Stories From All Over

A couple links for you today as you start your weekend.

First off, looks like the Library of America is offering all three PKD volumes in an attractive case (actually, strike that, it's not that attractive, and it's kinda weird that the case looks so different from the individual covers). But whatever, if you have 70$ (and who does these days?) buy it here, so I can get a cut:



Second, io9.com has posted a pair of articles about Adjustment Team, now being filmed as 'The Adjustment Bureau' - which I actually think is a slightly better title. I can't remember the short story well enough, so I'll reread it today and maybe post a little about the adaptation. I have to say, this looks like it'll probably have a dodgy chair in it.

The first article features an interview with the movie's female lead, Emily Blunt, talking about the film's love story. She says:

"The term soulmates is used so casually, but in this case, in this film, it is true. They are sort of destined to be together and they fight fate to be together."

The second io9 article covers some casting news, namely that LOST's Daniel Dae Kim "will play a "mysterious staffer" at the Bureau of Adjustments"

We Have a Winner

I have read a lot of bad PKD articles in my life. In the beginning, I built this blog around ripping these articles apart - so much so, that I kinda screamed myself hoarse, and eventually mellowed out. But (drum roll please) this is the worst! There's a longish article posted over on bookslut.com titled 'Speed Reading: The 44 Novels of Philip K Dick' which drags poor Phil through the muck and mire for a dozen or so paragraphs without ever discussing his writing.

This article made me mad.

Of course the article's author, Lorrette C Luzajic, would probably chalk my ire up to my apostolic devotion to PKD (she says PKD doesn't have fans, he has disciples), but there's more than just pathetic idolatry at work here. I'm not some starry-eyed seeker so intoxicated I can't see the prophet is flawed (though that sounds like a cool PKD story). What makes me mad about the article is that it fails to develop any sense of Philip K Dick as writer. Instead, Mrs Luzajic rehashes the same old 'PKD was mad as a hatter' article we've read a million times. I thought the Internet, especially sites like Bookslut.com were supposed to provide more depth and analysis, but not here.

Basically, Luzajic read Sutin's biography and Carrerre's meta-fictional I Am Alive and You Are Dead and decided she had PKD all figured out. Here's a sample of her myopic analysis:

"Phil sometimes explained freely that he needed speed to write books faster, because he had wives and children to support. Not a particularly rational man, it didn't occur to him that spending less on speed and other drugs would solve that problem. Or maybe it did, and the thought of life without pills was too frightening."

Dangling participles aside, this paragraph marks a new low. What amazes me (aside from the presumption to know what another person you've never met was thinking) is that anyone (let alone a professional) could possibly believe they could read a couple biographies about an author (doesn't look like she read any of his novels) and write anything cogent or interesting about the guy's life. Luzajik goes one step further, judging the guy based on motives she ascribes to him.

Later, the article really goes off the rails, as Luzajik continues with her sermon from the soap box:

"Phil was convinced that identities were also interchangeable, and that he received messages beamed into his skull from God. Sometimes he wasn't sure if he himself had been replaced, or if he was somewhere else. And while many of these metaphysical ideas fueled fascinating aspects in his stories, proving to be a playground of mind games of which he never grew tired, he was also plagued constantly with dark, terrible paranoia. He didn't know whom to trust. He was sure one wife was crazy, out to get him. He spent hours peering through a slit in the blinds, certain someone was lurking in the yard. He was terrified of the FBI, the KGB, Nazis, people following him. He was certain of elaborate conspiracies. He saw things that simply were not there."

As soon as Luzajic used the word 'convinced,' she revealed her own limited grasp of Dick's work. She need merely skim VALIS to see that Dick was very skeptical about all of his 'mystic experiences.' In fact, that internal duality between faith and skepticism is the central theme that emerges in his later writing. You've heard of a straw man argument; this is a straw author, so oversimplified, in fact, as to be an unwitting illustration of the critic's own ignorance. If Dick were simply mad, well, his writing would be a lot less interesting, and there'd be a lot more 'bleet snort clack vrrrmmph' gibberish, instead of his searing, heartfelt dedication to the goodness in man that fills his books

As soon as somebody can give me a satisfying definition of sanity, perhaps I will more fully buy into the notion of 'insanity.'

The article also misses several important points:

Luzajik writes, "It's peculiar how Phil dismissed his [drug] use as inconsequential."

This fails to mention the extensive work Dick did in the 70s and 80s crusading against drug abuse. Remember, he wrote long, passionate letters about the dangers of abuse during his time at X-Kalay. He even wrote an anti-drug novel, A Scanner Darkly, which chronicles the dangers of amphetime abuse.

Also, the article implies that Dick was a lifelong speed addict, failing to recognize that he quit speed in the 70s and wrote several of his best novels without its assistance.

But why should I even bother trying to explain this? I kinda get the feeling that this Luzajik person is too far gone to even see the problems with her article. I think it's interesting to note that this isn't one of those cookie-cutter PKD-is-in-the-LOA article we've seen so often, because those articles are built around a kind of natural tension: the pull between his pulpish origins and his current status as a canonical writer for the 21st century. Luzajik will only go so far as to say:

"But Dick was perfectly lucid much of the time; he was so intrigued by the moments of madness that he would dissect them, prying apart the very nature of our minds, or reality, or spirits. And this is the magic stuff of his books, this intrepid travelogue between universes."

This imagines a binary oppostion: sane/insane. As I've said before much of Dick's writing sought to undercut this simplistic dichotomy, and the genius of Dick is not this imagined dialog between what we normals see and what the fragile and dysfunctional artistic genius sees, but rather to point out how often we have our reference points backwards, how nuts our supposedly sane world is.

As Dick says, "Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."

Alternate Post Title: 'Jane you ignorant book slut'

Volume Three From the Library of America Reviewed

The Philip K Dick juggernaut continues its long slog towards literary respectability whether or not I can pull myself away from papers to grade long enough to document it. Case in point, the Library of America's third volume of PKD was released a few days ago. The deafening cacophony of mainstream media outlets falling over each other to chronicle the countless tragedies of PKD's life has quieted a bit, leaving only a few reviews to contextualize the efforts of our favorite ultra-prolific social misfit. David Hellman, a librarian at San Francisco State Unversity (where I am currently working as well) offers a lengthy and interesting review of the new volume for the San Francisco Chronicle. While the review offers little new information (seems like these articles all chronicle some guy who's never heard of Philip K Dick struggling to wrap his mind around what all the fuss is about), Hellman does zero in on the value of Dick's writing:

"What this volume ultimately tells us is that Dick was not a science fiction writer, but instead he was our writer. Some science fiction readers have chided him for valuing the fiction over the science, and he certainly did not write your typical space operas. But that seems to be the point here, and why in fact he transcends in so many ways, and to use his own concept, the "Black Iron Prison" of the genre. Dick was our writer because he was deeply concerned about human matters and about spiritual survival in an ever more materialistic and media-driven world. That should be good enough reason alone to be in anyone's canon."

Read the whole article here.

And buy the latest volume from the Library of America here:

Some Reading Material

I'm too busy celebrating my freedom this weekend to do much more than link to some important PKD-related articles.

First off, there's a long and in-depth article about PKD's life in Orange County in Orange Coast Magazine. Not only does the article include interviews with Tessa Dick, Linda Castellani, and Tim Powers, it also has a shout out to this blog. Read the whole thing here.

Second, there's an exclusive interview with Jonathan Lethem about PKD's third volume from the Library of America. Download the PDF file here. The volume hits stores July 30. I'm interested in seeing how thoroughly footnoted VALIS and Transmigration are in this edition.

Pre-order your copy:

Third Library of America Volume to Include.....

I've been getting a lot of email regarding the third PKD volume from the Library of America. I went to the source and asked the volume's editor Jonathan Lethem. He responded this morning. Drum roll please.... Volume Three, titled VALIS and Later Novels, due out July 30, 2009, will include:

A Maze of Death
VALIS
The Divine Invasion
The Transmigration of Bishop Timothy Archer

The inclusion of A Maze of Death in this edition is perhaps Lethem's most controversial choice yet. Dick's irv is tailor-made for long-winded discussions over Cheetos and Mountain Dews about which books should be included in these kind of faux-canon-making endevors, but it is interesting to note that Lethem chose A Maze of Death over Radio Free-Albemuth. I like this selection as it compiles, in one edition, much of Dick's later, more overtly religious/cosmological work.

This has all got me thinking. I mean the Library of America is supposedly dedicated to 'preserving America's best and most significant writing,' but from my vantage point, there would be no volume three if the first two volumes had been duds. Perhaps the most Dickian assembly of this edition would include excerpts from the Exegesis, which would undoubtedly sell well (especially if it included previously unavailable entries), but would sort of undercut the LoA's reputation. Very few people have read the Exegesis in its entirety - perhas Sutin is the only one - so, by virtue of its obscurity, it cannot really be America's most significant writing.

In the world with that edition, Dick has managed to expose the LoA's hypocrisy and vault even his most far-flung theories onto the literati's bookshelves. His pulpish search for meaning has been upgraded, evolved onto onion skin paper - the literary establishment's seal of approval. To legitimize his own search for meaning, while de-legitimizing the medium of distribution, wow, that's pretty Dickian.

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.

PKD Article Machine Strikes Again

There's an article in the Boston Phoenix about PKD's second volume from the LoA (which is out now - sorry I slept on that announcement) by Peter Keough that seems to focus a bit more on PKD's work than the other articles. But the final paragraph has a couple problems:

"Should conditions conducive to a Dick revival return — and they always do — plenty of material remains for movie adaptations and Library of America anthologies. He wrote 30 short stories in 1952 alone, and probably not even he could have said how many novels he wrote. (Thirty-six is a conservative estimate.) Yet even the relatively small (2000 pages) sampling Lethem has given us in these two volumes can get a little repetitious, though the writing remains fevered, startling, and hilarious. The same motifs keep popping up: drugs, psychiatrists, dead people, petty capitalism, orbiting disc jockeys, tacky artifacts. And, underlying it all, Dick’s trademark high concept: taking what it means to be human beyond what any human can understand."

I like the beautifully arbitrary number of novels: 36.

I'm really sorry that Keough can't understand Dick's notion of what it means to be human, but I wish he wouldn't suggest that I don't understand it (or imply that I'm not human).

Note to my readers: I am vacationing with my family on Kauai for the next couple of weeks so the posting will be a bit slower, but don't give up on me. I'll be back soon, tan, rested, and snarky.

PKD-Article Machine Up and Running (Again)

That strange rattling, 'chug chug' sound you're hearing in the background is the old Philip K Dick article machine groaning to life again because PKD's second volume from the LoA comes out next week. Pre-order yours here. One of the first articles to emerge from the machine is Boston.com's book review of the second volume from some guy I'm sure they pay named Mark Feeney.

Let's get this party started with a checklist I've developed for these:

Creepy oil painting making PKD look distressed?

Check, see above.

Does he say PKD was a crazy druggie?

"Bedeviled by drug abuse, mental illness, and the bill collector, he had good reason to think people might be out to get him."

Check.

Does he say PKD's writing isn't that good?

"Writing hardly comes any clunkier than this sentence from "Now Wait for Last Year": "But in all fairness, it had to be realized, Eric reflected, no one possessed the money and economic know-how to underwrite this admittedly uniquely expensive and beyond all others - imitations all - utterly impractical venture.""

Check (*with an example! Does Feeney get extra for that?).

Let me guess, the writing is 'uneven'....

"Wild unevenness is the price a reader pays for Dick's two great virtues: a blazing fecundity of imagination (the science part of science fiction didn't interest him that much, but the sheer fictiveness of it certainly did) and a quality of claustral despair that only Theodore Dreiser can match in American fiction."

Check.

I bet they talk about all the adaptations....

"The only canon Dick is a pillar of is Hollywood's. Among films adapted from his fiction are "Blade Runner," "Minority Report," "Total Recall," "Paycheck," and "A Scanner Darkly." There are another three movies in various stages of production."

Check.

Good to know PKD's not a canonical science fiction writer, or a part of the southern Californian counter-culture canon. Perhaps these other canons aren't on his Google map.

Here's the tough one, does it say anything nice?

"Yet make no mistake. Dick belongs in the Library of America as Melville and the rest do. True, he is often turgid - so are all of those four (and Dreiser, with two volumes of his own in the library, definitely makes five). More important, like Melville and Whitman, he's a true visionary, a writer who's enlarged our literature and continues to vex it."

Well aside from that the play was fine, said Mrs Lincoln.

How about a less-than-perfect literary comparison?

"The closest literary analogue for Dick may not be Dreiser or such masters of paranoia as Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo (even if a sentence like this one, from "Dr. Bloodmoney" - "It was war and death, yes, but it was error; it lacked intent" - could come straight out of "White Noise" or "Underworld"). It's George Orwell, though the similarity isn't so much in his own dystopian masterpiece, "Nineteen Eighty-Four," as in the three kitchen-sink novels he wrote during the 1930s, "A Clergyman's Daughter," "Keep the Aspidistra Flying," and "Coming Up for Air" (definitely a Dick-worthy title). There's the same sense of ceaseless desperation and perspiring spiritual fatigue - "the damp sweat of anxiety," as Dick writes in "Martian Time-Slip." Actually, in his novels there's hardly any other kind."

Actually, Orwell's Coming Up for Air, in retrospect, does have the same sort of suburban ennui as many of PKD's works.

Got anything nice to say Feeney?

"Yet make no mistake. Dick belongs in the Library of America as Melville and the rest do. True, he is often turgid - so are all of those four (and Dreiser, with two volumes of his own in the library, definitely makes five). More important, like Melville and Whitman, he's a true visionary, a writer who's enlarged our literature and continues to vex it."

Play us out Mr Feeney:

"Dick is, in fact, just the sort of author for whom the library should exist: one whose work can be hard to find, who is so variable in quality as to cry out for editorial selection, and who greatly benefits from such a body's imprimatur. That the library should publish, as it has, novels by Saul Bellow and Philip Roth - work that's long been in the canon and remains securely in print - makes no sense. Publishing these novels by Dick, though, is a real service to American literature."

Note to Feeney: there's a section in most book stores where they stock the science fiction. I think if you can find that section, you may even be able to locate a PKD book or two, though I hate to think you might accidentally pick up a 'turgid' one.

Perhaps this much snark is unwarranted, but I'm having a lousy week. There was a great segment on the Jim Lehrer news hour today about how the LA Times Sunday Book Review section is being discontinued because, among other things, so much passionate literary discussion is taking place on the web, mostly on blogs. They didn't mention this one by name, but you could tell they were really plugging Total Dick-Head implicitly. Sheer repetition will not make these 'facts' any more accurate or the insights any deeper.

Long Article About PKD in London Review of Books

The London Review of Books has a long article on PKD in their July 3 issue and now it's available online here. Is it the article we've all been waiting for, the one that corrects all the commonly-repeated inaccuracies from the other articles, the one that finally and ultimately gets PKD, the one that finally explains him so that everybody will love his work as much as we do?

...No.

Stephen Burt, the article's author, seems to be operating under the assumption that Emanuel Carrere's I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K Dick is a legitimate biography (it's a good read but it's not a biography as biographers generally avoid inventing facts out of whole cloth). Stranger still, Burt doesn't even mention Sutin's biography. But he's read Kim Stanley Robinson's doctoral thesis on PKD (or paid someone to tell him what it was about) and I think he's read at least a couple of PKD's books, so he's perhaps got a cleaner lens than Gopnik.

Here's some excerpts from the interview (setting snark to 'minimum'):

"Dick said near the end of his life that he was ‘into power’: ‘Instead of society moulding me,’ he claimed, ‘I mould it.’"

When did he say this and why is he spelling mold with a 'u'? (Yes I know it's a British spelling and it's a British article, but Dick was, er, American - shouldn't the writer be honoring the quotee's spelling habits - or has British imperialism extended to changing spellings within quotation marks?) Does that sound like PKD to you? If anybody has a source for this quote please let me know. Perhaps the spelling is a clue to the source: maybe it's an audio recording transcribed by Burt or someone else on that side of the pond.

Burt continues:

"His late belief in his own visionary importance puts into new, sad light the schlubby repairmen, newspaper-puzzle obsessives and helpless Organisation Men in Dick’s earlier works: these little people stuck in large systems, with their frustrated hopes and their cartoonish (mostly bad) sex lives, align Dick less with other SF writers than with other mordant Californian satirists, such as Nathanael West."

Now, really, I am not trying to be a dickhead, but how does the logic in this sentence work? How does Dick's own belief in his own "visionary importance" caste a sad light on the characters in his books (and what about PKD's skepticism about his authenticity as a 'visionary'?). I guess you can say his experiences caste his characters in a pink light, but, seriously, what's so sad about it?

Thank you for comparing PKD's work to Nathanael West's - it's perhaps the most apt literary comparison and one many other writers have failed to make.

Burt continues:

"Dick should be placed close to psychoanalysis, too: not so much the kind Freud practised, but the kind that coated American popular culture in the years Dick started to write. His characters wonder whether they count as neurotic or psychotic, whether they are sufficiently masculine or feminine, whether they should see a specialist about their complexes. By far the most important psychiatric label in Dick’s work is ‘paranoid’: his protagonists wonder whether someone or something is manipulating all they see. Usually the answer is ‘yes’: Dick’s characters must detect ‘the enemy, with its infiltrating tactics, its systematic contamination of institutions . . . of the domestic life itself’. That enemy may be a phalanx of telepaths and precognitives employed in corporate espionage (Ubik); a squad of doppelgangers from alternative timelines (Now Wait for Last Year); drug-enforcement agents whose high-tech ‘scramble suits’ make them unrecognisable even to one another (A Scanner Darkly); or androids who pass for human (almost every book). Such plots draw at once on the Red Scare mentality – anyone might be a secret Communist, and any Communist a double agent – and on what Dick knew of clinical mental illness."

Well now I'm starting to like this guy, but I think it's just because he agrees with me. PKD is tirelessly analyzed in relation to Jung, but very few of us dare to see the themes and elements Dick tore from the pages of Freud's On Narcissism.

Play us out Burt:

"Depictions of drugs and depictions of fake or robotic people work well together in Dick’s books, since people whose moods depend on a single chemical (on what it does to them, or on how to get more of it) are as predictable, even robotic, as the rest of us might think we are not."

Read the rest and then tell us what you think in the comments section.

PKD's LoA Volume Fastest Selling Ever

PKD's total pwnership of our culture has just begun. It turns out the Library of America's PKD volume has been the fastest selling ever! Galley Cat reports that PKD's volume has sold 23,750 copies. To compare, Jack Kerouac's edition sold around 15k, and Edmund Wilson's a little under 10k copies (teehee!). Galley Cat quotes a guy at the LoA as saying:

"When we first conceived our multi-volume and multi-year plan for a Philip K. Dick edition, we never dreamed that it would resonate so strongly with our readers. The closest comparison in terms of velocity of sales out of the gate would be our Grant and Sherman volumes, released in 1990 at the same time as the debut of Ken Burn's The Civil War on PBS. But even those volumes didn't sell as fast as has the PKD."

The second LoA volume from PKD comes out July 31. Reserve yours now at Amazon (or better yet buy the pulp editions in bulk on ebay - that's what I do).

Via Steven Hart's Blog
Thanks FP Kiesche III!

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.