Announcing the Dates for the 2014 Philip K Dick Fest!

Even bigger news than the SYFY demotion, I've just heard from Umberto Rossi, and the plans for the 2014 Fest are underway! What's more, they have set the dates: April 25, 26 at UC Irvine! I'm especially excited that I don't have to plan it! But I will be there for sure, hopefully presenting something or other. There's a Facebook group, and there will probably be updates at the Festival website. Stay tuned, more news as it becomes available.

Now Read About Last Year, Then Purchase and Read My Fiction!

 
Happy New Year, gentle readers! 2012 was quite a ride for this humble blogger. Philip K Dick Festival, done and accomplished, a roaring success -- a success which still nourishes me during this cold and dark winter. Such memories: I gave Jonathan Lethem a ride in my car. Umberto Rossi and Laurence Rickels rode in that car too! Watching Radio Free Albemuth with 120 Dick-heads! These aren't sentences, mostly because no mere arrangement of words can capture how great it was.

Was there any other Dick news in 2012? Lawsuits, adaptations and rumors of adaptations, down websites, the rise of the Facebook PKD group, Precious Artifacts!, two issues of PKD Otaku!.

Pretty good year. 

Now, what do we have to look forward to in 2013? Well it's the year when Linklater's version of A Scanner Darkly is set. Will a quarter of the population get hooked on Substance D (otherwise known as Fox News)? Perhaps. Will we see a theatrical release or Netflix appearance of Radio Free Albemuth? Stay tuned to find out.

2013 is starting out on a high note for me personally, with not one, but two science fiction stories out today. My story "Escape Velocity" is in issue six of Speculative Edge which is available in both Kindle and print editions.

And I've got another story, "Bedroom Eyes" appearing in issue one of Theurgy Magazine. That one you can read online (here), and if you like it, you should probably order a hard copy (here). The cool thing is my co-editor at Pravic, Nathaniel K Miller also got a story placed in Theurgy, so they've obviously have good taste. Speaking of which, you have issue one of Pravic, right? Well stay tuned, issue number two is imminent.

In terms of Dick stuff, I've got Erik Davis' write up from Dortmund to run in the next couple days. Radio Free Albemuth at the Philip K Dick Film Festival! Reading Nick and the Glimmung with my seven-year-old. Sentence fragments, again! Time to go.

Umberto Rossi Recalls His Festival Experience

Words and pictures by Umberto Rossi:

Let me tell you all that my notions about the geography of the Bay Area were awfully foggy. I didn't even know that SFSU and Berkeley were two quite different places. However, while I was waiting for rescue (a bold team made up by Ted Hand and Dave Gill) I took a picture of this street sign because it sounded distinctly Dickian. Yet I could not recall what role this Shattuck Avenue played in Dick's world. I did need some anamnesis then, but it wasn't coming!

Thanks to Dave and Ted anamnesis came: and there, on the other side of the avenue, I saw--well, not the light, but surely the Shop. The repair shop where Hollis' repairmen were busy fighting against Jory and the forces of evil (or is it entropy?). Now they sell role games there, but hey, aren't games PKD stuff? Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next, Bluff, etc.? Though the Game-Players from Titan weren't there, I knew I was in Philip K. Dick territory.

Records are such a powerful Dickian topic. It seems our pal Phil thought some media were less evil than others, maybe even intrinsically good. Radio, ok. TV, bad. Newspapers, bad. Vinyl, good! Let's not forget that in a happy season of his life he was a music buff and vinyl collector who worked in a records shop: isn't this a form of small-scale utopia? And this is where he discovered Beethoven and Bach, not to mention Dowland. Flow our tears, the Dickhead said.

There are firefighters everywhere, of course, also in Italy, but--US firefighters are something special. No, it's got nothing to do with Phil, it's more a matter of Ray Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451, and book-burning firemen. However, this pumper parked near the building where I slept fascinated me. Now I realize that this very ordinary fire engine has something so deeply American in it, something that makes me think of Ragle Gumm and his nameless small town. Maybe it's part of a layout where Verne Haskell is busy reproducing Woodland, his town.

Ok, but the PKD fest was not just places--and what places!--it was above all people. Names printed on the cover on a book which suddenly turned into real people you could talk to. And here we have the biographer extraordinnaire, Mr Gregg Rickman, and supreme interviewer. I am still waiting for the second volume of his bio, and I can't believe it will remain forever on his PC. Even Brian Wilson managed to release Smile, after all. C'mon, Gregg, we've been waiting for it for so long and all this time has passed us by--it doesn't seem to matter now... (thank you, Peter Gabriel!)

Can one think of a PKD fest without Jonathan Lethem? No, definitely not. But the presence of Rudy Rucker was unexpected. Let's call it a bonus. However, let's get accustomed to the idea that PKD Festivals will grow. There's no way to avoid it. I know someone doesn't like the idea, but hey, it was to be expected. Phil has got so many friends all around the world--can you tell them "stay at home"? I foresee a bigger fest in Southern California, and just try to imagine what will happen in 2018... 90th anniversary! (Well, I'm looking forward to the 2028 event... in Washington? A Million Dickheads March? Why not!)

Let's say these are the ghost of the last fest and the ghost of the next one! Well before the Fort Morgan event there was the now legendary Macerata conference in 2000... (there are also two events in the UK, but I leave comments about those to people who were there) I was one of the organizers in Macerata, and I will be in Dortmund with Stefan Schlensag and many others--let's say the EU branch of the PKD Church. The history of PKDom abroad goes on and on and on...

How could I ignore the Famous Director? John Alan Simon will, I hope, also direct the movie version of Time Out of Joint and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. In the meantime, we're waiting for the release of his ALBEMUTH dvd (or blue-ray). Or for the mystical apparition of his movie in cinema theatres all over the world. If he wins at Cannes (Academy Awards are unlikely) we will be there to clap our hands, on the side of the red carpet.

I wonder just how powerful is Dave Gill. Has anyone noticed that the movie theater nearby was showing Total Recall while we were busy talking about our pal Phil? He surely managed to have that film in this theatre.

 
Where does the borderline between scholarship and fandom lies? I don't know, I don't really give a damn. I only know that Lord Runnig Clam and Monsieur Henri Wintz, the mighty bibliographers, gave us PKD scholars such a powerful tool to investigate Dick's oeuvre... it will be on my desktop (physical, not digital) in the next years, helping me not to get lost among paperbacks, hardbacks, reprints, translations, etc. besides, they are such nice people!

The young scholar who gave us the Exegesis. Pamela Jackson, folks! Surely, like the Fairie Queen, she had a team of valiant knights to tackle the Monster, but it was quite a fight nonetheless, and the Exegesis panel managed to convey an impressive picture of the onslaught. However, PKD scholars everywhere can only be grateful to her for having managed the publication of this juggernaut of a book.

I can only think of Laurence Rickels, accomplished German cinema scholar and international academician, in black and white terms... echoes of Murnau, Lang and Pabst in the background. His presentation on the German integration simply amazed me. The apparition of Wernher Von Braun in a Disney documentary was something directly out of The Man in the High Castle and Gravity's Rainbow. One of the highlights of the festival, no doubt.

They say I'm a PKD scholar--hah! I'm just a part-time critic who struggles with novels greater than him, or a dwarf on the shoulders of giants. (A dwarf, mind you, not the Dwarf, that evil creature which rules the land of Mordor, whose capital is the seven-hilled Babylonian Meretrix...) But these are the real PKD scholars, folks! Erik Davis and Ted Hand, with their theological panel, really enlightened me. Moreover, Ted reascued me on Shattuck Avenue, where I might have remained stranded till PKD come...

Well, this is a detail of a house that isn't easy to photograph, for a complex series of complicated reasons. Let me just tell you that it's in Point Reyes Station, and that it didn't look the way I'd pictured it while reading Dick's stuff and Sutin and Rickman, but hey, does that really matter? Now it's branded on my memory, and I won't forget it. (On the other hand, the Marin County landscape, though much less bleak than Phil depicted it, is something I had somewhat imagined...)

And here is the mastermind of the event, Dr Gill hisself. How can I thank him? I can't, so let'd move to other issues. Such as the excellent food served in this restaurant, and the wealth of anecdotes on PKDom that he provided us with. Will Dave one day write the ultimate PKD biography? I am sure he has the chops to do it, because he is also a swell writer. Time will tell us. Joyce and Wilde had Ellmann, Phil might have Gill. I really hope so.

Umberto on Androids

Just finished reading Umberto's chapter on We Can Build You and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It's a great chapter with lots of insight, and Rossi gets a lot of mileage by comparing the two novels. I also know it's one of Umberto's favorite chapters. Anyway, it got me thinking.

Rossi writes:

"[In Do Androids] Dick had to contrast [wife] Nancy (the authentic human being) with people like his parents, his distant father and his cold mother (metaphorically androids, reflex machines). This often leads to those analyses which, like Robinson's short but effective discussion, show that in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? beside the Humane Humans (such as John R. Isidore) there are Cruel Androids (Roy Baty, his wife Irmagard, Pris Stratton), but also Cruel Humans" (162)

I'm not sure I agree that Roy and Irmagard are "cruel" or, more precisely, I think they are more than just cruel. For example when Irmagard is killed, Roy lets out a "cry of anguish." To these catagories laid out above, I would like to add that of the Empathetic Android. Now, this is not to say Humane Android, or anything like that, but in it's clear that for Dick androids are a grey area. For my money, the most striking bit of empathy in all of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is Rachel's decision to kill Deckard's goat, because she knows that will wound him the most, and she derives this knowledge from putting herself in Deckard's shoes. Rickels points that the Nazis put sirens on their bombers in order to scare the bejeezus out of their victims, again they gained this information by imagining themselves in that position, therefore empathy is not necessarily an altruistic trait, but can be used for good or ill.

Give me a moment to set up my second thought. Did you know the only coordinating conjunction used in the biblical book of Genesis is "and"? Can you imagine the bible saying something like, "And God said, let there be light, BUT...."? The entire book is put together in paratactic metonymies, long clauses joined by 'and,' because everything that happens is simply an addition to God's creation. Likewise, "and" is a grammatical unit that means in only one direction in a sentence. For example in the sentence - "I like coffee and my wife likes tea" - the word 'and' does nothing to change the meaning of the words preceeding it; it merely adds to them. Words like "however" and "although" cause the reader to reassess the words that precede them. They change the meaning of the sentence by altering the relationships between the words.

Consciousness which has been programmed can only react to reality, it cannot change the way it perceives reality, and because of this every action is taken as a kind of addition. If each action undertaken is reflective in the sense that it was triggered by a specific event in reality then it is really a reaction, a reflex. The doctor hits you with that mallet in the knee and your legs kick. These kinds of unthinking reactions can never allow the programmed consciousness a chance to decide how to react. They can only act in reaction. Their decisions and choices are additional to their situations, not transformational. Hence, their names, "andys."

PKD's Postmodern Thoughts About Genre

My progress through Umberto's book has slowed a bit as I prepare to take the family to Kauai on vacation later this week. Nevertheless, like any good book, it's got me thinking. Additionally, we've created a new closed group of Dick-heads on Facebook and I've been spending a lot of time there. This time-suck is primarily to account for the recent dearth of posts.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I will take something I have been thinking about from Umberto's book and relate it to a discussion from said Facebook group. Can you believe nobody is paying me for this?

It all started when, like the Trotskities and Lenninites at Berkeley, the Pomos and Anti-Pomos got into it. By this I mean that the folks who think Dick was basically a postmodern writer (pomos) disagreed with those who perceive postmodernism as a kind of academic chicanery, smoke and mirrors, pretentious bullshit (Anti-Pomos). As I have previously noted, postmodernism is a nebulous streak in an impossible sky, a loose collection of (sometimes contradictory) ideas that can hardly be seen to form a cohesive ideology, or worse, can be seen as giving rise to any number of ideologies, each more ridiculous than the last. Google can only offer that postmodernism is "A late 20th-century style in the arts, architecture, and criticism that represents a departure from modernism." Hardly edifying, is it?

So it's sort of an endless series of straw men: "Postmodernists believe in nothing!" "radical cultural relativism, non-judgmentalism, and a postmodern conviction that there are no moral norms or truths worth defending." "Dogs and cats living together..."

So, in an attempt to move the conversation forward, our good pal Cal came up with a few criteria for Postmodernism:

1. Historically, he occurs long after the decline of Modernism as a significant influence in literature. That movement did however inform PKD's education and early work. His publication timeline clearly places him in the postmodern period.

2. Postmodernism tends to blend elements of various genres kept separate by modernism. The eradication of critical divisions such as "high" and "low" art are a central feature of postmodernism. In his tightrope walk between 'serious" and "pulp" literature, PKD exemplifies a common tension of postmodernism.

3. The question of objective truth is a central concern of postmodernist thinking; the question of objective reality is a central concern in much of PKD's work.

4. The nature of power and authority are of central concern to postmodern political thinking. The relationship of the individual to the authoritarian power structures of society is the central focus of more than one PKD novel.

These are four very good reasons why PKD should be considered a postmodern writer *(keeping in mind that any adjective we throw in front of writer is by nature reductive and can only go so far in explaining anything).

Umberto's book breaks new ground in the way that it examines criteria number two, about the mixed genres. Part of Dick's genre mash stems from his frustrated ambitions as a mainstream writer, his pursuit of two parallel careers: a desire to make high-art, literature of significant merit, and to make a living as a science fiction writer. Notice the ideological holdovers from Modernism - especially the notions of high and low art - that Dick transcends, partly because his twin ambitions contaminated one another, and partly because those distinctions didn't matter as much any more. Just look at how he blurred the line between science fiction and fantasy with an early work like The Cosmic Puppets! Umberto's got a great quote where PKD espouses an incredibly postmodern view of the very idea of Genre, suggesting the divisions are not external, depending on the content of the narratives, but that instead the distinction is internal and subjective to each individual depending on their world view:

"... to separate science fiction from fantasy... is impossible to do... Take Psionics; take mutants as we find in Ted Sturgeon's wonderful MORE THAN HUMAN. If the reader believes that such mutants could exist, then he will view Sturgeon's novel as science fiction. If, however, he believes that such mutants are, like wizards and dragons, not possible, nor will ever be possible, then he is reading a fantasy novel."

Here Dick is questioning how genre operates, and his conclusion is not that the distinction between fantasy and SF is made based on authority, or even on the contents of the story. Dick recognizes that two readers reading the same book with different belief sets will be reading, essentially, two different books. The text provides no real stable linchpin which makes identical the experience of the text for different people. That's postmodern in that it lays bare the lack of objective truth, the impossibility of knowing what is objectively real.

Now I know I won't convince the Anti-Pomos here. I could simply be choosing to define postmodernism as a kind of genre-mash then merely supporting that one simple idea, rather than the ideology. But I am convinced that examining PKD through the lenses offered up in Cal's summary of postmodernism can pay off big time.



If you're interested in joining the Facebook group, you'll have to find me in that world.

Quote of the Day

I'm really digging Umberto's book and this sentence I read today jumped out at me. I thought it might spark a discussion:

"I cannot see why the proliferating imagination of a novelist like Thomas Pynchon is praised by interpreters as an impressive example of postmodernist complexity, while it should be a fault in Dick's novels."

My initial thought is that this disparity in reaction has something to do with genre-related expectations, but I hope others will have more to say in the comments section.

The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick: A Reading of Twenty Ontologically Uncertain Novels
by Umberto Rossi

On Criticism: Umberto's Book

I'm really enjoying Umberto Rossi's new book of PKD criticism. Having finished the introduction, I'm now almost through the opening chapter on The Cosmic Puppets and The Game Players of Titan. The book is well written, readable, insightful, and compelling - four adjectives seldom used to describe academic writing.

It was great to read a serious investigation of The Cosmic Puppets as this early novel of Dick's often gets short shrift. Umberto runs through the Jungian, Marxist, and religious readings of the book, developing an absolutely brilliant connection to It's A Wonderful Life and displaying for us the literary pyrotechnics Dick shoehorned into one of his earliest novels.

My reading of Umberto's plan in the book was overly simple. Rather than positing that ontological uncertainty is a product solely of Dick's tendency to dance back and forth between object and subjective value systems, Rossi catalogs the various sources of ontological uncertainty: schizophrenia, amnesia, implanted memories et al.

I'm noticing that these academic books often sell literary criticism as and end in and of itself. This is, of course, an illusion as the article or book of criticism usually results in remuneration of the critic or a similar rise in stature. So there is a hidden end toward which the critic is working. But seriously, these books on criticism skip over entirely the point of criticism, which, when you think about it, is kind of amazing. In this regard, Alain DeBotton's How Proust Can Change Your Life stands heads and shoulders above other books which purport to explore an author's oeuvre.

Do you want to know why I think PKD's work is important? Because I think his writing has the power to help us be better people undertaking difficult task of living in the 21st century. The payoff for reading Dick's books isn't some dorm-room 'aha-moment' of grokking exactly how bizarre the world is when you're stoned. Although that's what initially drew me to his work. The payoff is the realization that reality is subjective and plastic, and that changing your reality is as easy as changing your mindset. This is how most of Dick's characters ultimately make their peace with the world. Once you can learn to see a problem as a blessing, or at least a challenge, you've got it made in the shade. Well, at least it's made my life easier.

The fact that you can see the cosmic forces battling outside Millgate in The Cosmic Puppets as Freud's Eros and Thanatos or Zoroastrianism's dueling Ahriman and Ormazd is far less important than the subtler way the protagonist Ted Barton revitalizes his own life by returning Millgate to the interconnected community he remembers, from than the Pottersville-like malevolence of the town's more sinister incarnation.

I'm not slamming Umberto's book, just coming to realize what I see as missing from criticism in general.

The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick: A Reading of Twenty Ontologically Uncertain Novels
by Umberto Rossi

How Proust Can Change Your Life
by Alain de Botton

Otaku #22 and Umberto's Book

Once again, I'm left with insufficient time to do more than blast you with some links and quick thoughts, as I finish up summer school. Luckily you can enjoy reading through the latest issue of PKD Otaku #22 out this week which includes much to be savored (download .pdf file here). I've only skimmed it a bit but was impressed by Frank C Bertrand's column on "The Magic Flute" allusion in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which I found quite interesting as I've thought about the relevance, but don't really know enough about the opera to make any connections. Frank does some heavy lifting for us yet again.

There's also a great interview with Tessa Dick, and others with Scott Apel and Jami Morgan (whose book I very much hope to have time to read someday)... Near the end John Fairchild says this of Christopher Palmer's "Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern":

"I started to read Chapter 1, “Philip K. Dick and the Postmodern” and just couldn’t finish it. He makes statements like “Today we live in the epoch of the postmodern, and are subject to the condition of postmodernity.” Really? I don’t think we’d get much agreement on that one. At least in the circles in which I travel."

I know and like John very much. I also think we are living in the 'epoch of the postmodern.' Postmodernism is to blame for this communication breakdown insofar as it has never really developed an efficient way to define itself. Let's use, as a starting point, a sentence provided by the Keeblers over at wikipedia:

"Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical direction which is critical of the foundational assumptions and structures of philosophy."

Much of Dick's work is a critique of rationalist philosophy grounded in the trite neatness of Descarte's Cogito Ergo Sum. For Dick, Descartes is like Deckard, futilely searching out differences without distinction, an operation that, because of the complexity of the problem and the subjective bias of the observer, is irresolvable. We are at the epoch of postmodernism because much of our reality has become a subjective bubble - that is to say a Fox News viewer is, to some extent, existing in another parallel reality to a listener of NPR. Advertisers warp reality to try to get you to buy stuff, and now they want to do it without you noticing. Because of this we can't really know if they've already gotten to us, so we are at the epoch of postmodernism, it's just up to us postmodernists to explain why better.

Which brings us to this pretty good read on Dick's Posthumanism (but, I hope the author, Alex Lyras, knows that had he called Dick a posthumanist to his face, PKD would have given him a fat lip). I actually think Dick's focus was on the importance of retaining our human-ness in a world of artificiality. Regardless, it's a good read. Lyras writes:

"In the world of Blade Runner, replicants and humans suffer from the same existential crisis. Both seek answers to same elemental questions. Where do I come from? Where am I going? How much time do I have left? Mid-century language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would answer that our ability to formulate questions like these doesn't necessarily mean intelligible answers exist. Language isn't a tool for unearthing deeper meaning. It's a tool for connecting on the surface. That we endeavor to ask the big questions is far more useful than endlessly confabulating over some metaphysical conundrum. If we're able to find meaning or get relief from an insightful exchange with another being, does it matter if their insides are circuitry?"

Which reminds me, I heard this radio show on NPR which analyzed classical music in great detail. I think it was hosted by Susanne Vega. Now I can't find anything about it. I hope readers can help me identify this show, because there was a half hour on a piece by Beethoven that made it sound like Ludwig was innovating in much the same way as Dick: using unexpected dynamic and key changes, playing in odd registers. So this may be an additional foothold to be further explored, if we can figure out what the show is called and where it's archived on the net.

I got Umberto's book. 10 pages in I can say it's both insightful and readable - two circles who have yet to touch on the "Academic Books About PKD" Venn diagram. I look forward to reading more and reporting back to you, but I can already tell you that the book's premise seems to center on the ontological uncertainty in Dick's work which is a product of Dick's slipping back and forth between subjective and objective value systems. In fact, Umberto, in his intro, quotes this, our recent quote of the day. Citing this key interplay between empirical systems and individual experience as the basis for the ontological instability in Dick's fiction (I'm sure Umberto will correct me if I'm reading it wrong).

The book is a bit pricey. You may want to urge your local library to get it, or you can get a kindle version, but I think you're gonna wanna read it.

The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick: A Reading of Twenty Ontologically Uncertain Novels
by Umberto Rossi

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...

Weekly News Roundup

Here I am with a bit of a Sunday respite and plenty of recent Dick news to recount.

There was a minor media blitz by Isa Dick-Hackett last week, talking about PKD adaptations at both io9.com and then later in an article in The Wall Street Journal. The interviews were both done to promote Adjustment Bureau which went to DVD recently. Gondry is still set to direct Ubik which is being scripted as we speak. I have high hopes for this one.

Radio Free Albemuth was screened at the Science Fiction Hall of Fame on Friday. In a surprise bit of promotion there was a pretty good article on msnbc.com's Cosmiclog about the movie. I liked this line: "The movie seems certain to win over the sci-fi master's hard-core fans, who call themselves 'Dick-heads.'" I like this because I was careful, when I started this blog, to hyphenate Dick-head to see if I could affect the way the term is written. Before the blog (and with Deadhead) Dickhead was not, traditionally, hyphenated. In other words, kneel before the semantic power of Zod! My ripple is a mighty hyphen!

The future of Philipkdickfans.com is in doubt as the site has become a prime target of spam bots and requires extensive upkeep and monitoring. If you're interested in changing the name of the site and transferring it to another server let me know in the comments section. It's a good site, with, I think, more traffic than I get, and just needs a dedicated webmaster.

I skyped in a short talk to the fourth annual PKD Day at Nottingham Trent University. It was a very Dickian experience for me as it was 7:30 in the morning and I found myself connected to a small classroom full of Dick-heads. I had no idea how well they could see or hear me; indeed, I had very little connection to the room, and yet I had to speak off the cuff about PKD for about a half an hour. I felt like I was communicating from space. I should have recorded it.

Umberto Rossi's new book of PKD criticism is now available on Amazon:

Buy it from here so I can get a cut. I'm gonna need it to buy my own copy.

Japanese Multi-Foci Influence

I am proud to announce we have our first guest post here on TDH. Italian Dick-scholar, Umberto Rossi, who's written extensively on PKD provides for us a snippet from the book he is currently working on, tentatively titled Ontological Uncertainty in the Fiction of Philip K Dick, to be published by McFarland. Below, Rossi does the heavy lifting involved in determining which mulit-foci novel Dick repeatedly suggested in interviews inspired The Man in the High Castle.

"Though Dick insisted on his having drawn inspiration from Japanese novelists, he never specified who those novelists were. There are indeed important Japanese writers who earned a degree in French literature at the University of Tokyo (Kenzaburo Oe, Osamu Dazai, Hideo Kobayashi), while others studied French literature at the University of Kyoto (Hiroshi Noma and Shohei Ooka), but the works of these authors which were available in English translations before the publication of The Man in the High Castle do not have a multiple plot structure, though one of them, Horoshi Noma's war novel Zone of Emptiness (1952, translated into English in 1956) does have multiple points of view. It is however difficult to see it as a narrative model to Dick's 1962 novel because there is only one plot, pivoted on the tragic story of a Japanese soldier who is imprisoned for two years in a military penitentiary for a crime he has not committed and then sent to fight (and probably die) in a faraway Pacific island; and this novel has only two narrative foci, unlike Castle. Moreover, while Dick's novel presents the reader with a rather positive image of the Japanese domination in California, which is depicted as stern but substantially fair, Noma's novel denounces the corruption of the Imperial Japanese Army and the hypocrite and narrow-minded militarism which dominated the country in W.W.II years; though it is true that private Soda's desperate efforts to save the doomed protagonist, Kitani, from the deadly bureaucratic machine of the army may bear resemblance to the rebellion of the little man Nobosuke Tagomi, which instead manages to save Frank Frink from the deadly machine of Nazi racial warfare. But it is not enough to prove that Dick had read Zone of Emptiness; besides, a component of the plot is not equivalent to the overall architecture of a novel."

Here's Umberto's Bio and the list of articles on PKD he's written:

I am an independent scholar and secondary school teacher, I have written an am writing articles on Dick published in Italian and foreign academic journals, organized an International conference on Dick in 2000 with Italian and American scholars, wrote a book on 20th-Century war literature which also deals with Dick, and am currently writing a monograph on Dick for an US publisher.

As for my articles:

1. "Dick e la questione della tecnica (o Della tecnologia)", in Rosella Mamoli Zorzi e Francesca Bisutti de Riz (eds.), Technology and the American Imagination: An Ongoing Challenge, Atti del XII Convegno biennale AISNA, Venezia, Supernova, 1994, pp. 473-83.

2. "Just a Bunch of Words: The Image of the Secluded Family and the Problem of logos in P.K. Dick's Time out of Joint", Extrapolation, Vol. 37 No. 3, Fall 1996, pp. 195-211.

3. "Quattordici piccoli indiani", in Philip K. Dick, Nostri amici da Frolix 8, Roma, Fanucci, 1999, pp. 246-52.

4. "All Around the High Castle: Narrative Voices and Fictional Visions in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle", in Clericuzio, A., Goldoni, A. e Mariani A., Telling the Stories of America - History, Literature and the Arts - Proceedings of the 14th AISNA Biennial conference (Pescara, 1997), Roma, Nuova Arnica, 2000, pp. 474-83.

5. “Postfazione”, in Philip K. Dick, Svegliatevi dormienti [The Crack in Space], Roma, Fanucci, 2002, pp. 239-47.

6. "From Dick to Lethem: The Dickian Legacy, Postmodernism, and Avant-Pop in Jonathan Lethem's Amnesia Moon", Science-Fiction Studies # 86, 29:1, March 2002, pp. 15-33.

7. “Fourfold Symmetry: l'interazione dei livelli di realtà in tre romanzi più o meno prestigiosi di Philip K. Dick,” Acoma #23, spring 2002, pp. 100-13.

8. “Fourfold Symmetry: The Interplay of Fictional Levels in Five More or Less Prestigious Novels by Philip K. Dick”, Extrapolation, 43:4, Winter 2002, pp. 398-419.

9. "‘The Harmless Yank Hobby’. Mappe, giochi, missili e altre paranoie in Tempo fuori luogo di Philip Kindred Dick e L’arcobaleno della gravità di Thomas Ruggles Pynchon", in Carratello, Mattia e Ginacarlo Alfano (a c. di) La dissoluzione onesta. Scritti su Thomas Pynchon, Napoli, Cronopio, 2003, pp. 91-106.

10. “The Harmless Yank Hobby: Maps, Games, Missiles and Sundry Paranoias in Time Out of Joint and Gravity’s Rainbow”, Pynchon Notes #52-53, Spring-Fall 2003, pp. 106-123

11. “The Game of the Rat: A.E. Van Vogt’s 800-Words Rule and P.K. Dick’s The Game-Players of Titan”, Science-Fiction Studies #93, 31:2, July 2004, pp. 207-26.

12. “The Great National Disaster: The Destruction of Imperial America in P.K. Dick’s The Simulacra”, RSA: Rivista di Studi Nord Americani #13/2002, pp. 22-39.

13. “Il gioco del ratto: Avvisaglie avantpop in I giocatori di Titano”, Trasmigrazioni: I mondi di Philip K. Dick, eds. Valerio Massimo de Angelis e Umberto Rossi, Firenze, Le Monnier, 2006. pp. 142-55.

14. “California/Marte”, in Antonio Caronia e Domenico Gallo, La macchina della paranoia: Enciclopedia Dickiana, Milano, Agenzia X, 2006, pp. 105-10.

15. “Genealogie”, in Antonio Caronia e Domenico Gallo, La macchina della paranoia: Enciclopedia Dickiana, Milano, Agenzia X, 2006, pp. 147-52.

16. “Ambiguous Spokespersons: The DJ and the Talk-Radio Host in U.S. Fiction, Cinema and Drama.” Ambassadors: American Studies in A Changing World, Ed. M. Bacigalupo, G. Dowling. Rapallo: Busco, 2006, pp. 318-27.

17. “Acousmatic Presences: From DJs to Talk-Radio Hosts in American Fiction, Cinema, and Drama”, Mosaic, 42:1, March 2009, pp. 83-98.

Thanks, Umberto, and keep up the great work!

VALBS Transmission

I've been thinking a lot about how this blog can best contribute to the serious study of PKD, which is very much the wild west of academia. I think we (ok, I) need to dig into more of the scholarly analysis of Dick's work, and try to find the articles and essays that can deepen our readings. There's a lot of academic kipple out there, and it just keeps on multiplying, driving out the none-kipple, making it harder to find the good stuff. Looking back, I have giant gaps in my masters thesis about Dick, simply because I didn't know about several important essays. Whether this is a testament to the obscurity of the secondary materials or my researching skills, I'm seeing a lot of these gaps in the new studies of PKD hitting the market.

What follows is an email interview I conducted with Italian PKD scholar Umberto Rossi who has assembled the most complete electronic bibliography of PKD-related material, VALBS, Vast Active Living Bibliographic System:

Q: When did you start VALBS?

A: Uhm... well... good question. Let me tell you that I started from two
existing bibliographies, one prepared by Andrew M. Butler, the other
by Salvatore Proietti... both notorious dickheads. I merged them and
put them on the web. I guess it was 1999 or 2000, something like
that.

Q: What's there?

A: Everything they and I could find which deals with Philip K. Dick. It's
a secondary bibliography. You have monograph, collections, articles,
reviews, etc. And webpages, provided they belong to something like
an online journal/magazine.

Q: How do you locate new articles and essays for the bibliography?

A: Three sources, fundamentally: the MLA online bibliography for
articles, Amazon.com for books, and the emails of those who visit my
webpage and ask me "Hey, why isn't my book/article/essay in
VALBS?"

Q: What are some of your favorite academic papers on Dick?

A: Disch's on Solar Lottery; Andy Butler on Lies, Inc.; Frasca on
Transmigration; Jameson's essay on History and Salvation; but
surely I'm forgetting some other short essay.

Q: Who are some of your favorite Dick scholars, or scholars of science
fiction?

A: Those I have already mentioned. I might add Kim Stanley Robinson.
I'd also like to add two more Italians, Antonio Caronia and Domenico
Gallo, whose La macchina della paranoia (The Paranoia Machine) is
an excellent introduction--unfortunately published by a very small
press, and written in a language that not even Italian understand
properly any more...

Q: Who should use VALBS?

A: Students. I have read several PhD dissertations recently, and I am
amazed by the important books and articles they regularly omit in
their bibliographies. I suspect that those young scholars have been
tutored by university professors who weren't knowledgeable with
Dick, and couldn't support them the way they deserved to be...

Personally I do not believe in bibliographies on paper anymore. I'm
not one of those digital fundamentalists who believe that the web and
Kindle or some other toy will replace books. But I do believe that the
days of reference books are limited. Look at the success of the
Wikipedia. I have worked as a translator, and I can tell you that no
pro translator who hasn't been struck by Alzheimer uses printed
dictionaries today. They all use dictionaries on CD-ROMs. So what's
the use of a paper bibliography today? None. Unless it's the
bibliography of a monograph, that is, part of a larger book. But if
your purpose is collecting all the secondary texts on Dick, go digital.
Put it on the web!

Q: What role do you imagine VALBS playing in the Dickhead community?

A: Reference. It should be THE secondary bibliography. A way to know
what's available, what's been written, even in languages different
from English. A way to know who's studying Dick now and who's
studied him. I dare say it might turn in a sort of collective memory of
PKD scholarship, be it academic or independent.

Thanks Umberto!

My first project is going to be to read Frederic Jameson's book Archaeologies of the Future, which is very dense and, as they say in the Hawaiian Islands, 'hybolical,' meaning overly verbose in its prose, but Jameson is a respected critic outside of science fiction and his interest in Dick is incredibly important in terms of serious study. Plus, it's clear from the following quote that he's onto something:

"Dick's work transcends the opposition between the subjective and the objective, and thereby confronts the dilemma which in one way or another characterizes all modern literature of any consequence: the intolerable and yet unavoidable choice between a literature of the self and a language of some impersonal exteriority, between the subjectivism of private languages and case histories, or some nostalgia for the objective that leads outside the realm of individual or existential experience into some reassuringly stable place of common sense and statistics. Dick's force lies in the effort to retain possession and use of both apparently contradictory, mutually exclusive subjective and objective explanation systems all at once" (350).

That quote would have taken my master's thesis to the next level, but I didn't know Jameson had written on PKD, neither did my advisers.

Part of the problem with studying this stuff is that it can be really hard to find. I have a bunch of PKD-related files that I'd like to post somewhere so that I could link to them in various discussions. If a Dick-head knowledgeable about these things could chime in about potential file sharing sites I could use to make .pdfs and mp3s available that would be much appreciated.