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Re: OT- literature
At 8:59 AM -0700 9/24/08, Kevin Cheli-Colando wrote:
>
>And as someone pointed out Ubik by Philip K. Dick, I would also add
>Valis and the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch as crucial though
>you could do worse than reading all his novels. PKD has the
>capacity to cause a major shift in your persepctives if you're not
>careful.
No f*cking sh*t: I'll give a big +1000 to that last sentence! I was
already a pretty big fan of Dick's and had read quite a bit of his
stuff.
And then I hit "Valis".
I know I've a talent for hyperbole, but that book got my head messed
up for the best part of a year -- like a bad case of carsickness or a
mild hangover that just won't go away. And it got worse as I worked
through the rest of the trilogy ("Valis", "Divine Invasion", and "The
Transmigration of Timothy Archer"). It wasn't until I finally
followed those three with "Radio Free Albemuth" that I started to
pull it back together again. For some reason, that last book
(although it was the first written of the four, but published
posthumously) acted as a benediction, a coffin nail on that whole
chapter.
PKD is fascinating, but he occasionally also offers glimpses of raw
entropy -- the effects of the universe and everything connected to it
gradually rotting to pieces before your eyes. You can see it near
the end of the story in "Ubik", in the true nature of "Palmer
Eldritch", in the shared hallucinations of the autistic child in
"Martian Time Slip", and even in the various forms of 'kipple' (both
inanimate and animate) strewn throughout "Electric Sheep".
And the "Valis Trilogy" [sic] is one of Dick's most personalized
visions of this. At that point in his life, Phil Dick was
legitimately concerned that he was becoming unhinged, and, being a
writer, tried to deal with some very strange occurrences in the only
manner he really knew how: to write his way through making sense of
it. Fortunately/unfortunately, he's very good at putting the reader
inside his head, which is sometimes not the most pleasant or healthy
place to be, especially in the case of possible mental illness.
Everyone's different, but I would NOT start a tour through the works
of PKD with "Valis"; rather, I'd work up to that. "Man In The High
Castle", "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", "Flow My Tears, The
Policeman Said" and even "A Scanner Darkly", are all excellent novels
without having to worry about a great deal of excess baggage slipping
in. I'd ramp up to the heavier 'reality twisting' novels, like
"Three Stigmata", "Ubik", or, of course, the "Valis" series. But, as
I said, everybody's different, and I'm sure there's somebody out
there for whom even a Dick novel like "Deus Irae" has been a
life-changing experience.
Anyway, sorry for the tangent and, as always, YMMV.
--m.
--
_____
"we're no longer sure where home is; homesickness is our only guide"