a couple of insomnia notes

First, I’m probably not alone in noticing that Twitter has become a major source of death notices… If I look over at the most popular topics and see a proper name from out of the blue, like Cory Aquino just now, then I can be pretty sure that they have died. (William Shatner the other day was an exception; he’s still alive.) Steve McNair was the first case where I noticed this. Since I now check this blog, Facebook, and Twitter before checking any mainstream news source, I’m less and less surprised these days by what I find in the news– I’ve usually gotten it from my friends first. (That was the grain of truth in Chris Anderson’s interview, but he didn’t need to be such a cuss about it.)

I’m going to file this post under “Composition of Philosophy,” though, because I have one other thought about the virtues of having a critical mass of pages… And it really is a critical mass, all printed out and sitting on the dining room table. Not only do I see how to attack the second half, I also now see what to do to double the length of the book. (I’m starting to think I’ll just double it for the sake of the English version, regardless of what happens with the French matching grant, which will be unknown for months to come anyway.)

Back to the topic at hand… Another virtue of having a critical mass of pages and being within striking distance of the end is that you can start thinking seriously of the project that comes next. I can now do that seriously for the first time. This particular book no longer feels like a forest stretching off indefinitely over the horizon, but looks more and more like a finite project that will be finished off in X number of additional hours. I already knew that, of course, but there’s a big difference between “knowing” something and actually living in the conviction that it’s true. (Everyone “knows” they are mortal, for instance, but perhaps only after certain frightening events do you actually utilize that knowledge as a major shaping force in your decisions.)

Instead of counting sheep I reread the biographical pages in the back of Philip K. Dick’s Library of America volume. Those biographies at the end are one of the major selling points of the volumes, I think. They’re often just as interesting as the works themselves, especially for someone like Dick who had a relatively wild 54 years on the planet– ridiculously prolific (30 short stories published in one year alone), four marriages if I counted right, lots of amphetamines, a never-solved eerie burglary at his apartment, rampant paranoia, bizarre religious visions, actual CIA surveillance of his correspondence on Einstein with a Soviet scientist, and I guess I forgot to mention his twin sister who starved to death in infancy in Chicago. And yes, the suicide of one of his mothers-in-law, whose minister lover died a couple of years later in Israel while searching for the historical Jesus. He also did get to see parts of Blade Runner, or maybe the whole thing, but definitely he was at least invited to L.A. to see a special effects reel from the film. Briefly a Philosophy major at Berkeley. And I feel as if I’m forgetting a few things. It was both entertaining and sad– but I have to admit, mostly entertaining, since he’s been gone for nearly 30 years now.