kleenexwoman | (no subject)

So we're doing Baudrillard's Simulations in po-mo class, and it's all about the stages of simulacra and reality not being real and all that. And the class is going "OMG! CRAZY!" and I'm thinking, "This stuff is oddly familiar." Because everyone in class has seen The Matrix and knows the "desert of the real" saying, but then there's Smiths flying about (who are Level 2 industrial simulacra, by the way), and the movie doesn't quite bother to go into the allegorial details the way Philip K. Dick has lots of paragraphs to.

My teacher says he's read some Philip K. Dick, and he can't see the thematic connection between Dick's work and Baudrillard's work. WTF? This is not like it's terribly arcane, either. I mean, Dick's entire oeuvre is made of cosmic Scooby-Doo stories, except that at the end the twist isn't "The pirate ghost was really Old Man Feeny!", it's "And the guy was a robot all along!" or "And the alien was really God all along!" or "And REALITY WAS AN ILLUSION ALL ALONG!!!"
I think he may have thought that I was implying that Baudrillard stole Dick's ideas, since Dick died in '82, one year before the book was printed, and I pointed that out when someone else said, "Well, maybe Dick read a lot of Baudrillard..."

More later because I have a Creative Writing class to go to.

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Baudrillard's pretty cool. Try Becker for decent psychoanaylsis (of the existential variety) and Lacan for psychoanalysis plus deconstructionism

I think Lacan's on the syllabus, even.

yeah, I'm a dork. I think Literary Theory is exciting. ;0

It's fantastically exciting! And I always feel like a jerk because it's a seminar and I usually have nothing to contribute besides, "Um, I think this is really cool." I don't know if it's because I do understand it, or because I don't understand it.

Am I the last person in the world under the age of 35 or so who still hasn't seen The Matrix? I saw about one third of it over the millennial New Year before passing out on my basement floor into a pizza-and-champagne-induced coma, and I've never bothered to watch the rest of it.

You should do a project on how Dick tended to use the same plot backgrounds over and over again, with only the characters at the front of it engaging in any movement whatsoever. Zoinks!

Did I ever tell you about the Mystery Machine van that used to be in my neighborhood?

Yes, you are the last person in the world under the age of 35 who still hasn't seen "The Matrix."

Philip K. Dick wrote nonfiction.

Tell me about the Mystery Machine!

Damn it. I suck.

Did he ever write any porno? And what pen name would be have used?

The Mystery Machine: well, about four blocks south of me and one or two over, someone had redesigned a van (an old van, from some point in the Seventies, ergo a very Scooby-Doo-era vehicle) to look exactly like the Mystery Machine. And when I say exactly, I mean exactly. A perfect paint job, from what I could see of it a perfect interior, a vanity plate that said something like "ZOINKS". Everything. They kept it until sometime about three years ago, when they either sold it or moved. It may be up in Ann Arbor now, because my friend David says he's seen one up there that looks like it.