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Diary

Robert Irwin: The Best Thing since Sex, 2 December 1993

... to call them roller blades and to think of myself as a blade runner, someone who is waiting for a Philip K. Dick novel to happen in. Specifically, I now glide about in the faster and more graceful Rollerblade Coolblades. These have a moulded and vented polyurethane boot with ratchet fastenings and ...

Smash the Screen

Hal Foster: ‘Duty Free Art’, 5 April 2018

Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War 
by Hito Steyerl.
Verso, 256 pp., £16.99, October 2017, 978 1 78663 243 2
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... trick, and sometimes this leads her to oscillate between semi-paranoid projections (à la Philip K. Dick) and semi-cynical implosions (à la Jean Baudrillard). Such criticism has a special knack for catastrophism, which it also craves. With enormous ambition it challenges the culture of capitalism, but finally it is ...

The it’s your whole life

Iain Bamforth: Jean-Claude Romand, 22 March 2001

The Adversary: A True Story of Murder and Deception 
by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by Linda Coverdale.
Bloomsbury, 183 pp., £14.99, January 2001, 0 7475 5189 8
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... read about the murder that week, on the day he finished a biography of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, Emmanuel Carrère, writer, père de famille, and Romand’s contemporary, finally decided that the only person who could answer the questions that had begun to trouble him was Romand himself. Six months after ...

Making a Break

Terry Eagleton: Fredric Jameson’s Futures, 9 March 2006

Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 431 pp., £20, September 2005, 1 84467 033 3
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... utopia, the book has some supple, remarkably powerful readings to offer of Le Guin, Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick (‘the Shakespeare of science fiction’), A.E. Van Vogt, Kim Stanley Robinson and a range of others. Jameson has always been an energetic retriever of the neglected and maligned, and a brilliant salvage job ...

It’s him, Eddie

Gary Indiana: Carrère’s Limonov, 23 October 2014

Limonov: A Novel 
by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by John Lambert.
Allen Lane, 340 pp., £20, October 2014, 978 1 84614 820 0
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... I know, has paraphrase been taken this seriously as a literary form. As in his pseudo-biography of Philip K. Dick, I Am Alive and You Are Dead (2004), Carrère has largely relied on already published sources, Limonov’s extensive self-portraiture first and foremost. He seldom questions Limonov’s veracity, except when it ...

Diary

Jonathan Lethem: Theatre of Injury, 15 December 2016

... seemed more or less a given. So did the proposition that we were living in a world imagined by Philip K. Dick; this was easily recognisable even if you’d barely read him. To those who knew his work well, the morning-after debate consisted of whether Trump was more like Buster Friendly, the fascist demagogue television ...

You have a new memory

Hal Foster: Trevor Paglen, 11 October 2018

Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen 
by John P. Jacob and Luke Skrebowski.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, 252 pp., £45, July 2018, 978 1 911282 33 4
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Trevor Paglen 
by Lauren Cornell, Julia This Bryan-Wilson and Omar Kholeif.
Phaidon, 160 pp., £29.95, May 2018, 978 0 7148 7344 2
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... a lot – a mode of viewing that is ‘critical-paranoid’ (I mean this term positively, as Philip K. Dick did when he defined the paranoiac as a person hell-bent on the truth). In the mid-19th century a French painter might remove any evidence of industrial production from his beautiful landscapes, while his American ...

Bendy Rulers

Glen Newey: Amartya Sen, 28 January 2010

The Idea of Justice 
by Amartya Sen.
Allen Lane, 468 pp., £25, July 2009, 978 1 84614 147 8
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... that the Tolstoy is the ideal doesn’t help in deciding whether a Joanna Trollope surpasses a Philip K. Dick in literary merit. And so, Sen concludes, with justice: we don’t need a grasp of ideal justice to know how to act justly in the non-ideal world. Sen frames the prime contrast as between niti and nyaya, two ...

What We Have

David Bromwich: Tarantinisation, 4 February 1999

The Origins of Postmodernity 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 143 pp., £11, September 1998, 1 85984 222 4
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The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-98 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 206 pp., £11, September 1998, 1 85984 182 1
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... AT–T Building in New York) gave plausibility to the promotional prose. AT–T was the work of Philip Johnson, the friend of Andy Warhol, and so the publicity came with a background story ready to hand. The Post-Modern would be the art-historical movement that went beyond art by stopping short of art. Where Modernism was enchanted by affinities with the ...

We are our apps

Hal Foster: Visual Revolutions, 5 October 2023

Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle 
by Jonathan Crary.
Zone, 262 pp., £25, October, 978 1 942130 85 7
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... semi-paranoid view of our ‘techno-institutional worlds’ leads Crary to turn to Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard.In 1982, Crary published a brilliant essay on horror movies, which he reads through Deleuze and Guattari (Anti-Oedipus appeared in English in 1977) and against Freud (psychoanalysis pervaded film ...

Long Live Aporia!

Hal Foster: William Gaddis, 24 July 2003

Agapē Agape 
by William Gaddis.
Atlantic, 113 pp., £9.99, January 2003, 1 903809 83 5
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The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings 
by William Gaddis, edited by Joseph Tabbi.
Penguin, 182 pp., $14, October 2002, 0 14 200238 0
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... into a paranoid ‘zeal for order’ of his own (I mean this as a compliment, according to the Philip K. Dick definition of the paranoiac as ‘the person with all the facts’ on whom the maintenance of meaning in the world seems to depend). At the same time his short history of outmoded techniques also points to a ...

If on a winter’s night a cyclone

Thomas Jones: ‘The Great Derangement’, 18 May 2017

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable 
by Amitav Ghosh.
Chicago, 176 pp., £15.50, September 2016, 978 0 226 32303 9
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... men in the aggregate.’ As counterexamples (from seven languages) Ghosh cites War and Peace, Moby-Dick and the work of Zola, Upton Sinclair and half a dozen Indian writers: Adwaita Mallabarman, Mahasweta Devi, Sivarama Karanth, Gopinath Mohanty, Vishwas Patil. (He could also have quoted Henry Fielding, who claimed in Tom Jones to ‘describe … not an ...

Francine-Machine

Jonathan Rée: Automata, 9 May 2002

Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen 
by Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak.
Getty, 416 pp., £30, February 2002, 0 89236 590 0
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The Secret Life of Puppets 
by Victoria Nelson.
Harvard, 350 pp., £20.50, February 2002, 0 674 00630 5
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Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life 
by Gaby Wood.
Faber, 278 pp., £12.99, March 2002, 0 571 17879 0
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... Self and Lars von Trier with Carrington and Anna Kavan, as well as St Augustine, Giordano Bruno, Philip K. Dick, Walt Disney and J.R.R. Tolkien. Her cast of ‘imagined puppets’ ranges from the entertainers in Ben Jonson’s Bartholemew Fair, through E.T.A. Hoffmann’s weird Olympia to Karel Capek’s robots, and such ...

Big toes are gross

Hal Foster: Surrealism's Influence, 6 June 2024

Why Surrealism Matters 
by Mark Polizzotti.
Yale, 232 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 300 25709 0
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... and interpretations’, and the crazy-enough-to-be-true projections of Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard (who wrote incisively about Surrealism). The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others: ‘We all ...

Pseudo-Couples

Fredric Jameson: Kenzaburo Oe, 20 November 2003

Somersault 
by Kenzaburo Oe, translated by Philip Gabriel.
Atlantic, 570 pp., £16.99, July 2003, 1 84354 080 0
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... and comic nightmare more reminiscent of Lem’s Futurological Congress than of anything in Philip K. Dick, the father and son actually change places (it might have been called ‘The Switchover’), the former becoming a teenager while the latter assumes the advanced age of the father (38), the whole being projected ...

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