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Maureen's Reviews > VALIS
VALIS
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Maureen's review
bookshelves: favourites, books-dangerous-to-my-sanity, break-on-through, novels
Nov 07, 2008
bookshelves: favourites, books-dangerous-to-my-sanity, break-on-through, novels
VALIS stands for vast active living intelligence system. it is also a trigger to my crazy. i am a perfect breeding ground for it: i read a lot of gnostic texts in university, and struggled against tipping points when i read the book within franny and zooey "the way of the pilgrim" and when i saw mike leigh's film, "naked" and it made me think many crazy things, like chernobyl means wormwood, and the disaster was the third trumpet.
when i first read VALIS, i embraced it. i could feel it insinuating itself into how i thought; my regular, relatively logical self slipping into the hub in my mind where reason and faith collide, bend back and forth in their struggle to exist in my susceptible brain. and every subsequent complete or near-attempt to read it is the same, i start to slip, and think i cannot accept but neither can i live without, believing in something very like VALIS. the last few times i've tried to re-read it, i've stopped reading. i feel its serpentine, and usually somebody who knows better says, "why are you reading that again? that book makes you crazy!" and i realize they're right, and i'm better off not going down this road again.
and yet for all that, remembering VALIS makes me happy. from a safe distance, and attempted atheism, i can recall i enjoyed being horselover fat talking to friends about pre-socratics and gnosticism, death and life, coincidence and fate, about miracles in pink lights, and magical-pseudo david bowie, the man who fell to earth. if you're somebody who can read about these things without succumbing to them, i heartily recommend this book. if you find them crazy-making, consider this a warning.
greg's review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... actually helped me figure out how to articulate this. thanks, greg!
when i first read VALIS, i embraced it. i could feel it insinuating itself into how i thought; my regular, relatively logical self slipping into the hub in my mind where reason and faith collide, bend back and forth in their struggle to exist in my susceptible brain. and every subsequent complete or near-attempt to read it is the same, i start to slip, and think i cannot accept but neither can i live without, believing in something very like VALIS. the last few times i've tried to re-read it, i've stopped reading. i feel its serpentine, and usually somebody who knows better says, "why are you reading that again? that book makes you crazy!" and i realize they're right, and i'm better off not going down this road again.
and yet for all that, remembering VALIS makes me happy. from a safe distance, and attempted atheism, i can recall i enjoyed being horselover fat talking to friends about pre-socratics and gnosticism, death and life, coincidence and fate, about miracles in pink lights, and magical-pseudo david bowie, the man who fell to earth. if you're somebody who can read about these things without succumbing to them, i heartily recommend this book. if you find them crazy-making, consider this a warning.
greg's review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... actually helped me figure out how to articulate this. thanks, greg!
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
November 7, 2008
– Shelved
January 27, 2011
– Shelved as:
favourites
March 12, 2012
– Shelved as:
books-dangerous-to-my-sanity
September 17, 2012
– Shelved as:
break-on-through
September 17, 2012
– Shelved as:
novels
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Mar 12, 2012 11:38PM
Such a wonderful book. Altho it freaked out all my friends in college when I tried to get them to read it. (I knew one other person there who liked Dick. ((twss)) But he was into Palmer Eldritch, which freaked me out.)
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Moira wrote: "Such a wonderful book. Altho it freaked out all my friends in college when I tried to get them to read it. (I knew one other person there who liked Dick. ((twss)) But he was into Palmer Eldritch, w..."ha! i didn't read palmer eldritch until last year because it made me nervous. i had a boyfriend in university who steered me toward pkd. he loved ubik. i was leery because he also loved the jerry garcia band and followed their tour and came back with these horrible guatemalan patch pants. so clearly his tastes were suspect. but i was won over by the short stories, moved onto the novels. i am sort of happy i read radio free albemuth before valis. it is almost like a primer. :)
Maureen wrote: "i had a boyfriend in university who steered me toward pkd. he loved ubik.Aww! Ubik is so underrated.
i was leery because he also loved the jerry garcia band and followed their tour and came back with these horrible guatemalan patch pants. so clearly his tastes were suspect
OH DEAR
Yeah, I forget the order I read everything in....I know I read Bladerunner/Androids after the movie (which I saw on cable, with my parents, at about....age 15? 16?) because I persisted in asking for it by its ORIGINAL title and nobody said they had it til my mother finally got fed up and grabbed the movie tie-in edition off the shelf. I think I found out about Dick from Le Guin* -- that essay in Language of the Night. So I read Castle and Valis and Transmigration pretty early on, too. Didn't read Albemuth til way _after_ both Valis and The Divine Invasion (argh, that's a slog). Lost track of how many times I've reread Valis and Scanner and Archer, really. And Tears is beautiful. (It's so weird having Dick be kind of popular nowadays, like when suddenly there were a lot of new novels by Russell Hoban.)
You know what I could never figure out, was why Deus Irae SUCKED. I mean, you had Dick and Zelazny AND apocalypse times -- what the fuck happened? I think they sent it back and forth through the mail or something -- so sadly terrible.
Galactic Pot-Healer is probably my favourite underrated one. God that book is funny. Or maybe it was that I was terribly terribly depressed the first time I read it. God, so funny. And yet so oddly moving.
*T
W
S
S
I just collected a collected Dick from the library but it reeks of cigarettes :P
Miriam wrote: "I just collected a collected Dick from the library but it reeks of cigarettes :P"that ubik-loving boyfriend i mentioned to moira in message 2 used to brew bottle tokes off the back of his copy of ubik. maybe the previous owner of the collected did the same? :)
(i did mine off the back of my mother love bone CD. oh, those were the days!)
A plastic cd case sounds more appropriate for that use.I'm starting to learn toward David's used-books-have-cooties position.
i'm a big fan of david's but i think he is a bit of a prissy pants on this issue. also on at least one other issue, but this one especially. if the used book can't be aired out it is perhaps not worth buying but barring any boogers or other human effluvia that can't be easily dealt with, i say press on with used books. but that's of course because a lot of books i am interested in are OP and i'd rather have a good used copy than a crappy desktop publishing one (i'm still annoyed by that copy of night of the hunter i recently read)... :)
Yeah, I think I'm just squeamish right now because of a string of bad luck with used/borrowed books. Also because of seeing that dude urinating in the periodicals.
Callum wrote: "Mike Leigh's Naked! Best film of the 90s. Are ya with me?"definitely it's an all-time "favourite": in quotes because it's like lolita -- depraved but beautiful --so i don't go around proclaiming how much i love it; i learned not to do that the hard way since i showed the film to a guy i was dating in the nineties and he looked askance at me. i've never really stopped thinking about it, though, and i can't actually remember the name of another film i liked so much in the 90s... so many words to say yes, i am with you. :)
Ha! I had an ex who was convinced that Thewlis' character was an amalgam of the worst qualities of myself and my closest friend at the time. I halfheartedly argued with her about it, but suspect there may have been some merit to her assessment.
Neil wrote: "Ha! I had an ex who was convinced that Thewlis' character was an amalgam of the worst qualities of myself and my closest friend at the time. I halfheartedly argued with her about it, but suspect ..."this is probably just compounds all the other reasons we are friends, neil. his intensity, his propensity for speculative conversation and seeing connections in conspiracy are all utterly beguiling. these exes of ours had NO IDEA WHAT THEY WERE MISSING. :)
Here's the Dick talking about his stuff. I think it's all just an excuse to take LSD.
:P
Adrian wrote: "Here's the Dick talking about his stuff. Dick Stuff
I think it's all just an excuse to take LSD.
:P"
i think one of the biographies i read about pkd talks about this conference and his comments but thanks for linking to the footage. it's kind of bittersweet because he's being so earnest about the "plurality of reality" but it's clear that the audience thinks he is a major kook.
and hey, LSD never took me anywhere like that even though i really wanted to go there. but PKD mostly took speed, didn't he? unfortunately, i'm not really good with speed. makes me rambunctious. mushrooms are really the way to go, i think. :)
Well, you're just a shroom snob!Dick usually took speed when writing, but I had to throw in LSD because he got cranky when Harlan Ellison suggested that Dick used it while writing a story.
The audience is full of those ugly '70s replicants pretending to be humans. Dick was very indulgent with them by sharing his visions.
sometimes i think that harlan ellison descended from lot's wife he's so salty. who hasn't he scrapped with? poor pkd -- harlan couldn't even get his drug of choice right. :Pthe 70s replicants are happier believing in the crappy reality currently on sale, real susan from narnia types. that susan. i've never gotten over her choosing lipsticks over narnia. :P
i am going to go sleep at a sleep clinic tomorrow night: one can only hope i will end up somewhere else if i actually fall asleep. :)
Maureen wrote: "i am going to go sleep at a sleep clinic tomorrow night: one can only hope i will end up somewhere else if i actually fall asleep...."You better be careful. When I was a kid, I read a horror story about a young woman at a sleep clinic. While she was sleeping, she had an out-of-body experience; but her astral form took a wrong detour while returning: she woke up, looked in a mirror ... and saw the reflection of a fat old man screaming.
Wouldn't it be a hoot if you fell asleep and met VALIS? It could be your new boyfriend!
Mo and VAL sittin' in a tree,
K-i-s-s-i-n-g ...
Hey, look at this ... Robert Crumb got in on the act ...
Maureen wrote: "sometimes i think that harlan ellison descended from lot's wife he's so salty. who hasn't he scrapped with? poor pkd -- harlan couldn't even get his drug of choice right. :P"Ellison gave an interview on my college radio station and was really mean to the girl interviewing him, which seemed kind of low. I mean, what's the point of picking on some earnest sophomore? Naturally they aren't going to have entertaining comebacks.
God, is Ellison ever a needler! Dick and Ellison probably super competitive with each other, because they were equally weird in scifi but in their own very different ways. And Ellison is much more a realist, so Dick's ambiguity about the otherworldy (aliens, replicants, gnosis, multiple worlds) probably also irritates. But that is what PKD so great; he never settles; is Deckard a replicant? are we different from replicants? Much truer to the searching of the presocratics and Gnosis than LSD banality. And now multiple worlds, just may be proved ...
