alien wisdom conduit is something to behold.
1 Like
I only remember her as God.
2 Likes
