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BOOK REVIEWS FROM THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA
HIGH WEIRDNESS, Erik Davis (2019)
5 radiant stars!
High Weirdness by Erik Davis (MIT Press/ Strange Attractor Press) is a plate piled to the moon of Gordian pasta (one that pairs best with a chilled glass of ergot wine). A 500+ page opus that gazes into the eyes of three counter-cultural sphinxes from the 1970s to the 1990s: Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson; psycho-literary one-offs whose trippy spiels and fractal meanderings continue to influence how folks think and dream.
But there’s a fourth character not explicitly mentioned in High Weirdness who features prominently in the tome, and that is Davis himself. Far more than a work of scholarship, High Weirdness is a mycelial mind map of networkiness that weaves itself into a tapetum lucidum of 1970s druggy new age spirituality and stoner philosophy, with a healthy dose of sci-fi and munchies mixed in, written by a true head who has spent decades pickling himself in this material. The result is a thing that is both heavy (literally, it weighs like 20 lbs.) while light enough to be bingeable. If you’ve read Davis’ Techgnosis or Nomad Codes, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
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