Meditative Prose
Monday, 14 January 2008
On Friday I forgot to bring my backpack when Sarah and I went to a cafe to read. I may as well have forgotten to bring my eyes, so we walked up Church St. to a certain big box bookstore that shall remain nameless. I knew what I wanted to read, what I have been jonesing for recently, so I made my way to the the sci-fi section and then found a whole glorious shelf of Philip K. Dick novels. I picked one (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said), shelled out, and we headed back to the cafe to start the weekend right: with caffeinated reading.
I’ve read three other PKD books, the three that make up the VALIS trilogy, & I’ve seen probably four other movies based on his books. I haven’t read a ton of sci-fi, but this stuff hits me just right. It doesn’t depict some glorious utopian future provided by technology. By now we all know that’s bullshit and will never happen. Instead, Philip K. Dick gives us a gritty view of a future where technology might be a little more “advanced” but we still interact with it in the same ways. There are still economy cars, they just happen to fly. Cops are still power tripping assholes, they just have bite-sized hydrogen bombs that can be implanted into your skin and detonated remotely. There are still rich people and poor people, and of course you still have to go to work. The drugs are better or worse, depending how you look at it. People are basically the same, though — shades of good or bad, sharing or selfish, sane or insane — and PKD books always seem to be about relating to those characters despite the divide between our universe and theirs. And it’s never very difficult.
I finished Flow My Tears Sunday afternoon and started reading a book called Off the Map that I bought back in Lewisburg, PA for $3. It is a nice little paperback with cool cover art and illustrations inside, and I remember when I bought it wondering out loud why it only cost three dollars. The clerk at the bookstore pointed out that there are cheap ways to print books, and that’s when I noticed that the book was published by a collective called CrimethInc in Olympia, WA. The authors give only first names, and there is an anti-copyright notice inside giving permission for anyone to copy and redistribute the book for the next four hundred years, as long as they don’t profit from it. What a great idea! Literature for the sake of literature.
It is an awesome little book about a couple girls who hitch around Europe, make friends, check out different squats, and generally have a good time being free human beings for three months. I’m not done with it yet, but it’s making me really happy, and making me really look forward to the warmer months when I can have adventures of my own with Sarah and whoever we meet along the way. But it’s January in Vermont, so for now I’ll have to content myself with books & dreams: a luxuriant garden, bike trips, late-night drumming, swimming in the lake, all-day picnics, napping under trees, meeting strangers and making friends.
