A Talking Dick Head
Title: How to Build An Android, the true story of Philip K. Dick’s Robotic Restoration
Author: David F. Dufty
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
Genre: Technology
Length: 272 pages
Yesterday afternoon I messaged my friend after returning from running errands which involved the bookstore, lunch with my daughter, Hobby Lobby, and of course – the library.
“So I know you’re at work, but did you know that in 2005 some scientists made an android that looked just like Philip K. Dick and one of them LEFT HIS HEAD ON A PLANE! The robotic Philip K. Dick head has never been found. Some super nerd freak has his head somewhere. (And I’m jealous.)” I said.
“We must search for this robo head.”
We certainly do not plan to go searching for Philip K. Dick’s robotic head that has been missing for a decade. The police have not found it and ended their search a long time ago. The creators aren’t even looking for it anymore. It was never insured, so there was nothing fraudulent about the circumstances. But someone, somewhere, in a very A Gentle Madness style, is hoarding Dick’s head in their basement – probably in Washington State… or Orange County… or well, anywhere the airline could go.
Dufty’s recount of the building of the android and his version of events at Comic Con and other such places is a fun, light, entertaining read that I read in two sittings. It’s fascinating that so many intelligent people were involved in such a large scale plan that ended in something Philip K. Dick would probably determine predestined and foreseen. They made an android of the author who wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? then lost its head. It’s a funny bit of irony, no?
The book isn’t just about building an android though, and isn’t as mechanical as you’d think. It’s got a lot of commentary about Dick, his life, his themes, his work, and, of course, what makes a human human and an android a mere android. If you appreciate robotics or are a Philip K. Dick fan, I recommend checking this one out sometime.
Pheromones
Title: Bombardier Beetles and Fever Trees
Author: William Agosta
Publisher: Helix Books * Addison-Welsey Publishing Company
Genre: Science/ Nature
Length: 224 pages
It started because I realized I had used the word “pheromone” one too many times during every day discussions that week. It seemed from a biological standpoint my nose – and my whole body really – was on high alert. I could smell EVERYTHING. Which happens more often than I’d like. And not normal smells like the fast food restaurants when you drive by or someone’s overbearing perfume. It’s not even the homeless guy that comes into work from time to time. He’s odorous, don’t get me wrong, but those aren’t the smells I tend to notice.
I smell clean skin a lot. And not the soap that was used, just skin. I tend to pick up on not the typical overly sweaty man on a jog, but the very subtle clammy sort of sweat that someone gets when they are thinking too hard or are wearing the shirt they slept in. I can smell my daughter’s little curls – not the shampoo, not the preschooler desperately needs a bath smell, but HER smell. Obviously, I have a word and a basic gist of why humans respond to these smells (whether they are aware of them or not), but I wanted to know more.
The library has NOTHING on people. So beetles it was.
And Agosta is fascinating. I love this book and plan to purchase it for kiddo to read for a biology course when she’s older. It’s smooth reading, has a lot of information, and has taught me something new about a subject I was already interested in (nudibranchs) that I wasn’t aware was going to be included in this title. Agosta goes over caterpillars and butterflies, discusses spiders and their silk, and even talks about plants, opium, and medicinal remedies.
Definitely loved every word and page and am now moving onto Wyatt’s Pheromones and Animal Behavior. Pipe in if you’re interested in a discussion.
One Woman Everything
Title: One-Woman Farm
Author: Jenna Woginrich
Genre: Memoir / Farming
Length: 207 pages
I’m in research mode. I’m elbow deep in tree and herb encyclopedias. I’ve been reading every homesteading and nature memoir I can get my hands on. I’m scouring the fields, ditches, and woods for new specimens of plant life to identify, and I just helped my mother-in-law build a compost bin.
One-Woman Farm was one of the recent memoir selections, and it was a breeze to get through. Daily journal entries, basically, of farm life through out the year, the author’s quest for a Fell pony, and to learn to play the fiddle.
I enjoyed reading Woginrich’s book mostly because I want to homestead… but I don’t want what she has. She’s too far north. I want more plants and fewer animals. I want the freedom to get up and travel when the inevitable wonderlust kicks in. I don’t want to be a one-woman farm, I simply want to do EVERYTHING, and also not quite that much. But it was nice to live a year in her shoes for a bit, and I would like to select baby chicks and hold a baby goat. I would love to have fresh milk in the mornings…
The book is full of sweet illustrations as well, which made it spunky. Her talk of pigs felt more in depth with a pencil sketch of a pig sharing the page. Faux paperclips in the margins, like a well-worn guide book to life. Typed recipes and quotes added a richer flow to her sparse text.
Now on to the next… I’m reading The Last Great Walk by Wayne Curtis and The Quarter-Acre Farm by Spring Warren.
Maple & Willow
Title: Maple & Willow Together
Author/Illustrator: Lori Nichols
I would have gotten this review up earlier in the week except every time I pick it up to look at it the kiddo stops me and says, “Oh Mommy, read it again, it’s so beautiful.”
So we’ve read this on repeat all week and have yet to put a line down about it anywhere.
We love that the girls are named after trees. We love that they spend 90% of the story outside. We love that they are sweet, sweet, but realistic sisters.
The girls play outside making fairy gardens and blowing dandelions – something we do a lot of. Collecting worms is also a household specialty; kiddo once delivered earth worms to my sister’s kitchen table and insisted they have lunch along with her and her cousins. My sister was none too thrilled about this and sent kiddo and the worms back outside where they belonged.
We love how familiar the girls’ lifestyle is, how much these aspects of their lives are in fact the best parts of childhood. We love… well, we simply love everything about them. Kiddo has asked that I buy this one for our collection, as we picked this up at the library. We will do just that as soon as I find it. We’ll purchase the other books in the series as well.
Swirl By Swirl
Title: Swirl By Swirl
Authors: Beth Krommes & Joyce Sidman
Genre: Picture Book / Educational
We actually read this one quite a bit ago, I was hoping to review it when I finally got around to purchasing it, but I can’t wait any longer. It’s too wonderful to keep under wraps any longer and it has been an inspiration to my kiddo who now draws swirls and “round ups” into all her artwork.
The book is all about finding math in nature. About how snails, flowers, and everything have mathematical patterns that create functional things we can see. It first page by page identifies all these things… spider webs, tendrils on foliage, the curls of animals’ tails, etc.
Then, it explains the how and why of it all.
Kiddo’s eye lit up at the end of the book every time (we had to read it over and over again before we turned it back into the library). My four year old’s mind was blown.
I want to have this book on hand when she’s older as well, to revisit and enjoy the beautiful illustrations again and again through out her studies. It’s so lovely.
Abuse, Affairs, and Amateurs
Usually if I don’t finish a book, I don’t review it. If I don’t finish it, am I truly the most qualified person to throw opinions on it around to the public.
I’m not talking about books that you CAN’T finish because they are too awful. I’m talking about the ones that I start, I sorta enjoy, and then I simply abandon to read something else – or, I decide that even though it’s interesting, it’s not quite interesting eno
ugh. Or, I just get bored with the topic halfway through.
I used to not be this way. I used to barrel through. I used to treat a book like a ship, me its Captain, and come hell or high water I would make it to its end – together. This practice became cause for some dark moods and much wasted reading time.
I picked up Wedlock when I took a sabbatical from my family (sort of) to work full time in the bookstore for a few months. I saw it on the shelf as I was running history and thought, this looks interesting, and I loved Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. I thought this one would be similar. And it was. But it wasn’t.
Although the life of Mary Eleanor Bowes is one for the history books, and she was an incredible closet botanist for her time, I found that reading about her life, unfortunately, felt more like reading about Kim Kardashian or Brittany Spears than, say, reading about Marie Curie. The heiress was often in the social limelight, easily wooed by absurd men, and seemed to spend her life being abused by the system. This is to no fault of the biographer, but to the fault of society and the fact that, although intellectuals will complain how enraptured we are as a modern society by celebrities and trashy magazines – the reality is that s
ociety hasn’t changed all that much over the last few hundred years.
Moore’s book includes reports worthy of People magazine and Star. Elite gossip regarding who has married whom, how much money so-and-so is in debt, affairs, bastard children… If these things excite you, this book is for you. It just made me tired. It made me very tired, indeed.
So I gave it up. I was halfway through, and I pulled my bookmark and re-shelved it.
I’d love to do a full on study of her botany research. I’d love to visit museums dedicated to her pursuits outside of her abusive marriage. (Alas, I must be content to surfing the internet for now, visiting other bloggers’ reports) I wish I could see her experimental hothouses where she grew exotic plants. But it seems we are mostly to be doomed to read about her trials of being swayed by sociopaths and used for her money. That’s what makes sensational stories, after all, both now and then.
Most people will hear or read her story and say, “Aren’t we lucky that post suffrage, women now will not suffer like this!” But I don’t feel that way. Women will suffer like this as long as they behave like idiots, as long as they swoon over a seemingly kind word, as long as they can’t keep their panties up. I found myself feeling less sympathetic for Mary’s plight and more and more annoyed that she seemed to just dig her hole deeper and deeper. The simplest version of events, boiled down to all the ways she was victimized can be found here: http://historyandotherthoughts.blogspot.com/2013/03/mary-eleanor-bowes.html. Beating and torturing your wife is never ok. Treating any human the way Stoney treated Mary is completely unacceptable. I’m not saying that these things in her life were not awful. I’m just saying there is much she could have done to avoid additional pain, even in that era.
Although I agree with the commentator below in many ways, it pained me to see – centuries later – Mary’s missteps, all the things she could have done to avoid such a terrible life.
I have just finished reading Wendy Moore’s fantastic “Wedlock”, an account of Mary Eleanor Bowes’ life, in particular, her disastrous marriage to Stoney. What a woman, not only did she survive incredible domestic abuse and terror at the hands of her second husband, who tricked her into marrying him, but also had to suffer the heartbreak of losing her older children because of the dictates of the Georgian society of the time. Yet Mary Eleanor’s spirit was not crushed and eventually she managed to escape Stoney’s clutches and obtain just retribution for all his wrongdoings through the courts. The biography reads like a novel, I have never read a historical account so quickly. I can only recommend it.
I didn’t make it to the triumphs. I didn’t make it to the courts. I was still plodding through the terrible ache of lost children, another affair gone wrong with poor Mary not finding true love with her sexual partner yet again. Tip: Keep your dress on, dear. Don’t “fall in love” so quickly, and if you do, practice some propriety. Knowing that bastards very rarely stay with their mothers, why risk having them? I’m not talking about abortion, that to me is also unacceptable. I’m talking about keeping a marriage bed pure – even if you’ve fled from your psychotic husband, shacking up with someone else isn’t going to make everything right, it just makes it all a little bit worse.
Has anyone else studied the life of Mary Eleanor Bowes? What are your thoughts. What do you suppose she was like aside from the tabloids and history books? What would you say to her? What would you ask her?
I’m filing this one away with Anna Karenina.
February Reads
One of my literary counterparts, Neon Gods, posted a “February Reads” article. In general, she’s more organized, I think, in her reading ventures. We’ve kept track of each other’s reading habits for years, having met on Shelfari about 5 or 6 years ago. Despite my aversion to meeting people on the internet, she has been a pretty stellar internet friend. I’ve never met her in person, and yet she has influenced me – my reading life, atlas – greatly.
My reviews these last few months have felt less consistent than usual, so I thought I’d take a page from her book and do a monthly summary. At least for this last month anyway.
We wrapped up January with One Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith. 
The original, not these new media tie ins you’ll find with the Glenn Close movie cover on them. For once I can actually say, No, it’s not the same book! Typically you can tell book buyers that it was just a marketing tactic. They put a movie cover on an old manuscript and sold the same book again. That is not the case with One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Pay attention when you purchase. Also… now that we’ve read the original, I’ve discovered that there was a sequel. Of course, now me must find it and read it too. (Until then, we are tackling The Wind in the Willows as our evening family chapter book.)
As previously mentioned, I read Guide to Wild Foods & Useful Plants by Nyerges. But I also read through A Game of Thrones last month. (And caught up on the tv show.) There’s a reason the masses are in love with George R.R. Martin’s world. It’s impressive. It’s grossly human. It’s epic fantasy. The prude in me would like a little less nudity and sex out of the show – the books are far less detailed in that regard – but from a cinematic point of view, I’m blown away. The sets, the actors, the crew, everyone just seems to have nailed the feel for the world. Clearly, I’m very late to this party – as usual – but I love it. Obviously, it brought a whole new appreciation to this moment from Comicpalooza in 2013:
Yes, that would be me, braiding the hair of the Father of Dragons. I knew what I was doing, knew what we were emulating, but I didn’t really have a full appreciation for it all until now.
Then, I kind of went all self improvement in my reading. I read through The Excellent Wife by Martha Peace and The Homeschool Life by Andrea Schwartz. I don’t particularly care for self-help books, but I do manage to keep them in my life via my “read for every discipline” mentality. No section of a bookstore is left untouched by the end of the year, if it’s a good year.
I also read through Garden Crafts for Kids
Finally, I finished The Gardener’s Bed Book by Richard Wright. I’m not going to touch too heavily on the book here, because honestly, I have far more than an online book review in mind for my experiences while reading it. My favorite thing about a reader’s life are the books written in response to other books. They are like love letters through time and space to people you’ll never meet or know, but feel more akin to than any other humans on the planet. I feel like Melanie Kerr’s Follies Past was her love letter to Jane Austen. I have projects in mind that will be odes to Madeleine L’Engle and Richard Wright. They have moved me so completely and become a part of who I am, it’s only right they are responded to with ink and paper.
There is a Season
As a homeschool mom there’s a constant struggle for designating specific “school times” through out the day. She is learning that education is a life pursuit, and at four can tell you that. I can’t tell you how adorable it is to have a four year old look at someone when they ask her about school and tell them, “Education is a life pursuit.” Every day, every moment, is a chance to learn something – and she is extremely aware of this as we stop to read information along trails, get sidetracked by research projects after asking a simple question, and discuss the scientific reasons things are happening in the kitchen as I cook. But sitting down for specific lessons, that’s a bit harder to grasp. We open our reading book and she thinks that crazy silly time shall commence. She has a stubborn nature she gets from me combined with her father’s joy of watching me fume with frustration, seriously, I get angry and she laughs at me. It’s a problem.
Someone from one of the homeschooling forums on Facebook gave us a great idea, though. Read Ecc. 3:1 before every lesson. Don’t know that one off the cuff? The “lyrics” were made famous in the 1950’s by The Byrds.
The concept of there being a proper time and place for every activity and emotion, is a necessary lesson to teach toddlers (and kids, and teenagers, and humans at large). Emotions, feelings, and attitudes toward chores can be intense. There is a time to feel those things and a time to suck it up and do what you have to do. Just like a gardener has “a time to plant and a time to uproot” there’s also “a time to weep and a time to laugh.” We end the reading of these verses with, “there is also a time to be silly and a time to focus on your lessons.”
Needless to say, both little girl and I were excited to find this book at the public library last month.
This picture is beautiful. It reveals art styles from all different regions, cultures, and time. It gives a child a great sense of the impact these words have on every human throughout history. Everyone must learn this lesson, the fact that everything has a time and place. That feelings can and will be embraced and (if we want to be overly bookish and quote An Imperial Affliction – a book by a character imagined by John Green in The Fault in our Stars) and say, “Pain demands to be felt,” but as every grown person has learned at some point, sometimes it can’t be felt right now. For a four year old, the wiggles must come out… but they can’t always come out right now either.
And everyone must learn this lesson. Whether you are from China, Russia, Germany, Egypt, or Ancient Greece. Whether you are Native American or from the heart of Mexico. Whether you hail from the Ukraine or Australia, Japan or England. Humanity is united in this one all encompassing lesson of life: “There is a time to mourn and a time to dance… a time to search and a time to give up… a time to love and a time to hate… a time for war and a time for peace.”
Teaching Life and Liberty
Title: Thomas Jefferson
Author/Illustrator: Maira Kalman
Publisher: Penguin
If you want to teach about the founders of America via biographical picture books, Maira Kalman is a great place to start. With spunky pictures and fonts, Kalman introduces children to Jefferson (and in another book she tackles Lincoln), his love for books, language, and gardening.
Kids can discover in Thomas Jefferson quirky details about how Jefferson got out of bed in the morning, his obsession for peas, and learn the quote he told his wife:
“Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any.”
There’s a few pages dedicated to Jefferson’s friends: John Adam, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington, and the ideals the team struggled for.
Kalman doesn’t pull any punches. She talks about slavery and addresses the truth of Sally Hemings. Jefferson had so many wise quotes that adults praise and sharing them with a four year old is especially wise:
“When you are angry, count TEN before you speak; if very angry, to ONE HUNDRED.”
The book ends with a visit to his burial grounds and notes regarding his epitaph.
As a whole it’s lovely and educational. When I told kiddo I was finally posting the review and asked her what she wanted to say about it, she said, “I think we should read it again.”
President’s Day is fast approaching. This one is worth having in your hands on that day.
Anakalian Whims 
Philip K. Dick and Me
April 23, 2015 at 7:48 pm (Reviews) (books, commentary, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, human condition, humanity, Magills, Philip K. Dick, reviews, science fiction, social commentary, The Penultimate Truth, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch)
I answered:
I’m currently on a Philip K. Dick kick. His stuff is considered classic in the genre, has been made into several films, and he’s got some pretty awesome social commentary and religious themes going on. His characters usually deal with hallucinations, drug use, and some sort of religious/emotional/existential crisis in the midst of futuristic dystopias and post-apocalyptic worlds. I adore him.
That’s the simple answer, I suppose. Unless I were a 19 year old boy and then I’d merely say something about of the blatant drug use references.
I suppose my answer makes me sound like an ignorant and pretentious prick. It’s ok, I’ve come to terms with my lot in life – I sound like a snob, but I will never be brilliant.
I say I’ve come to terms, but that’s a lie…
I find myself having a love affair with Philip K. Dick. He invites me to futures I forgot to think about, makes me feel nostalgic for certain versions of the past. He has forty something novels and I’m only reading my third one… all I want to do is talk religion with the old coot.
Eleanor Roosevelt said something along the lines of great minds talking about ideas, average minds discussing events, and weak minds focusing on people… but I could talk about Philip K. Dick all day. I’d like to think it’s because I like his ideas.
He has me wanting to dive into religious theory, social philosophy, and everything else – all the IDEAS behind it all. I want to read literary criticism on all his work. I suddenly want to get high. With him. I’ve never gotten high or even wanted to in my whole life. Good thing the dude is dead, I might weasel my way into an opportunity to kill my clean record if he weren’t. As it stands, I’m safe.
He’s genre sci fi, but it’s not about the science fiction, I don’t think.
I will never write anything so well.
I have a young friend who likes Dick. For all the drug use, naturally.
“Is that your real answer or your 19-year-old answer?”
“Both,” he responded, “Why am I being interrogated?”
He wasn’t. He was, I suppose. I just really wanted to know if everyone else had the same draw to him in the same way I did. They have to, or else he wouldn’t be reprinted so often. Why aren’t we reading him in school alongside 1984 and Brave New World?
Philip K. Dick is so much more than drug induced rantings, and drug-love. It’s possible he was certifiably insane – I don’t know yet – but clearly that appeals to me. If Hunter S. Thompson and C.S. Lewis had a love-child, it could have been Dick.
I’m not equipped for proper commentary beyond that. My one lament in life is that I see glimpses of great ideas but cannot grasp or define them. I have been surrounded by so many brilliant minds my whole life and have never had one myself.
I watched The Theory of Everything and nearly cried. Selfishly. It was not because of Hawking’s trials, or the good fight his wife put up, or any of that. I found myself scribbling:
I am no G.K. Chesterton or Ayn Rand. Or Philip K. Dick.
Not even close.
I went to the library and read through Magill’s various commentaries that were available.“Wherever they are set, most of Dick’s novels are grounded in the clutter and trivia, the mundane cares and joys, of everyday life,” the Survey of A
merican Literature said.
Because I’ve read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and The Penultimate Truth and am currently reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I felt I was equipped enough to at least see what other people have to say about him. I found people saying things I had already discovered, Dick is focused on how empathy is what makes us human, he thinks everyone lies and that we are all a little too gullible, in his life he maintained a “persistent skepticism” with an “equally strong yearning to believe.”
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Me too.
I doubt my own identity as well. Both spiritually and here in the world. I have defined myself over and over again so scrupulously that at the end of the day I often wonder if I have lied to myself.
Is this who I am or who I’ve chosen?
Is there a difference between the two?
We are gullible, we are easily deceived.
Yes we are.
As am I.
People have told me over and over again what a contradiction I am. A hopeless romantic wrapped in the armor of a cynical skeptic. I trust too quickly, and dismiss at the drop of a hat.
My favorite thing about reading Philip K. Dick is how he has laid out all the turmoils of my soul into genre fiction. When I ask others what their favorite part is, it is because I want to know if we have similar turmoils. If it is merely the human condition…? If we are kindred spirits? Or if I am alone.
Ultimately, I always just want to know if I am alone.
I am 31 years old. I should be over this by now. But those damn empathy boxes really got to me.
For a cool article, go here: http://boppin.com/1995/04/philip-k-dick.html
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