EVERY TYRANNY IS DESIGNED TO separate us from who we really are — and thus from each other.
Tag: PKD
Philip K. !!!!!!!!!!ing Dick: mystic, madman, writer.
First Graf: VALIS
IN FEBRUARY AND MARCH OF 1974, science-fiction author Philip K. Dick had a series of experiences which might have been psychosis, hallucination or divine grace. Phil often tended toward the last explanation, at least in print, and based a handful of novels (and more than a million pages of exegesis) on trying to figure out what happened to him. VALIS is one such novel; its thesis (in part): through an ancient satellite named VALIS (for Vast Active Living Intelligence System), a rock and roll musical, and a little girl, God or something like It is trying to comfort us all — most especially the broken ones. There’s much more to it, but this — and the fact that Phil once lived around the corner from where I live now — is what makes VALIS this week’s First Graf pick.
Horselover Fat’s nervous breakdown began the day he got the phone call from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals. He asked her why she wanted them and she said that she intended to kill herself. She was calling everyone she knew. By now, she had fifty of them, but she needed thirty or forty more, to be on the safe side.
Pithyism #PKD
WHEN THE POCKET CAMERA ASKS if your subject blinked, it’s time to turn off ALL the machines.
Rainy Day Equation
SEMI-FERAL CAT, PLUS FORCED CONFINEMENT, divided by ping-pong ball, equals nothing else.
Modern Manners, Economywise
IF THE PERSON AHEAD OF you in the checkout line is stocking up on Meow Mix, don’t ask about their cat.
Paul Williams Support Fund
IF YOU PASSED THROUGH THE 1970s and ’80s, you likely read his Das Energi, his rock criticism, or his Philip K. Dick scholarship. Now he, like so many, needs our help.
Natural Machines
A number of years ago, I got into a cocktail-party argument (or its boho-pomo equivalent, since we were in San Francisco in the 1980s) with someone who decried the “unnaturalness” of spaceflight. Her thesis, IIRC, was that humans were somehow apart from and opposed to Nature, as evidenced by the fact that “we make stuff instead of using what’s already there.” I asked, “What about beavewr dams and birds’ nests?” She got mad and found another people-knot. Would but that I could have steered her http://www.nextnature.net/-ward!