Winter's Tale again, A Scanner Darkly

Rain mentioned loving Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin, which convinced me that maybe i should give the book a second go. It's been a few years since it swept thru the Santa Cruz Pergolesi crowd like wildfire, and i read 90 or 95 percent of it back then before deciding that going on was good money after bad. So but maybe my spectacles had changed since then, so when i found myself at a bar on Upper Haight with no book in my backpack i went down the street and got it, and..

If we were rats i'd say "There's something fishy about all this cheese, friends, and i wouldn't eat it if i were you".

Which is to say that i distrust Winter's Tale. I get the feeling that Helprin is giving us candy, true, but at the same time secretly convincing us to stop worrying and just love the market economy. I could go on, but i'm stopping with that.





Went to see A Scanner Darkly last night, the new movie-adaptation of Phillip K. Dick's novel. I think Logan put it best when he observed that most movie-adaptations of Dick's work (Bladerunner, Total Recall, Minority Report, etc) don't really follow the original text very closely, but that unfortunately, A Scanner Darkly does. I totally agree. The book was not really worth reading (i unfortunately read clear thru to within 20 or 30 pages of the end) and the movie holds true to that. Unless you're interested in drugged-out self-absorbed presentations of drugged-out self-absorbed people. The special effects were neat and distinctly revealed way more processing and synthesis than i expected, which is impressive, but at the same time they weren't really compelling in any way.



but enough!

still soon to come: unicorns, creationism, and quantum physics.

also i need a new book, as i'm nearly done with the last scrap of printed material in the house i'm willing to read, which is a copy of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (think Isaac Asimov's or Analog SF) from 1992. Which thank you to Nevada for that!