Martian Timeslip by Philip K. Dick
I've wanted to do a blog for awhile. I've tried a few times: xanga, myspace, personal journal, but it's never worked out. I've never managed to be interesting enough to keep myself amused by writing these things.
I got a journal awhile back. It's currently in the top drawer of my room some several hundred miles away. I used it to write commentaries on books I read. So I'm going to try again...
The last book I read was no duh Phillip K. Dick's Martian Timeslip which deals with mental illness, drug use, and Martians. Basically, this small time union leader is attempting to get rich by harnessing an autistic boy's precognitive abilities. It's the regular cast of crazies and when I first read it a few years ago, it struck a deep enough impression that I've been looking for a copy ever since. What was attractive was the freakishly scary bits from the viewpoint of Manfred Steiner, the severely autistic boy. The account of autism is inaccurate, it's still sympathetic and bewildering. When I first read it, it seriously gave me a sense of vertigo. There is something seriously creepy about people with no faces whizzing around saying "gubble gubble." One of the things I noticed now is the odd analytical way that Dick writes about women. He did that with the android character from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep too. It's very detached
He had seen such clear coloration in high-school girls approaching nubility, and once in a long while one saw it in fifty-year-old women who had perfect gray hair and wide, lovely eyes. This girl would still be attractive twenty years from now...Arnie, by investing in her, had perhaps done well with the funds entrusted to him: she would not wear out. (102).
oddly flattering but also demeaning. You can't really argue if it's wrong or right. Well you could as a woman say it's taking a very superficial viewpoint yet it's a nice description. It gives a nice image.
I walked to the library today and got some books: Kim by Rudyard Kipling, Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote, some guilty pleasure science fiction novel, Strange Itineraries by Tim Powers, and some other romantic thing by Alexander Dumas fils . I have no idea why the "fils" is italicized. I also have Problems of Philosophy from a somewhat significant other.