ST ch 19 French 75s, Greasy Thumb Guzik

Thu May 14 21:56:37 UTC 2026

>From an interview with William Gibson (https://philipdick.com/resources/articles/william-gibson-on-philip-k-dick/):
“I never got into Phil Dick. Somehow I missed him, coming up. I don’t remember reading any of his novels when I was a kid. I may have read some of his short stories. But by the time I realized who he was, I had already read Pynchon. Pynchon will do for you what Dick does, but it’s like free-basing. I never needed Dick.”

Kim Stanley Robinson speaks of "reality breakdowns" in Dick's work and suggests it occurs on three different levels: “the protagonist in his fictive world, the reader reading the text, and the reader in his world—and each reflect the other two, and this resonance lends the text significance.”

I just finished my thesis comparing Dick and Pynchon (happy to send if anyone is interested), and I generally concur with Gibson. Dick is already mind-twisting and crazy and Pynchon totally destabilizes (in GR at least) any sense of a stable or coherent truth of the narrative and storyworld, such that there are sometimes multiple reality breakdowns on one page. But I don't think it's fair to say that we don't need PkD's writing—rumor has it that Pynchon was devouring Dick's books during the latter 60s. They both lived in California and were connected to the counterculture. The comparison is very interesting. But PkD is Northern California and Pynchon is Southern California? I wonder if it's possible to make a coherent argument about how this affected their novels and style. Fredric Jameson once referred to PkD as the "Shakespeare of science fiction", which I suppose makes me wonder what would be the appropriate comparison for Pynchon—but perhaps he defines his own category and thus needs no real comparison or historical forbear.

-------- Original Message --------
On Thursday, 05/14/26 at 15:38 Robin Landseadel via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
Great post, do think the thing in and of itself is the real criteria for any given artwork, not
adherence to whatever source materials were deployed. OBAA is a great film not because
it sticks to the original material—nope, didn't happen—but because there is an essential
story embedded in Vineland, buried (or is it entwined?) under all manner of potential
distractions—The "Pynch" is great at mindless pleasures and {seemingly} pointless
tangents. Paul Thomas Anderson found the emotional essence of Vineland and distilled
it. Is OBAA attempting to be "Vineland" in the same way "Inherent Vice" pretty much sticks
to the plot?  No, but it says so right on the box. The movie is decidedly not an "adaptation".

Think I'll watch it again today with my headphones on. Soundtracks really matter in
Pynchonlandia, Vineland being no exception.

People's Republic of Rock 'n' Roll anyone?

Bueller? Bueller?

https://youtu.be/KS6f1MKpLGM?si=747ZfVR6vKKSmTVl

Speaking of "Adaptations":

“ . . . Some kind of classical music coming from the TV room. Mozart. In these desperate
stretches of early-morning programming, she finds Ernie tubeside, his face transfigured
in the ancient Trinitron glow, watching an obscure, in fact never-distributed Marx Brothers
version of Don Giovanni, with Groucho in the title role. She tiptoes in barefoot and sits next
to her father on the couch. There’s a big plastic bowl of popcorn, too big even for two
people, which Ernie after a while nudges in her direction.

During a recitative he fills her in. “They cut the Commendatore so there’s no Donna Anna,
no Don Ottavio, this way, without the murder, it’s a comedy.” Leoporello is being played by
both Chico and Harpo, one for lines and one for sight gags, Chico fast-talking his way
through the Catalog Aria for example while Harpo runs around after Donna Elvira (Margaret
Dumont, in the role she was born for), pinching, groping, and honking his bicycle horn, as
well as later picking harp accompaniment for “Deh vieni all finestra.” Masetto is a studio
baritone who is not Nelson Eddy, Zerlina is very young, lip-synced and more-than-presentable
Beatrice Pearson, later to portray another ingenue with a fatality for scoundrels opposite John
Garfield in Force of Evil, (1948) . . . “

Bleeding Edge pgs. 417/418

See also:

" . . . “Yes, I forget your name, you had your hand up?”

“Let’s say that in life, in his career as a network slimebag, Frank Stokes accumulated a
huge pile of truly horrible karma. So next time around, to work off this karmic debt, he gets
to expose, mock, ridicule and otherwise invite contempt for the very behavior he was once
guilty of in his former life. Lying, corruption, the abuse of power, so forth.”

“Hmm. If we could pitch that in shorter sentences…”

The Daily Show – Pynchon’ Foreword for the 10th Anniversary Concert Program https://thomaspynchon.com/the-daily-show-thomas-pynchons-foreword-for-the-10th-anniversary-concert-program/

Corbeau Castrum: " . . . I took a class last year all about adaptation and the academic
criticism associated with since the 1950s. What academics up until present day
simultaneously discuss and attempt but fail to exorcise is so-called "fidelity criticism," i.e.
evaluating the film based on/with respect to the original novel instead of seeing it as a
separate art object. (Every article we read disavows fidelity criticism as irrelevant in the
first several pages. Lady doth protest too much methinks kind of situation.) The class
specifically focused on Martin Scorsese's adaptation of The Age of Innocence by Edith
Wharton (interestingly Scorsese calls it his most violent film, i.e. emotionally violent), which
attempts to be super literary* in its style (overlaying text from women's conduct books from
late 19th century at the beginning, having the main character mournfully fondle books,
introduce physical objects into the scene just as a novel's narrator would describe them,
include voice-over narration). Growing up I was indoctrinated in the book>movie ideology
(my mum is a book publisher), but I discovered when I got older that if I watched the
movie adaptation before reading the book, I would appreciate both a lot more (otherwise
I would think the film just sucked). I guess if anything ever sells itself as an adaptation,
it's really difficult to get away from comparisons with the source material.

My favorite adaptations:
PkD's A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater)
Harry Potter 1 Chris Columbus)
Adaptation (Spike Jonze)
Inherent Vice . . . "

*I was operating on the motto "Make it literary," a piece of bad advice I made up all by
myself and then took."

Slow Learner, Introduction, pg. 4

Parenthetical note, digression, tangent, tendril perhaps; got my battered copy of Slow
Learner from Serendipity Books, the most magical bookstore I've ever walked into:

Era ends: Liquidation sale at Berkeley's Serendipity Books https://www.berkeleyside.org/2013/11/07/an-end-of-an-era-serendipity-books-liquidation-sale

This was in Berkeley on University, I was at the store sometime in the 1990s during a period
of temporary insanity.

https://youtu.be/ycv4vLVvkB8?si=tVTUJQG9OTkbDfEi

My copy is stamped:

"NOT FOR RESALE
DISTRIBUTED BY GREEN THUMB"

Doubtless Antifa terrorist scum.

Agree about all four movies you cited. "A Scanner Darkly" is a classic movie. It manages to have brilliant performances, very little deviation from the plot, perfect visualization:

https://youtu.be/seP2DPqd0o8?si=ezBfVBRvFwChDC1V

Most people making films using PKD as a source really mess with the material. Blade Runner
is brilliant, but "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" it isn't. Ridley made a classic film, some
of the best stuff in the movie was improvised on the spot, without the director's knowledge:

https://youtu.be/HU7Ga7qTLDU?si=9CSGwQgPulHh0R-n

Tears in rain monologue - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_in_rain_monologue

If Philip K. Dick is the poor man's Thomas Pynchon, is Pynchon the rich man's Dick?

Curious people want to know.

“There must be a Pony in here somewhere.”

--
Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l