The Puzzles of Appetite: Why I Started Reading Philip K. Dick Again

For the last few years, I’ve been hiding out in Philip K. Dick’s head. As Orwell said of Wigan Pier: “The path has been a long one, and the reasons for taking it aren’t immediately clear.”

Up to a point I’m kidding, of course. I appreciate what’s valuable about PKD. I just wouldn’t have guessed I’d keep reading him despite how little I often like his writing.

I tore through a bunch of PKD in high school. No surprise there — our “homegrown Borges’s” work is a capsule summary of my adolescent worldview: amateur philosophy, weirdo metaphysics, charismatic paranoia, social critique, the working class, a shaggy, stonerish aesthetic, and so on.

I lost touch with him as I exited my teens, and I hadn’t read much PKD since then (which, for me, somehow now amounts to the better part of two decades).

I started reading him again around 2020 after getting back from China. Since then, I’ve revisited a bunch of PKD I’d read as a kid and read a bunch I hadn’t.

I’m inclined to think our aesthetic tastes, particularly when they’re as obsessive as this, can tell us something about ourselves. They’re not random. The challenge is in decoding what they tell us.

My return to PKD hasn’t always been a warm homecoming. Even his better works have been tough for me to swallow on this go around. I was just barely able to get through the decent-by-PKD-standards Clans of the Alphane Moon. The ones that even PKD devotees admit are bad were truly intolerable — yes, like Vulcan’s Hammer, but also much but not all of the Valis trilogy, A Crack in Space (which seems like such a missed opportunity), and (at least for me) basically anything from before 1955, if not 1958.

What are some of the better ones? Jonathan Lethem seems to be on the mark in “You Don’t Know Dick.” His suggestions: “Castle, Stigmata, Ubik, Valis, Androids, Bloodmoney, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, A Scanner Darkly, Martian Time-Slip, Confessions of a Crap Artist…Now Wait for Last Year, Time Out of Joint, A Maze of Death, Galactic Pot-Healer… (127).”

I might quibble over Bloodmoney, and The Transmigration didn’t totally resonate with me (though was probably one of his subtler and better written ones). The last four are definitely more central than the first four, though I took particular pleasure in Time out of Joint and A Maze of Death and am happy to see them included. I might suggest substituting The Penultimate Truth and/or Flow my Tears for one or another of the entries, but I’m nitpicking at that point.

I always like Lethem’s writing, but it’s his biography that is illuminating for me here. I feel like his troubled and obsessive relationship with PKD was a version of my own turned inside out. In places like “My Crazy Friend,” Lethem talks about his youthful discomfort with Dick’s status as a mere genre writer. Of course, part of what was behind that, both explicitly and implicitly, is Lethem’s discomfort with his own working-class background, relationship with the art world, etc., and PKD then became a means for him to sort that out.

The similarities are almost eerie. I think in hindsight I used PKD — and continue to use him now, really — as a vehicle to struggle through a somewhat similar constellation of issues.

Our responses seem to have been different. From his essay, it sounds like Lethem set out to rehabilitate PKD by emphasizing his literary merit. He launched his own little PKD gentrification campaign (a proxy for his own).

I feel like I went the other way: rather than emphasize PKD’s importance, I dismissed him. Particularly as I entered college, I had the sense that I’d graduated from PKD to the strong stuff. After cramming myself full of Heidegger et al., to say nothing of the real Borges, it was hard to take PKD seriously in quite the same way.

Needless to say, this had a heavy social class component — I’d followed my interests and unwittingly boarded a bus to the middle class (was it really so unintentional, though?). The results could be baffling.

Lethem launched a private gentrification campaign through Dick; I launched a private gentrification campaign by spurning him.

The reasons for this might seem obvious: the late 90s/00s when I was reading PKD were a different time from when Lethem read him in the pre-Bladerunner 70s. Given PKD’s current ubiquity, it’s safe to say that folks like Lethem won the war on that one. Maybe I just didn’t have a battle to fight.

There’s probably some truth there, but in the time before Total Internet Armageddon, I don’t know to what degree I would have known or cared that PKD was taken seriously. Later, I would get impatient with his trendiness, but this was well before that time (at least in my rural New England bubble).

Before 2020, my road from PKD seemed to only be accelerating. The basis of one of the many symptoms of this comes out in Lethem’s introduction to The Selected Stories (2002), where he refers to Dick’s tendency to find “a spark of life or love arising from unlikely or ruined places.”

That’s definitely an orientation towards the world that defined my youth. I think on some intuitive emotional level this came to seem embarrassing when I decided that “looking low for insight” seemed more about self-justifying mediocrity.

Looking low for insight can take many casts. For me, it often had a political undertone: “You don’t need a weatherman, etc.” If sociologist Paul Willis overtheorized the way that anti-social adolescent behavior can have a socio-political critique marbled into it, I was much more excessive, much less sophisticated, and much more sincere in my thought on that front. Not promising.

Was I overthinking things? These days I’m of two minds about that one, but I wasn’t of two minds during my period of spurning Dick. It seemed embarrassing and childish, and now that we were on the topic, stoner sci fi writers kind of did, too.

My contempt accelerated as the political currents changed along with those of my life. By that point, I rarely went home (literally or figuratively), but when I did, I watched in horror as the vague “damn the man” wink between dissident co-conspirators became the much more grounded tea party, then pizzagate, then lizard people, and finally Trump.

Maybe I’d been wrong — maybe you did need a weatherman — or at least some form of respect for expertise.

Of course, none of this had anything to do with PKD himself. It was more of a reaction to a personal association I had assigned him, and even then it was pretty nebulous — I doubt I had the thought of directly linking any of this with PKD in particular.

Actually, one could make the case his writing provides an excellent diagnosis of a world that arguably seems more Dickian than ever before (cryptofascism and all). I suspect at least on some level part of why I found myself going back to him in 2020 was because I had returned to the US after some time away and had landed in the dystopian reality of Trump’s America (after an all-too-vivid simulation of the Maoist era had by living through China’s Covid lockdowns). PKD was cathartic and possibly illuminating.

Then again, it might not have all been personal association and projection on my part. A troublingly direct demonstration of this is Alex Jones’s appearance in the film version of A Scanner Darkly — one of the more faithful adaptations of a PKD novel in film (and which makes wise edits to the final 20% of the original work).

It wouldn’t require particularly advanced psychoanalytic training to see all of this as my diary of a repetition syndrome: as I teetered closer to middle age, I turned PKD into a stand-in for parts of my adolescent self I hadn’t full digested. I keep returning to him because I haven’t fully integrated my past, and my obsessive review of his work indicates a resurgence of an undigested part of myself that will continue to haunt me until I’ve come to terms with it. The fact that I often dislike PKD’s writing adds an almost-too-obvious layer of psychological weight to the dynamic.

There’s definite truth to that, but the story is not quite that neat. I lost interest in PKD, but I never lost interest in a Dickian aesthetic, and I remember being thrilled to find a collection of his short stories in the lobby of my apartment six or so years ago (in fact, the same one with the Lethem intro cited above). In short, the break wasn’t quite so harsh or so clean, and I think I’d actually settled a lot of my kind-of-quarter-kind-of-midlife crisis before PKD had gotten back on the stage for me.

From another standpoint, as disappointing and irritating as PKD can be, I haven’t found an adequate substitute. I keep going back to him because I want the aesthetic he sets out: the synthesis of Cheever Americana with hallucinatory realities and pulpy tropes is definitely a distinct flavor. I keep exploring ever-more-obscure corners of the master’s bibliography (small “m” for me), trying to get at least a bite of what might have previously been a meal.

Sometimes the band doesn’t have any other songs (possibly because they’re dead), so I listen to the same tired tracks or search out b-sides that even I think kind of suck as a way to at least blow air at the itch if not scratch it.

PKD is particularly fertile territory for that compulsion because you never know when he happened to have had a lucid morning and buried something valuable in one of the eight rushed novels he wrote in some odd, drug-addled year in the 1960s. I guess in its own perverse way, that’ll keep you coming back.

In hindsight, the unevenness of PKD’s writing and thought was one of the reasons he resonated with me in the first place. It telegraphed how I saw (see) myself: a little wobbly, but with occasional flashes of talent if you look from the right angle. (Gee, you don’t say — I wonder if that played some role in my hang up on his work?)

I guess I wanted a PKD without PKD. I definitely wanted a me without me. Maybe I wanted an everything without an everything.

Which reminds me: I still haven’t read The Man Who Japed, and someone was telling me The Zap Gun is good….

Aesthetics of the Unrepresentable: Reflections on Varas-Diaz’s Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America

I feel like I’ve been a detective when it comes to heavy metal since moving to Colombia.

My tastes have skewed towards the more musically sedate for the last two decades, but my background in extreme music sensitized me to its presence in Bogota.

I don’t know how effective of a detective I’ve been in investigating any of this — I’ve been more of the clueless Philip Marlow from Robert Altman’s satirical version of The Big Sleep (minus the Rip van Winkle anachronisms) than the Chandler one. But, as a guest/observer, I’ve had the sense that I’ve intuited something in the way that Colombian metal seems to reflect undercurrents of socio-political critique and a defiant form of historical memory.

So, when I saw a post about Nelson Varas-Diaz’s Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America (Intellect 2021) on Instagram the other day, I had to drop everything to read the chapter on Colombia along with the one outlining the theoretical framework. I worked through some of the remaining chapters over the next day or two.

It’s based on nearly a decade of ethnographic research and really nicely clarifies how extreme music in Latin America fosters what Varas-Diaz calls “extreme decolonial dialogues” aimed at coping with and transforming the impact of the region’s colonial history/ongoing experience.

I’m a guest in Colombia, not a Latin American studies scholar by any measure, and have limited understanding of the country and region (I’m working on it). Still, speaking from that perspective, I took a lot from the text.

It condensed in really powerful analytic prose the sense of the Colombian metal underground that I had intuited. Perhaps most essentially, Varas-Diaz underscores how Latin American metal refashions metal aesthetics in a way that is political, yes, but also distinctly Latin American and decolonial (the former a disposition furthering the goal of the latter). He persuasively demonstrates that this version of metal is not a rehashing of Tampa death metal expressed in Spanish, though the metal scene of the Global North may mistake it as such. It is a spontaneous creative expression that draws on a metal register while reflecting a unique ethical (Dussel) and epistemological (Mignolo) commitment to local knowledge(s). On that note, I thought it was nice the text addressed the celebratory facets of metal, which are particularly important in a colonial/post-colonial context, and often underappreciated in general, I think.

As Varas-Diaz points out, both the lyrical content and artistic imagery of a large part of metal in Latin America are often overtly decolonial. In this way, it can serve the Friereian goal of starting a non-hierarchical educational dialogue regarding the region’s colonial experience. I was particularly interested in how it serves as a bottom-up movement to preserve the face of those who’ve suffered (thinking of Levinas), which was the theme of the chapter on Colombia. On this account, decolonial metal is a type of insurgent democratic monument to memorialize the face of those who’ve suffered when perhaps the state might not provide such (or may even try to actively erase it).

As I was reading the text, I started to wonder about the sonicality of the music. What I mean by this is the form or character of the sound of the music (as opposed to the lyrics, album art, or stage show). For example, Varas-Diaz points us to the use of indigenous instruments in some decolonial metal. I found myself wondering about how those instruments can be a type of symbol, certainly, but also how the sound they produce might generate a sensory experience that implies an idea or perspective. I think Merleau-Ponty might talk about sound in that way in the Phenomenology of Perception.

One then wonders the same of metal. Perhaps something about the experience that the sound of that music generates might be conducive to certain ways of thinking. Is there something about the harsh sonicality of metal that may have marbled into it ideas or perspectives that might even go beyond verbal expression but nevertheless communicate a certain standpoint?

If that is the case, then the aesthetic experience of decolonial metal could be thought to work on two levels simultaneously. As a slight riffing on Claude Lanzmann’s language regarding the image in his films, decolonial metal might entail lyrics that understand what they represent and music that maybe doesn’t (to be clear: in the case of metal sonicality in particular). On this interpretation, metal sonicality might be thought to reach beyond the literal content of the music (which is explicitly decolonial) to gesture towards suffering that, again thinking of Lanzmann and now Ranciere, might be unrepresentable (which would then be implicitly decolonial). If that is the case, then something like decolonial metal’s lyrical content might lead us to enter into a vigorous form of decolonial dialogue while the sonicality and general aesthetics might point towards dimensions of social trauma that overflow or cannot be fully addressed by that lyrical content. The two levels would work in tandem.

That line of inquiry then leads me to wonder about the history of the genre in the region. It was interesting to hear about how some of the originators of Colombian death metal, such as Masacre in the 1980s, had found themselves almost inventing the genre as they went due to a lack of international exposure. That’s fascinating for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being the question of why those fans settled on metal rather than a related but more overtly political genre such as punk, which particularly in its 1980s form may have ostensibly been a more congenial vehicle for overt social critique. It might have just been a matter of exposure, or it had something to do with the phenomenology of the sonic experience of metal. Likely both, I guess, as well as other considerations, too, I’m sure. I’d be curious to see the results of further historical scholarship that would build on what Varas-Diaz has given us.

To put my cards on the table, some of this line of thinking might stem from my own musical biases: I grew up going to shows in the 90s, which was well after the “crossover” era of the 1980s had blended metal and hardcore/punk, but the genres still didn’t mix much at that point. I’d listened to metal in elementary school, but it seemed very Dungeons and Dragons — especially when compared to the likes of groups like Crass, Gang of Four, or Bad Religion.

Maybe I’d underestimated metal. As Varas-Diaz points out when discussing the indifference and condescension of the Global North’s metal community to decolonial metal, the genre can be reactionary, but perhaps it also has the seeds of a counter-thrust woven into it. That’s certainly how I related to and defended the more boneheaded, macho sides of 90s hardcore, which at least at that time I made endless excuses for.

I don’t quite know. My sleuthing continues.

A few of the Colombian groups Decolonial Metal Music in Latin Americafocuses on: Tears of Misery, Corpus Calvary, and Masacre.

Selected Bibliography

Dawes, L. (2013). What are you doing here? A Black woman’s life and liberation in heavy metal. Bazillion Points.

Derrida, J. (1999). Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Translated by Michael Naas. Stanford University Press.

Drabinski, J. (2011) Godard between identity and difference. Continuum.

Dussel, E. (1985). Philosophy of Liberation. Wipf and Stock.

Friere, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed, 30th anniversary edition. Bloomsbury.

Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and infinity. Translated by Richard Cohen. Duquesne University Press.

Mignolo, W. (2000). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton University Press.

Ranciere, J., and Murphy, T. (2002). “The saint and the heiress: A propos of Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema.” Discourse 24(1), 113–119.

Varas-Diaz, N. (2021). Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America. Intellect.