Fun article about Philip K. Dick in today's NYT

[swag]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/books/06mcgr.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin

(You can see still more of his influence on Sonic Youth in the lettering on this t-shirt - )



ALL his life the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick yearned for what he called the mainstream. He wanted to be a serious literary writer, not a sci-fi hack whose audience consisted, he once said, of “trolls and wackos.” But Mr. Dick, who popped as many as 1,000 amphetamine pills a week, was also more than a little paranoid. In the early ’70s, when he had finally achieved some standing among academic critics and literary theorists — most notably the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem — he narced on them all, writing a letter to the F.B.I. in which he claimed they were K.G.B. agents trying to take over American science fiction.

So it’s hard to know what Mr. Dick, who died in 1982 at the age of 53, would have made of the fact that this month he has arrived at the pinnacle of literary respectability. Four of his novels from the 1960s — “The Man in the High Castle,” “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and “Ubik” — are being reissued by the Library of America in that now-classic Hall of Fame format: full cloth binding, tasseled bookmark, acid-free, Bible-thin paper. He might be pleased, or he might demand to know why his 40-odd other books weren’t so honored. And what about the “Exegesis,” an 8,000-page journal that derived a sort of Gnostic theology from a series of religious visions he experienced during a couple of months in 1974? A wary, hard-core Dickian might argue that the Library of America volume is just a diversion, an attempt to turn a deeply subversive writer into another canonical brand name.

Another thing that would probably amuse and annoy Mr. Dick in about equal measure are the exceptional number of movies that have been made from his work, starting with “Blade Runner” (adapted from “Do Androids Dream”), 25 years old this year and available in the fall on a special “final cut” DVD. The newest, “Next,” taken from a short story, “The Golden Man,” starring Nicolas Cage as a magician able to see into the future and Julianne Moore as an F.B.I. agent eager to enlist his help, opened just last month. In the works is a biopic starring Paul Giamatti, who bears more than a passing physical resemblance to the author, who by the end of his life had the doughy look of a guy who didn’t spend a lot of time in the daylight.

Mr. Dick died while “Blade Runner” was still in production, already unhappy about the shape the script was taking, though not the kind of money he hoped to realize. “Blade Runner” is probably the best of the Dick movies, if not the most faithful. (That honor probably belongs to “A Scanner Darkly,” released last year, in which Richard Linklater’s semi-animated technique suggests some of the feel of a graphic novel.)

There’s no reason to think Mr. Dick would have approved any more of the others, especially “Total Recall,” in which Quail, the nerdish hero of Mr. Dick’s story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” turns into Quaid, a buffed-up Arnold Schwarzenegger character. Meanwhile, as several critics have noted, movies like the “Matrix” series, “The Truman Show” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” though not based on Dick material, still seem to contain his spark, and dramatize more vividly than some of the official Dick projects his essential notion that reality is just a construct or, as he liked to say, a forgery. It’s as if his imaginative DNA had spread like a virus.

. . . read the whole thing if you want to

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/books/06mcgr.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin

[hfojvt]

1. "trolls and wackos"

I resemble that remark.

Do Androids dance like electric sheep?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=105&topic_id=4841737&mesg_id=4841737

[oustemnow]

2. Thanks!

I've really grown to appreciate PKD more and more over the years.

Have you seen Next? After that POS Paycheck, I'm afraid to check out any movie based on his works.

[Giant Robot]

3. I'm curious about Next but have reservations

Nick Cage is not the greatest actor on the planet after all. I am just too poor to go to the movies anyway except for once in a great while special occasions. I thought Paycheck wasn't bad; it wasn't good either but it lived up to the average Affleck movie. I also saw it for free so couldn't get angered up about wasting my money on that.

[oustemnow]

4. Bite your tongue!

Nick Cage, not the greatest actor in the world? My God, man, haven't you seen Valley Girl?

Point taken on Paycheck--if you remove the Dick connection and just look at it in the context of an Affleck flick or action flick, it's not totally vomit-inducing. But I wish they hadn't fucked around with Dick.

[Giant Robot]

5. Ummm

The Wicker Man?

Captain Corelli's Mandolin?

Con Air? (Although I have a soft spot in my heart for this movie as it was the last movie my sainted father and I saw together)

Fire Birds?

No not the greatest in the world.

[oustemnow]

7. Eeps

I should have slathered another coat of sarcasm on that post.

[EstimatedProphet]

10. Gotta disagree about Cage

I was surprised to find out he had more range than I ever figured he was capable of in Lord of War and The Weatherman. However, I haven't seen the movie yet, and I have to wonder if they didn't F up the idea behind the story. For those not familiar with it, The Golden Man was an interesting story about the next stage in human evolution being a big step backward. A man is born who is stunningly beautiful and capable of seeing the future, but is also an intellectual cypher - he's on the intellectual level of an animal. But because he is so beautiful, he has no problem whatsoever attracting sexual attention, and the gist of the story is that his offspring will overtake Homo sapiens by outbreeding them, reducing man to the level of intellectual nothings who can see the future. From the movie previews, it looks like that aspect is gone from the story, and I think that's bad, because that's what the story was about in the first place!

[anarch]

6. somehow this has caused the song "Schizophrenia" to get stuck in my head

and it's a pretty nice earworm to have, really.

[oustemnow]

8. Haha, me too.

Damn, I wish they would remix that album as a 20th anniversary edition or something.

Going to see SY perform Daydream Nation front to back this summer--I'm psyched!

[PassingFair]

9. Time Out of Joint

...is my favorite PKD novel.

But I LOVE THEM ALL.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Out_of_Joint

His writing takes you into the MOST INTERESTING
brain of any writer EVER.