Sunday, March 17, 2024

A Picture of Art Music in Berkeley, At Long Last


I've been looking for a picture of Art Music where Phil worked in Berkeley for more than a decade, and at last I've found it. The photo comes from an East Bay Times walking tour guide, and clearly shows the record store where Phil worked in the early 1950s. The caption reads, "California National Guard troops occupy the intersection of Telegraph Avenue and Channing Way in Berkeley, Calif. during the People's Park riots in 1969. (William Crouch / Oakland Tribune Archives)"

Sure it's fifteen years after Phil worked there, but at least now we know where it was. Many, including myself, have mistakenly believed the Rasputin Records across the intersection to be the location, but now we know. What a feeling! As you can see, Berkeley has always been a hotbed of political activism and overreactive police responses. 

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Is a Great Novel Says The Atlantic


From the world-is-catching-up-to-us-Dick-heads file, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is an Atlantic pick for one of the 136 best novels of the last hundred years. But tell us something we don't know. The interesting tide that may be turning here is the explicit recognition of the formal quality of the prose. The criteria for their canon involves, "novels that say something intriguing about the world and do it distinctively, in intentional, artful prose—no matter how many or few that ended up being (136, as it turns out)" (Triple emphasis mine) Here's Lenika Cruz's write up, which is pretty good: 

"Before there was Blade Runner, there was Dick’s prescient science-fiction noir, which opens not with the movie adaptation’s columns of fire spewing into a degraded sky, but with a tedious domestic dispute. Both scenes communicate dystopia in their own ways, but Dick’s is sneakier: Bounty Hunter Rick Deckard and his wife argue over the settings on the machine that controls their mood, immediately raising the question of just how real they are in comparison to the rogue androids that Deckard is paid to capture and “retire,” or, essentially, kill. This is a bleak, wry, and mind-bending novel—a consideration of the all-too-porous lines that separate human from animal from machine."

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Get to Know the Fest Guest: Part 3 -- D.H. Wilson


Here's another in my semi-regular profiles of the scheduled guests for this year's Dick-Fest in Ft. Morgan, Colorado, June 13-16. In this post we'll meet, doctoral Dick-Head D.H. Wilson (the picture is Brett Weldele's rendering of DH as Gully Foyle from Bester’s The Stars My Destination -- not directly Dick-related, but we'll accept it). 

TDH: What are you gonna talk about at the fest?

Hello! I’ll provide an overview of the book I’m currently working on, The Biographies of Philip K. Dick: Infinite Regressions, for Routledge’s Auto/Biography Studies series. Here’s a brief description that I included in my proposal to the publisher: Philip K. Dick was one of the twentieth century’s most prolific, forward-thinking authors and a luminary of intelligent, idea-driven science fiction. His singular oeuvre, esoteric mythos, and chronically autobiographical novels and stories have generated a surplus of biographies in an effort to uncover his “real” identity. Most attempts to biographically render PKD in the light of would-be “truth,” however, are undergirded by a speculative conundrum that his characters and their author cannot escape themselves. Infinite Regressions will unpack this overarching thesis while functioning as an engaged overview of the biographical literature on PKD. PKD scholarship is vast, but my monograph will be the first comprehensive study to account for and interpret this material as a collective literary venture. I appropriated my subtitle from PKD’s Exegesis, an 8,000-page journal inspired by a hallucinatory breakdown that he experienced in the 1970s. Written between 1974 and his death in 1982, the Exegesis is an epic attempt to understand an ostensible trickster god, and yet every gesture towards definitive knowledge results in “an infinite regression of theses and countertheses.” Biographers fall through a similar trap door when they try to “understand” PKD, but that isn’t to say that their biographies aren’t productive or meaningful. As literary artefacts, they are largely meritorious. Ultimately, then, PKD’s biographies call attention to the inherent instability and variability of biographical writing, which has always evaded a grand definition.

TDH: What’s your connection to Dickdom?

Most recently, the Dickheads Podcast. In 2023, I became a co-host with David Agranoff and Langhorne J. Tweed, who started the podcast with Anthony Trevino in 2017. Such great fellas. I’ve been reading, studying, and writing about PKD for years, though, beginning in graduate school in the 1990s at the University of Massachusetts, where I was working on my M.A. degree in English. In an independent study with SF scholar Robert Crossley, I read The Man in the High Castle and “Faith of Our Fathers.” Thereafter I devoured his entire canon, as we PKD fanatics tend to do, and I remember trying (and failing) to emulate him again and again when I first started writing my own fiction.

TDH: Tell us about your new publishing endeavor.

Research and note-taking for Infinite Regressions is occupying most of my time right now, although I have a monograph on Stanley Kubrick’s futurist cinema coming out in November from Stalking Horse Press called Strangelove Country: Science Fiction, Filmosophy, and the Kubrickian Consciousness. Very excited about that one. As editor-in-chief of Anti-Oedipus Press, I should also mention that I’ll be spearheading a new PKD book series. Here’s the formal description on AOP’s website: EXEGETICS: PKD STUDIES is devoted to original, high-quality scholarship on and about Philip K. Dick, one of the science fiction genre’s most renowned innovators and a singular voice in twentieth-century literature. Books in the series include critical and/or creative explorations of Phildickian fiction, nonfiction, biography, cinema, and multimedia. Scholarly yet defiant of academic stodge, EXEGETICS aspires for the definitively New in the world(s) of PKD.

More details soon!

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Erik Davis on the Pink Beam


Well yesterday may very well have been the fiftieth anniversary of PKD getting zapped by the delivery girl's Jesus fish necklace, or whatever. The funny thing is that the deeper you dig into the timeline, the more out of joint it becomes. Maybe it wasn't February at all. On February 1, 1974, PKD writes to Jamis, "All I can recall about the entire month of January is that I had two molars and a wisdom tooth which had grown down and become embedded in my jawbone removed...." (74 SL pg 3.)

I got to spend part of the afternoon with High Weirdness author Erik Davis, as we riffed on Dick's visions for about thirty minutes in my class, before Davis had to teach the last class of his Stigmata course

The main idea I got out of all of this is that 2/3/74 is a kind of sacred uncertainty (if you rearrange the letters of the word "sacred" you get the word "scared"). For me the most important lesson of this radical uncertainty is that part of me wants to be certain, and that I have to work to keep from being certain. As much as I would like to believe that PKD concocted these experiences to fulfill some unmet need for significance, I have to save space for the possibility that something divine and revelatory happened. And I would ask that you check your own need for certainty as you explore your own ideas about what happened to Phil Dick. 

Davis put an old essay about the whole beam deal on his website yesterday. Davis writes: 

"Unlike most religious seers, Dick did not approach his visions with anything like certitude. Dick distrusted reification of any sort (his novels constantly wage war against the process that turns people and ideas into things), and so he refused to solidify his experiences into a belief system. Like William Blake, another impoverished autodidact whose bubbling imagination was steeped in the Western visionary tradition, Dick approached his theophany (or “in-breaking of God”) as artistic material, reworking it in his writings with an artist’s commitment to irony, craft, and a political bite. Even in his private journals, he constantly liquefies his revelations, writing with a modern thinker’s sense of the tentativeness of speculative thought. “Indeterminacy is the central characteristic of 2-3-74,” writes Sutin in his Dick biography Divine Invasions. Sutin points out that mystics traditionally interpret their experiences within the faiths they are raised in. “Phil adhered to no single faith. The one tradition indubitably his was SFwhich exalts ‘What IF?’ above all. In 2-3-74, all the ‘What IFs?’ were rolled up into one.”

Friday, February 16, 2024

So, When the Heck is 2-3-74?


PKD biographer, Lawrence Sutin, dates Phil's "pink beam" experience following a dental procedure when a dark-haired girl delivered some pain medication to Phil's door to February 20th, 1974. 

Sutin writes, "What precisely happened on that February 20 after Phil gazed upon the golden fish?" (210)

Sutin's source notes at the end of the book, usually quite thorough, offer nothing to substantiate that date. He points to a letter Dick wrote to Ursula LeGuin in 1973 that confirms the delivery took place in February. Phil writes, "... in February I had major oral surgery, and was home recovering, still under the influence of the sodium pentathol, and in severe pain." (SL 1974, 247)

So I asked biographer Gregg Rickman, who responds, "Phil refers to the Valis event as "2-3-74" many times in the Exegesis, as shorthand for the months of February and March." 

So, I asked PKD's friend Tim Powers who responded, "And I don't know if he talked about it to anyone right after it happened. I lost track of him for about a year right after he married Tess -- in fact I wonder if he was talking to anybody but Tess at that period!" 

PKD's friend Bill Sarill and ex-wife Tessa reconstructed the day as a Thursday, making it either the 14th or the 21st of February. 

As Erik Davis says, "There's too much noise on the line" to determine exactly what happened and when. Dick fans looking for certainty in life have obviously not been paying attention to Dick's work, which foregrounds this radical uncertainty the characters must work through. 

At the end of last semester a student asked if I had a time machine, where and when would I go. My answer without hesitation was "Orange County, February 1974." I've been thinking the last couple of days about what I would've seen if I'd been lurking outside PKD's apartment that fateful day. 

Would I have seen the pink beam? Doesn't seem like the delivery girl saw it, so why should I? Honestly, I'm not even convinced anything really happened. I could see PKD flashing on how intense it would be if it had happened and maybe moving straight to creating elaborate fictive narratives around it. But the flurry of activity prompted by the event (a million words of notes on the subject) suggests the truth of the experience for Dick, even if the ferocity and manic quality of the belief argues for skepticism. 

This is a long way of saying, take some time next Tuesday and think about the difference between what you know, that is your empirical experience, and what you are given to know through revelation, known as transcendental experience. Now deconstruct the false binary. Even in empirical experience our perceptions still leap this magical and mysterious chasm between external reality and our internal subjectivity, and in doing so, sure act a lot like revelation. And revelation has to be processed by the mind and made sense of, which involves all the standard tools of experiential thinking. 

In other words, this anniversary is a chance to inject a little of the mystery that animated the end of Dick's life into your own. 

Illustration from R. Crumb's "The Religious Experiences of Philip K. Dick."


Thursday, February 15, 2024

Stage Production of "Minority Report" in Nottingham


A Nottingham Playhouse, Birmingham Rep and Lyric Hammersmith Theatre Co-Production In Association with Simon Friend Entertainment and by arrangement with Electric Shepherd Productions are staging a production of PKD's short story, "Minority Report." Check out the website here

Looks like they've tweaked the story a bit:

"In 2050, neuroscientist Dame Julia Anderton is about to launch the next phase of her pioneering Pre-Crime programme, detaining people for crimes before they are committed. But when Julia is accused of pre-murder, she’s in a race against time to save herself from her own system."

Sounds promising.. 

"Minority Report sees award-winning director Max Webster re-united with the producers of the globally successful stage version of Life of Pi (‘It will make you believe in theatre. A triumph’ The Sunday Times). This incredible theatrical experience creates a world at the borders of science fiction and reality."

Webster also staged a production of "Back to the Future" last year. 


There's a Financial Times write up, but it's behind a paywall. So I grabbed that shot above and here are some quotes:

“What’s brilliant about the Philip K Dick story is it’s got a psychological conundrum in the centre of it,” says Webster. “But it’s not a philosophical exercise or lecture; it’s a crime thriller. It’s a person who’s caught by their own system and then is on the run.”

This next one is a great quote: 

“The wildness and extremeness that sci-fi allows you to think about possible futures might actually be a good match for the kind of extremity of the times in which we find ourselves.”

The final quote comes from writer David Haig: 

"Haig’s Minority Report touches on this 'deprivation of free will, free choice, free thought', he says. 'The fear of a dystopian society controlling our minds is a very powerful one. I think there’s always room for material that projects into the future to comment on the present.”

I think the reason mind-controlling dystopian futures are so common in science fiction is that they express an anxiety that we are currently under the control of a beyond saturated media society that not only feeds us an endless series of things to purchase, but also the necessary mindset of passive consumption (which of course has to simultaneously perceive itself as vital and necessary). 

The play runs February 16 to March 9 at Nottingham Playhouse, nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk, then touring to the Birmingham Repertory Theatre (March 22-April 6) and the Lyric Hammersmith (April 19-May 18), London. 

Tip o' the hat to star Dick-student Al Berg! 

Saturday, February 10, 2024

The Pseudo Science of The American Weekly

 


Dick writes in his 1968 "Self-Portrait, "And then there was the lurid section of the Hearst newspapers which on Sunday told of mummies still alive in caves, and lost Atlantis, and the Sargasso Sea. The American Weekly, this quasi-magazine was called. Today we would dismiss it as “pseudo-science,” but in those days, the mid-thirties, it was quite convincing. I dreamed of finding the Sargasso Sea and all of the ships tangled up there, their corpses dangling over the rails and their coffers filled with pirate gold. I realize now that I was doomed to failure by the very fact that the Sargasso Sea did not exist -- or anyhow it did not capture many Spanish gold-bearing ships-of-the-line. So much for childhood dreams." 

Pictured above is the two-page spread about the Sagrasso Sea from The American Weekly, March 5, 1939 edition. 



I've been developing an idea about Dick's approach to writing I call "Juxtaposition and the Flip-Flop" in which polar opposites or elements in a binary opposition, are first juxtaposed and then their positions "Flip-Flop." 

So here in this important early influence on PKD we have a very early example of "fake news." But The American Weekly is not Fox News or MSNBC using their infrastructure to perpetuate a partisan rhetorical bubble. The American Weekly traded on its journalistic reputation every Sunday, flipping the relationship between "truth" and "fiction" in the attempt to squeeze money out of their readers by capitulating to the luridness of their imagination. As Robert Anton Wilson famously said, "Reality is what you can get away with."