Dick et la pranoïa
Posté : mar. janv. 26, 2010 6:50 pm
Quel rapport, me diriez-vous? Il y en aurait un, si on en croit cette étude…
http://www.amazon.fr/Strange-Days-Indee ... 007244282/
Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia—Nixon’s Neurosis,
Philip K. Dick’s Delusions, and a World on the Edge of a Nervous
Breakdown Francis Wheen. Public Affairs, $26.95 (352p) ISBN
978-1-58648-845-1
The 1970s is the most deranged of decades in this rollicking, lurid
retrospective. Taking Richard Nixon’s paranoid persecution complex as
the period’s zeitgeist, Private Eye deputy editor Wheen (How Mumbo
Jumbo Conquered the World) finds it everywhere. Along with an amusing
rehash of Watergate, his panorama of ’70s nuttiness encompasses
conspiracy theories, Hollywood thrillers, the Baader-Meinhof gang, sci-
fi novelist Philip K. Dick’s letters to the FBI denouncing his
literary agent as a Communist, and tawdry political intrigues in a
Britain beset by strikes, power outages, IRA bombings, Trotskyist
dramaturgy, and coup whisperings. Anthropomorphized, Wheen writes, the
decade would be “a meth-swilling vagrant waylaying passers-by to tell
them that the Archbishop of Canterbury had planted electrodes in his
brain.” Wheen thinks the period’s ravings were both laughably lunatic
and on to something important in a world of covert ops and oil
embargoes, but his paranoia diagnosis is too pat to fully capture the
politico-cultural chaos. Still, writing like Hunter S. Thompson might
have had he been English and sober, Wheen offers a vivid, entertaining
guide to an era of fear and loathing. (Mar. 2)
Oncle Joe
http://www.amazon.fr/Strange-Days-Indee ... 007244282/
Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia—Nixon’s Neurosis,
Philip K. Dick’s Delusions, and a World on the Edge of a Nervous
Breakdown Francis Wheen. Public Affairs, $26.95 (352p) ISBN
978-1-58648-845-1
The 1970s is the most deranged of decades in this rollicking, lurid
retrospective. Taking Richard Nixon’s paranoid persecution complex as
the period’s zeitgeist, Private Eye deputy editor Wheen (How Mumbo
Jumbo Conquered the World) finds it everywhere. Along with an amusing
rehash of Watergate, his panorama of ’70s nuttiness encompasses
conspiracy theories, Hollywood thrillers, the Baader-Meinhof gang, sci-
fi novelist Philip K. Dick’s letters to the FBI denouncing his
literary agent as a Communist, and tawdry political intrigues in a
Britain beset by strikes, power outages, IRA bombings, Trotskyist
dramaturgy, and coup whisperings. Anthropomorphized, Wheen writes, the
decade would be “a meth-swilling vagrant waylaying passers-by to tell
them that the Archbishop of Canterbury had planted electrodes in his
brain.” Wheen thinks the period’s ravings were both laughably lunatic
and on to something important in a world of covert ops and oil
embargoes, but his paranoia diagnosis is too pat to fully capture the
politico-cultural chaos. Still, writing like Hunter S. Thompson might
have had he been English and sober, Wheen offers a vivid, entertaining
guide to an era of fear and loathing. (Mar. 2)
Oncle Joe
