THE PHILIP K. DICKATHON (10): MARTIAN TIME-SLIP

Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Philip K. Dick just couldn't be bothered by some of the standard verities of science fiction. He knew sf should often take place in outer space, but whereas other novelists placed their narratives in the 22, 23, or some unimaginable distant future, in the novels Dick wrote in the 1950's and 1960's, he thought that 40 or so years was plenty of time for man to start populating the universe. He also didn't pay much attention to the news coming out from astrophysicists that the weather on other planets seemed to be uniformly bad. Martian Time-Slip takes place in 1994. Mars has scattered settlements and townships, mostly sponsored by national groups from Earth. The exception, and the most powerful group of all, is a Plumbers Union. I assume Dick had had some unpleasantness involving plumbers when he sat down to write this book.


But plumbers are essential to the workings of the settlements. The weather is bearable if a little dry. One good trade-off is that you only weigh about fifty pounds, and housewives slip into halter-tops and Capri pants to visit neighbors. But water is in short supply and closely rationed. Arnie Kott, the vulgarian union boss, is one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet, although that may change. Rumor has it that the U.N. is planning to develop the FDR Mountains, drilling deep water wells and creating self-sustaining luxury living complexes. The land grab is on.


Wikipedia has a coherent synopsis of the book. and I congratulate whoever wrote it. Topics touched on include: schizophrenia (which is almost epidemic), black marketing, adultery, extensive drinking and drug ingestion, pesky neighbors -- in other words, it is Dick's Northern California neighborhood transfered to Mars. Much of the plot hinges on Manfred, an autistic child who becomes a test subject for the main character's experiments with communication and ultimately time travel.


And let's not forget the Beakman, the remnants of the Martian race who are now reduced to wandering the deserts or working in the homes of wealthy earthlings. Dick always presents himself as progressive in terms of race and social policies in general, but his portrait of the Beakmen is among his strangest concoctions. Just as he didn't care much for astrophysics, Dick also didn't seem to keep up with physical anthropology. The Beakmen are described as Negroid and descended from the same source as  earthly Africans. (Phil, all homo sapiens come from common stock, long predating any division into races. And so unless you are saying some Central African natives somehow found their way to Mars 30,000 years ago, you are really off on this one.) Also, this is a novel written in the early sixties, and Dick was certainly aware of the Civil Rights movement. So what does it mean that Mars has a society somewhat reflecting the Antebellum South. The word slave is never used, but wealthy settlers have "tame" Beakman working for them, refer to the as niggers, and enjoy giving them such high-falutin names as Heliogabalus. But of course, the Beakman have deep, secret knowledge. Where was Dick going with this?


This is one of Dick's enjoyable train wrecks of a novel. I don't want to slip into biographical criticism, but it reads like a combination of Dick's marital problems, his extensive experience with psychiatrists, a general dislike of land speculators and plumbers, and some cock-eyed ideas about autism. And as nutty as the whole thing is, the conclusion is not only satisfying on many levels but genuinely strange as well.




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MONDAY MORNING

THE FUDDY DUDDY ON THE STAIRS

More and more often I find myself no longer the demographic for certain cultural events. Perhaps I have less patience than I had twenty or even ten years ago. Sometimes it's the "been there/done that" syndrome. And sometimes, I admit, I am just too old. I hate to show up places where I look like some one searching for his runaway teenage daughter.

 I am using the term "cultural event" here in the broadest possible sense. Music, art, movies, books, fashion, and those new roller coasters where you strap in but dangle from the actual machine and experience the sensation of dying. Sorry, I meant flying.

Music was never that big a part of my life and now even less so. I do listen to the radio rather than CD's in the car. I want to hear what's out there on the progressive rock stations -- if they worked at it, they could come up with a more pompous term for that genre -- as well on what passes for country stations. If I  might lower the tone of the discussion here, what I really liked about music from my teenage years on were songs that made me think about fucking. I still like those songs and they are many and various.  A few years ago I taught a class of college juniors and asked them to recommend some music. Radiohead was at the top of the list. What is Radiohead least likely to make you think about? Right. Bring back The Georgia Satellites.

With visual art I see a lot of reinventing the wheel, but I remain curious to see where things are headed. And sometimes individuals have to first reinvent the wheel before they can decide to either give it all up or find their own way.

I often see movies that I am sure the producers, usually at Lion's Gate, were not counting on me to help them make their money back. After a day of business appointments, I saw Hostel  in a sold out New York City theater where I feel pretty certain I was the only person wearing a suit and top coat and carrying a briefcase. But I enjoyed it as much as the kid next to me. Other things I see in an effort to stay somewhat in tune with the Zeitgeist. The DVR has upped my consumption of such things as the Twilight films. Sex in the City 2, Adam Sandler's latest, and films starring Jason Stratham -- although there are extenuating circumstances there I choose not to go into.

With books I draw the line on keeping up with the Zeitgeist. Books take too long. I will eventually watch most if not all of The Da Vinci Code on television, but I am not going to waste my time reading it. I know it's junk. Same goes for John Grisham, James Patterson, et al. And please never tell me that you know the one Stephen King book I would really enjoy.

Sometimes my reactions to something can catch me by surprise. It doesn't make me feel old, but I wonder if on some level I am slowly slipping out of it. I am by and large unshockable. I have never closed my eyes during eye gougings or disembowelments; when Seann William Scott ate the dog turd in American Pie Number Whatever I laughed my ass off. I've seen several of those serious European films where the characters have real sex and thought some were better than others. But then there is the case of Gasper Noe.

Noe is a forty-seven-year-old French director who, if such a thing remains possible, is "controversial." I have seen two of his films. Irreversible (2002) and Enter the Void (2009). The formal trick to Irreversible is that the story is told in reverse. It starts, or ends,  with a brutal beating death in a gay bath house. The victim has raped his killer's girlfriend in one of the most prolonged and painful sequences ever put on film. As the story continues to move backwards we get to know this couple, who are not particularly appealing. We go with them to a party full of drunken French assholes. In the final, or the first, scene we learn that the girl is pregnant and we see Vincent Cassel's semi-erect penis. I left the theater feeling the film was equal parts serious filmmaking and hooey.

I watched Enter the Void about a month ago on DVD, and the idea for this now overlong blog posting came to me that night. I no longer, however, remember much of what the movie was about. It was set in Tokyo, the central characters were an American brother and sister, there was a lot about drugs with names I had never even heard before, and towards the end there was a shot taken from inside a vagina as a penis head plunged toward the camera. This was followed by a really pretty version of a sex ed film depicting the tiny sperm attaching itself to an egg. As much as I remember, the story of Enter the Void seemed to be that we all start out as zygotes and then shit happens.

I was happy to write it off as flashy nonsense, but a few days later I read on a website, for which I was obviously not the demographic, a report by a very articulate young man who said Enter the Void was the film he had been "waiting to see all his life." I couldn't write this guy off as an idiot, but I had to admit that we came from different worlds.

Two years ago, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth -- this, by the way is not a digression -- hosted a series of French New Wave Cinema. They invited me to introduce Jean Luc Godard's Breathless. I was surprised that so many of the audience were seeing the film for the first time, and I assured them they were in for a treat. But the bulk of my introduction concerned the negative responses the film drew upon its release, especially in the United States. It was immoral, incoherent, an insult to all things decent, cast with unappealing actors, etc. Bowsley Crowther, the critic of record for the New York Times, was particularly vehement in his put downs.

And so is this the formula? I am to Gaspar Noe as Bowsley Crowther was to Jean Lun Godard. Fifty years from now will the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth be hosting a Gaspar Noe retrospective, with some know-it-all standing before the audience and assuring them they are in for a treat?

Am I slipping not only into late middle age but even worse into the irrelevancy of the fuddy-duddy who just doesn't get it?

BOOK REVIEW: WHITE CHAPPELL, SCARLET TRACINGS by Iain Sinclair

White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings by Iain Sinclair
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Is it possible to enjoy a book while aware that you are not "getting it"? Obviously, yes, at least three stars worth.


I have been looking forward to reading Iain Sinclair, and have built up a small battery of his books. This is the first one I've tackled, lured in by its brevity and the plot lines that promise dissolute used book dealers and Jack the Ripper.


The book dealers, given my slight contact with the British used book trade, I found completely believable. There is razor thin Nicholas Lane who, due to stomach ulcers constructing a coral reef in his gut, lives off cocaine and what nutrients he can absorb from his meals before he regurgitates them. He and his crew are introduced on a Mr. Toad's wild ride through the English countryside, scouting,or rather scrounging, for books, waking up one dealer in the middle of the night who, having forgotten his key, is happy to kick in the front door of his shop so they can have a look. Inside is the dealer's night crew is busy removing remainder marks and forging autographs. Lane and company find Elmore Leonard first editions and one true prize, a rare variant of Study in Scarlet they expect to net thousands from. So much for that plot line.


Now the bits about Jack the Ripper. Historical Victorian characters take over or rather permeate the proceedings, especially Dr. William Guy, a popular but largely discredited contender for the Ripper himself. The prose is brilliantly fevered at it best but so chock-a-block with place names and historical references that I decided to let it just roll on rather than work to hard to puzzle it all out. I enjoyed the ride, but I have to admit I was glad, or I should say, relieved when it was over.


  

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THE PHILIP K. DICKATHON (9)

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've never been big on Alternative History novels. Never been tempted by those Harry Turtledove books that show spacecraft flying Confederate flags or Doughboys crouching behind armor-plated dinosaurs. But this is Dickian alternative history, and the novel that won him the Hugo award. He claims in a letter from the mid-sixties that he was not that crazy about this book. Maybe like Henry James he craved success but then tended to look down on works that brought him the most attention. In James' case it was Washington Square, Daisy Miller, and The Turn of the Screw. And that is the only comparison I would ever think to make between Philip K. Dick and Henry James.


The Allies have lost WWII. The United States is now officially only those states on the Eastern seaboard, and they are under Reich Rule. No one has shown much interest in the Midwest, and, although still part of a conquered empire,  it exists as a marginally freer buffer zone. The Japanese control the Pacific States of America, and the bulk of the novel takes place in San Francisco. In the PSA, most Americans have made their peace with the Japanese occupation. No Patrick Swayze has risen to the fore and led a group of teenagers, strangely proficient in advanced military weaponry, to stage a Red Dawn style insurgency. Most San Franciscans are working profitably with or for the Japanese, but in alliances that are marked with crippling levels of anxiety. This is, after all, a Philip K. Dick novel.


Dick establishes a dozen or so characters, several of whom are even who they claim to be, and sets things rolling so that paths seemed destined to cross in disastrous ways. But in fact things run rather smoothly with the exception of a couple of spectacular outbreaks of violence. This is a novel of anxiety, not action. It's a story where anxiety can arise from the excruciating decision of what will be the proper gift to "graft" in a given situation, or by the discovery that the Nazi's are planning a massive nuclear holocaust. Linked characters are scattered across the continent, and I was worried that somehow everything was going to tie together neatly as in one of the machines-for-winning-Academy-Awards like Crash. But the stories run parallel more often than they cross. One character does save another's life, but he never meets the man and acts because he is pissed off and wants to exert some authority.


And then there is the man in the high castle, the reclusive author Hawthorn Abendsen --how does Dick think up these names. Abendsen is the author of the controversial and absurdly titled novel The Grasshoper Lies Heavy. This is an alternative history in which the allies win the war, and although banned by the Nazis, Japanese and American readers are snatching it up. The final question in Dick's novel centers on the possibility that Abendsen's novel is not fiction. The Allies did win the war. History is not  a progression of events but an infinite play of possibilities. But still a play where some people get killed,some go insane, and some plan to blow the whole thing up.



   

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MONDAY MORNING

A DISTURBING CHRISTMAS PRESENT

(For other "Disturbing" posts, follow the "disturbing" label.)

My family did Christmas on Christmas Eve. The grandparents came over to my family's house mid-afternoon, we opened presents, ate something light, and then my father tried to assemble toys as quickly as my brother and I could play with them, passing from one to another in a frenzy of acquisition. A wooden train -- a very early gift although I think they still make them for high-end toy stores. A motorized race track with a flimsy plastic track that made a figure eight and that was really only fun when you could make the cars fly off the elevated turn. A chemistry set that could create the smell of rotten eggs (big hit). On the higher end, a telescope one year, a go-cart another. Then we got older and it was mostly clothes we had picked out for ourselves.

Later in the evening, a second tier of relatives would arrive. Aunt Ivy was my paternal grandmother's sister. She lived in Akron, Ohio with her husband, Uncle Dee. I was always told that I had not been named after Uncle Dee, despite the eerie similarity of our names. They were in town to celebrate Christmas with their daughter's family, Jerry, her two sons, considerably younger than my brother and I, and, if she had one at the time,  her husband. They brought us boring gifts. Some years the soap-on-a-rope went in the cabinet next the previous year's soap-on-a-rope. The bottle of English Leather sat unused next to the British Sterling I doused myself in for special occasions. These were gifts that proved most valuable when school friends insisted on having birthday parties for themselves well into their high school years.

I was in tenth grade when this disturbing event occurred. The doorbell rang and Aunt Ivy and company arrived. We convened to the living room, which in itself marked the ritualized formality of the event. The tree and actual family event took place in the den. But the seldom-used living room was closest to the front door and that's where we sat. There was conversation, I suppose, and cookies and complaints of being too full to eat another bite. Then came the desultory passing out of gifts, with all the lowered expectations we had come to expect.

Until my brother married some years later, my family traditionally distributed all the gifts and then everyone tore into them at once, holding up whatever they found in the box and shouting "Thank you" across the room before moving on to the next package. My brother's wife, however, introduced the time-consuming tradition of opening one present at a time. But this was not yet the case, and so the room full of relatives started in all at once on their packages.

My box from Aunt Ivy and Uncle Dee had an unusual shape. It was a cube, weighed almost nothing, and was flimsy to the touch. Both soap-on-a-rope and cologne were out as possibilities, and I was preparing myself for the wrong kind of socks. I didn't know exactly how they would be wrong, but I knew that wrong they would be.

While everyone else in the room was busy with their own gifts, I opened mine and saw what I at first took to be some sort of packing material. It was fabric, light-weight fabric, some patterned and some solid. Where were the bad socks? Once I fished my way deeper into the box and touched what could only be an amply sized brassiere did I know for certain that I held in my lap a box of Aunt Ivy's soiled underclothes.

"What have you got there?" someone asked, but I was speechless. I think I had a pair of panties in  my hand at that time because the next thing I remember was Aunt Ivy, a woman of a certain age and considerable girth, leaping across the room, grabbing the box from hand and saying something. I wish I could be more specific here, but Aunt Ivy was never well-spoken and was understandably as flustered as myself. It was all something about packing for the trip, knowing that she needed to do laundry when she arrived, and somehow making the terrible mistake.

This should have been a moment a general hilarity and a treasured Christmas memory for the Mitchell family, but I do not believe it was ever spoken of again. I retold it this past year to my niece's and nephew's families. It was the afternoon after my mother's funeral, many photo albums were being passed around, and the younger people were curious about who was who in some of the pictures. A picture of Aunt Ivy--incidentally  not the picture of total strangers I have used with this post -- prompted me to tell the story of her unusual Christmas offering. But memory is selective. Of those who witnessed the event, only myself, my brother, and father are still alive. As my niece and nephew and their spouses screamed and laughed and rolled on the floor, both my father and brother claimed to have no memory of the event. Of course, neither of them had dug into that box and touched that well-worn Playtex living bra.