Monday, November 28, 2011

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Pictured, Radio Free Albemuth, Where are you?

While we wait for that big-time review of The Exegesis (New York Review of Books, please) we must content ourselves with the banal traffic of Dickian ephemera.

Here's an LA Times article about The Adjustment Bureau lawsuit. Since Philip K Dick really did write Adjustment Team I think there's no real question but that the estate is owed money. Furthermore it is my understanding that many big studios try to get of big post-production payments like this, either through legal wrangling or creative bookkeeping. It's obvious to me that Hollywood is nothing more than a sausage-making factory with lips and assholes in control. There's also this io9 article about a possible TV show. Here's my plot summary of the first episode: "Mr Chairwoman, we've re-arranged the ordering of events in reality again to result in several unwatched TVs being tuned to our show. That should give us the ratings we need!"

Here's Barnes and Noble's review of The Exegesis as written by Paul Di Filippo. Believe it or not the review is pretty positive and even encourages people to go out and buy the book, but there may be a conflict of interest there. I like this paragraph:
Beside all the multiplex, circuitous philosophizing, the book is full of mini-narratives pertaining to Dick's own life; insightful, critical examinations of what his oeuvre is all about; stoner aphorisms ("It is just as easy to think of the future pushing the present into the past as to think of the past generating the present and moving toward the future…"); Jungian dream adventures like Lovecraft's The Quest of Unknown Kadath; and plaintive cries from the heart, a voice echoing in the spiritual wilderness, longing for one true companion and guide. Arriving, exhausted and drenched in cosmological flop sweat, on page 827, written not long before Dick's premature death from stroke in 1982, we encounter his temporary elation, and it cuts like a knife. "Why am I so joyful? I am celebrating a victory and can now stop work -- finally -- and relax. Why? Because I did my job and I know it." But of course more hard work followed, and only death stopped him.
Lastly the PhilipKDickFans website is really firing on all cylinders. Good to know that if I wink out of reality like a distant supernova, there will still be quality Dickian web-content!

1 comment:

frankh said...

You say "I think there's no real question but that the estate is owed money." Would you say that if the estate was Austen's or Shakespeare's?