Dick--Heads to Invade SF in SF November 23rd

Sunday November 23rd, I'll be joined by Dick-Head Podcast host David Agranoff, cyberpunk legend Rudy Rucker, and Tachyon publisher Jacob Weisman at the San Francisco Public Library to talk about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, "Blade Runner," Dick's novel writing formula, as well as his influence on the science fiction genre. 

Here's what they say on their website: 

"Join SF in SF with experts David Gill, David Agranoff, and author Rudy Rucker, along with publisher Jacob Weisman, in a discussion on PKD and Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  David Gill, the authoritative expert on PKD, will tie Dick’s life and writing process with David  Agranoff’s expertise as the co-host of the PKDickheads podcast, and discuss the larger religious and philosophical questions the PKD’s work explores. Author Rudy Rucker, and Jacob Weisman, publisher of The Search for Philip K. Dick, by Anne Dick will join in as well.

Event is from 3:00PM until 5:00PM"

More info here. 

A Golden Opportunity

I'll make bones about the fact that I'm going on a total media blitz for Anne Dick's recently revised memoir The Search for Philip K Dick. I'm writing a more extensive review currently, but I want to give you guys another glimpse at the potential impact this book has on the academic study of PKD. I'm making a list of all the books that Anne mentions Phil reading - it's a long list and I'm 60 pages in. Just this afternoon I encountered this passage:

About this time I had started reading some of Carl Jung's writings. Dorothy Hudner [Phil's mother] had been deeply influence by Jung's works, and when she heard about my interest she sent of one of the beautiful Bollingen editions. Both Phil and I read it and soon we acquired and read the whole set. I thought of going to Zurich to study with Jung. I dreamt about cooking dinner for him. In the dream I opened up the refrigerator but it was filled with rotten meat. I guess it's just as well I didn't go. We listened when BBC interviewed Jung arriving in England for a visit. They asked, "Dr Jung, do you believe in God?" We were awed by his answer: "I do not believe. I know."

Phil studied Jung's volumes Alchemy and Symbols and Transformations in the Mass. He was interested in Jung's idea that a new world religion would soon arise, a religion based upon a quaternity instead of a trinity. The fourth force will be, Jung said, the force now regarded as demonic. This statement has a big influence on Phil" (60).

Well, there you go... A perfect foothold in the wall of influences any PKD scholar must confront. I've never read these books - I'm going to skim wikipedia forthwith [uh oh, wikipedia says, only: In 1944 Jung published “Psychology and Alchemy”, where he analyzed the alchemical symbols and showed a direct relationship to the psychoanalytical process. He argued that the alchemical process was the transformation of the impure soul (lead) to perfected soul (gold), and a metaphor for the individuation process.] - but I would imagine this idea of a quaternity could be read into The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (not to mention VALIS and The Divine Invasion). Who knows? The connections could be profound. I find it thrilling - like I've received a sudden bunch of leads in a long and tangled case. So much of the scholarship or coffee house speculations (if that's what you'd rather call it, I'll do you one better: bonged-out recliner ramblings) about PKD simply stab at the dark. There's a lot we know he read, but quite often people have been known to decide that PKD was influenced by a particular text. I may have been guilty, in the past, of assuming (perhaps even arguing that) PKD may have watched a particular movie.

Here in the excerpt from Anne's memoir you have solid evidence that this specific idea from Jung's text played some role in Dick's worldview (perhaps invading his subconscious and affecting his writing without his awareness). So I've added these volumes by Jung to the top of my reading list, but as I said earlier, I'm only on page 64. Perhaps more pressing research projects will emerge as I proceed.

Buy your copy today.

Excerpts From A Search For Philip K Dick

I have a fairly lengthy (and interesting) interview with Anne Dick posted on i09.com today. As part of my effort to promote Anne's revised and newly available memoir, I'll be posting some excerpts from the book here.

In this excerpt, Anne discusses the role of art and craftsmanship in her marriage to PKD:

I had been fascinated with all the accidental metal shapes and splashes that were produced while I was working on my welded sculpture. Lorraine and I thought we could turn them into an interesting form of jewelry. Phil encouraged us and bought me an anvil, a drill press, and a polishing motor. He built a well-constructed workbench in the utility room where I kept my welding tanks. He told me, “I don’t like to do carpentry. I made this bench extra strong so I won’t ever have to make it over again.”

Lorraine and I worked out wild new techniques for making jewelry using a tiny welding torch. We forged black iron bracelets with pearls set on them, made jewelry out of fire-glazed red copper and textured bronze, and learned to weld bronze rod into various shapes. About the same time I began to tile the master bathroom in our house. I bought different colored small tiles and made a mermaid, several fish, a cosmic eye right over the toilet, a boat, and a large sea serpent. It feels like you’re under water when you’re taking a bath. Phil wrote about this mural in We Can Build You. In that novel the bathroom tiling project is done by Pris Frauenzimmer, a horrible woman.

While Phil was writing, I was making jewelry with my partner, Lorraine Hynes, but we weren’t getting along well. Phil went back and forth between our neighboring houses, supposedly mediating, but somehow everything between us kept getting worse and worse. Soon Lorraine quit and I was working alone in my small laundry room workshop. To keep me company, Phil starting making some molten globby metal forms. He loved doing this. He made an irregular silver triangle and polished it for an hour on the buffing wheel. He described this object in The Man in the High Castle: “… a single small silver triangle ornamented with hollow drops. Black beneath, bright and light-filled above.”"

More excerpts to follow, but don't wait for me to get around to posting them, buy the memoir here.