Maxi Kim: Genre Miner & Enemy of Literature

I get a lot of hits from http://htmlgiant.com from this thread: http://htmlgiant.com/snippet/the-triple-entendre-unicorn-of-wordplay/ and they wind up reading this piece: http://toylit.blogspot.com/2010/07/trust-ascetic-for-nothing-todays-news.html which is cool, because I like traffic. My poem is the bar and the yokels leave the farm for a drink before returning to their drudgery.

Even though I think http://htmlgiant.com is filled with freaks, sinecure chasers and all around literary fucks; I sometimes encounter a writer I enjoy there. Yesterday was not one of those days. Have you heard of this fucker Maxi Kim? I have not. The first composition I ever read from the fucker was here: http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/two-or-three-ways-to-resurrect-philip-k-dick and as you can imagine, it made me berserk. Have you ever witnessed a thoughtcrime before? You would try to interfere to stop a rape, or a murder; if you care about ideas, why do you permit thoughtcrime to be unchallenged? I know, because you don't want to be a radioactive social pariah like Wessington. Well that's fine. I am your literary Jesus and I will receive malice and lower my social standing with institutional writers in order to speak the truth to motherfuckers.

 I will not recap my argument because it was hella slick and you deserve to read my righteous anger, unedited. Here it is. Enjoy.

"Whenever I see academic types who otherwise have no interest in science fiction bring up PKD, I groan. Your review of course demonstrates no understanding at all of the hobbiest culture that was the commercial sci-fi market back in the mid 20^th century. You bring up Lacan, Islam, Zizek; all this fucking shit, and completely ignore obsessive compulsion, the I Ching, determinism versus free will, and the root of it all, a fear of solipsism that serves as unifying theme in Dick's writing; in an attempt to 'legitimize' Dick to whatever degenerate and desiccated reading circles you've decided is your target audience. What rookie writing! This is not about Dick. This is about using a book review of Dick as a thin pretext to talk about your post-structuralist bullshit. Who the fuck do you think you are? Do you really think that people don't notice? Fuck you! Seriously!

You start off by milking 3 paragraphs saying that Dick was interested in God. I said that in 1 sentence and also managed to insert a snipe. You spend so much time trying to prove your judgments that your arc of reasoning is pathetically short. I think you haven't even familiarized yourself with Dick's own writings on himself. For example, in “Schizophrenia & The Book of Changes” Dick outlines that he is not motivated by what simpletons like you would consider to be 'the two logics' or really anything you might consider logic. He is obsessed with EPISTEMOLOGY! It's a totally different matter. You don't even need to read the whole damned essay, he declares it in the first paragraph: “...a newborn individual is more or less thrust out into the koinos kosmos (the shared world) immediately... a human child, at birth, still has years of a kind of semireal existence ahead of him: semireal in the sense that until he is fifteen or sixteen years old he is able to some degree to remain not thoroughly born...” The binary is not between logics, it's between dreaming and awaking! His problems are all solipsistic in origin.

You can say, “Oh, someone else did it better, I'd rather wank in PKD's direction, because I have nothing new to add” but that's a total cop out. You can summarize and pivot, but you didn't. Jameson is a fucking blowhard, and presuming that just because he was thorough that he was accurate is moronic. You decided to start on a specious premise and then went all out. I am pretty damned certain you've never even read the guy. In addition, I think it's safe to say you don't know any of his peers, who are equally 'literary,' such as Brian Aldiss, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Silverberg, Gene Wolfe, and so forth. I have no clue why you even decided you had something worth writing on PKD. Did you just see Doctor Atomic or something? What the fuck kind of thesis is 'At the sight of this, PKD was so freaked out it changed his concept of God and reality?' It's almost like you've never read the man's writing and are trying to fill your review up with other examples of your erudition. You want this essay to be about Abrahamic religions and patriarchy and Lacan and you pretty much smear your Ivy League scented feces all over PKD's legacy. What initially induced rage in me now incites a smile. You really thought you could pull this horseshit off. I can just see you thinking “I'm going to fool them all,” because you think we're all as stupid as your college GTF or something? OMFG!

I will NOT have another academic motherfucker go and strip mine a genre she knows nothing about without challenge. My accusations are: 1) You don't really read PKD or know anything about him, 2) You don't really read any scifi, nor do you know anything about its literary champs, 3) You wanted to write some meandering bullshit and decided to tie it all together with PKD as the theme, because that was your impetus. 4) Therefore, you have committed the equivalent of academic fraud, which is why I spew such vitriol at you. You are rancid. I curse you. I spit at you from my screen. Use a different language. You're corrupting the one I love."

http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/two-or-three-ways-to-resurrect-philip-k-dick/#disqus_thread

Don't let thought criminals perpetuate their specious attempts at 'reasoning' in the literary sphere. Fight them wherever they are, or literature as you know it and love it will DIE.


 
Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit