Word of the Day: bricoleur

bricoleur (n)

One who engages in bricolage (construction by using whatever comes to hand); a do-it-yourselfer.

"Coupled with his genre breaking is the fact that Dick is a bricoleur, though this is not the word Lem uses, but it is very much what he is describing."
--dynamicsubspace.net, "Stanislaw Lem's Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans"

My blogging is bricolage, a vertical patchwork of palaver and persiflage that leaks from my coconut almost every day. How's that for a mixed metaphor? As they say in the rulebooks, even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed....

So let's talk about Dick. His print works, some of which are in the public domain and some are not, have been strip-mined by Hollywood's blockbuster machine, with mixed results, as any Dickhead will tell you. No doubt the man was a mad genius. My favorite Dick book is the unfilmable (?) VALIS, a phantasmagorical mélange of sci-fi and gnostic speculation. What's not to like about an autobiographical novel that features a main character named Horselover Fat, a "plasmate", a child messiah, Valentinian Gnosticism, pre-Socratic philosophers, a rock musician named Eric Lampton, a "Black Iron Prison", and a pink laser beam from Sirius? In the fourth season of Lost a character can be seen reading a copy of VALIS.

There. Bricolage.