My class, The Total Dick-Head's Guide to Philip K. Dick, is just over a week away. My latest announcement is yet another amazing name on an all star roster of Dick-Heads, Professor Peter Fitting. Fitting's 1975 essay, "Ubik: The Deconstruction of Bourgeois SF" was one of the earliest critical examinations of Dick's work. What's more Fitting, met and hung out with Dick. Phil wrote one of his wildest 1974 letters to Fitting which included his famous formulation:
PHILIP K. DICK
by
Ubik
I was thinking about this the other day because I've been watching classic movies and Umberto Eco said of Casablanca, "Made haphazardly, it probably made itself, if not actually against the will of its authors and actors, then at least beyond their control. And this is the reason it works, in spite of aesthetic theories and theories of film making. For in it there unfolds with almost telluric force the power of Narrative in its natural state, without Art intervening to discipline it ... When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion."
.. which might be what Phil was getting at.
But THEN, Phil wrote to the FBI explaining that Fitting had written to him "in a rambling fashion" and proposed coming to visit. Fitting had then made contact with friend and fellow SF writer Norman Spinrad who reported back to Phil that Fitting had brought with him "wild-eyed French freak intellectuals, somehow involved in Marxism." (Letter to William Sullivan, April 16, 1974.
So we'll have plenty to talk about with Peter when he joins us on April 11.
Space is still available in The Total Dick-Head's Guide to Philip K. Dick, register here.
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