Two bucks.
Cover art by Darrell Sweet.
Here’s my riff on Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip.
I regret not picking up this edition of Kafka’s Amerika that same day:
I reviewed Schocken’s latest translation of Amerika (not the one above) on Biblioklept like over eight years ago. I still have the black hardback, but I’d maybe exchange it for this beauty.
I don’t like August and I’m glad it’s over.
I only wrote a few riffs and reviews in August, failing to write at length about Gordon Lish’s Cess and Victor Hussenot’s The Spectators and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Also: Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, which I audited the audiobook of—great stuff, a novel that posits the book as a primary and insuperable technology. And some films too—Michael Mann’s Thief (amazing); Quest for Fire (why were the Baby Boomers so obsessed with cave people?); Ex Machina (a well-acted design-porn riff on Bluebeard that has no real ideas about its central theme, human consciousness).
I also watched and loved and didn’t write about the second season finale of True Detective—loved it—a tragic hyperbole, a big exclamation point, a sympathetic punchline to the season’s paternal anxieties. I found the final shot unexpectedly moving—the season’s female leads moving through the traffic of humanity, strapped with a child, knives, the future.
In August—
I riffed on season 2 of True Detective, arguing for its merits as a neon noir satire.
Ryan Chang and I talked about New American Stories, an anthology edited by Ben Marcus. We riffed on the selections, scope, and the first story, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s “Paranoia.”
I wrote a barely-coherent, probably incoherent review of Philip K. Dick’s novel Martian Time-Slip. The sub(or is it super?)text of the review is that I am a Permanently Paranoid American.
I also wound up writing a bit on Paul Kirchner’s trip strip The Bus yesterday. For years now, I’ve run some kind of regular Sunday post to anchor the site—it was death masks for a while, book shelves after…maybe something else I’m forgetting now (?)—but running The Bus was the most fun I had.
I’m not sure what I’ll run this Sunday for a new series, but something serialish so…
Promised octopus, by Utagawa Kuniyoshi—
He saw, through the man’s skin, his skeleton. It had been wired together, the bones connected with fine copper wire. The organs, which had withered away, were replaced by artificial components, kidney, heart, lungs—everything was made of plastic and stainless steel, all working in unison but entirely without authentic life. The man’s voice issued from a tape, through an amplifier and speaker system.
Possibly at some time in the past the man had been real and alive, but that was over, and the stealthy replacement had taken place, inch by inch, progressing insidiously from one organ to the next, and the entire structure was there to deceive others.
Life in the bleak Martian colonies bears a striking resemblance to business as usual on modern-day Earth…In the parched Martian colonies, grasping Arnie Kott is the chief of the powerful plumber’s union (based on the fifties Berkely Co-op Phil despised for its wrangling politics). The little guy, repairman Jack Bohlen, is a onetime schizophrenic who still lives with schizophrenia’s aftereffects. An autistic kid, Manfred Steiner, slipslides helplessly forward and backward in time, into realms of entropy and death.
He lay there for a hundred and twentythree years and then his artificial liver gave out and he fainted and died. By that time they had removed both his arms and legs up to the pelvis because those parts of him had decayed.
He didn’t use them anyhow. And without arms he didn’t try to pull the catheter out, and that pleased them.
They gubbled and gubbled. He put his hands to his ears, but the product crept up through his nose. Then he saw the place. It was where he wore out. They threw him away there, and gubbish lay in heaps up to his waist; gubbish filled the air.
“What is your name?”
“Steiner, Manfred.”
“Age.”
“Eightythree.”
“Vaccinated against smallpox?”
“Yes.”
“Any venereal diseases?”
“Well, a little clap, that’s all.”
“V.D. clinic for this man.”
“Sir, my teeth. They’re in the bag, along with my eyes.”
“Your eyes, oh yes. Give this man his teeth and eyes before you take him to the V.D. clinic. How about your ears, Steiner?”
“Got ’em on, sir. Thank you, sir.”
They tied his hands with gauze to the sides of the bed because he tried to pull out the catheter. He lay facing the window, seeing through the dusty, cracked glass.
Outside, a bug on tall legs picked through the heaps. It ate, and then something squashed it and went on, leaving it squashed with its dead teeth sunk into what it had wanted to eat. Finally its dead teeth got up and crawled out of its mouth in different directions.
He lay there for a hundred and twentythree years and then his artificial liver gave out and he fainted and died. By that time they had removed both his arms and legs up to the pelvis because those parts of him had decayed.
He didn’t use them anyhow. And without arms he didn’t try to pull the catheter out, and that pleased them.
I been at AMWEB for a long time, he said. Maybe you can get me a transistor radio so I can tune in Friendly Fred’s Breakfast Club; I like to hear the tunes, they play a lot of the oldtime favorites.
Something outside gives me hay fever. Must be those yellow flowering weeds, why do they let them get so tall?
I once saw a ballgame.
For two days he lay on the floor, in a big puddle, and then the landlady found him and called for the truck to bring him here. He snored all the way, it woke him up. When they tried to give him grapefruit juice he could only work one arm, the other never worked again ever. He wished he could still make those leather belts, they were fun and took lots of time. Sometimes he sold them to people who came by on the weekend.
“Do you know who I am, Manfred?”
“No.”
“I’m Arnie Kott. Why don’t you laugh or smile sometimes, Manfred? Don’t you like to run around and play?”
As he spoke Mr. Kott gubbled from both his eyes.
“Obviously he doesn’t, Arnie, but that’s not what concerns us here anyhow.”
“What do you see, Manfred? Let us in on what you see. All those people, are they going to live there, is that it? Is that right, Manfred? Can you see lots of people living there?”
He put his hands over his face, and the gubble stopped.
“I don’t see why this kid never laughs.”
Gubble, gubble.
Another passage from Philip K. Dick’s novel Martian Time-Slip.
I find the passage’s rhetorical construction remarkable—the “he” whose consciousness we dip into here, briefly, is Manfred Steiner, an “autistic” child with precognitive abilities. The narrative here takes us into the (a?) future (maybe?) for a few sentences, before pivoting back into the novel’s “present” (1994!) with the verbal intrusion of Kott. This little episode ends a chapter, and the next begins with close attention to Kott’s perception of Manfred. I’ve provided some context here, but I think the little passage also stands on its own as a strange flight into breakdown.
And then the hallucination, if it was that, happened. He saw the personnel manager in a new light. The man was dead.
He saw, through the man’s skin, his skeleton. It had been wired together, the bones connected with fine copper wire. The organs, which had withered away, were replaced by artificial components, kidney, heart, lungs—everything was made of plastic and stainless steel, all working in unison but entirely without authentic life. The man’s voice issued from a tape, through an amplifier and speaker system.
Possibly at some time in the past the man had been real and alive, but that was over, and the stealthy replacement had taken place, inch by inch, progressing insidiously from one organ to the next, and the entire structure was there to deceive others. To deceive him, Jack Bohlen, in fact. He was alone in this office; there was no personnel manager. No one spoke to him, and when he himself talked, no one heard; it was entirely a lifeless, mechanical room in which he stood.
He was not sure what to do; he tried not to stare too hard at the manlike structure before him. He tried to talk calmly, naturally, about his job and even his personal problems. The structure was probing; it wanted to learn something from him. Naturally, he told it as little as possible. And all the time, as he gazed down at the carpet, he saw its pipes and valves and working parts functioning away; he could not keep from seeing.
All he wanted to do was get away as soon as possible. He began to sweat; he was dripping with sweat and trembling, and his heart pounded louder and louder.
“Bohlen,” the structure said, “are you sick?”
“Yes,” he said. “Can I go back down to my bench now?” He turned and started toward the door.
“Just a moment,” the structure said from behind him.
That was when panic overtook him, and he ran; he pulled the door open and ran out into the hall.
An hour or so later he found himself wandering along an unfamiliar street in Burlingame. He did not remember the intervening time and he did not know how he had gotten where he was. His legs ached. Evidently he had walked, mile after mile.
His head was much clearer. I’m schizophrenic, he said to himself. I know it. Everyone knows the Symptoms; it’s catatonic excitement with paranoid coloring: the mental health people drill it into us, even into the school kids. I’m another one of those. That was what the personnel manager was probing.
I need medical help.
From Philip K. Dick’s 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip, which I’m really digging.
Biblioklept 