Erik Davis on The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Last night I traveled up to the old Berkeley flats, near the old stomping grounds of PKD, to hear Erik Davis give his first of five lectures on The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Unfortunately, Erik's series is also on Tuesday evenings, when, after this week, I will be offering my own PKD class via Zoom. 

Davis was great, and it was awesome to see a roomful of people eager to engage with Phil Dick's weirdness. Interestingly a significant portion of the audience (maybe a third) had never read a PKD book before, which is a testament to their belief in Dr Davis' schtick. 

In the first lecture, Davis provided some background: how he got into Phil Dick (Berkeley druggies), how he was an early champion of PKD, most notably with his Village Voice article (which ended up getting blurbed on the Vintage editions calling Dick "A poor man's Pynchon,") and how he ended up working on The Exegesis.

Davis' overarching focus involves asking readers to play with the idea of Dick prophesying, not the granular details of our reality (though the global warming in 3 Stig is pretty interesting in that regard), but rather predicting how it FEELS to live in our now. As evidence, Davis tossed out the fact that Kanye just got titanium teeth. 

One of the other cool ideas I picked up was PKD's sensitivity to the ways in which everything can go sideways once people get involved. It's as if all of our interactions with reality are a game of "Telephone" with noise creeping into our every endeavor and perception. Another idea that I want to explore more is the idea of the "mind virus" which is sort of what Palmer Eldritch represents. 

It's not just ideas that we're inoculated with on social media. We are given complex rhetorical strategies which we immediately internalize. If you bring up January 6 to a republican, many have been trained to point out that Hillary called the integrity of the 2016 election into question. We are arguing in memes, which cuts off our ability to think about the issue completely. 

For the event, I pulled out my old Vintage edition of the novel, which has seen things you people wouldn't believe. 

Tickets are on sale for the remaining for dates are for sale here. Lectures are available to stream, but not the Q&A (when everybody eats Chew-Z and listens to fig jazz).