Phillip K Dick Audio Documentary / appreciation thread

hurlingdervish · **Joined:** Wed Feb 25, 2009 7:54 pm **Posts:** 1676

20 minute sound collage interview/bio, very skillful editing keeps you interested:
http://speechification.com/2009/09/17/c ... ap-artist/

Pure legend.
I recommend his work to everyone with half a brain

. specifically VALIS and Do android dream of electric sheep? aka "Blade Runner"

Here is some of his quotes/interview excerpts to read whenever you get around to it.

Quote:

A Scanner Darkly is a roman à clef (a fictionalized account of real events) based on Dick's experiences in the 1970s drug culture. Dick said in an interview, "Everything in A Scanner Darkly I actually saw."[5]

Between mid-1970 (when his fourth wife Nancy left him) and mid-1972 (when he entered the X-Kalay program; see below) Dick lived semi-communally with a rotating group of mostly teenage drug users at his home in Marin County. Dick explained, "[M]y wife Nancy left me in 1970 ... I got mixed up with a lot of street people, just to have somebody to fill the house. She left me with a four bedroom, two-bathroom house and nobody living in it but me. So I just filled it with street people and I got mixed up with a lot of people who were into drugs."[5]

During this period, the author ceased writing completely and became fully dependent upon amphetamines, which he had been using intermittently for many years. "I did take amphetamines for years in order to be able to — I was able to produce 68 final pages of copy a day," Dick said.

Quote:

Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

Quote:

These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior. In my science fiction I write about about them constantly. Sometimes they themselves do not know they are androids. Like Rachel Rosen, they can be pretty but somehow lack something; or, like Pris in We Can Build You, they can be absolutely born of a human womb and even design androids - the Abraham Lincoln one in that book - and themselves be without warmth; they then fall within the clinical entity "schizoid," which means lacking proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on the word "thing." A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that "No man is an island," but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.

Quote:

People just have no criterion left to evaluate the importance of things. I think the only thing that would really affect people would be the announcement that the world was going to be blown up by the hydrogen bomb. I think that would really affect people. I think they would react to that. But outside of that, I don't think they would react to anything. "Peking has been wiped out by an earthquake, and the RTD -- the bus strike is still on." And some guy says, "Damnit! I'll have to walk to work!"

Quote:

It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense.

NY Times reviewer wrote:

To call Philip K. Dick ... a science-fiction writer is to the underscore the inadequacy of the label. ... It would be more accurate to call him one of the most valiant psychological explorers of the 20th century.

and FYI...in case you have read the madness that is VALIS, they are making it into a a movie apparently...somehow...someway

HxC · **Joined:** Mon Oct 15, 2007 11:41 pm **Posts:** 737

The length of your post means you need to start a blog (-;

"Fantastic Planet" is an excellent piece of Sci-Fi as well. + You know who samples heavily from it and what's his name-who died- had a beat with an FP SP, and of course our hero- you know who- had a poster from the film on his wall on his liner notes - it's a trippy movie!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgCxCZNkQ9E

It's a trippie movie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgCxCZNkQ9E

It'z a trippy movie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgCxCZNkQ9E

It's a trippy Movee
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgCxCZNkQ9E

You gotta rent it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgCxCZNkQ9E

Smoke something B4 you watch it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgCxCZNkQ9E

pardon if everyone already knows about this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgCxCZNkQ9E

drewzle · **Posted:** Tue Oct 20, 2009 2:24 am

PKD is one of my favourite writers, really makes me question reality

hurlingdervish · **Joined:** Wed Feb 25, 2009 7:54 pm **Posts:** 1676

@hXc
yea the quotes make it seem long, but just trying to give some insight on his personality cause the audio doc assumes you already know about him so nah no blogs for me. its too one sided. if im going to share something, its going to be for the readers/listeners benefit not how many subscribers i can muster up :wink:

.

i recognize that movie! thank for reminding me about it. im picking that up tomorrow if i can!!

@Drewzle
PKD is like that. more psychological than sci fi

even though he gets incredible respect from those who understand his style...he is still the most underrated writer of the 20th century
this man should have been a millionaire, as people who adapted his books(very loosely, you know this :wink:

) to films became rich off of them...
blade runner was actually put out only a couple months after he died.

if you tapped into PDK's imagination i bet you would find the source of a new psychotropic :lol:

ellaguru · **Posted:** Tue Oct 20, 2009 7:51 am

hurlingdervish wrote:

20 minute sound collage interview/bio, very skillful editing keeps you interested:
Pure legend.
I recommend his work to everyone with half a brain . specifically VALIS and Do android dream of electric sheep? aka "Blade Runner"

HD, fat bastard

, this is my ever favourite writer!!! thank you for this post!!!

Philip Kindred Dick has essentially one theme: the paranoia of don't recognize reality from dream/nightmare, or, sometimes the paranoia of build another reality to don't accept the "real" reality.
he was an acid consumer too, so this has maybe change his vision of society drastically...

i read "Do androids...", "Ubik" (this is the real paranoic PKD!), "A Scanner darkly"(great movie by r linklater!), "Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb", "The Man in the High Castle", "Confessions of a crap artist" and various novels of the '50...

thanx again for the post HD!
cheers

cartesia · **Posted:** Tue Oct 20, 2009 8:22 am

Wise words from a wise man...

Quote:

Philip Kindred Dick has essentially one theme: the paranoia of don't recognize reality from dream/nightmare, or, sometimes the paranoia of build another reality to don't accept the "real" reality.
he was an acid consumer too, so this has maybe change his vision of society drastically...

I wonder abotu this sometimes too

Impossible to know... what you can do though at least is to trust that wahtever you're experiencing is real.. not at an 'appearance' level but- at least, you can't deny that your feelings are real.. whether caused by delusion or truth, if you feel a feeling, that feeling is there.

ellaguru · **Posted:** Tue Oct 20, 2009 10:23 am

cartesia wrote:

Wise words from a wise man...

Quote:

Philip Kindred Dick has essentially one theme: the paranoia of don't recognize reality from dream/nightmare, or, sometimes the paranoia of build another reality to don't accept the "real" reality.
he was an acid consumer too, so this has maybe change his vision of society drastically...

I wonder abotu this sometimes too

Impossible to know... what you can do though at least is to trust that wahtever you're experiencing is real.. not at an 'appearance' level but- at least, you can't deny that your feelings are real.. whether caused by delusion or truth, if you feel a feeling, that feeling is there.

that's why p.h.d. was paranoid about that. sometimes the frontiers between reality and dream are very weak and maybe what we feel is only what we need to feel on that particular moment but this not coincide with the "real" reality...
in his writing is also intresting the paranoia of power: maybe in this he is near to G orwell...

Hot Sauce · **Joined:** Sun Sep 23, 2007 10:46 pm **Posts:** 425

philip k. dick is one of my favourite authors. he has built up quite a cult following since his death.

when we analyse the work of philip k. dick we must remember to take certain facts into consideration.
he wrote the majority of his novels in order to survive. although he obviously loved writing, his first priority was making a living when it came to his work. this was born out of necessity.
we must also remember that he was mentally unstable for a lot of his life. his insight and beliefs on the nature of reality are interesting but must be taken with a pinch of salt as his own personal reality was distorted beyond what a lot of us would consider normal.

i personally really love his writing style. and i find him to be an interesting character somewhat. most of my feelings towards his work stem from the time when i was younger and really into his books. i used to love the interesting details and ideas in his novels that he would not further expand upon. wheter this was because of time constraints or because he simply didn't realise that he had stumbled upon something great is up to personal speculation.

he always wanted to be recognised as a "serious author" and i think it a real shame that he did not live long enough to produce a classic novel that would solidify his place as one.

Andrew P · **Posted:** Tue Oct 20, 2009 1:48 pm

PKD is one of my favorite writers. I highly recommend Dr. Bloodmoney, The Penultimate Truth, The Simulacra, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Elderitch (sp?) along with the other ones listed in the thread. Man in the High Castle is way up there too - the pacing is different from his other pulpier novels, but after you're done reading it, it sinks in. Radio Free Albemuth is another good one, I kind of liked it better than Valis.

Anyways, he was my favorite writer from my teenage years. He was one of those guys that looked into the future and saw the current world we live in. I think if he would have lived longer he would have been way too freaked out and depressed by the direction the world has gone in - but he was going to write some really crazy stuff that I would have loved to read.

hurlingdervish · **Joined:** Wed Feb 25, 2009 7:54 pm **Posts:** 1676

Hot Sauce wrote:

he always wanted to be recognised as a "serious author" and i think it a real shame that he did not live long enough to produce a classic novel that would solidify his place as one.

before i respond to this, i will say that he did write a lot of his stuff to get by but he wrote many books largely for his own satisfaction, those being the ones people remember, not the generic (but still good) sci fi- other worldly ones

i do think he wrote those novels that would solidify him as a serious author, just that they may be too weird for a lot of people who stumble onto them. and if you didn't come from any of the same background as PKD, or have an understanding of religous nuts, or drug culture they will fly over peoples heads as insane rambling...

the amount of depth in his last 10 years of work is truly astounding.

and for the record i think i heard he only did acid once, and never wanted to do it again. hes just a weird/eccentric guy from birth, mostly.
like the interview said he loved amphetamines (Kerouac and beat guys did too) because he could go all night on a book (68 finished pages that quote said, HOLY FUCK.), he would trick his therapist into giving him the speed haha

Phillip K Dick Audio Documentary / appreciation thread

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