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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)

#201

Post by shervinafshar »

atombender wrote: post #200
shervinafshar wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the above are his titles Back to original list from the parent comment that is the "above" in my comment. X denotes PKD title, O denotes otherwise: X Time Out of Joint X The Man in the High Castle O Martian Time-Slip X The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch X Clans of the Alphane Moon X The Simulacra X Now Wait for Last Year O Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)/Blade Runner (1982) O Ubik O We Can Bu…

You're being needlessly pedantic. But in the name of pedantry, you also have The Simulacra wrong. PKD's manuscript for The Simulacra was called "First Lady of Earth".

I'm just pointing out that my comment was about the list provided by the commenter above and "most" was about that list rather than all of PKD's work. What you refer to as "pedantic", I consider precision and talking about what's being discussed; someone asks "are these his titles", the answer was "yes. most of these are". Nothing more, nothing less.

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

#202

Post by pomian »

zorked wrote: post #174
bawolff wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its mostly hailed as a great artsy movie, that general audiences find super boring. I think its asethetic & art design is what its hailed for. Nobody hails bladerunner for its pacing. Its hard to be good at everything. Being really good at one aspect is enough to get people to fawn. I disagree on the contemplative bit. I think both are quite contemplative but in very different ways.

Blade Runner passed the test of not making my children pick up the phone while watching it. Very few movies do that.

We should make an hn movie list like that. Movies our kids watched to the end....

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

#203

Post by atombender »

shervinafshar wrote: post #201
atombender wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being needlessly pedantic. But in the name of pedantry, you also have The Simulacra wrong. PKD's manuscript for The Simulacra was called "First Lady of Earth".

I'm just pointing out that my comment was about the list provided by the commenter above and "most" was about that list rather than all of PKD's work. What you refer to as "pedantic", I consider precision and talking about what's being discussed; someone asks "are these his titles", the answer was "yes. most of these are". Nothing more, nothing less.

I'm not talking about the earlier comment at all, but rather about the entirety of PKD's output.

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

#204

Post by shervinafshar »

atombender wrote: post #203
shervinafshar wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just pointing out that my comment was about the list provided by the commenter above and "most" was about that list rather than all of PKD's work. What you refer to as "pedantic", I consider precision and talking about what's being discussed; someone asks "are these his titles", the answer was "yes. most of these are". Nothing more, nothing less.

I'm not talking about the earlier comment at all, but rather about the entirety of PKD's output.

Great. Good job doing your research, but your input and cross-link were not relevant to this thread focusing on that earlier comment.

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

#205

Post by atombender »

shervinafshar wrote: post #204
atombender wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about the earlier comment at all, but rather about the entirety of PKD's output.

Great. Good job doing your research, but your input and cross-link were not relevant to this thread focusing on that earlier comment.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#206

Post by shervinafshar »

atombender wrote: post #205
shervinafshar wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. Good job doing your research, but your input and cross-link were not relevant to this thread focusing on that earlier comment.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Great. Noted. Moving on...

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

#207

Post by mezentius »

kimi wrote: post #168
mezentius wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

With respect, I have no personal investment in defending the quality of PKD’s prose; I wouldn’t even count him among my favorite authors. I’m a professional writer—and while that doesn’t make my opinion authoritative, as writers disagree on many points large and small, and there are fewer professional rules to observe than your high-school English teacher would have you believe— I’m offering a technical appraisal of his sentences, in the same manner that a mechanic may tell you, “no, your timing belt is fine—you have at least another fifty-thousand miles on it. Whoever told you otherwise was trying to cheat you.”

If by “ELRON” you mean L. Ron Hubbard—well, the shocks are worn out, the muffler’s falling off, and the tires are flat. The car’s totaled, and unless you have some personal attachment to it, I’d have it hauled off to the junkyard. (My opinion on King is more complicated—it’s a fine car, I suppose, if you’re partial to that make, but the brand ain’t what it used to be.)

This isn’t a great venue for sentence analysis, but reading PKD’s early, extremely funny, short story, “Oh, To Be A Blobel!” is instructive. [1] Read it aloud, if you can. Note the little details he throws away, the way he sneaks ironic jokes into seemingly objective descriptions. It’s a Borscht Belt routine masquerading as a science-fiction story, and perfectly constructed. But if this seems like “bad” writing to you, consider that you may not have entirely passed through his veil of irony.

[1] https://sickmyduck.narod.ru/pkd038-0.html

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

#208

Post by mcv »

coldtea wrote: post #181
mcv wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not know that. And running scalpels makes a lot more sense for that title. Because as cool as the title sounds, it doesn't make any sense for the movie. Nobody is running blades there.

Cops aren't made of copper either (nor do they belong to the Sus domesticus species), but still...

> Cops aren't made of copper

No, but their badges are. Or were. I guess it's a pars pro toto thing.

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

#209

Post by evbogue »

TeaBrain wrote: post #161
abcd_f wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I am torn on whether I used the word arguably correctly in my original comment. When I first posted it, I thought I could find many sources that had argued it was PKD's best work.

Upon trying to find those sources I could only find Terence Mckenna's article on it, in which he doesn't exactly argue that it is PKD's best work https://sirbacon.org/dick.htm

Perhaps I now believe that those who read the book and "got it" would argue that it's his best book and perhaps even the best title.

But part of me wondered just now if those sources were out there and now I cannot find them.

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

#210

Post by int_19h »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #169
int_19h wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's the thing - "Isaac" is not a Russian name, but rather a Russian Jewish name, and is normally spelled "Исаак" (and pronounced something like ee-saah-k), which is indeed exactly how it was spelled in his birth certificate. It is also a very recognizably Jewish name - e.g. it would often be used in Russian political jokes on the subject.

And then you have USSR with its periodic antisemitic campaigns. The relevant one here is the one that started under Brezhnev in late 1960s, which is also when sci-fi in general became more popular in the USSR prompting more translations. So, publishing an author whose first name is Isaac would immediately draw attention from the censors. Seeing how anything Western was already on shaky grounds - sci-fi being allowed in the first place because it would often critique contemporary Western societies - translators played it safe by transcribing the American English pronunciation of "Isaac" into Russian, which made it Айзек (Ayzek). Which helpfully looks nothing like Исаак (Isaak), and doesn't "sound" Jewish at all to Russian ears.

This translation stuck, and it's how he is commonly known in Russian to this day.

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