Well Deserved Rest

The last few weeks have been running me ragged. I'm teaching a couple new classes this semester that require a lot of prep time, the band has been busy - we even played the clubhouse of an East Bay biker gang - so it's been kinda crazy. I went to Ithaca and gave a talk at the Tompkins County Library about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to a dozen and a half geriatric library patrons, many of whom didn't particularly like the book. It was actually quite a bit of fun. I met some super nice folks: the librarians who shepherded me around, wining and dining me, a couple nice people from Cornell. The pay was so good, the hotel so nice, it seemed otherworldly. Can you imagine these librarians presenting the board with their plan to bring a 'famous blogger' who writes something called the 'Total Dick-Head' to talk about DADOES?


The library selected the book in conjunction with Cornell University's assignment of the book as the freshmen read. It was a pretty big deal. The university created a really cool blog, there were lectures offered on the first day of school (these are now available as videos here), Gabriel Mckee put together an exhibit of different editions of the novel, and Del Rey published a special edition of the book. I got a whole bunch of swag too: a t-shirt, poster, bookmarks. Perhaps a contest is in order.

Anyhoo, it was a blast but I've been struggling to catch up with work and the blog and the band and the family. There's plenty afoot in the Dickian realm and I hope to get a chance to do a roundup soon.

On The Road Again

Sorry (again) for the dearth of posts - and no, not every post from now on will be preambled by an apology, but I've been neglecting the blog since so much else has been going on. My daughter started kindergarten; I'm teaching a new class for developmental writers that involves a lot of class preparation, my band has been looking for a replacement bass player and just released a new single; oh and I'm leaving tomorrow for Ithaca, New York where I will be delivering a lecture of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? on Thursday night at the Tompkins County Library! Any readers out that way? Find more info here if you can attend, or simply read this excerpted blurb about the talk:

"During his Library presentation, Gill will lead a wide-ranging discussion about “Do Androids Dream. . .” which will focus on the notions of identity raised in the novel, examining human interaction with technology as a form of schizophrenia, discussing the critical approaches that can be applied to the book, connecting the novel to the work of pioneering brain surgeon Wilder Penfield and the poetry of T.S. Eliot and Matthew Arnold, and exploring America’s growing fascination with zombie movies."

Who wouldn't want to see that?

I think it's absolutely amazing that they're billing me as a 'Famous Blogger'! In fact, I think the term is oxymoronic but 'Famous Dickhead' would probably be misconstrued by most readers. Anyway, this is all very exciting for me. I'm reading Jeremy Rifkin's new book, The Empathic Civilization, which I think clearly demonstrates how desperately we need to begin implementing PKD's solutions to our growing inhumanity. Ever notice how evolution always makes Dick's characters more bloodthirsty and violent? Or the opposite, that he often portrays early proto-Humans as gentle herbivores?

I'm also reading Alain De Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life which is great and shows how accessible and interesting literary criticism can be when it's done outside the ivory-tower walls of academia.

Anyhoo, I promise I'll get the next few parts of John Fairchild's Sentient Gravity queued up and ready to go while I'm away. But I'll be back home, hopefully in time to play an opening set for Canadian punk legends NoMeansNo Friday night.

Stuff I'm Doing, Update

The posts here have been few and far between as I've had quite the summer. I've got a bunch of stuff to post over this coming weekend and then, next Wednesday, I'll be hitting the road with Erik Davis for the two-day drive to the PKD Fest in Blackhawk, Colorado. I'm starting to get really excited. According to organizer Lord RC the Sundance Lodge in Blackhawk will be almost completely full of Dick-heads. Can you imagine?

I'll be giving a couple of talks at the Fest (festival schedule here). On Friday, Erik Davis and I will be speaking about our experience reading The Exegesis. (Oh yeah, I never mentioned I was doing that did I? - That's because I can't talk about it very much, but yes, I am one of the scholars working with Pamela Jackson culling the folders for material to publish in the two expected volumes) On Saturday I'll be giving a talk about the limits of identity in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. This'll be very much like the lecture I give my students when we talk about the book. Hopefully both of these will be available as a podcast at some point.

Speaking of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Cornell is really going all out in promoting the book as the Freshmen novel this year. In fact, the local library is making the book a community read. The big news is that they've contacted your humble blogger and invited me to give a talk. They're even paying the tab! I have to remember not to let all this go to my head, but it's very exciting. There was an article up about the event, but I can't seem to find it now. Hopefully it wasn't all a dream or an implanted memory.

Finally, I just finished writing a new introduction to Anne Dick's memoir, now being reissued by Tachyon Publications, and due out as soon as next month. If I were you I'd be scooping up copies to Anne's self-published edition, seeing as how the first edition, now incredibly rare, commands a pretty penny.

So things are going really well for me. I've decided that the next step is to write a book on PKD. Having now read both Rickels's I Think I Am: Philip K Dick and Eric Carl Link's Understanding Philip K Dick, it's clear to me that we're still missing a detailed, fun to read guide to Dick's life and writing. Rather than wait for someone else to write it, I'm going to try my hand at it. Hopefully the project won't keep me from regularly updating this blog. But, again, this is a great time to contribute guest posts!

Cornell to Expose Freshmen to Androids, Undecidability.

Cornell University is slated to use Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as their New Student Reading Project of 2010. I've been teaching this book to Freshmen for five years now, and can say it's a great book in the classroom. Read more about it here. Here's an excerpt from a write up in the Cornell Daily Sun:

"Out of 50 shortlisted titles that members of the Cornell community suggested, Philip K. Dick’s science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep emerged as the selection for the New Student Reading Project of 2010.

The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic future in 2021, after a nuclear war has driven millions of species into extinction and survivors to Mars. The plot centers on the protagonist’s struggle to identify androids in a crowd. By blurring the distinctions between humans and androids, the author explores the qualities, if there are any, which are unique to humans and separates them from automatons.

While the choice departs from the tradition of literary classics, the selection committee, which consists of students, faculty and staff members across colleges, evaluated this year’s selection along similar paradigms as the ones they used to single out The Grapes of Wrath last year.

“We chose a book that will cover a broad range of topics, like The Grapes of Wrath,” Laura Brown, vice provost of undergraduate education, said. “[The Grapes of Wrath] talks about the dustbowl, which sparks discussion about the environment and natural disasters. It also talks about economics, the Great Depression, family and the labor market. We want to generate as many topics as we can for exploration through the book we pick.”

I sure hope some students don't buy this edition of the book by mistake...