Often, people claim to remember past lives; Philip K. Dick once told an audience of admirers in France, where he was considered a literary genius, "I claim to remember a
different, very different present life." The notion that he lived two separate and simultaneous existences, one conscious, the other glimpsed in moments of disorienting revelation akin to LSD flashbacks, was only one of many delusions that beset him in his relatively short, tortuous life. His first novel was called Time Out of Joint, and its title, in retrospect, seems self-
fulfilling
Like J.G. Ballard's, Dick's reputation rests on the creation of dystopian fictions that foresaw a world something like the one we now live in, a world of conspiracy theories, clones, untrammelled consumerism, viral terrorism and virtual reality. His most widely known story, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, crossed into the mainstream via Hollywood, where it was retitled as Blade Runner by director Ridley Scott and given a happy ending wherein Harrison Ford, a surviving human, rides off into the nuclear sunset with his android lover.
When the movie money started rolling in, Dick, who had survived four marriages and a prolonged bout of amphetamine psychosis, was almost at the end of his tether. He emerged from one of his many spells in rehab, convinced that a spirit guide was responsible for his late financial good fortune, and began giving the money away to Christian-run charities.
Like L. Ron Hubbard, the science-fiction writer who founded the Church of Scientology, Dick's life sometimes seemed weirder even than his fictions, while his obsessions and neuroses found their way into stories that redefined the genre.
Emmanuel Carrere has written what he calls "a very peculiar book, a kind of imaginative biography which purports to depict the life of Philip K Dick from the inside." Sometimes, it appears almost novelistic in its rendering of Dick's thoughts, its re-creation of his love affairs and its litany of anecdotes concerning his pharmaceutically fuelled lifestyle in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
One chapter, entitled "Freaks," is made up of such recollections, each one beginning with the phrase, "Another time...," as in, "Another time, someone got the idea of painting all the windows in Phil's house black," or "Another time, a girl who had lived with them for a week went into a coma during a bad acid trip."
The effect here is conversational, almost throwaway, intentionally so, though to what end I am not altogether sure. Perhaps Carrere wants us to experience the myth of Philip K. Dick, the terminal stoner, the way he experienced it, in a wealth of remembered anecdotes, hazy and cumulative.
More ominously, there is nothing here in the way of an index or footnotes, none of the usual evidence of deep research that gives a biography the solid stamp of authority. And though Dick was the subject of several marathon interview sessions, most notably by Rolling Stone magazine journalist Paul Williams, and, towards the end of his life, by science-fiction critic Charles Platt, we seldom hear his voice or see his words appear directly on the page.
For all that, though, I Am Alive and You Are Dead is an intriguing read, well-paced and packed with evidence of Dick's eccentricity, which was of the obsessive and neurotic kind and must have made him impossible to be around for any length of time.
As a troubled and pampered child, constantly packed off to psychiatrists of dubious provenance by his fawning mother, Dick submerged himself in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, the most coldly
pessimistic of all fantasy writers.
In 1954, two years before Don Seigel's Cold War parable, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, arguably the first modern sci-fi movie, he wrote a short story in which a boy is convinced that his father has been incinerated and replaced by an alien impostor. All his greatest fictions were prescient in their countenancing of the deep, unconscious collective fears of an essentially puritanical America which was, and remains, profoundly ill at ease with the speed of scientific progress.
Ultimately, Dick was a great writer despite himself and his methodology, which involved ingesting a gargantuan amount of amphetamines and working manically on a novel until it was finished.
Perhaps because of his sustained drug abuse, he lived, as Carrere puts it, in a state of perpetual fear. He was afraid of the FBI, who visited his house more than once, and of abduction by aliens, a fate he saw as inevitable. Towards the end of his life, alone and reclusive in a ranch house in southern California, he sat in the dark, listening for hours to the Grateful Dead and devotional classical music, hallucinating about swirling pink mists out of which emerged angry creatures with three eyes. It was as though his work had invaded his life and his fictional creations his mind.
Willfully unpredictable to the end, Dick received Christian last rites on his death bed after a stroke. He was buried underneath a gravestone that had borne his name for the entire 53 years of his life, his parents having assumed that he would soon follow his malnourished three-week-old twin sister into the earth. But he survived, and the 50 novels published in his lifetime are but a fraction of the work he left behind.
Carrere's labor of love is as good a place as any to start trying to understand the enigma of Philip K. Dick, one of the few postwar novelists who deserves the title "visionary."
Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” was crowned best picture at the 98th Academy Awards, handing Hollywood’s top honor to a comic, multi-generational American saga of political resistance. The ceremony Sunday, which also saw Michael B. Jordan win best actor and “Sinners” cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw make Oscar history as the first female director of photography to win the award, was a long-in-coming coronation for Anderson, a San Fernando Valley native who made his first short at age 18 and has been one of America’s most lionized filmmakers for decades. Before Sunday, Anderson had never won an Oscar. But “One Battle
In Kaohsiung’s Indigenous People’s Park (原住民主題公園), the dance group Push Hands is training. All its members are from Taiwan’s indigenous community, but their vibe is closer to that of a modern, urban hip-hop posse. MIXING CULTURES “The name Push Hands comes from the idea of pushing away tradition to expand our culture,” says Ljakuon (洪濬嚴), the 44-year-old founder and main teacher of the dance group. This is what makes Push Hands unique: while retaining their Aboriginal roots, and even reconnecting with them, they are adamant about doing something modern. Ljakuon started the group 20 years ago, initially with the sole intention of doing hip-hop dancing.
You would never believe Yancheng District (鹽埕) used to be a salt field. Today, it is a bustling, artsy, Kowloon-ish “old town” of Kaohsiung — full of neon lights, small shops, scooters and street food. Two hundred years ago, before Japanese occupiers developed a shipping powerhouse around it, Yancheng was a flat triangle where seawater was captured and dried to collect salt. This is what local art galleries are revealing during the first edition of the Yancheng Arts Festival. Shen Yu-rung (沈裕融), the main curator, says: “We chose the connection with salt as a theme. The ocean is still very near, just a
A key feature of Taiwan’s environmental impact assessments (EIA) is that they seldom stop projects, especially once the project has passed its second stage EIA review (the original Suhua Highway proposal, killed after passing the second stage review, seems to be the lone exception). Mingjian Township (名間鄉) in Nantou County has been the site of rising public anger over the proposed construction of a waste incinerator in an important agricultural area. The township is a key producer of tea (over 40 percent of the island’s production), ginger and turmeric. The incinerator project is currently in its second stage EIA. The incinerator
RSS