About Last Night

From the left: Pamela Jackson, Me, Jonathan Lethem (I kinda feel like we're all so famous I shouldn't even have to tell you who's who!)

Well gentle readers, I went and had another magical Dick experience last night (oh, the Google hits I will get for that). Regular reader Ted Hand and I met a few other Dick-heads for dinner before heading to Moe's Books in Berkeley for a big Exegesis event.

It was a pretty big deal with at least 100 people in the store. It was standing room only and I heard they sold something like 80 copies of the book!

Pictured left to right: Erik Davis, Laura Leslie, Pam Jackson, Jonathan Lethem, Isa Dick-Hackett

The guests of honor were: Jonathan Lethem, Pamela Jackson, Erik Davis, and Dick's daughters Laura and Isa. There were people filming there last night and I have their email so I think I'll wait on providing in-depth coverage. Lethem did a great job of explaining the origins and significance of The Exegesis and Pamela Jackson filled us in on the process itself. For me, there wasn't a whole lot of new info. But stay tuned for the video, I figure you'll enjoy it. For now, you can listen to a podcast of the LA Event here.

Incredibly poorly composed picture that does little to convey the size of the crowd. But check out dude's shades.

Afterwords, we went to a smaller party and had a really good time. Like that line from Parsifal, time was turning into space all around us. Lethem had worked at this exact bookstore for years, and now he was returning with success he probably couldn't even imagine back then. I know I have lots of fantasies where I go back to some crummy record store where I used to work, but now I'm rich and powerful. It sure seems like it would feel good, but who knows? And of course we were only a couple blocks from Herb Hollis' record store where Phil used to work and first came into his own.

Anytime you get that many Dick-heads together it's almost like the collective energy somehow substantiates the man. You certainly couldn't look around that room of people and have any doubt that Dick's work has touched people and changed their lives. And when you get us serious folks together, those of us who have dedicated decades to our obsession, it's just really inspiring, almost magical. Our private worlds, the spaces in our minds inhabited by the things we covet, suddenly finding a shared interest, open up in a really beautiful way. I mean, my wife is pretty sick of hearing me talk about Phil Dick, and she hasn't read all the books and doesn't know the mythos. Anyway, my hyperbole is starting to ramble.

What I'm trying to say is that it sure is fun talking to people who find the same value in Dick's life and work. It makes me feel like dedicating two decades to the study of his life was a good thing. And for a while I hadn't really been feeling like that. So, good to know.

Now, quickly on to other topics:

1) We made boingboing!
2) The Guardian reviewed The Exegesis
3) Amazon says The Exegesis is "under review" -- WTF?
4) You can now get the Prophets of SF episode about PKD on Amazon
5) All the cool Dick-heads are tripping on this really amazing PKD interview!

PKD's Obscure 18th Century Philosophical Allusion of the Day

After finding a mysterious strip of paper that reads SOFT-DRINK STAND instead of an actual Soft-Drink Stand in one of Dick's most amazing scenes ever, Time Out of Joint's protagonist Ragle Gumm expresses an interest in studying philosophy, saying to his brother-in-law Vic, "I've read some [philosophy], in my time. I was thinking of Bishop Berkeley. The Idealist. For instance -"

Those of you interested [as I am] in decoding the soft-drink stand scene in TOoJ will be interested to learn that, aside from having the California town of Berkeley (where PKD grew up) named after him, Bishop George Berkeley was a 18th century philosopher/metaphysic who developed a very complex notion of subjective reality, dubbed by him as 'immaterialism' and later termed by others subjective idealism, which contends, in part, that no object exists without someone perceiving it. In other words when a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to hear it, it doesn't make a sound [although that's a simplification since the tree falling in the woods riddle is basically a vocabulary problem that depends on the definition of the word 'sound'].

Since George Berkeley is long dead, and, conveniently now in the public domain, you can read his A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge here. It ain't easy or fun reading, but it is interesting. Once you've ingested it, check out Wikipedia's synopsis. This incredibly poorly focused pair of sentences from Berkeley's treatise seem relevant:

"4. It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But, with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world, yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For, what are the fore-mentioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these, or any combination of them, should exist unperceived?"

Now, add the notion of reification to the above equation and you begin to see labels standing in for reality, because what we perceive is rarely the totality of what we sense, but instead, using language as a kind of shorthand, our minds rely on words to make objects comprehensible. Instead of seeing a silver, four-wheeled, loud, moving, object, we see a car. This is a necessary, albeit reductive, way of perceiving the world. If we become further removed from 'reality' because our nervous systems are overworked and stressed, or because of a mental illness like paranoia, we perceive even less sensory data, and, consequently, are quicker to see things as generalizations, as categories. The word or label is always a reduction of the object it describes, or, as I explain it to my students, "the menu is not the food."

I thought if I wrote this out, I might better understand my thinking on the subject. So much for that idea.

For an interesting summation of exactly how complicated (and influential) the soft-drink stand scene is I suggest you read Patrick Clark's essay The Secret of the Soft-Drink Stand Explained At Last (click here to download the .doc file). But, alas, Clark doesn't explain the Soft-Drink Stand.

Update: Philosophical debate continues in the comments section.