First Entry / PKD

Greetings folks! My name is Justyn, this is my blog. I like a lot of things. I don’t like listing them. Let’s figure them out as we go along, shall we?

What I will get into on this debut entry is the work of Philip K. Dick. Up until a few months ago, he was one of those writers who I was aware of but never investigated. I can’t remember what finally prompted me, I remember at the time I was rediscovering Sonic Youth’s 1987 masterpiece album Sister, which was reputedly heavily PKD-influenced. I was also reading Grant Morrison’s very excellent Invisibles series of comics, which also cited PKD’s wildly imaginative dystopias and meditations of the authenticity of reality as a jumping off point for Morrison’s own visions of the psychedelic occult. I found some summaries of PKD’s life (thanks Wikipedia!) and the stories of his obsession with designer realities and labyrinthine government control had me hooked. I’m a nut for paranoid anti-utopias, what can I say?

I rushed out and bought the first novel I could find, which was the Hugo Award-winning Man in the High Castle. To be perfectly frank, it took me a while before it sank in. The stories are remarkably slow-paced for having been written by a methamphetamine addict. In fact, there’s very little pacing at all; rather PKD introduces a set of 10 or so characters and shuffles between their minds over a span of several days. I had to adjust to the vibe, and when I did I still wasn’t sure what I was looking for. The writing style is very plain and unglorified, although easy to understand.

Without spoiling the twist of the book, I learned that this is in fact one of its strengths. PKD is a master of lulling you into a cold complacency. The world described is fantastic, but the characters are regular folks just trying to make ends meet. Not a very exciting premise, huh? Well, by putting you into the rhythm of these people, one of the immediate lessons is that progress and forced advancement benefit no one but the people pushing it. While that’s a somewhat unfair assertion in the case of High Castle (after all, there is the whole re-legalization of slavery thing), the characters focused on tend not to be more or less better off than if the novel’s parallel history didn’t occur and the 1950s progressed as we know them today. It’s this element that I really loved about Dick’s writing. So much has been written about his use of a story within a story, or unknown conflicts among upper echelons of already shadowy organizations and how they affect the public, or people concealing their identities and the like. Maybe these elements will register with me if I’ll read a few more of his books. To me, he doesn’t get enough credit for being an excellent writer of people.

To close, here is a BBC documentary on the man. I found this on YouTube this morning. There’s a lot of cheese-tastic camera tricks and heavily emoted readings of passages, but there’s a lot of good points made and interviews with friends, noteable fellow authors, and 4 of his 5 wives. The years towards the end of his life were particularly disturbing as his obsession with religion and heavy drug use pushed him into a mental state that was part imaginative visionary, part unpredictable schizophrenic. On the one hand, he gave us VALIS. On the other, he married an 18 year old girl and baptized their son with Ovaltine. Philip K. Dick, may your paranoid soul finally be resting in peace.

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