Yeah, well, I've been busy. Mostly doing stuff I can't really talk about, not because it's secret or anything, but because it's so dreadfully boring: taking the kids to school, making sack lunches, receiving rejection letters, and sleeping.
But fret no more. As today is a day to rejoice! For we finally have a decent review of The Exegesis to talk about. It's in today's LA Review of Books and it was written by Rob Latham. Read it here.
But first, check out this sentence:
...associate editor Davis, author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, assembled a diverse array of talents — including novelist Steve Erickson, critic N. Katherine Hayles, and blogger David Gill, whose website “Total Dick-head” is the best online compendium of Dickiana — to generate the shrewd, erudite, sometimes quite witty annotations.
I've criticized a lot of sentences on this blog, but, at last, I've found the perfect combination of predication, tone, subject matter, and everything. I'm in love.
Stay tuned for some other wicked cool stuff on the horizon. Secret awesome stuff not involving sack lunches.
4 comments:
Yeah, I really enjoyed reading the Rob Latham piece. It branches out as much more than just an exegesis review aswell.
It also allowed me to find the LA Review of Books archive which has a load of great stuff to read.
Definitely one of better reviews I've read so far. Sure, he questions the decision to publish the E but does so without throwing the baby out with the bath water; claiming that the whole thing is simply the result of a drug addled mind, as many of the other reviewers have done. By including reviews of other PKD works, Latham suggests that some of the valuable content within the E may be more accessible and interesting to most readers in novel-form.That may true, but I do believe that there's a market out there for the E; maybe a small market, but one that that is very thankful to see the book published. While I didn't exactly agree with some of his conclusions, the review overall was certainly not one churned out by the ol' pkd article machine :)
Latham's article/review is excellent, and almost makes me want to actually read the Exegesis...almost. (I bought it, of course, and it sits on my shelf along with my other PKD books, but as to whether I'll ever try to read it or not...who knows?
I am totally jazzed to read his work-in-progress on the "new wave" science fiction of the 60s/70s!
In contrast, the io9 'community' have surpassed themselves with the initial comments on '10 Ultra-Weird Science Fiction Novels that Became Required Reading'. All the usual trolling guff, but my particular favourite is that Dick 'really abuses the '-ly' construction'. Damn him!
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