The Fredösphere

Arts & Letters Daily has a link to a new biography of Philip K. Dick.  I think I'm too afraid to read it...

As Dick grew older, ingested various drugs in ever-larger quantities, and indulged his compulsive passion for catastrophic relationships with women, these fantasies grew ever more bizarre, and ever more insistent on the illusory and adversarial nature of reality. But Mr. Carrere never wavers: With his concise, fluent prose and eye for psychological detail, he succeeds in making Dick’s psychoses not only understandable but even convincing. By the time Dick, in the last decade of his life, came to the conclusion that reality as we know it is an illusion used by the Roman Empire to numb the minds of Christians, the animating idea of his unfinished Exegesis, the reader feels as simultaneously trapped and enlightened as Dick must have at the moment of his epiphany. Mr. Carrere, through a remorseless and clear-eyed accretion of detail, makes this last madness seem both plausible and inevitable.

...but I guess I'll put The Man in the High Castle on my reading list.  How strange it is, that I have never read a word of Dick.  Once again, I rail at my folly and laziness, wasting all those hours on the effluvium of Asimov's incontinence.

[Memo to self:  think really, really hard about whether you want to keep that sentence as-is before you hit the send button.]

Speaking of creative kooks, we finished watching Vertigo last night.  I saw it years ago and loved it, but the intervening time and the loss of surprise drained the movie of suspense for me.  Thus I was in a position to notice its leaden pace, and how silly that contra-zoom trick looks.  (Hitchcock sure recycles it plenty of times.  "Hey, I paid good money for this footage!")  As a bonus, we get a few Freudian Words of Power from a white-coated doctor pronouncing the pronouncement:  Guilt Complex!  Sheesh.  Fortuantely, we visited San Francisco a year ago, so I was able to amuse myself by playing Name That Location.