TWO FISTED HOMEOPAPE March/07 - Imagine a PKD take on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre world!
Won't lie, this one's pretty scattershot - buckle in!
♫ I applied for a rescue dog,
But if I get you dog,
You're rescuing me ♫
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2022 -- bounce.
Why I love Philip K. Dick.
We just passed the 40th anniversary of Philip K. Dick’s death - there was a great comic on the New Yorker by Paul Karasik about it that’s thoughtful and informative as a taster entry.
I know I bang on about PKD a lot [A LOT], but he really is one of the most formative writers in my life. Thinking about it being 40 years without him is crazy to consider all that’s happened since then, all that he would have found interesting, and all that he kinda predicted.
I’ve shared the story before, but it’s something that’s so firmly stuck in my head, and I think repeating it refreshes that memory cartridge and keeps it vivid, so I’ll do it again because I love the story of my discovery of Philip K. Dick.
I was a young ween, maybe 13 or something, and was yet again prowling the local Sunday markets for cheap books. Usually filling in a gap in my Stephen King collection, I also took it as a time to see what else turned up and just read blurbs and scope spines and enjoy the outdoor experience. The fact there were also hot jam donuts was just a bonus.
There were a few different weekly book selling vendors. Some overpriced, but the stock was good quality, some erratic in nature, and one really cheap. The books were all stuffed into styrofoam broccoli trays and you could score a paperback for 50c. And on this Sunday, I’d spent my money already - no doubt on a King paperback, a Star Wars toy/figure of someone like the Rancor Keeper [still with that rad hood he wore] and of course an energy top up of the sugar filled *and* sugar coated warm dough ball, and I had one 50c piece left to me. So I went to the cheap stall, and I looked over stuff, and knew I’d just nab something.
I still don’t know if I connected PKD to Blade Runner, but I have to assume I knew, probably. I was still more of a James Cameron sci fi kid than something as cerebral as Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, though I still did like it. But flicking through spines, covers, blurbs, I found this:
And what a ghastly cover it is. But it was the right amount of money [oh, how I wish I could stumble across 50c PKD books now!], so I stowed it into my backpack and I rode my bike home. I don’t know how soon it was, but I soon read that paperback [back when I would buy new books and then they’d actually get read, ha].
I was instantly in love. It’s not PKD’s best book, but it does have its moments, and since then I’ve spent 3 decades entering secondhand bookstores and instantly going to Sci Fi and looking for D for Dick. I’ve got a full bookshelf of nearly all his books. I’ve read…maybe two thirds of them. But only like 20% of his short stories. That five volume set of shorts will be devoured one day.
But it’s the way PKD thought that has kept me engaged all these years. His worry about the perception of reality, and really his truth about it. How the hell do we know what is going on around us? How easy is it for social media companies to skew our perceptions, and thus our concepts of truth, on a whim?
PKD would have found today’s global climate fascinating, but debilitatingly scary. He thought his phone was tapped in the 70s and he was worried. No way was he carrying an iPhone around to track his movements, and sounds, and eye focus, and everything else. He knew this shit was bad, and only getting worse, and he played with these worries through fiction. As we all should.
I try to do this in my writing. What’s my brain really chewing over? What’s a big worry or fear I have? Then I spill it all over some sci fi gonzo canvas and see what bubbles over. I try to consider my characters’ perceptions of things, and what information they have, and what they don’t. I try to think about how the world I’m writing in got made, and how it’s run. I try to worry myself with their social failings, and then push them through my character.
He’s got the top shelf on my bookcase, he’s got the most inspiration in my work, and he’s got a body of work that still inspires me as I work slowly through it. He’s been gone 40 years, I missed him by only a few months, but he’s still around in most of the mornings I spend playing make believe.
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4am Feedback.
Got up at 4am the other morning and just started giving feedback on my students’ essay planning work. I did this because I need to stay on top of my workload, and because this needs to be done before this week, but also because I was up and energised about giving my students feedback that will hopefully genuinely assist them in preparing to write their essay.
I’m also really wanting this one class to connect with FAHRENHEIT 451 so they can see how technology can distract you from society and distance you from any feeling of belonging, and how the people in that book don’t seem to have much purpose or connection to others and how that’s not working out so well for them.
So I got up and gave statements on their thesis statements, and validated their quality example choices for the essay, and gave hints on how to further analyse these things to draw out maximum meaning.
It’s nice to enjoy your job.
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The writing.
It rolls on, week after week. I kept chipping away at this latest script. Often just a single page a day, but that’s a script a month, or in less time, and that’s gonna add up.
I’m still worried that my brain only has so many productive hours available to it every day, and I’m always so damn productive at the day job - just hours of deep focus - and whether that means when I wake up I’m more in tinker mode. I do some press, or some proofreading, or a page of script. But I find it hard to really just knuckle down deeply because my brain, well, it just doesn’t do that. And I’m worried if I really push it to do that then maybe it’ll break. So I’m trying to keep the goals short, close at hand, and just slowly and easily get there. There is no rush on any of this.
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ASD&D.
I need to prep for the next instalment of my campaign that I am DMing tomorrow night. I know the story and details, but not the numbers. I shall get ready for that.
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PERHAPS YOU'D CARE TO SAMPLE
Tried to think about why I’m not reading a lot of stuff online. I mean, I’m busy, sure, I get that, but nothing?
Then realised there’s the war on Ukraine, constant climate catastrophe, friends with cancer, and the main headlines are shared with Kim/Kanye break up news, and cricketers dying, and it’s either a mix of the mundane that still hints at the underlying ennui of the world, or it’s the catastrophically large stuff that’s hard to compartmentalise. So, yeah, I guess I stay away from the news. Which leaves me with fun stuff, and I’m mostly just teaching or writing and I miss most of it.
I need to get back into reading quality interviews or analytical review stuff that can actually expand my mind a little.
First, I gotta know where to find this stuff, and have it come to me so I’m not out there trawling sites like it’s 2009.
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GRIST FOR THE MILL
SAGA has returned! - after a 3 and a half year hiatus, one of the truly best comics of the past decade is back on the stands and it’s still just as fantastically awesome as before. There’s something seemingly simple about Brian K. Vaughan’s scripts that come across as so easy to digest on the page, but there’s complexity to the layers he writes with. Characters twist and turn and evolve, and his turn of phrase is always so emotionally metered out. It’s so effortless you’d think you can do it yourself - I’ve never been able to. It took me a few weeks to get to the comic shop, so I got 2 issues of this return, and they were a glorious read.
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE on Netflix - I love the original TCM, I think it’s a staggering work of tension and tone. Beautifully shot, precisely structured, it’s a work of true art. Not like the slashers that would come after - Jason Voorhees as an unstoppable supernatural monolith with a penchant for dramatic kills [shout out to the time he picked up a sleeping bag and whipped it against a tree, much to Teen Ryan’s stupid stupid glee], and Freddy Kruger as a wiseass dream stalker - we got the family from down south who just like to nibble on the local visitors, as well as maybe sell a little of their offcuts, and we got Leatherface, this hulking man-child of sad nurtured brutality. The whole flick is just an exercise in fear of the unknown within your own country. How a nation can have two paths laid out before them and most naively think one or the other is taken, when in actuality there are plenty of trees to burrow into, or fields to go explore, or perhaps some people just face that fork and walk backwards into hell.
The OG TCM is about a nation divided, and growing further apart. A shame then that this new reboot/sequel/thing is also aiming to be about something - gentrification of the deep south. But then it just gets mired in standard slasher gore. Or, that’s all I could see, though I admittedly did nope out about halfway through and do not plan to return. Why? Because this one lacks the nuance of the original, because this one seems more interested in full and present gore on the screen than any kind of analysis of the social themes beneath the surface [or perhaps only surface thin], because even Leatherface is shown as just some guy who likes to create as much varied chaos and violence as possible.
Originally, the whole family are just batshit crazy and they like being butchers, it’s what they do. So they trap, kill, and eat people. Here, we are presented with some emotional hook for Leatherface to reemerge, but then it’s just slasher killings in different ways and it’s fairly boring, sadly. I just read the wiki recap of the rest of the flick, and I’m fine with never going back into this one because it’s just standard cheap horror fare. Don’t get me wrong - Teen Ryan would have eaten it up, but even he would have known he was only in it because it does what it says on the tin: people in Texas will be massacred with a chainsaw. He would have known that he’d never go back to it, not like that 1974 classic that still sticks in his thoughts.
If you want some cheap thrills, and there’s nothing wrong with that, fire up the Netflix engines of war and check this out, but if you are wondering if they were able to match the original, take this gif as my review - it’s weird looking, unnecessary, and while it’s intriguing, you’ll regret spending too much time on it. Seriously: look at this gif, why does this scene look so cheap and cgi and underwhelming?
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Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.
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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE
Been teaching theme this past week and realising how much I love diving deep into a scene and trying to pick out how/why it works. I do it generally with most things, but the chance to just sit with one single chapter and take a stab in the dark as to what it’s about and how it’s presenting that is something I love so much.
I’ve also realised that it works best when you spitball and then just tease it out and around, mostly through conversation. It’s a genuinely fun process and you can learn a lot.
Anyway, that’s how I proved a sequence in ‘Salem’s Lot is actually about capitalism, and why a student and I slowly whittled down one encounter in the book as being about the fact we all wear fake faces and that this is crucially important to allowing a “polite society” to survive. Fun.
It's been a busy season for me. Haven't got to read and comment on as many of these as I would like to. But I really enjoyed this one so I'm glad I found the time.
I'm not nearly as read in PKD as you are, but when I picked up a copy of DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP a few years back on a whim he instantly became my favorite author. I've read SCANNER DARKLY and THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, as well as a handful of his shorts up to this point.
I love the way you describe PKDs thinking. I often talk about how different BLADE RUNNER is to DO ANDROIDS because it feels like they sort of miss the actual point the book is making. But looking at it from the perspective of "PKD just thought different." makes it make so much more sense.
He was worried about the root while most worry about the symptom.
Kind of wraps my head around why I enjoyed EVERFROST and BLACK BEACON so much. It seems to be a shared sense of sci-fi and world building. And why those worlds feel so much bigger than the story that is taking place.
In a good way obviously.
Really enjoy the introspection that flows through your newsletter and I hope to get back to reading and commenting on more of them. Can't wait to get around to SPEED REPUBLIC. Thanks for always sharing.
Cheers!