Monday, 16 May 2022

'blade what? isn't that in william burroughs?'

morning good morning. grey day.  

horsemouth types this from the alternative universe where philip k.dick is a genre science fiction writer unknown outside of SF fandom because blade runner was never made. 

after the initial promise of the man in the high castle nothing seemed to go right for him and he went down a wormhole of drugs, divorce and paranoia that effectively stopped him from writing for many years. even before his religious conversion he had earned a reputation as being unreliable (and after conversion to the church of the utah saints he was no better). he became a chemtrails/ conspiracy theory nut. at his death his papers were dispersed to the wind. there was talk of making a tv series of man in a high castle  but the script editors balked at his racism against german and japanese characters. it never happened, robert silverberg's dying inside  was selected instead.

the non-SF novels (other than confessions of a crap artist) were never released. he is survived by a handful of paperbacks in the DAW imprint (usually with lurid covers featuring dinosaurs and spacecraft).

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horsemouth is reading hallucinating foucault by patricia duncker (a book he would often see in the second hand book shops). an english grad student goes in search of a french writer called paul michel (foucault's first two names) who corresponded with a philosopher called foucault. paul michel is an out gay man and a contrarian, very much as you would imagine foucault to be from his writings but younger. 

so far not too much of foucault's philosophy/ies. this character paul michel delivers the eulogy for foucault, one lifted from la volonte de savoir.

'there are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one  thinks and perceive differently than one sees is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.' 

horsemouth spent the afternoon listening to miles davis' black beauty. so what would this music sound like shorn of teo macero's studio trickery? he also spent time reading the FT weekend section (stylish people save the world on the weekend)

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it's a grey morning but it's a monday (so horsemouth will have to make some efforts to start the week). there should be a new episode of the podcast will be wild - from an alternate universe where a sitting US president encouraged his followers to storm the capitol building. 

at the moment the assumption is that this (all this insurrectionary bollocks) is all over - but in fact the trump supporters are just making the long march through the school boards and local politics. the republican party is being seized from the conservatives. 

 

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