Philip K. Dick's Exegesis To Be Published In 2011 82
Dynamoo writes "The NYT reports that a two-part edition of PKD's Exegesis will be published next year. This huge work, a combination of journal and philosophical treatise, has been published in part before, but this is the first time that the whole version will be made generally available."
wow (Score:4, Interesting)
I love Phil Dick's books. I've read the majority of them and even the bad ones are masterpieces in their own way. I have to say that I have mixed feelings about the Exegesis being published, because as interesting as it will be to read I think it is going to further tarnish his reputation. Phil Dick was the kind of person that was so smart that it caused mental disorder and he had some absolutely crazy beliefs. The Exegesis will probably underscore that.
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It didn't help that he and many of his friends were heavy drug users, so much of PKD's strange visions were most likely the result of drug use.
That's not to say it won't be interesting of course.
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Most profound work that is imaginative is related to drug use.
While I not sure that's a good generalization, a lot of interesting work has come from people who actively used drugs. For example take a look at all the work done at SRI during the 60's: bit-mapped displays, collaboration software, hypertext, precursors to the graphical user interface and the first "mouse". According to the book, "What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer " the team there all experimented with drugs. Basically it implies the modern PC and how we intera
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I think that there is a flaw in your logic.
Tacos (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know, does the latin cuisine have hallucinogenic properties or the ability to alter someone's perception of reality?
Well, aside from the spicy part. We all know about that.
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BTW, I hope you don't drink coffee or alcohol.
i drink coffee (Score:2)
i've done psilocybin, marjiuana, and alcohol. all should be legal and none of which i mind, because they don't produce addicts aggressively (alcohol, and to a much lesser extent marijuana, are only moderately addicting)
but what i don't tolerate is the idea that the use of any of this, including coffee, somehow enhances your life, somehow enhances your pleasure. your pleasure is maximized when you lose all drugs in your life. complete abstinence is the ultimate drug
and furthermore, the highly addictive and i
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yes (Score:2)
and to do it at other people's expense, to risk becoming a zombie addict unable to maintain a job and keep a relationship, is not something i will allow, because i and many others don't want to support the useless zombies. we'd rather prevent them from becoming zombies: its cheaper
freeloading is not an option
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that's right (Score:1, Troll)
just dismiss me with a clownish characterature
there's no real substance to my concerns is there?
everyone is always wonderfully responsible with brain altering addictive substances, there's no danger or downside whatsoever, its all unicorns and rainbows
ignorant irresponsible asshole
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recreational drugs (Score:1, Flamebait)
have been used since antiquity, and recreational drugs will be continued to be used forever
lsd, psilocybin, and marijuana should be legalized, because the war against them is more costly than their cost in use
but for heroin, cocaine, and meth, the costs to society of use is greater than the costs to society of war on them
i suppose your position is that heroin cocaine and meth are wonderful lifestyle accessories with no downside whatsoever
everyone is a responsible thoughtful human being, even with substances
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Individuals don't exist! Only "macro" statistics. By your logic, driving should be banned, since it kills far more people than illegal drugs. Oh wait. They help us produce for the hive, therefore they're okay.
sorry for the shorthand, here's the logic: (Score:1, Flamebait)
low addiction, low inebriation: caffeine, legal
low addiction, high inebriation: lsd, psilocybin, legal
high addiction, low inebriation: nicotine, legal
moderate addiction, moderate inebriation: marijuana, alcohol, legal
high addiction, high inebriation: meth, heroin, coke, illegal
the reason is that these substances themselves, no social policies, destroy lives. a human being cannot take a substance which significantly alters days and hours of their lives while at the same time locking them into hard pharmacolo
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You might want to look up the government's own addiction statistics on crack and cocaine. I have.
you're forgetting cocaine tea (Score:1, Flamebait)
used in the andes by bolivian indians for centuries. at low concentrations, more similar to nicotine addiction than powder cocaine or crack
absolutely: concentration and delivery method (rate of acceleration in the bloodstream) has an affect on addiction rates
but you're not arguing about that are you? what are saying is that yes, cocaine and crack have different addiction rates... ok, that means what? that means they should both be legal? in other words, you point to differences, but use that to argue for eq
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"drug addi
i stopped reading here (Score:1, Flamebait)
"For example, legalizing marijuana isn't going to take drug profits away from organized crime; they'll just sell more hard drugs"
this is low iq crap. you're root problem is your just not a very bright person
but you keep on believing the policy is the problem, not the substance itself. go on with your bad self. you're not the first moron who draws breath and spouts nonsense, you won't be the last. when it comes to drug policy, you're an idiot, and you hurt yourself and those around with your ignorant beliefs
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You think the drug cartels are just going to lay down and stop operating if marijuana is legalized? Haha, good one.
The simple fact of the matter is the drug war does far more to hurt more people than any amount of drugs themselves. You do know we are the highest incinerator on the plane
marijuana should be legal (Score:1, Flamebait)
obviously
why? because of the psychopharmacology of that particular drug
but, dear "genius", why the FUCK do you think something like heroin cocaine or meth should be legal?
you do realize that simple exposure to highly addictive+highly inebriating substances is enough to spiral lives into ruin, to turn your average human being into an addict?
in your supposed massive high iq intellect, you DO understand the biochemistry of addiction, don't you?
and if you are actually as smart as you suppose yourself to be, you
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LOL (Score:1, Flamebait)
this is your argument:
"i'm a (self-declared) superman who can drive 100 mph all the time and never crash. therefore, nobody needs speed limits"
so you're telling me addiction to HIGHLY ADDICTIVE substances is a minor issue
(face palm)
in a way you're right: nobody is an addict. until they become one. and then they spend their time like you hopelessly insisting they really aren't. sound familiar?
you're ignorant. you could have an iq of 250, you're still ignorant. you can read every study of drugs that ever exis
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i'm a (self-declared) superman who can drive 100 mph all the time and never crash. therefore, nobody should be banned from driving. Instead, prosecute people for the actual crimes they commit.
Your post is quite funny when read in the Michael Jackson from South Park voice. "You're being ignorant." He kept exclaiming it over and over again, but without evidence to back it up, it was just ridiculous.
wow, i feel the power of your genius now (Score:1, Flamebait)
why do we have speed limits, dear einstein?
because the price people pay for speeding is death and dismemberment of innocents. the price is too high. so instead, we save the irresponsible and suicidal assholes from themselves, and save us from them: we post speed limits
understand reality, oh great high iq yogi?
if you speed, you increase the chance you will kill someone. if you use the most highly addictive+inebriating drugs, you risk becoming a useless zombie who can't house or feed themselves, and then we h
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that's a point that supports my position, moron (Score:1, Flamebait)
exposure to the most highly addictive and inebriating substances is all you need to create addicts. that's my fucking point. thanks for supporting my fucking point
yes, hillbilly heroin is a problem. what is your point? we make hillbilly heroin legal? ok, so more people will take it. then what? less addicts?! is that your position? what the hell is wrong with you, "genius"?
there will ALWAYS be addicts. some people in this world are just hellbent on slow motion suicide. they are pitiable and pathetic. there i
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that's right! (Score:1, Flamebait)
if we had no speed limits, people would drive slower!
unfettered exposure to METH, COKE, and HEROIN means less addicts!
yay!
what a retard
and you want to talk history of drug use before 20th century?
ok, asshole, let's talk about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars [wikipedia.org]
there's your harmless substance. there's your more exposure leads to more addicts. in fact, when china tried to fight the scourge of opium, because THE DRUG ITSELF WAS DESTROYING THEIR SOCIETY, the drug dealing mafia forced war on them to keep
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the war and the prohibition was caused (Score:1, Flamebait)
by the social degradation the easy availability of a highly addictive substance caused
but it's really amazing how, according to you, a legal edict can go into the bloodstream and change simple pharmacological biochemistry. quite amazing
that's your point, isn't it? that laws have a greater effect than how biochemistry works? that in a land with no laws, the addictiveness of something like heroin is different than a land with draconian laws?
hmmm. maybe if a country passes a law about gravity, we could float?
(
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thank you for the red herrings and strawmen (Score:1)
the degradation to society by the most addictive+inebriating substances (heroin, cocaine, meth, etc) are more costly to society than prohibition effects. prohibition effects argue for legalization of less addictive/inebriating substances (lsd, marijuana, etc)
i've already written this. but thanks for trying to smear me with positions and attitudes i don't resemble. furiously rationalizing and denying ;-)
when britain got the monopoly on opium, and began flooding china with it, consumption of opium went from 1
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portugal doesn't prove anything (Score:2)
except that it is slowly rebounding from a horrible situation, due to a whole number of factors, not only one dubious factor you allude to out of agenda cherry picking of your facts
furthermore, cocaine was not as widely available or historically well-known at the beginning of the timeline you cite. growth was a simple function of increased awareness and product of availability, regardless of legal landscape. again: arguing for my point about simple addictiveness of a drug being the deciding factor
but what i
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i love freedom immensely, it motivates my opinion (Score:2)
and i understand that the bars that addiction creates in your mind is more freedom destroying than the most fascist autocratic regime orwell could imagine in the furthest reaches of his imagination. you take a mind that might have explored new avenues in art, literature, music, science... and instead you have a mind that is on a constant interruption circuit "need more fix, need more fix, need more fix..." and unable to be the person they were before the addiction
in fact, the tool of the most oppressive re
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P2: Too bad no dictators have tried that, eh?
P3: So the anvils are on tarps now? What about gargoyles?
Treated in what sense. Medically? Legally? Ethicly? In the end, the effects on freedom and choice are the same, an
artists do art (Score:2)
in SPITE OF their drug use, not BECAUSE of it. drug use by artists is contemporaneous with them being characters on the edge of society, which leads them to do great art AND take drugs due to various personality issues. but drug use does not CAUSE art. even artists like william s burroughs or hunter s thompson: their art was from periods of sobriety, crawling out of their overindulgence, before slipping back in. imagine what burroughs or thompson could have done if they remained drug free!
and you're saying
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Hunter S. Thompson and William S. Burroughs might have been something. But I doubt they'd be remembered like they are today.
Laws against drug use are a ploy to steal rights? First off, remember, most drugs were criminalized over racism against the groups using it. In those cases,
drugs and racism (Score:1, Flamebait)
you mean this?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars [wikipedia.org]
forcing nonwhites to become addicts for profit then waging war on them when they resists forced addiction?
stop with the red herrings asshole
it should be quite clear to you the source of my opposition to the highly addictive+inebriating substances by now, i've said it repeatedly. it is based on sound science, sound pharmacological facts of addiction. not racism. not nancy reagan
you're smearing my position because you have no logical coherence in your oppo
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By your own logic, you actually should also be against alcohol being legal. It causes far more harm to society than cocaine. Snicker.
Ahh, the drugs themselves are creating the suffering. Nope. Don't agree. They're just drugs, sitting there. Neutral, like a gun or a sandwich. It takes people to mis-use them for that to happen, and most people don't mis-use most substances. In the end, you want to control the freedoms of the responsible citing the folly of the irresponsible. It'
so what about plutonium (Score:1, Flamebait)
howabout anthrax
who needs restrictions on those things? they're just "things", its the person who does bad things with them, not the substances, because everyone is always 100% responsible all the time
so of course, restricting plutonium and anthrax is just a social conservative control freak freak out just trying to make everyone as miserable as they are, right?
oh and speed limits: this is of course the slippery slope to social conservative control and destruction of all freedoms. we should just assume that
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Otherwise, you're just continuing on in the rantings of a 20th century freedom hater. You keep repeating the same things over and over: Oh my god. Someone's life can be ruined over it. Therefore it should be illegal. While ignoring alcohol, which you put in the should-be-legal category! What a laughingstock you are.
why do we have any government regulation? (Score:2)
for example, the argument with wall st is: if a guy loses his cash on a bad investment, that's his problem. why intrude?
and the answer is: because the whole damn economy can go into meltdown in an unregulated marketplace, like it did in 2008
in other words, the argument that any negative consequences of certain behavior is small, or only effects the individual, is bullshit. we regulate anthrax and plutonium because the consequences of using that stuff and screwing up is death and destruction for people besid
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I'm not an anti-drug crusader, but no matter what you think it won't make you interesting.
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Re:wow (Score:4, Interesting)
Most profound work that is imaginative is related to drug use.
Is it the profound work that is imaginative that is related to drug use?
Or drug use that's related to profound work that is imaginative?
I've often found that the truly creative/imaginative folks have a hard time dealing with reality as it is, and frequently wind up self-medicating with various substances.
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Ditto. I just read V.A.L.I.S. and just from the parts of the Exegesis quoted in there it sounds insane and repetitive ("The empire never ended".) Even V.A.L.I.S. was sort of on the edge for me, interesting only because Dick is there to navigate through the madness with the reader and provide context and a counter weight. Can't imagine this will interesting unless heavily edited.
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To be honest, for me the VALIS trilogy (VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer) are the least interesting PKD books. In his efforts to talk about the "pink laser" and Gnosticism, the storytelling suffered. Give me Dr. Bloodmoney any day.
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You may not like it - but all of it is true. Even the parts that are not.
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Well if it's true, no wonder it's not interesting.
Re:wow (Score:5, Informative)
And for those of you who missed it, here's [scribd.com] Robert Crumb's The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick
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Err, it wasn't smarts, it was a whole lot of speed that sent him nuts.
very intelligent != crazy (Score:2)
"so smart that it caused mental disorder"
no, this is an exoticization and a glamorization, like "a beautiful mind"
there are smart people
and there are crazy people
then there smart and crazy people
its an overlapping of types, not a cuase or effect anywhere in there
there is no such thing as smart -> crazy and there is no such thing as crazy -> smart
the man was brilliant and gifted. he had also had paranoid schizophrenic tendencies. this was not a cause of his intelligence, or an effect, this was merely a
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He also took a shitload of amphetemines (which produced every book written before 1970) and LSD, and smoked pot daily. I'm sure that helped.
Movie (Score:1)
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Just before the animated cartoon series.
Against PKD's wishes? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't have sources to cite, but I recall when Radio Free Albemuth came out post-humously, that there was a stir that PKD had specifically stipulated that he did not want his works to be published after his death / without his approval. IIRC, his son approved the publication of aforementioned book, and like I said, there was quite a stir at the time.
Is his estate profiting against his original wishes?
FWIW, RFA was a GREAT book and I am glad it was published. Just wondering about the estate's ethics here.
Oh boy (Score:2)
Overrated. (Score:2, Interesting)
Not that I'm trying to offend Ph. K. Dick's fans, but IMHO he was just a schizofrenic. He does not offer any particular insights into the future. Yes, his writings are notably different from most of the SciFi garbage, but diferent doesn't mean better. It's OK, but would you expect any revelations from psychotic type of personality? I don't. Yeah, I read many of his books, just to see what's this all about. As I said, my only impression that he's quite delusional kind of person.
Stuff I do like: Heinlein. and
Re:Overrated. (Score:5, Interesting)
As I said, my only impression that he's quite delusional kind of person.
Having met him in person, that was not my impression at all. He was the guest of honor at Octocon II in Santa Rosa, CA, in 1978, and I happened to recognize him as we passed one another, him on his way back to his hotel room, me on my way to the convention floor. I stopped him by saying, "Excuse me. I hope I'm not bothering you, but you're Phillip K. Dick, aren't you?" He admitted that he was and stood there fidgeting slightly, as if impatient to get this little unwanted intrusion into his privacy over with, so he could be on his way. "Again, I don't want to impose on you," I told him, "but I've always wanted to ask you, 'Where did you come up with the plot to "Ubik"?' It always seemed to me as though you started out to tell one story and wound up with quite a different tale than the one you set out to write."
PKD's eyes lit up, he became quite animated, and his tone of voice indicated that he was actually enjoying himself, as he replied, "You're right. I set out to write about a society where psionic powers - specifically telepathy - were developed to the point that they were routinely used in business for espionage and negotiation, and what the consequences of that would be. How they'd be regulated and licensed and so on. And then, about a dozen or so pages in, the typewriter just developed a mind of its own. It was automatic writing, really. I had no idea what was coming next, or how it would all turn out - I just sat there and let the story channel itself through me. I'd never experienced anything like that before, and it was really a very odd thing to witness!"
I told him that "Ubik" was probably my favorite of his books, because it was so surreal, and so unique among his works, and he confided that it was one of his personal favorites, too. I think I mentioned that I felt John Carpenter should have credited Ubik for inspiring the scene in "Dark Star" where the acting Captain consults the frozen corpse of the ship's original Captain, and I probably could have stood and talked to him for another hour or so, if I'd cared to push it, but I really didn't want to impose on him, so I thanked him for his time and for the insight into his novel and went on my way.
That was such a great convention.
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Not that I'm trying to offend Ph. K. Dick's fans, but IMHO he was just a schizofrenic. He does not offer any particular insights into the future. Yes, his writings are notably different from most of the SciFi garbage, but diferent doesn't mean better. It's OK, but would you expect any revelations from psychotic type of personality? I don't. Yeah, I read many of his books, just to see what's this all about. As I said, my only impression that he's quite delusional kind of person.
Stuff I do like: Heinlein. and S. Lem.
So, just because he suffered from mental illness, he can't be a good author?
I've never based my reading list on who writes the most accurate prophecies... Nor who has the fewest diagnoses...
I'm just interested in reading a good book. And PKD certainly delivers.
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He wasn't trying to offer insights into the future. So there's your problem.
great author (Score:1)
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I have really enjoyed a few of his books including 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.' I definitely HIGHLY recommend 'A Scanner Darkly' and 'Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said'.
On the other hand, I thought 'Maze of Death' lacked depth and was entirely predictable. I also didn't like 'The Broken Bubble', mainly I think because it deals with a lot of "human" issues and not much sci-fi. Possibly I didn't understand it.
I'm slowly working my way through all his books I can pick up at the library. After going t
The Exegesis Lives (Score:2, Interesting)
I love PKD works. Really love them--and V.A.L.I.S. is my favorite. I've read a few pages of the Exegesis, those published by the estate so far. They read kind of like Crowley's better works, some kind of hypnotic poetry. They help put me in touch with infinity and chaos.
Regarding astro's comments, I can't think of a better way to honor his memory than to celebrate his work--all of it.
Regarding his reputation being tarnished, well, whatever. The man was in a category by himself. The only other autho