While I Was Away Part 1: An Interview with Salon

I didn't cease my Dicking entirely with my abandoning of this blog. In the coming days and weeks, I'll share with you some of the stuff I did.

Scott Timberg, I miss you, man

First up is this interview I did about Amazon's The Man in the High Castle with Salon.com. You may remember the interviewer, Scott Timberg, and his awesome feature about PKD for the LA Times in 2014. Unfortunately, Scott committed suicide last year. I still can't wrap my head around it. I owe him quite a debt as he quoted me for a piece about Anne Dick for the New York Times, and interviewed me for this piece. Both serious feathers in my raggedy ol' cap. It still bums me out.

I never got beyond the first season of The Man in the High Castle. I'd only seen a few episodes when I did this interview. My opinion of the show never improved. Don't get me started.

Anyway I think this interview gets to the substance of my issue with it. I said:

"They basically stole Phil Dick’s pitch — and then deployed it in their own inimitable style. I find the show fairly compelling to watch. But I also find myself saying, “I don’t know that this is what Dick was getting at.”

It seems much morally simpler, less ambiguous. There were some suggestions in [the novel] that America and Nazi Germany were not all that different — that’s not a particularly P.C. idea, but it is important. While the Germans were extinguishing Jews, we were excluding black people from the lunch counter. It was a matter of degrees.

We had [racial] superiority here … The Nazi fantasy of the blond, blue-eyed book and how it overlapped with California dreamin’ … The idea of the blond, perfect teeth, riding on the wave like some übermensch. It’s not without its resonance, and to leave all those out and make it a simple good vs. evil — that’s a travesty. A betrayal of Dick’s intention. But probably works better on TV."

One of the few things that stuck out to me about the series was the iconography associated with it. Particularly the juxtaposition of classically fascist or Nazi tropes and American icons, like the Statue of Liberty giving the ol' Sieg Heil.

Remember when Amazon plastered these ads all over the subway right after Trump won the election, and people flipped out about it, so they pulled the ads?

That was wild. That was a real PhilDickian moment. Here's my favorite quote from the article from the show's producer, who had this to say:

“It’s very difficult with a show with subject matter like this to market it tastefully, so I understand they’re walking a very difficult line[...]If they had asked me, I would have strongly advised them not to do it.”

Implicit in all of this is the very reason that Amazon's MiTHC had to depict a much more active rebellion against Nazi occupation within the series: we, as a society, are not ready to accept one of Dick's central premises in the book, that for many in the novel American life would go on, much as it had before the Nazi's took over. It seems to me in the freakout over these posters (and the subway seats, my God! the seats!) there seems to be some recognition of the appropriateness of the imagery given the political zeitgeist of the time -- that was immediately, not only rejected, but which must be removed for its crass offense.

About Last Night

From the left: Pamela Jackson, Me, Jonathan Lethem (I kinda feel like we're all so famous I shouldn't even have to tell you who's who!)

Well gentle readers, I went and had another magical Dick experience last night (oh, the Google hits I will get for that). Regular reader Ted Hand and I met a few other Dick-heads for dinner before heading to Moe's Books in Berkeley for a big Exegesis event.

It was a pretty big deal with at least 100 people in the store. It was standing room only and I heard they sold something like 80 copies of the book!

Pictured left to right: Erik Davis, Laura Leslie, Pam Jackson, Jonathan Lethem, Isa Dick-Hackett

The guests of honor were: Jonathan Lethem, Pamela Jackson, Erik Davis, and Dick's daughters Laura and Isa. There were people filming there last night and I have their email so I think I'll wait on providing in-depth coverage. Lethem did a great job of explaining the origins and significance of The Exegesis and Pamela Jackson filled us in on the process itself. For me, there wasn't a whole lot of new info. But stay tuned for the video, I figure you'll enjoy it. For now, you can listen to a podcast of the LA Event here.

Incredibly poorly composed picture that does little to convey the size of the crowd. But check out dude's shades.

Afterwords, we went to a smaller party and had a really good time. Like that line from Parsifal, time was turning into space all around us. Lethem had worked at this exact bookstore for years, and now he was returning with success he probably couldn't even imagine back then. I know I have lots of fantasies where I go back to some crummy record store where I used to work, but now I'm rich and powerful. It sure seems like it would feel good, but who knows? And of course we were only a couple blocks from Herb Hollis' record store where Phil used to work and first came into his own.

Anytime you get that many Dick-heads together it's almost like the collective energy somehow substantiates the man. You certainly couldn't look around that room of people and have any doubt that Dick's work has touched people and changed their lives. And when you get us serious folks together, those of us who have dedicated decades to our obsession, it's just really inspiring, almost magical. Our private worlds, the spaces in our minds inhabited by the things we covet, suddenly finding a shared interest, open up in a really beautiful way. I mean, my wife is pretty sick of hearing me talk about Phil Dick, and she hasn't read all the books and doesn't know the mythos. Anyway, my hyperbole is starting to ramble.

What I'm trying to say is that it sure is fun talking to people who find the same value in Dick's life and work. It makes me feel like dedicating two decades to the study of his life was a good thing. And for a while I hadn't really been feeling like that. So, good to know.

Now, quickly on to other topics:

1) We made boingboing!
2) The Guardian reviewed The Exegesis
3) Amazon says The Exegesis is "under review" -- WTF?
4) You can now get the Prophets of SF episode about PKD on Amazon
5) All the cool Dick-heads are tripping on this really amazing PKD interview!

Things and Stuff About Amazon and an Article About PKD's Writing

Gentle readers, as you no doubt have already heard, amazon canceled all of their associate accounts in California last night. So, I am switching over to Powell books, where I should have been in the first place. My feelings on the subject are well voiced by this dood.

So, let's do this. Go buy Umberto's book over there:

Pre-order your copy of The Exegesis over there:

The Exegesis of Philip K Dick

I just noticed there's a video for the book!



In case none of this interests you, check out this article examining PKD's prose style.

Check this out:

A long silence, then. Then, “Oof.” She leaped, galvanized as if lost to the shock of a formal experiment. His pale, dignified, unclothed possession: become a tall and very thin greenless nervous system of a frog; probed to life by outside means. Victim of a current not her own but not protested, in any way. Lucid and real, accepting. Ready this long time.

"Take a minute to read this passage closely. You may not have noticed, but Dick has just compared a naked woman in the throes of orgasm to an electrified frog. Yet the description is so out-of-nowhere unexpected and ambiguously communicated that the first time I read it I thought Dick was comparing a penis to a jolted frog leg (“become tall and thin…”). There’s also the weird, dehumanizing way that the woman here is labeled a “possession,” a description given some obvious counterweight—one can sense Dick hoping—by the word “dignified.” And the adjective “greenless” is stupefyingly strange in this instance (and would be in a lot of other instances)."

Did that guy just completely misread the excerpt he's analyzing? The woman is galvanized; the penis is like the frog of a nervous system. I'm not defending it, I'm just looking at the syntax! But I think I like point the guy's making, if I understand it correctly. The other cool thing, the guy quotes Lethem:

"What does it mean when a great writer like Philip K. Dick is considered to have an occasionally terrible prose style? Even so brilliant and well-regarded a defender of Dick’s novels as author Jonathan Lethem has referred, in a 2007 interview with the online journal Article for example, to Dick’s “howlingly bad” patches of prose."

That's my interview! Nice thing about the internet is sometimes you send something out through a tube, it comes back to you through another!

Up top that's a picture of the new Mariner Books editions of PKD's VALIS. Here's a forum where you can look at some of the others... I kinda like this one...

Two New PKD Sources Hit Bookshelves

Dick-heads have been waiting for years for the final volume of PKD's letters. After some false starts, it looks like the 80-82 volume of letters is finally available from Amazon.com. At almost $50, it ain't cheap, but will most likely be a very useful resource. Buy it here. If you buy enough copies through my links, maybe I'll be able to afford this volume:



Also recently released is another PKD Overview-type book by Eric C Link:



Umberto Rossi says of Link's book:

"It's way more readable than those excerpts from Rickels. Clear, well-documented, competently written--though, as I had surmised, it mostly says things we know.

Yet there are some interesting bits here and there.

He starts discussin' Dick as a novelist of ideas by reading"

LOST's Buried Treasures

I'm sure many of your salivary glands are already in overdrive for the season premiere of LOST tonight. I know mine are. What other top TV show references VALIS, not once but twice? So this seems as good a time as any to plug a book about the show. I wrote a short article on VALIS's appearance for the book LOST's Buried Treasures. Actually, that sounds more like a plug for me than for the book, but that's to be expected. Luckily, the rest of the book is quite good as well. Buy it from the amazon link below - buy anything, preferably something expensive - and I will get a cut, and that's how it should be: