Had a pretty busy weekend including hitting Red Arrow on Saturday night for Daniel Holland’s new exhibition. It’s a great show of paintings including collage elements and even shaped canvases that give the display more of a sculptural sensibility than Holland’s previous work. If you’re in Nashville you don’t want to miss it. That said, I had a pretty chill Sunday that mostly found me catching up on the new Sherlock series and reading a bunch of articles including a great piece about Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Scanner was the first PKD book I read and it’s still one of my favorites. The novel is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Here’s a bit from the article at The Quietus…
Its main character, undercover narcotics agent, Bob Arctor, lives in a California that feels straight out of the early ‘70s, although we’re told the novel is set in 1994. When Arctor tries to infiltrate the supply chain of a drug called Substance D, he becomes addicted to it – his own supplier, Donna, is the woman he loves. His friends and housemates are all addicts, too. The plot ramps up when his police colleagues, from whom his identity is protected, ask him to run surveillance on himself, which is no-one’s idea of a good time: whenever he’s not on Substance D, he’s watching videos of himself on it.
Substance D is basically speed. For a long time, this was Dick’s drug of choice (I’ve written before about how you can conjure up an image of him at his desk, furiously typing, blinds drawn to block out the South California sun. He said he could turn out 68 pages of prose a day when he was on speed). Substance D is especially nasty, though. It destroys the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain, so that they first function independently and then compete, destroying any coherent idea of the self. In the case of Bob Arctor, it means that the addict self and the narc self eventually become unrecognisable to one another.
Here’s a long French interview with Dick shortly after the book’s release…
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