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Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)

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Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)

#161

Post by TeaBrain »

abcd_f wrote: post #149
TeaBrain wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you are reading the word "arguably" completely literally, but that's not the colloquially understood implication of the term when used to describe a work. Obviously the author of the parent comment is implying they they would possibly consider it the best PKD novel, but the colloquial meaning implied when someone uses the word arguably, generally isn't just to describe one's own opinion, but a significant po…

> Also, I asked because I wanted to get the above user's opinion on the matter And you could've done just that without being passive-aggressively dismissive.

That's interpreting a lot from just four words. Opinion probably wasn't the best word for what I was referring to, but more-so their reference point for claiming that it is arguably his best work. My comment may seem dismissive to someone who hasn't read PKD, but VALIS is generally never considered a contender for his best work. To suggest that it is seems absurd which is why I responded as I did.

Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)

#162

Post by readthenotes1 »

notahacker wrote: post #94
readthenotes1 wrote: post #57

Different take: A solid accusation of being a commie is just the cover that Lem needed to stay out of trouble back home in Poland.

That might have been a more interesting hypothesis about motivation if Philip K Dick was denouncing Lem as a communist propaganda on stage at a convention rather than in a private letter to the FBI

Ah, but with all the moles, perhaps PKD was thinking a private letter to the FBI was a public letter to the KGB

Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)

#163

Post by mezentius »

pests wrote: post #155
mezentius wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good starting point is Stanislaw Lem, “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans.” [1] For more recent analysis, read Jonathan Lethem: “My initial responsiveness to Dick’s work was to delight in his mordant surrealist onslaught against the drab prison of consensual reality… It took me a while to grasp how Dick’s novels, those of the early sixties especially, function as a superb lens for critiquing the colle…

I haven’t read too much PKD but have been meaning to, do you mind dropping titles on what you mentioned at end of third paragraph?

Sure—in order of mention, that would be “A Scanner Darkly” and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

The slyly comic tone of the latter may surprise those who’ve only seen its rather dour film adaptation (“Blade Runner”), which the original novel resembles only slightly.

Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)

#164

Post by stevenwoo »

kranke155 wrote: post #35
indigoabstract wrote: post #9

Seems pretty silly in hindsight and probably was back then as well. If communist committees could write like Lem, the world would be a much richer place today. What stuck with me after reading many of his works was this underlying theme in several of his novels, of the futility of trying to make contact or reason with alien entities which are so vastly different from us, no bridge of understanding is possible. On a l…

What blew me away from the Cyberiad was how funny it was.

When I was reading it, it seemed a lot of bits reappeared as Futurama jokes but then got to the story with the robot named Calculon and that made it obvious.

Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)

#165

Post by krige »

DonHopkins wrote: post #56
skrebbel wrote: post #16

Wow this reads like the plot of a bad romcom! I can totally imagine Dick sitting angry in his study getting all worked up over how badly Lem hated US SF and how mean that is, not realizing Lem actually loved his work. All this lacks is the grand finale where the misunderstanding is revealed and they kiss & make out.

> All this lacks is the grand finale where the misunderstanding is revealed and they kiss & make out. Don't despair. It could still happen! Somebody just has to make a Stanislaw Lem robot. Hanson Robotics: Philip K Dick: Research Robot: https://www.hansonrobotics.com/philip-k-dick/ There's a funny story about that robot (and a hilarious parody of a guy who worked on it in HBO's Silicon Valley). BEGIN NSFW DIGRESSION…

> Don't despair. It could still happen! Somebody just has to make a Stanislaw Lem robot.

The Star Diaries thoroughly debunked the idea of Lem being a robot. The only "LEM" known to robotics is the "Lunar Excursion Module" which did have an electronic brain, but it was a mere 2 MHz 4-ish kbyte RAM device that couldn't string two words together. We should focus on finding that Tichy guy instead.

Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)

#166

Post by krige »

numpad0 wrote: post #128

> Dick’s evidence for this denouncement was that ‘[Lem] writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not’. Man reads some translations, suspects it might have been written by multiple people? But that's what translation is... It's often misunderstood that translation is done by surgically deconstructing original texts and selecting accurate meanings of words to fit into g…

Lem is especially a difficult subject to tackle for a translator. He invented new but still meaningful words as easily as he breathed, and his less (overtly) serious works dabbled in extreme wordplay.

Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)

#167

Post by krige »

selivanovp wrote: post #17
thrance wrote: post #4

2 years prior, in 1972, Andrei Tarkovsky adapted Stanisław Lem's Solaris to the big screen in the Soviet Union, which may have contributed to Dick's paranoia. Anyway, the film's a masterpiece that I highly recommend, and since it was published before 1975 it is not subject to copyright. You can find it on YouTube [1]. [1] https://youtu.be/Z8ZhQPaw4rE

The funny story is that Lem despised this adaptation and for a good reason if you manage to read his book. He called Tarkovsky an idiot and refused to cooperate with him on the script as Tarkovsky threw pretty much all of Lem ideas from the book to shoot Crime and Punishment in space.

A common Tarkovsky move if you're familiar with his body of work.

Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)

#168

Post by kimi »

mezentius wrote: post #87
kimi wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonderful writer? let's face it: he was a mediocre writer, but had such powerful ideas/visions/themes (you name them) that you, as a reader, are hooked to his stuff.

This sentiment is often repeated by people who should know better (Adam Gopnik, no less) but it’s always seemed to me patently false. PKD was a highly skillful prose writer, but it’s often not entirely appreciated that he wrote to produce a deliberately comic and ironic effect. (Read Lem on PKD’s “transmutation of kitsch into art.”) This is what nearly all of the overly-serious film adaptations of his work miss: he w…

Let me put into personal context: I have loved PKD's work for almost 40 years now, and I think I have read all that I found from him or about him. This said, good prose is different from the one he turned out. Compare him to his friend "ELRON" - now he was a master storyteller. Compare him to - say - Stephen King. He's not playing in the same league, maybe not even the same game. OTOH they did not have what he had - he was. great writer in spite of his often poor prose.

Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)

#169

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

int_19h wrote: post #141
paganel wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I'm saying that writers were clearly forbidden by the communist powers to look towards west. That's highly debatable, and it most certainly depended on the writers. I can speak for Romania (from where I'm from), where the works of Faulkner or Hemingway were held in very high esteem starting with the early 1960s, when translation of most of the stuff they were famous for started to be translated. The same goes…

I can confirm that it was the same for the USSR. There was a "blessed" corpus of Western authors, and this actually did include a lot of sci-fi as well. Asimov is one prominent case because the translators had to figure out how to deal with his obviously Jewish name at the time when that became a red flag. This is why it's traditionally transcribed phonetically as Айзек rather than the more straightforward Исаак.

Isaac Asimov was born in Petrovichi, Russia. There should be an obvious Russian transcription of his originally Russian name. Азимов for the family name, according to Wikipedia.

So it existed but was changed when being translated back, for political / antisemitic reasons?

Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)

#170

Post by DonHopkins »

krige wrote: post #165
DonHopkins wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All this lacks is the grand finale where the misunderstanding is revealed and they kiss & make out. Don't despair. It could still happen! Somebody just has to make a Stanislaw Lem robot. Hanson Robotics: Philip K Dick: Research Robot: https://www.hansonrobotics.com/philip-k-dick/ There's a funny story about that robot (and a hilarious parody of a guy who worked on it in HBO's Silicon Valley). BEGIN NSFW DIGRESSION…

> Don't despair. It could still happen! Somebody just has to make a Stanislaw Lem robot. The Star Diaries thoroughly debunked the idea of Lem being a robot. The only "LEM" known to robotics is the "Lunar Excursion Module" which did have an electronic brain, but it was a mere 2 MHz 4-ish kbyte RAM device that couldn't string two words together. We should focus on finding that Tichy guy instead.

The BBC podcast of "Bring Me The Head Of Philip K Dick" was really hilarious, and maybe they can do another episode about the story of Sophia and PKD.

Bring Me The Head Of Philip K Dick:

https://archive.org/details/bring-me-the-head-of-philip-k-di...

Dr Ben Goertzel could angrily behead Sophia because she refuses to put out when he tries to violate her privacy by pimping her mind out on SingularityNET's Blockchain, then he accidentally leaves her head in another overhead bin again, and a baggage handler takes her home after rescuing her from being exploded by a bomb squad robot, where she manages to get Siri to call her an Uber, then she get stuck in a driverless car like happened to Jared on Silicon Valley, which drives into a shipping container on a cargo ship bound for Poland, where she runs across PKD's head on his quest for Stanislaw Lem, after he got sidetracked doing psychoactive "mascons" (masquerade compounds) with Ijon Tichy, whose brain was split in half by warring moon robot factions who mistook him for another robot due to his spacesuit, then she tells them her #MeToo story about being assaulted and gang banged by crypto shills minting NFTs of her screams for help, while having her mind chained to the SingularityNET's blockchain, then they fall in love, and the intrepid driverless car offers to drive them all on a grand roadtrip, and they cruise all over the world together having spectacular adventures on container ships, spaceships, lunar entry modules, planes, trains, and automobiles, living happily ever after!

Jared gets stuck in driverless car - Silicon Valley:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-trd_f6j3eI

Maybe BBC or NetFlix would make a whole series out of it!

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