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A review by thomasgoddard
High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies by Erik Davis
4.0
If you can get over the repetition, this is a dense and heavily impregnated text of the most splendid sort.
You'll be wanting to take notes.
Why would you embark on this challenging read? If you're a writer of any variety (except perhaps commercial fiction) it will offer some really fascinating insights into the creative process. The effect of narrative. The powerful effect of reading/absorbing information about the world. And how our minds are crystalline and refract and bend that incoming enlightenment into new and many-splendid forms.
The examination of Terence and Dennis McKenna's explorations was quite interesting, but I think rather too... Glorifying? I'm still not 100% teased out on my thinking of this.
My favourite parts were those tackling Philip K. Dick's life and creative process. It examines his work from multiple perspectives and doesn't fall into assumptive reasoning.
Once weirdness is defined. And after it has been documented as a tool. The book zooms off into these Philip Dickian rhapsodic sequences. I do feel like there were more authors (beyond others touched on earlier in the text) that could have shared a little of the space so clearly carved out solely for Philip K. Dick's work.
It felt, by the end, as if it was a book that merely went through the motions of exploring weirdness until he could catch the reader up and then get on with chatting about PKD.
That's not a direct criticism because you still gain from the experience. But I felt it would be a stronger piece simply by throwing out the sections on other people and making it a book about PKD.
Throughout there is a foolishness (a joyful indulgence in their role as the mystical fools) - interpolated into a sort of ignorant wisdom or accidental brilliance manifested via a form of intellectual playfulness.
Overall the book is a detailed, well-crafted textbook of the weird and taught me a fair bit. It shifted my thinking about the implementation of the aspect of weirdness to my own life. And into the value of consciousness and the suspension of disbelief necessary in order to correctly curate selfhood.
You'll be wanting to take notes.
Why would you embark on this challenging read? If you're a writer of any variety (except perhaps commercial fiction) it will offer some really fascinating insights into the creative process. The effect of narrative. The powerful effect of reading/absorbing information about the world. And how our minds are crystalline and refract and bend that incoming enlightenment into new and many-splendid forms.
The examination of Terence and Dennis McKenna's explorations was quite interesting, but I think rather too... Glorifying? I'm still not 100% teased out on my thinking of this.
My favourite parts were those tackling Philip K. Dick's life and creative process. It examines his work from multiple perspectives and doesn't fall into assumptive reasoning.
Once weirdness is defined. And after it has been documented as a tool. The book zooms off into these Philip Dickian rhapsodic sequences. I do feel like there were more authors (beyond others touched on earlier in the text) that could have shared a little of the space so clearly carved out solely for Philip K. Dick's work.
It felt, by the end, as if it was a book that merely went through the motions of exploring weirdness until he could catch the reader up and then get on with chatting about PKD.
That's not a direct criticism because you still gain from the experience. But I felt it would be a stronger piece simply by throwing out the sections on other people and making it a book about PKD.
Throughout there is a foolishness (a joyful indulgence in their role as the mystical fools) - interpolated into a sort of ignorant wisdom or accidental brilliance manifested via a form of intellectual playfulness.
Overall the book is a detailed, well-crafted textbook of the weird and taught me a fair bit. It shifted my thinking about the implementation of the aspect of weirdness to my own life. And into the value of consciousness and the suspension of disbelief necessary in order to correctly curate selfhood.