Jim's comments (member since Apr 26, 2008)

Jim's comments from the Philip K Dick group.

PKD's language most likely never fit an era. I would imagine that most readers were always left a little off-kilter while reading him.

What's more amazing is that he was able to keep that voice for 30 years. Very consistent, very him.

That's the performance art. Even later works like Valis still held his writing style. Going back to early ones, you see in the 50s he starts out writing like "Can I get away with this?" And around 1960 he finds out, "Holy cow! I can!" And he blasts off.

I will also note that Nabokov, Pynchon, Zora Neal Hurston, and on and on had a peculiar style that translates to any generation - perhaps more so that "mainstream" fiction.

I'm Jim Benson. In high school I read a bunch of PKD and then didn't touch any for about 20 years.

Then one day I was reading a Salon.com article about PKD and it said "Philip K. Dick wrote 37 novels." And I said, "Wow, if I read one a month, it would take me 3 years to read them all.

That sounded like a challenge. So I've been reading (more or less) one a month since then.

There are two types of immersive environments: expansive and compact. Expansive would be like going to another culture. So China or Los Angeles can be expansive environments. These are experiences that place _You_ inside another culture and force _You_ to define yourself in terms of that culture.

A compact environment is like a sensory deprivation tank or several days in bed with someone intense. They are focused, out of body, experiences that force _You_ to abandon your concept of self.

This is what PKD writing is to me. The beauty of a PKD book is inward, it can only be judged based on an understanding of the PKD aesthetic.

Sometimes, you need to read four or five different books for an entire pattern to emerge. Sometimes patterns emerge within the confines of his usually 120 page treatment.

Like Mike, the PKD I read in the past didn't resonate until my 40s. As a teen, they are rides that broaden your horizon. As a 40 year old, they are little capsules of loss and pain that treat the conditions they describe.

I stopped writing reviews of individual PKD books on my blog because they are never stand alone units. But the units they attach to (other books) can sometimes have taken 10 or 20 years of PKD writing to realize themselves.

The themes of The World Jones Made (1956) were not fully realized until books from the 1980s. But The World Jones Made is not an optional read.

As for who what why I am ... um ... apparently I'm here to type a lot.