Garden Of Blog

Just finished this Philip K. Dick book, A Maze of Death. And that it was… until… sorry, can’t spoil it. As with all of Dick’s books I seem to promptly forget most of what I have read soon after I put the book down. This is much like the worlds that he creates in his futuristic imagination. “Worlds” are more temporary psychological frameworks than they are realities.

I just finished this Tom Robbins book. It’s been too long since I read Even Cowgirls Get The Blues to compare them meaningfully, but I recall liking Cowgirls just a little more. This one confused me with the long “Tanuki” section leading it off. Still, I’d probably give Robbins one more chance.

The poll that produced this list was a very small sample of readers, but it’s still interesting.

As a kid, I collected comic books. I still have them, several thousand, in residence at my mother’s house to protect them from any “eBay moments”. Fond memories.

And currently I am reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the novel that earned Michael Chabon his Pulitzer, well deserved. Read it. It’s about the lives of two Golden Age comic book creators, one a Holocaust escapee.

Kavalier and Clay’s first blockbuster hero, “The Escapist,” premiered before WWII and continued to be published after, in the story. Kommandant X was the chief villain, and Chabon points out that the evil X “quite easily made the transition from Nazi to Commie” after the war. This got me thinking. Naturally, children’s literature would reflect the contemporary heroes and villains of its day. But what happened after the 1950s, I wonder? What heros and villains did the comics of my day portray?

My comic book heroes, in the 1980s, were The X-Men (no relation to the Kommandant). The X-Men were created in 1969 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Who were the X-Men, and who were their villains? The face of “evil” didn’t seem to map any longer to the consensus enemy of the day. In ‘69, the US was trying to save Vietnam from the Commies, but the consensus had evaporated.

The X-Men were mutant “freaks,” who often looked different and (as is the superhero mandate) were possessed of super powers. They ended up that way as a result of genetic mutations, the story goes. Their enemies were not generally the political enemies of the United States, but rather the villainous embodiments of intolerance to the freaks themselves. 1969.

I haven’t read a comic book, or its “mature” cousin the graphic novel, in a long time. I can only guess that today’s villains are terrorists, thinly veiled from 6 o’clock news terrorism, if disguised at all. I might have to look into that.

Who, I wonder, will the next villain be? And how distinct, this time, the line between good and evil? The emotional health of a society depends on its ability to properly identify the enemy.

Ka-POW!

I like books as much as the next guy, and have even been known to read them on occassion. I have supported many professional writers over the years by buying their printed work. So I can understand how, when livelihoods are threatened by a copyright-unfriendly internet, intellectual property concerns emerge.

But seriously, people. It’s over. I hope that doesn’t sound cold. But it’s getting painful to watch as you kick and scream long into the 21st century about this new technology. The medium is the message. Watch closely, lest the pixels dissolve before your eyes. It’s over.

I know it’s not fair. You know what your mom told you about fairness in life. And I’ll bet she didn’t charge you for the advice. Words and sounds will continue to have great value, but on a different exchange. Don’t always expect money, henceforth. Your work will pass from peer to peer to peer. Isn’t that an honour, at least?

Hardcopy is dead. The trees applaud.

If I had a crystal ball, I’d tell you more. Instead, all I have is this liquid crystal display. Want to know the future?

Watch the screen.

Back when I was tearing through his novels, I never realized Kurt Vonnegut had published volumes of nonfiction. There are two, to my knowledge: Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974) and Palm Sunday (1981, an autobiography… sort of). The only novel I saved for myself is the one Vonnegut apparently claims is his last, Time Quake. I guess Kurt is mostly drawing these days, at the age of 82.

What is apparent in Vonnegut’s nonfiction— even moreso, if possible, than it is in his fiction— is his politics. A relatively recent interview will give you the idea (his pen, or tongue, is still in fine, biting form, when he whips it out). Wampeters… in particular contains some whithering attacks on war itself, and the society that let it happen, in the Vietnam era. To me, Vonnegut is another example of how superior intelligence always arrives at the same general conclusions, when pressed. He is one of the premier geniuses of our time and a voice for the ages.

And so on.

As a theatre major and counterculture buff in college, I fashioned my senior thesis to tie the two. This was definitely a case where I went searching for evidence to back up my fantasy. Luckily, the thesis turned out to be correct, and the paper wrote itself. I am sure that if the thesis had been upsupportable, I would have mysteriously developed writer’s block.

I suspect writer’s block occurs for the same reasons in all genres. The fiction writer may sense, in his unconscious, that he is lying, or at least bending the truth too much, in characterization (like, in Wonder Boys, when James tells too tall a tale about his childhood to Grady at the Warshaws’ house).

Less than being morally averse to the disingenuine, the writer fears the day he is exposed as a quack by an auditorium of indignant colleagues. So he freezes. Cannot write a word. No 1920s typewriter nor present day PC could produce the romance or convenience necessary for this pitiable author to realize yet one more paragraph. He is trying to write a falsehood.

All of which is a roundabout way for me to introduce a book, which is really a thesis, recently reviewed on Slashdot. What The Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry has a similarly long and proclamatory title as my own senior thesis. I have heard whisperings (from the late Timothy Leary among other dignitaries) of the hippie-computer connection, but this looks like the best attempt yet to show how the most mindblowing technical advances of our time actually sprung from good old California Dreamin’.

The recounting of any history is by nature anecdotal. You can never really prove anything. All you can do is tell a story. But by virtue of not having writer’s block, you at least know that your subconscious mind senses truth. So we have this book, What The Dormouse Said. Feed your head.

Right now I’m in the middle of Michael Chabon’s novel Wonder Boys. Of the three Chabons she’s read, this is Jessica’s least favorite, but thus far I think I like it a little better than Chabon’s first, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (which had nonetheless blown me away). His latest novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is Jessica’s favorite, about a couple of comic book creators, or something like that. My buddy Jake liked it too, so I am looking forward to that one.

I’ve actually seen the film version of Wonder Boys, starring Michael Douglas. I remember loving it, but thankfully it was long enough ago that I do not remember the plot points.

Another book-inspired film that I saw before being tempted by the book: The Mosquito Coast. Harrison Ford was great in that movie, which I recall seeing in the theatre as a kid. I have a copy of the book now, after Jessica and I recently discovered Paul Theroux through Rhythm Ship singer Maggie Woods.

Philip K. Dick’s Galactic Pot-Healer presages the appearance of Viagra and other drugs for erectile dysfunction. Dick called the remedy Hardovax, and I imagine him snickering as he concocted his less-than-delicate pharmenclature.

But Viagra, evoking an ejaculatory Niagra Falls gushing-forth of your, er, vitality, could be considered yet less delicate. The book was written in 1969. Viagra reached market in 1998. Truth is once again stranger than fiction.

You’ll also recall (below) that the title of the book was mistranslated to the French. In the book, there is a game known (in a sociologically ominous way, it seems) simply as The Game, and it involves using poor (over-literal and phoneme-based) computer translators to mangle book titles and then translate them back to the original language, producing riddles to be ciphered (such as “The Lattice-work Gun-stinging Insect” for “The Great Gatsby”). I wonder if the French translator altered the title to Cathedral Healer to be ironic in light of this game in the story. Probably not. They probably thought Galactic Pot-Healer was a horrible title.

I love to read, so I figured having a book learnin’ section of this blog site would be nice. I don’t plan on writing reviews, exactly, but maybe to record a thought or two for each book. Sometimes my impressions of what I read disappear with time, like waking from a dream and starting the process of forgetting.

My so-called “recommended reading” list is here, but any comments I make will be in this blog.

Right now I am reading Galactic Pot-Healer by sci-fi legend Philip K. Dick. It’s about a ceramics repair man, not a proponent of medical marijuana as I suspected before reading the book. I am a huge Dick fan, but I am careful about what company I admit that in. These are bigotted times.

It was curious to note that one French translation of the book didn’t even attempt to recreate the title as Dick intended. Here it’s “Cathedral Healer”! There is a cathedral prominent in the novel, but c’mon.