/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3511129]

What does /lit/ think of Dick's Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch?

[Anonymous No.3511131]

It did Lovecraft better than Lovecraft.

[Anonymous No.3511137]

Not one of his best works, but it is a very disturbing novel.

The dreamer of the dream hates you.

[Anonymous No.3511143]

Been years since I read it, but I remember it being a good read that ended rather abruptly. Too many of Dick's SF novels read like first drafts.

[Anonymous No.3511147]

>>3511143

He only did first drafts.

His entire works are giant altered state Amphetamine-fueled stream of consciousness.

[Anonymous No.3511149]

>>3511147
His non-SF books (Confessions of a Crap Artist, Mary and the Giant, etc) read like they've had more care taken with the writing.

[Anonymous No.3511155]

>>3511149

Because they were serious works.

His philosophy was that the interior of the mind should need to be edited, or something of the sort. You could see his works as translated dreams or nightmares of some sort in that regard.

Only implying that you're in a kind of dream reading it.

[Anonymous No.3511165]

Dick is a really fucking spooky person if the legends that surround him were true.

With the religious experience he claimed to have with a pink ray of light from a Jehovah Witness-type came to his door that hit him in the eyes yada yada. He claimed that he could talk to God himself, only it wasn't really God, it was the Universe, but it was also our minds, but just at the very dark ocean bottom.

Anyways, he awoke from a dream he had or, "conversations with the meta-god" and said that his son would have a hernia in a year, and that he would die from it if the doctor's did not treat it.

A year passes.

Child keeps crying at night.

Take the kid to the pediatrician, apparently "Diaper Rash".

Time passes, he starts screaming take him to the pediatrician again.

What does he have? Hernia.

There is a fundamental truth to Dick. The insanity is sanity.

[Anonymous No.3511170]

Saw a copy of his Exegesis recently. From a flip through it looked potentially mind-bending. I didn't like like his 'beam of pink light'-influenced books (VALIS) as much as his other novels, though. They start getting close to listening to the ramblings of the insane guy at the bus stop.

[Anonymous No.3511173]

>>3511170

That insanity is what make Dick so great though.

Insane drug-addled Dick was Dick at his best.

[Anonymous No.3511177]

>>3511165

Or that time he dropped acid and he believed himself he was a Roman Gladiator.

He never learned Latin at any time in his life, yet he was speaking completely grammatically correct Latin.

[Anonymous No.3511187]

>>3511177

Or that time he claimed that he would recieve a "Socialist Assassination Signal" in a letter that would program him to kill himself when he read it.

A week later, he recieved a letter of a Left-Wing publication of a praising review of one of his books with the words "Death" "Decay" "Dying" and "Totality" underlined in alternating red and blue marker.

The address apparently came from a 5-star hotel in the Washington D.C. area near Capital Hill.

[Anonymous No.3511204]

>>3511165
Amphetamine psycosis.

[Anonymous No.3511208]

>>3511204

Yes, but what makes his viewpoint any less or more valid than yours?

Nothing.

[Anonymous No.3511210]

this thread reads like the disciples talking about christ. He was a fucking lunatic, he hallucinated all of this shit

[Anonymous No.3511211]

>>3511210
>He was a fucking lunatic, he hallucinated all of this shit
You don't think those two things are interesting?

[Anonymous No.3511212]

>>3511210

And how are you not hallucinating?

Do you believe therefore you are?

Do you really believe you think that you think therefore you think you are?

[Anonymous No.3511219]

>>3511208
I never claimed it did. His worldview is subjectively much more valid and interesting than most mundane authors, he has been my favorite author growing up, and he is one of the best authors to read to get an angle on identity and virtuality. The fact that he was a paranoid psychotic doesn't alter any of that, but still it is there.

[Anonymous No.3511279]

>>3511211
It's not that it's not interesting, it's just that those things didn't really happen. They're the hallucinations of a crazy person. Some people in this thread are trying to push it as fact, when it's the same thing as saying jesus walked on water, or turned it into wine. Makes for a cool story, but it isn't really real. He was a good writer, not a prophet. A lot of crazy people claim they talk to god.

[Anonymous No.3511281]

>>3511210
>this thread reads like the disciples talking about christ. He was a fucking lunatic, he hallucinated all of this shit
Christ was an extremely lucid, practical, down-to-earth and cynical man. Do us a favor and read the source materials, for God's sake.

[Anonymous No.3511284]

>>3511212
you just blew my fucking mind, man

[Anonymous No.3511291]

[Anonymous No.3511302]

>>3511279
>it's just that those things didn't really happen.

Except they did.

His wife and children at the time attest to it.

>>3511291

Are we on /lit/ or /v/?

[Anonymous No.3511310]

>>3511129
I read 3 Dick novels, this was by far my favourite (others were the man in the high castle and ubik). I liked it very much. If I remember correctly reading it was like listening to Pink Floyd.

[Anonymous No.3511314]

>>3511302
>His wife and children at the time attest to it.
This is exactly how religions start.

[Anonymous No.3511316]

>>3511310

Funny, I listen to Radiohead's more surrealist ambient works like Amnesiac when reading Dick. It fits much more.

[Anonymous No.3511317]

>>3511314

That's the point of Dick.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and sometimes the book is reality since it came from the mind and all we know is that the mind translates the concrete universe, the written word is as any valid interpretation since it can influence the reality of individuals.

[Anonymous No.3511352]

>>3511317
The fact that a book can change your life and way of thinking doesn't mean that any of that shit really happened to him in reality, but you've been pushing it as truth. I like PKD, but I understand that the guy's grasp on reality was pretty slippery. Sane people have come to a general consensus on what reality is, and we all seem to have similar experiences with it. When someone comes along saying that they're predicting things in the future, but tell you after the prediction comes true, it raises an eyebrow on the bullshit meter.
And what's with the messianic worship of SF writers? There's already a big religion based on the bullshit ramblings of one, do we really need another?

[Anonymous No.3511357]

>>3511316
sounds like I should try it. I'm a musically obvious person.

[Anonymous No.3511368]

>>3511352

I doubt there's going to be a Dick-version of Scientoloy, I just like the lore surrounding the guy.

And what's ironic, is that he wrote about a slippery grasp on reality, and then, later in life, right before he died, he started to slip like the characters he wrote about.

Sure, his grasp wasn't great to start with, but the metaphysical quandaries are what make his work just so goddamn special in the science fiction field. It's not even science fiction really, only in setting.

His idea was that Gods and Dragons were in the mind and the mind is reality.

The putty like nature of reality can be bent.

The Universe and reality are not the same.

It makes excellent surrealist fiction.

[Anonymous No.3511388]

>>3511368
>It makes excellent surrealist fiction.
agreed, no argument there, he was a genius.

But also a heavy speed user. Although he claimed that speed didn't work on him because his liver was so strong that it processed it faster than it could reach his brain lol. I don't know if you've ever been around someone with amphetamine psychosis, but they make some outrageous claims, and are extremely fucking convincing sometimes.
We all like the thought experiments on reality, but you have to know, deep down, that he was a little crazy.

[Anonymous No.3511482]

>>3511129
the cover to my copy is real spooky

with that said the book goes nowhere. just jumps from one vaguely related tangent to the next and then it stops right at what seems like the buildup to the big finale.

this quote from the good man Baudrillard basically sums up the book, for me:

"[Dick's work] is hyperreal. It is a universe of simulation, which is something altogether different. And this is so not because Dick speaks specifically of simulacra. SF has always done so, but it has always played upon the double, on artificial replication or imaginary duplication, whereas here the double has disappeared. There is no more double; one is always already in the other world, an other world which is not another, without mirrors or projection or utopias as means for reflection. The simulation is impassable, unsurpassable, checkmated, without exteriority. We can no longer move "through the mirror" to the other side, as we could during the golden age of transcendence."

[Anonymous No.3511510]

Does anyone else find the bits on Mars to be horribly boring? The world-building is extremely effective, a real menace pervades everything, like the potential for evolutionary regression in the E-therapy for example. And then we leave this neat world for the 3rd quarter of the novel with the not entirely convincing self-exile of the clairvoyant dude and his hackneyed ruminations on it. That curious decision prevented this from being first rank Dick in my opinion.

[Anonymous No.3512232]

>>3511388

Of course he was a little crazy. That's what makes him great.

A madman who can write is a great man.

[Anonymous No.3512407]

I love Dick. (huehue)

Seriously though, there's so many wacked out people who are doing uppers that just waste away who you'll never about. He had all that shit going wrong for him and still churned out a shitton of novels many of which are pretty damn entertaining through all of his chronic poverty and insanity.

His conclusions may not be perfect, and his insights may not be profound, but it cannot be denied that he was a man who asked many of the right questions.

[Anonymous No.3512440]

>>3512407

I think he suffered through many a mental illness, but he was not without sanity.

He convinced his own psychologist at the time of his first wife that he was the sane one and his wife was a threat to their children, whom the psychologist ordered immediately locked up in a ward, and Dick immediately regretted his actions and told paramedics that he was really the insane one, not her, "Take me!!! I'm bonkers! Take me!"