Kevin's Watch

for me:
just barely understand-- Harlan Ellison, Gertrude Stein
can not comprehend a word they write-- Phillip K. Dick, William S. Burroughs

do you mean Burrough's cut up technique?



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique

I have no problem with Dick. ( oops! that didn't come out right, oops, that even sounded worse... )

Never read Stein. Enjoy all the other authors.

--A

Perhaps it was just because I just had ten years on the kids in my class, but I was the only one discussing her when the teacher brought it up for discussion. I would pick up Burroughs and read bits of it-- somebody that's how you should read Burroughs.

William Gibson. Granted, I never got past the first few pages of Neuromaster, but I also didn't really want to.

Neuromancer. Gibson's not hard. In fact, I find his writing pretty plain and straightforward, almost journalistic. The thing about him is that he describes the extraordinary, as we see it, as the ordinary, as the characters see it.

Dick is just weird. You have to approach someone who tells stories about living shoes and gumball machines like you would your crazy, but entertaining, uncle.

My prblem with PKD is he suddenly changes everything that's going on in such a radical way, that all context is utterly gone and my brain is too preoccupied with restoring context to assemble any workable narrative. It becomes much like the "word salad" used by severe schizophrenics.

Well, he was a pretty disturbed guy, and a bit of a junkie to boot. You just have to read A Scanner Darkly to know that he knows what it feels like.

And Radio Free Albemuth is one of the oddest books I've read. Enjoyed The Man In The High Castle quite a bit. Maybe you're trying to read too much into him? ( I dunno.)

Orlion: What? You don't read Gibson? Damn, he's the basis of...like...every futuristic cyber movie, from Johnny Mnemonic to the Matrix. Hell, he invented the term cyberspace.

Personally, I think people read Gibson, told themselves that this was so awesome they had to make it reality, and started doing so. Life imitating art to provide a roadmap for the future development of the net.

--A