Back in the Future

This week I taught PKD's 1980 short story "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" in my second-year literature course. The experience has reinvigorated my sense of purpose, and I've been thinking about some big changes I'd like to make to the blog. I've got the new kid, an additional class (due to a friend and mentor's grave illness), my band's playing out, and, subsequently, I can't keep up the Dick Head on a daily basis, and to be honest, for the next few months it will be difficult to post on a weekly basis.

As this site has become a great place for PKD fans to discuss the texts and media happenings, I've decided to invite a few readers and fellow Dick scholars to become contributors here. If you're interested in writing something or leading a discussion, please let me know. I'm thinking of remaking this blog more in the model of the Philip K Dick Society Newsletter with myself acting as the Paul Williams, editing and publishing work done by garage scholars and academics motivated by curiosity rather than currency. We've had great discussions about Palmer Eldritch, Maze of Death, Flow My Tears, and others. I'd like to feature more of these types of discussions, starting with "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" (also published as "Frozen Journey"). Get a hold of this story and I'll post some interesting discussion questions from my class in the next couple of days. Let's try to dig a bit deeper than this...

Flow My Tears to be Next PKD Film

The Intertoobz are abuzz today with word that Halcyon Productions, who signed a first-look agreement with Electric Shepherd Productions, have decided to go with PKD's Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said as the production company's first adaptation of Dick's work.

I think this is a good choice, and I'm glad to know John Simon (currently finishing up a film version of Radio Free Albemuth) is expected to produce (along with Isa Dick-Hackett, and the two Halcyon studio heads Victor Kubicek and Derek Anderson - currently preparing Terminator Salvation for release) and Dick's oldest daughter Laura will be an executive producer.

I've written at length about Flow My Tears, and believe it has great potential as a film. It will be interesting to see how much of the novel's moral ambiguity (which includes an incestuous relationship between a brother and sister and a lot of drugs) will make it into the film. Here's hoping the effort will rival A Scanner Darkly which I felt benefited from Laura and Isa's hard work and input. As long as we can keep Tom Cruise out of the film we should be ok (remember Cruise owned the option for Flow for quite a while and expressed interest in playing Jason Taverner).

Flow Some Thoughts On The Book, The Blogger Did

This summer I have dedicated myself to rereading all five of the books in the second PKD volume from the Library of America:

Martian Time-Slip
Dr Bloodmoney
Now Wait For Last Year
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
A Scanner Darkly

I'm on chapter four of Now Wait For Last Year, and I recently completed Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, which I have to say blew my mind. It had been a while since I read it, and, admittedly, I had never done a close read of the book. Like I think happens quite often with PKD's readers, I devoured Flow soon after I discovered Philip K Dick amid a flurry of his books, reading something like five books in a couple of weeks (all of which kind of blended together in my mind).

So I was reading Flow and when I got to the end I was like, "what the hell happened to the Callisto cuddle sponge that knocked Taverner into the world where nobody knew his name (much like a Boston without Sam Malone or a bar called Cheers)?" It kind of weighed on me as I knew I could never really talk seriously about the book (much less assign it in a literature class) if I couldn't get a grip on the plot. What's more, there's tons of evidence that PKD spent more time and energy revising, rewriting, and reworking Flow than any other novel, so I knew that this wasn't just some plot hole PKD had failed to fill.

I asked around, but failed to get an answer that satisfied me. So I moved on, but then I remembered that PKD's agent had given him a challenge. I think it was Terry Carr who told PKD (please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm away from most of my reference materials) that he needed, once and for all, to come up with an answer to the question he had been asking his entire career: what is real?

Dick's answer came in the form of Flow My Tears which, at its core, is a mediation on various types of love (for a detailed list of the types of love, see the dialog between Taverner and Ruth Rae that PKD cut from the book at the advice of his editor excerpted in The Different Stages of Love published in issue #28 of the Philip K Dick society newsletter).

Anyway I had a 'Eureka!"moment. Dick was answering the question 'what is real?', in part, by stating what is not real. And what isn't real is the world of the first chapter in Flow, a world in which there is no agape, no empathic love, no concern for anyone but the self (as demonstrated by Taverner's incredible self-absorption and his reckless disregard for the feelings of others).

Taverner's reality in that first chapter is based on his status as the one of the biggest celebrities on the planet. What's more, his identity is based on his wealth, and his power over others. I think Dick is suggesting these aren't the best ways of establishing an identity, because the world that Taverner discovers when he wakes up in that seedy motel room is far more 'real.' In this world, Taverner has no identity (and more importantly, no identity papers) and, the connections he makes with people in that world are based on intimacy (the sharing of the self with others) rather than the exercising of power over the people around you.

It's interesting to note that the notion of vertical power dynamics (who's got more power and who's got less) is now often ascribed by interpersonal relationship experts as a 'male' view of reality, while a horizontal axis which concerns intimacy (I'm closer to person A than to person B and therefore person A is more important to me than person B) is often thought of as a feminine way of looking at the world (please don't ask me to name these 'experts' - I'm trying to find my notes from the interpersonal communication class I took ten years ago).

So what's my point? Just that the 'reality' in chapter one is not real. I'm not saying it was a hallucination, or a 'dream within a dream' as Poe might call it, but rather, there's no there there, like a schizophrenic's private world, which ends abruptly at the tip of his or her nose, an ornate solipsism formed not from perception but from a flawed sense of self, and an exaggerated sense of self-importance.

Flow will someday make a great movie. It's perhaps the best suited for adaptation aside from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It's set over the course of just two days and has a relatively simple setup: a lost soul tries to find his way home (it's the Odyssey narrative, which has been used in tons of movies, like, for example, E.T. and Oh Brother Where Art Thou?). Of course a screenwriter is going to have to provide a resolution for the cuddle sponge event. For awhile, before my realization about the book, I was thinking it would be great if Taverner at the end of the film were to suddenly discover the cuddle sponge's feeding tubes in his chest, thereby making Taverner's struggle to return to his world a dream within a dream. But now I realize this would be to invert the moral of the novel (ala Blade Runner). A far more faithful ending would see Taverner realize he was never famous, that chapter one was a delusion of grandeur.

I want to talk about Felix Buckman and his role in all this, but I'm spent, and it's time to go swimming, so stay tuned.

Next Stop Pottersville

Way back when I started this blog (a little over a year ago) one of my first posts was about an Italian scholar named Frasca Gabriele and his contention that the 1946 Frank Capra film "It's A Wonderful Life" may very well have inspired PKD's notion of false realities. In that post I quoted another Italian Dick-head, Umberto Rossi, as saying,

"Well, I saw [the film] yesterday and I have to admit it's so true it's almost ludicrous. The Cosmic Puppets comes from that. But also other things (the scene in CASTLE where Tagomi visits our world, plus some aspects of UBIK)."

Well I just finished watching the movie and I have to agree. Especially after reading The Cosmic Puppets.

Whether or not PKD was consciously influenced by Capra's film or the short story it was based upon is irrelevant. The moral of Capra's film is the moral in any number of PKD stories: that in small and seemingly insignificant ways people are heroes; ordinary people, through kindness, and most importantly, through a kind of empathic connection to those around them, make this world real for us. It's late so I'll just quote Ursula Le Guin:

"There are no heroes in Dick's books but there are heroics. One is reminded of Dickens: what counts is the honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people."

Everybody has seen 'It's A Wonderful Life' right?

I hadn't. I recognized some of the lines, and the famous scenes, but I didn't know the story. And, my friends, the Dickian lies in the details here, so please allow me to recap.

Capra's protagonist George Bailey (famously, and I must say brilliantly, portrayed by little Jimmy Stewart) is torn between his own dreams of travel and adventure, and carrying on his family's small loan business after his kindly old father dies suddenly of a stroke. George decides to postpone his dreams of "kicking off the dust of this old town" and stays in New Bedford in order to continue the family business as it battles with Scrooge-like tycoon Henry F Potter who embodies miserly greed completely untempered by any compassion for the townspeople upon whom his shadow falls. Imagine Montgomery Burns without the gentle ethics of Smithers to restrain his malevolence.

When George's uncle accidentally loses an $8000 deposit to the bank, threatening not only the family business but possible jail time for George on charges of fraud or embezzlement, George considers throwing himself off a bridge so that his family can collect his life insurance policy and settle his debts. Of course, a Twain-reading angel (second class) named Clarence shows George what the world would be like if he had never been born.

What's important in relation to PKD's work is the way the Joe-everyman hero, of modest means and high ethics, is set against the knife-edge of ruthless, cutthroat, Wall Street-style capitalism (uh, there's this one book called Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch that is kind of like that). In fact the entire town of Bedford Falls lies in the balance. In the reality in which George was never born, Bedford Falls has become Pottersville, the entire city transformed into a den of iniquity with bars, Burlesque houses, boxing arenas, pimps, hos - you know, straight thug life. You gotta see the way Stewart plays this. His panic upon discovering the "wrongness" of this reality is so perfectly Dickian - don't you think?).

Note to actors in this Ubik film this is how you play it.

In the most Dickian scene never featured in a PKD book, George Bailey stumbles around the dusty, decaying house he shares with his wife and family in his other reality. He's brushing aside cobwebs and dust, searching desperately for his family in his new reality of decay and emotional emptiness.

Of course when he finally sees his wife Mary (an old-maid librarian in this reality) he delivers his famous, "Mary, Mary, don't know me?" line.

While on the surface 'It's A Wonderful Life' appears to be a pretty straightforward anti-suicide, pro-God, Jesus, and family pic, a little deeper, it's is a scathing indictment against Ayn-Rand-style capitalistic greed. That's not to say that the film is anti-capitalism (or a Marxist critique of any kind), but rather that it promotes the same kind of honorable, decent, marketplace that PKD venerates in his books: small business owners who sweep the sidewalks in front of their store before it opens (I think you need more than two hands to count the number of times this scene has appeared in various PKD books); banks that provide loans that enable lower-middle class workers to buy a home; small town business, handshake deals, and a code of honor. The kind of business ethics I like to imagine PKD learned from his boss and mentor Herb Hollis. What both the movie and PKD's work seem to reject is ruthless capitalism, dehumanized capitalism, Palmer Eldritch-style capitalism, corporate thug capitalism. George Bailey, like so many of Dick's characters holds this tide of oligarchical evil at bay by simply by adhering to a higher ethical standard.

What's more 'It's A Wonderful Life' depicts the celestial world of Heaven as a fundamentally bureaucratic one in which angels are given ranks and promotions, and where prayers, when enough people say them, can get God of his couch and into action.

I'm currently reading Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, and there are a number of similarities to 'It's A Wonderful Life': basically both depict people encountering worlds where they never existed. But a book like The Penultimate Truth also resonates with the film because in that novel the fake reality is perpetuated for profit. Similar to 'The Matrix', there is a stake in maintaining the illusory reality; certain entities are profiting off the bamboozlment and exploitation of others. These false realities lack realness because an essential human element is missing: the empathic connection between citizens that keeps everyone's greed in check.

Perhaps a better way to explain this is to note that in PKD's books and the film it is greed that alters and perverts reality, in both cases, until it is no longer 'real.'

Stay tuned for another post on the similarities between 'It's A Wonderful Life' and The Cosmic Puppets.

Cover of the Day

Exciting news Dick-heads! Philip K Dick's second volume from the Library of America is due to be released July 31, 2008. As previously reported this volume of PKD's work from the 60s & 70s will include:

Martian Time Slip
Dr Bloodmoney
Now Wait For Last Year
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
A Scanner Darkly

All great novels. I can't help but notice Lethem's saved some works for a now-seemingly-inevitable volume of Dick's final novels.

Perhaps something on the order of:

VALIS
The Divine Invasion
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

What do you think should round out the final volume? I know Lethem prefers VALIS to Radio Free Albemuth but perhaps Radio could round out the final volume, or maybe some of the Exegesis....

Pre-order your copy of volume two from Amazon here.

Update: Be sure to read Lethem's awesome short story, "The King of Sentences" published in the December 17th issue of The New Yorker.

Cover of the Day

Here's another Panther Edition. Reader James, a library science student, informs me there were a number of PKD titles released by this publisher including:

The Zap Gun. 1975.
Now Wait for Last Year. 1975.
We Can Build You. 1986.
The Cosmic Puppets. 1985.
Our Friends From Frolix 8. 1976.
World of Chance. Panther books (This one doesn't sound familiar to me. Anyone know anything about it?)Update: World of Chance is alternate title for Solar Lottery. Thanks anonymous!

My guess is that these editions have nice cover art but cheap and already pretty degraded paper.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is definitely one of my top ten favorite PKD novels. A celebrity wakes up in a world where no one has heard of him. The novel also resonates with the legendary guilt Dick felt as a result of surviving infancy when his twin sister, Jane, did not.

Sutin writes:

It is Buckman who lives out the novel's title, when his twin sister and incestuous wife, Alys Buckman -- a bisexual leather queen who abuses drugs and binges on direct brain-stimulus at orgies -- dies of an overdose of the mysterious time-binding drug KR-3. The parallel, in Alys's death, to Phil's loss of Jane is confirmed by the Exegesis. Phil often imagined Jane as a lesbian, and always thought of her as strong and courageous.

The novel's title comes from 16th century composer, the "melancholy madrigalist," John Dowland's song, "Flow my years" -- Which Sting recorded and released recently along with other hits from back in the day.