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Philip K. Dick Speaks (Sorta)
futileboy writes "Erik Davis put together this posthumous interview of Philip K. Dick from some tapes he found (he explains how it came together in his introduction to the interview). It comes off pretty clean."
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Really though, this is straight out off the super market tabloid rack.
/. just sank to new lows. I mean c'mon couldn't roll out the Bill of Nine or an SCO rant so we had to troll the readers with "bat-boy" fodder?
from the article:
"I was experimenting with electronic voice phenomena. I was recording the analog noise between tracks on a scratchy old copy of Karl Muck conducting Parzifal with the Bayreuth Festival Chorus onto a cassette tape. Then I would cut, splice, and process the tape in various ways, and then listen to the results. On the third attempt I heard a voice that I recognized, from a tape once available through the Philip K. Dick Society, as belonging to the late science fiction writer. More incredible was my discovery that, by recording my own questions on the same cassette tape, I was able to initiate a genuine dialogue with this mysterious voice. Subsequent research proved, however, that all of the quotations have already made an appearance somewhere in Dick's fiction, letters, or essays. Nonetheless, the conversation seems worth presenting"
Jumping crack-heads on pogo-sticks batman!
What crack are the editors smoking and please pass it because my reality distortion field is waning and I need a hook up before the shakes set in.
The page is only "text" from this supposed "interview" and none of the cut-spliced-processed audio is to be found.
This is utter crap, if the audio was present it would at least have some artistic merit and therefore interest of value, but there is nothing but the rantings for those who wear shiny foil hats squarely screwed to their brows and interview excerpts readily available on Google!
Mod me down for being a troll, but
Can we plz change the picture that is associated with sci fi? Everytime I see that weird looking face, I get a little freaked out.
I still remember one of the first PKD things I read.
Some guy meets a chick at a party who gives him some drugs. Then he watches the president on tv and sees a monster with writhing tentacles. But everything else looks normal.
Comes to find out, the drug he was given was an anti-hallucinogen. Everyone who gets it sees some hideous thing when lookig at the President because there are already drugs in the water. But everyone sees a different hideous thing when on the anti-hallucinogen, but everyone sees the same thing on the hallucinogen....
I'm pretty sure this is PKD. Something in my head says there's a slight chance it was Phillip Jose Farmer, but I don't think so.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Also, the comment about Dick's ideas infusing The Matrix is true as far as it goes, but misses one important point. Dick was an SF writer firmly grounded in the field, and would never have made as obvious and asinine mistake as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics the way The Matrix's idiotic "humans as batteries" backstory does.
Actually the original script apparently had a (slightly) more plausible explanation - the machines used humans as components in a sort of huge neural network, and the point of the matrix was to keep the conscious parts of the brain occupied while they use the rest as needed (ties in nicely with the whole humans only use 10 percent of their brain thing.) But apparently that was too complicated for the average Joe Moviegoer so they dumbed it down to the stupid batteries thing. Blah.
I think that Morpheous was incorrect about the need of humans as batteries. I think he was told that, but that isn't really what's going on. That's why it doesn't make sense. I think we will see what humans are really for in the next series.
If they follow the VALIS storyline, neo will end up as the next Morpheous, looking for the real One. And that's where it will end, and there will be no more movies.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
Phil would have liked that plot.
If you think that PKD's writings are "strongly rationalist", you haven't read much of him.
I have a problem with literary journalism of this sort; we have absolutely no idea as to the context of the excerpted quotes. I could've dealt with this i he had actually created an audio interview; he did piece it together from recordings in the first place, after all. THAT would've been great (I love hearing authors talk). All this is is a transcription of an interview that never happened with no technical or historical reason for it to be interesting. I'll pass.
Triv
So the building blocks of the cosmos are not matter or energy, but information.
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three-dimensional and not in space or time. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. Since the universe is actually composed of information, then it can be said that information will save us. This is the saving gnosis which the Gnostics sought.
Did anyone read the recent Scientific American article about the holographic theory of the universe, whereby we're all not actually 3-dimensional, we're like information "painted" on another, 2-dimensional surface or somesuch....it also had something to do with the thermodynamics of black holes. I don't pretend to fully understand it, but it seems to be an actual tie-in the Dick's remark about us being made of information.
I belong to the ______ generation.
http://www.philipkdick.com/frank/sf-letter.htm
Then again, I think I would be hard pressed to call something like "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer" SciFi ;)
Did anyone else notice that his technique for the interview is based off, or strikingly similiar to that used my William Burroughs cut up
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
Phil Dick may or may not have been bitter, but this quote does not reflect it. He did not look down on trash. One of his other quotes was that, "It may seem that I trust nothing, but it's just that what I trust is so small." Furthermore, he was steeped in California culture. He once wrote Lem, "You have to understand, trash is all that we have here." His relationship to trash reflected more of what might be called a Buddha nature than bitterness.
With that said, however, there's a little bit of an (unconscious?) agenda in this "interview" I think. He turns some of PKD's ideas about the world and religion and spirituality into ideas about technology, which really isn't fair or reasonable. Short example:
NO! This isn't PKD talking about technology emerging into consciousness, a la Terminator's SkyNet. For PKD, the prototype of living information was the Torah and the Dead Sea Scrolls, not some piece of technology. It's a very Hegelian view of consciousness and history here, that there's a sort of transcendent and fundamentally spiritual consciousness consisting only of ideas which forms the true substance of the Universe and the medium of history, but the information there isn't bit and bytes in computers; it's ancient Gnostic explanations of the spiritual relationship between God and man and the world.So that's my one gripe about the article. By trying to make PKD's usually incoherent ramblings coherent, he turned some really strange ideas about God and universe into easier-to-digest ideas about technological development. Aside from that, it was pretty clever.