New Clans of the Alphane Moon Class on Morbid Anatomy

I'm excited to announce a new PKD-related course through Morbid Anatomy. This time I'll be diving deep into Clans of the Alphane Moon with special guest Jonathan Lethem! Instead of a mind-destroying 16 week marathon, this is a simple one week, two session class. 

Here's my class description: 

In 1963 Philip K Dick’s third marriage was crumbling, his idyllic life in the small northern California town of Pt Reyes Station was coming to a sad and dysfunctional end, and the author was relying on increasingly large doses of amphetamines to supercharge his writing output.

During this chaotic period in his life, Dick wrote one of his most “out there” science fiction novels: Clans of the Alphane Moon.

The “Clans” in Dick’s novel are tribes of psychiatric patients organized around their diagnoses: “pares,” or paranoiacs, comprise the leadership, “manses” or those suffering from mania, live amid "a hodgepodge of incomplete projects, started out but never finished," the “skitzes,” or schizophrenics, comprise a village of disheveled poets.

Dick’s microcosm of mental illness functions not as a bleak dystopia, but as best-selling author Jonathan Lethem explained in his keynote address to the Philip K Dick Fest in Fort Morgan Colorado last summer, a vision of diversity that lights the way out of the dark times we find ourselves in.

Join leading Philip K. Dick scholar David Gill and Jonathan Lethem for a two-session class on Dick’s novel and his life at the time of its composition. Survey the weirdness of one of Dick’s strangest books and discover his proffered solution to our troubled times.

The class starts March 31st. More info at Morbid Anatomy.

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.

Issue One of Pravic Now Available

So, yeah, there's a few more tidbits of Fest coverage I've got to get to, but don't sweat it. All in good time. Let me tell you about my newest endeavor, Pravic Magazine. You may have already read about Pravic, but back then it was just a gleam in the eyes of me and Nathaniel K Miller. Now Pravic has our first issue out (many fest goers were privileged to pick up their copy for free) and you can read some of it at our website, which will no doubt lead you to want to purchase a hard copy of the magazine for only $3 including shipping and handling. You get Ben Loory's story, "The Astronaut" - which you can read in its entirety here. You also get a story from Nathaniel K Miller, a sort of reverse of Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains," but post-apocalyptic and grim. Speaking of grim, I have the final story in issue one, called "The Singer" and it's a real downer. It's quite long and I literally worked on this story for about a year and a half. I want you guys to read it. There's also a discussion of Star Trek and our Commandments for New Science Fiction.

All of you readers have been so generous with your time, dedication, and praise for me on this website. I really hope you'll continue to support me as I take what I've learned studying the life and work of PKD and apply it to my own art.

Photo: Jonathan Lethem is reading Pravic, are you?

Dick-Fest 2012 Totally Recalled

 Photo: That's me interviewing Jonathan Lethem, Laurence Rickels, Rudy Rucker, and John Alan Simon. Click to see the rest of the image: Rucker and Simon have been cut by the auto-formatting...

Though I'm still pretty tired, as well as behind in my grading and housework, I guess I better put my thoughts down about the Dick-Fest before the memories start to fade. They tell me it was an unqualified success. I actually didn't get to see much of the Fest as I was running from emergent situation to technical catastrophe almost the entire time.

First off, there were more than 130 who registered. The big lecture hall/theater where we were staging the fest only holds 140, and people were still registering the night before. I was sweating. Talk about sweating, I met Dr Laurence Rickels at the airport and drove him to his "Hospitality Suite" on campus - only I couldn't find the damn place.  Talk about an anxiety dream! But Rickels is a cool cat, a nice guy, and I drove him around on Friday before the fest. I can't say I "get" his book now, but he did offer this kernel of wisdom: Naziism is Psychoanalysis in reverse. That sure got me thinking. Rickels also had a cool video presentation of old space race stuff.

The next night I drove Jonathan Lethem to his suite and we had a nice talk. I knew we'd be pulled in different directions at the fest, so I was glad to get the time. Very nice guy. I've got some friends that call me "Dave" and some friends that call me "David" - Lethem is a "David" friend. I got him to sign my copy of "Men & Cartoons" too! His keynote was funny, touching, and revolutionary - more on that when the videos come out -- more on when the videos are coming out later.

The highlight of the event was the screening of Radio Free Albemuth. Well before that we had a nice dinner in the "Nob Hill Room" at my school, with an open bar, and pretty good food. But the movie was a hit, and seeing it with a theater full of Dick-heads was wonderful and rewarding for me personally.

I finally got to meet Umberto Rossi. A gentleman and a scholar. And of course got to catch up with old friends Lord Running Clam, Perry Kinman, Frank Hollander, Laura Entwisle, and more. The whole thing reconfirmed for me that Dick-heads are some of the nicest, smartest, and most generous people on the planet. In addition, I met lots of cool new people: Chris Rudge, John Burton, Doug Mackey. I can't list everyone.

The Verge has just posted their video and article about the fest, and they're great! Check them out here. More pictures to follow.

Toot, Toot!

Yeah, well, I've been busy. Mostly doing stuff I can't really talk about, not because it's secret or anything, but because it's so dreadfully boring: taking the kids to school, making sack lunches, receiving rejection letters, and sleeping.

But fret no more. As today is a day to rejoice! For we finally have a decent review of The Exegesis to talk about. It's in today's LA Review of Books and it was written by Rob Latham. Read it here.

But first, check out this sentence:

...associate editor Davis, author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, assembled a diverse array of talents — including novelist Steve Erickson, critic N. Katherine Hayles, and blogger David Gill, whose website “Total Dick-head” is the best online compendium of Dickiana — to generate the shrewd, erudite, sometimes quite witty annotations.

I've criticized a lot of sentences on this blog, but, at last, I've found the perfect combination of predication, tone, subject matter, and everything. I'm in love.

Stay tuned for some other wicked cool stuff on the horizon. Secret awesome stuff not involving sack lunches.

All I Wanted For Christmas Were Links, Links, Links!

I've been away; now I'm back. Before we look back on the year that was, let's stroll through the internets for a moment to see what people are saying about the world of Dickiana.

I know a lot of you have had weird Phil Dick-style, pink-beam-esque mystical experiences of your own. I know this because you write me emails about them. Well, now we all have a place to share our inexplicable Dickian synchronicities: a new blog called The House of Ubiquity dedicated to "Mystical and Mysterious Encounters in the World of Philip K. Dick." Someone has already posted a super interesting entry about a dream involving the drugstore in Ubik. That site's not going to work without your input, so get on there and start talking about how weird you are.

That was the one really cool thing I had to blog about. Sigh.

Did you see that Adjustment Team was one of the best SF movies of 2011 according to ScienceFiction.com? Go here and you can learn that and other fascinating things. For my money Moon was the best SF movie 2011. You're probably saying to yourself, 'but that movie came out a long time ago!" But it, in my opinion, so far outshines any of the entries in this year's list (*admittedly I haven't seen a whole lot of these), that it deserves to win every year until something better comes out.

I found this weird site where people ask and answer questions, and they have some weird questions, like this one:

I have just finished reading VALIS, and I remain puzzled by something. It seems to be made clear that Horselover Fat is, in essence, an alter ego of Philip Dick - a separate personality of someone experiencing multiple personality problems, or just a literary device to cover talking to himself. Anyhow, Horse clearly does not have an existence of his own.

Admittedly, it's not exactly a question, and if it were, it wouldn't be a good one, but answer is pretty insightful. Read it here.

Reader Mr Hand turned me on to this crazy blog where PKD gets compared to Ken Wilbur, who I looked up, and is not really anything like PKD, except they both had esoteric ideas. And the blog entry is really weird because it's super reverential about Wilbur and kinda snarky about PKD, but the whole thing is set on a background composed of Dick's book covers. Sample sentence:

"Philip K. Dick, on the other hand, was a sprawling disaster of a man, who wrote bizarre science fiction stories."

Never gets old, does it guys?

Anyhoo, there's this piece about Lethem and Vonnegut and Dick's Exegesis... Sample sentence:

It's a shame then that the book is more or less a flood of babble. Dick's religious experience—some have called it an undiagnosed stroke—may have filled his head with concepts, but it surely didn't bless him with coherence.

Oy.

Ever wonder about Portuguese States of America from Radio Free Albemuth? Well it's not without historical precedent, at least in the world of weird, esoteric maps, as Big Think explains:

In one of those parallel universes, there exists a country called the Portuguese States of Africa, spanning southern Africa from its Atlantic coast all the way to the Indian Ocean. This country, a transcontinental Lusophone giant perhaps one day to rival Brazil, is based on more evidence in this world than PKD’s possibly merely psychotic visions. It was envisaged in this Mapa Cor-de-rosa (the ‘Pink Map’).

"The Pink Map," huh? Read more here.

Tessa Dick sold an autographed copy of Flash Gordon from Art Spiegleman. It went for what I consider to be a pretty good price.

SFF Audio is contending (with a fair amount of corroborating evidence) that PKD's short story "Upon the Dull Earth" is now in public domain.

That's it for now. Stop reading! Get some fresh air. Maybe tell your loved ones that you appreciate them.

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!

Another Weekly Amalgamation of PKD Reading (This week with Listening!)

We have yet to hear even the rickety ignition sequence of Philip K Dick Article Machine, but I imagine it's coming out of mothballs this weekend with the release of The Exegesis last Tuesday. There are two reviews of the book at Amazon already, both of which are positive. Slate published a nice excerpt here. It's from earlier on in the text and is part of a letter.

Our own Mr Hand has already received his copy and is digging in over at his Philip K Dick and Religion blog.

Jonathan Lethem is out on tour in support of his pair of books released last week. Here's the New York Time's review of his collection of essays The Ecstasy of Influence. And here's Lethem on video talking about the Exegesis on video.

And here's a cool entry on PKD written by fellow Exegesis Annotator Gabriel Mckee over at freq.uenci.es... "a collaborative genealogy of spirituality."

Doug Mackey contacted me by email to say he's written up and posted a review of Ganymede Takeover on his book review blog Orbis Biblios.

Here's a blogger digging into some of the later stuff in the Exegesis, a very interesting set of themes about a dead king and a usurper that ties in Hamlet and the end of Flow My Tears.

I read here that they printed 100,000 copies of The Exegesis, whoa.

Annotator and Afterword author of The Exegesis, Rich Doyle posted his talk, Stairway to Eleusis, about PKD here.

The Science Channel is premiering a new series, Prophets of Science of Fiction, and one of the upcoming episodes is about Philip K Dick, and it looks, from the screengrab they are providing as a publicity still that Philip K Dick will be played by a re-purposed, animatronic Abraham Lincoln, with a cheap, fake beard. Don't believe me?:

The Dick episode is this Wednesday, November 16, 2011.

Reader and blogger MDK is raising money via Kickstarter for a memoir. Check that out here.

Speaking of PKD coinkydinks (MDK has had a few) check out this blog entry I stumbled on about Dick's apartment in Wash - 35.

That ought to keep you busy for a couple of days. If you've got your copy (or even if you don't), head to the comments section to talk about it.

The Lethem/Exegesis Juggernaut

In our continuing coverage of all things Exegetical, today we learn about the nationwide tour being mounted by Mr Jonathan Lethem as he promotes two new book projects due out tomorrow. If you're in NYC tonight, get thee to Lethem's appearance at Barnes and Nobles in Union Square at 7pm. The rest of the dates are as follows:

Mon 11/7: Manhattan, 7:00 pm

PKD Exegesis

Barnes & Noble Union Square, with PKD’s daughters, Isa Dick Hackett and Laura Leslie.

http://store-locator.barnesandnoble.com/event/72218

Tues 11/8: Brooklyn, 7:00 pm

The Ecstasy of Influence

Book Court, 163 Court St, Brooklyn, NY 11201

http://www.bookcourt.org/category/events/

Wed 11/9: Boston/Cambridge, 6:00 pm

The Ecstasy of Influence

Harvard Bookstore, Brattle Theater, 40 Brattle St, Cambridge, MA

http://brattlefilm.org/2011/11/09/harvard-book-store-presents-jonathan-lethem/

Monday 11/14: Los Angeles, 7:00 pm

PKD Exegesis

Central Library, LA Library ALOUD SERIES: Panel discussion with co-editors Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson, and PKD’s daughters, Isa Dick Hackett and Laura Leslie. Moderated by David L. Ulin, book critic, Los Angeles Times.

http://www.lfla.org/event-detail/664/The-Exegesis-of-Philip-K-Dick

Tues 11/15: Pasadena, 7:00 pm

The Ecstasy of Influence

Vromans, 695 E. Colorado Blvd, Pasadena, CA

http://www.vromansbookstore.com/jonathan-lethem

Mon 11/21: Corte Madera, CA, 7:00 pm

The Ecstasy of Influence

Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd

http://www.bookpassage.com/event/jonathan-lethem-ecstasy-influence-nonfictions-etc

Tues 11/22: Berkeley, 7:30 pm

PKD Exegesis

Moe's Books, with Laura Leslie, PKD’s daughter

http://www.moesbooks.com/pages/Store-Events-.html

Exciting stuff! I hope you can make it. Lethem really made the Exegesis happens and it is a beautiful book that is going to get people talking.

The World Sucks, and My Lack of Posting Isn't Helping

I'm finding it increasingly difficult to find the time to post here. Now I've got a second band, a side-project that I'm involved with, and I've been slaving away late at night working on this story, which if all goes according to plan, should get submitted tomorrow. At that point my attention will turn towards the Philip K Dick Conference planned for next year. Time to get going selling t-shirts, raising funds, maybe even getting a Kickstarter project going. Our list of notable attendees includes: Jonathan Lethem, John Simon (director Radio Free Albemuth), Tommy Pallotta (producer A Scanner Darkly), Erik Davis, Ted Hand, and me. That list is sure to grow as I begin the process of tracking folks down in earnest.

The amazing thing is, while I've been away from this blog, the world has gone full Black Iron Prison:

First, Pat Robertson fails to have even the heart of the robot taxi cab at the end of Now Wait For Last Year, as he recently suggested a husband could leave his wife suffering from Alzheimer's, Nice work, Mr Robertson:

“I know it sounds cruel, but if he’s going to do something, he should divorce her and start all over again, but make sure she has custodial care and somebody looking after her,” Robertson said.

To quote another famous android, "That's the spirit."

But a quote in this article about Amazon seemed to sum up best the way our world now resembles the apathetic futures in PKD's books:

"People who run companies like Amazon operate as though it never occurred to them that it could have been them crawling through the aisles. And the people who run labor unions possess little empathy for how difficult and risky and remarkable it is to build something like Amazon."

And it's starting to really bum me out.

If you've been pining for more Phil Dick content, cursing my name and blog for my seeming indifference, you need to head over to Mr Hand's PKD and Religion blog where our friend has been a very busy little Phil Dick scholar and has all kinds of good posts. Talks are underway to bring Mr Hand's content to us directly here at TDH. So don't give up on us yet.

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...

About That "Empathy Test" Of Yours

There's been some PKD activity on the Intertoobz lately, and I really need to write up a news roundup article, but not today; I want to share something cool a student hipped me to in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Yes, it's that time of the semester again, when I read literally about a hundred essay about DADOES?. Most are pretty simplistic and usually go over one of the topics I suggest during our class lectures. Last week, a student approached me and said she wanted to write about the Voight-Kampff test in the novel; specifically, she found it ironic that the questions were not the least bit empathetic. I was stunned by the power of her discovery, and a little amazed that I had missed it.

Indeed, if you read the test questions Rick asks Rachel for instance, it's clear that there is nothing empathetic about the test itself. Rick describes a situation to Rachel: "In a magazine you come across a full-page color picture of a nude girl" (49). This is when Rachel gets the great line about testing to see if she's an android or lesbian - a line so great it even made it into the movie. But then it gets weird; Deckard continues: "Your husband likes the picture."

Uh, Rick... she doesn't have a husband. The questions are impersonal and in many cases seem totally unrelated to the expression of empathy someone might make in their day-to-day lives. So, this test and its administrators, which seek to detect empathy, make no attempt to tailor the questions to the subject. Martin Luther King Jr wrote in his letter from a Birmingham Jail that the ends are preexistant in the means. And here I can't help but think that the apathetic and clinical attitude of the test and its administrators creates a situation in which the androids' apathetic outlook has spread like a virus to the very people who are charged with eliminating this apathy.

This is yet another layer of irony in a deeply ironic book. Look, all of the characters transcend their identity in one way or other: the androids are empathetic, the humans are apathetic, the supposedly Chickenheaded John Isidore shows an appropriate reverance for life; Deckard, who keeps talking about how much he wants a real animal, can't take proper care of the animals once he acquires them.

It reminded me of this interview I did way back in the day with Lethem, where he said:

"On the other hand “Do Androids…” has “Blade Runner” attached to it. I think in terms of the role that Dick has taken in terms of the popular imagination it’s an important connection… I reread [each of the four novels] carefully and “DADoES” is the one book I’ve been underrating. It struck me as totally controlled and emotionally precise..."

I'm, once again, appreciating the care with which Dick wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. I have a new theory, that perhaps it is DADOES that marks a transition in Dick's writing career from his second-draft masterpieces written in the early 60s to the multiple drafts and Herculean efforts he put into his later books. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said went through how many editions and drafts?

Anyway, all that effort pays off brilliantly in DADOES?, a book that continues to open up to deeper and deeper analysis and interpretation. Even after teaching the novel to thousands of students, I'm still amazed by what I find inside.

(Thanks for the insight, Lisa Casale!)

Mark Your Calendars!

I would apologize for the recent blog silence but for two facts:

1) I promised at some point that I wouldn't begin blog posts with an apology for a dearth of posts.

and

2) I've been working behind the scenes laying the groundwork for a Philip K Dick Conference to be held September 22-23, 2012 at San Francisco State University.

Of course you knew that already from seeing the wonderful logo at the top, produced by Sebastien Berruyer!

The big news is that our first confirmed guest, the guest of honor for the conference, will be none other than Jonathan Lethem (or a simulacrum thereof)! No seriously, Lethem's in!

In the coming weeks I will be looking to do some fundraising. I think the first step will be to print up some t-shirts with Sebastien's logo to sell. If you have any ideas for raising money or know of a good online silkscreen service let me hear it in the comments.

Additional information about the substance of the conference as well as details about potential lodging will be forthcoming. I'm very excited.

"Horrors of War" Card #54

Jonathan Lethem just sent me a link to a super cool post over at a posterus blog called 'Now Hear This." The picture above is from the card mentioned in The Man in the High Castle. PKD writes:

'I am a collector,' Major Humo had explained. He had spent an entire afternoon searching among the heaps of old magazines in the store. In his mild voice he had explained something which Childan could not quite grasp at the time: to many wealthy, cultured Japanese, the historic objects of American popular civilization were of equal interest alongside the more formal antiques. Why this was so, the major himself did not know; he was particularly addicted to the collecting of old magazines dealing with U.S. brass buttons, well as the buttons themselves. It was on the order of coin or stamp collecting; no rational explanation could ever be given. And high prices were being paid by wealthy collectors.
'I will give you an example,' the major had said. 'Do you know what is meant by 'Horrors of War' cards?' He had eyed Childan with avidity.
Searching his memory, Childan had at last recalled. The cards had been dispensed, during his childhood, with bubble gum. A cent apiece. There had been a series of them, each card depicting a different horror.
'A dear friend of mine,' the major had gone on, 'collects 'Horrors of War.' He lacks but one, now. The Sinking of the Panay. He has offered a substantial sum of money for that particular card.'
'Flip cards,' Childan had said suddenly.
'Sir?'
'We flipped them. There was a head and a tail side on each card.' He had been about eight years old. 'Each of us had a pack of flip cards. We stood, two of us, facing each other. Each of us dropped a card so that it flipped in the air. The boy whose card landed with the head side up, the side with the picture, won both cards.' How enjoyable to recall those good days, those early happy days of his childhood.
Considering, Major Humo had said, 'I have heard my friend discuss his 'Horrors of War' cards, and he has never mentioned this. It is my opinion that he does not know how these cards actually were put to use.'
Eventually, the major's friend had shown up at the store to hear Childan's historically firsthand account. That man, also a retired officer of the Imperial Army, had been fascinated,
'Bottle caps!' Childan had exclaimed without warning.
The Japanese had blinked uncomprehendingly.
'We used to collect the tops from milk bottles. As kids. The round tops that gave the name of the dairy. There must have been thousands of dairies in the United States. Each one printed a special top.'

Indeed, the card did have a front and a back. Here is the back:


When I have some more time, maybe I'll write about how interesting these cards are: wartime souvenirs that address the horrors and glories of war in hacky prose and garish illustrations. Or maybe I'll ask my dad if he remembers collecting any of this stuff. He was born a month before PKD (don't worry, Dr Freud has already been paged).

Here's a link to illustrations of the rest of the set.

Photo of the Day

Finally, a shot of Jonathan Lethem with his Ubik tattoo. From the hard-hitting Huffpo expose: 15 Amazing Literary Tattoos.

Erik Davis Interviews Jonathan Lethem about Philip Dick

There's a must-read interview of Lethem up over at h+ magazine conducted by none 0ther than TDH friend Erik Davis! It's a meaty interview, knife and fork kind of stuff. Here's a taste:

ED: Dick set many of his tales in what we might now call a “posthuman” future of cognitive-enhancing drugs, psi powers, and other amplifications of human capacity. Many of the developments he envisioned in his own unique way are now edging ever closer to reality, and there are many enthusiasts. While not exactly bleak, Dick had a generally more dark and satiric — and often funny — take on cognitive enhancement. Was he a pessimist or a realist? How would you characterize his particularly lesson about human for today‘s enthusiastic transhumans?

JL: While I‘m hardly an expert on the reality of cognitive enhancement or the transhuman impulse as it‘s working itself out on the contemporary frontier, I suspect Dick had little to offer in the way of a “lesson” for aspirants, except in the senses that were relevant while he was coming of age as a writer — that‘s to say, when the breaking news in the framing of such matters involved names like Freud, Kinsey, Norbert Weiner and, well, A.E. Van Vogt. Dick‘s concerns were ultimately both epistemological and deeply moral — in the sense that a philosopher would use the world moral, not in the sense that, say, Joseph L. Breen would. You know, love, empathy, “what is human?” and so forth. For contemporary voyagers, these matters remain as Dick delineated them: exquisitely local, negotiated on the human-to-human, or human-to-self playing field according to an infinite number of variations and contexts. No sweeping paradigms will do here. We‘re all walking down the street conducting our self-Turing exams every time we pass a homeless person, or greet our spouse at the breakfast table.

Read the rest here.

Lethem's 'Crazy Friend' Essay

Jonathan Lethem has written an essay detailing his 'imaginary friendship' with Philip K Dick for an Italian collection of his writings on PKD. Lethem is allowing his fans to read the essay in English through his Facebook page (just scroll down to the announcement NEW LETHEM ESSAY ON PHILIP K DICK). I've had some difficulty accessing the essay, and in my experience it's best to use a browser other than Firefox to access it.

Of course it's a great piece of writing that covers a lot of territory, including Lethem's own evolving literary stature, and his good old days working with the PKD Society Newsletter. Lethem eventually gets to the topic of Dick's mental state, and perhaps I'm flattering myself, but I think he's talking about me a bit:

"Dick's defenders - other than me, I mean - often bristle at hearing him called 'crazy' or at the rehearsals of his human frailties, his drugs and divorces, which tend to accompany the laurels the larger culture keeps draping on his tomb. I've never understood the problem. Apart from the dopey emptiness of the question - was Melville crazy? Was Malcolm Lowery? Kafka? - I suppose I'm residually inclined to hear the term as a shred of beatnik exultation, "That's crazy man!" I'm still looking for crazy wherever I can find it."

Sure, given Lethem's take on the word, 'crazy' doesn't sound so bad. But, mental illness is not a concept Lethem can control the meaning of. Lethem seems to love people who relate to the world idiosyncratically, who march to the beat of their own drum, and of course saying 'he's crazy' is just a another way of saying 'he's relating to the world in his own unique way.' But mental illness isn't mere idiosyncracy, it's a deep, debilitating disconnect from others, something that prevents the kinds of tender, weird moments shared between freaks that Lethem seems to relish in the essay.

So sure man, Dick was crazy! But his accomplishments as a writer are a testament to his sanity.

Update: apparently you can download the .pdf file here.

Volume Three From the Library of America Reviewed

The Philip K Dick juggernaut continues its long slog towards literary respectability whether or not I can pull myself away from papers to grade long enough to document it. Case in point, the Library of America's third volume of PKD was released a few days ago. The deafening cacophony of mainstream media outlets falling over each other to chronicle the countless tragedies of PKD's life has quieted a bit, leaving only a few reviews to contextualize the efforts of our favorite ultra-prolific social misfit. David Hellman, a librarian at San Francisco State Unversity (where I am currently working as well) offers a lengthy and interesting review of the new volume for the San Francisco Chronicle. While the review offers little new information (seems like these articles all chronicle some guy who's never heard of Philip K Dick struggling to wrap his mind around what all the fuss is about), Hellman does zero in on the value of Dick's writing:

"What this volume ultimately tells us is that Dick was not a science fiction writer, but instead he was our writer. Some science fiction readers have chided him for valuing the fiction over the science, and he certainly did not write your typical space operas. But that seems to be the point here, and why in fact he transcends in so many ways, and to use his own concept, the "Black Iron Prison" of the genre. Dick was our writer because he was deeply concerned about human matters and about spiritual survival in an ever more materialistic and media-driven world. That should be good enough reason alone to be in anyone's canon."

Read the whole article here.

And buy the latest volume from the Library of America here:

Some Reading Material

I'm too busy celebrating my freedom this weekend to do much more than link to some important PKD-related articles.

First off, there's a long and in-depth article about PKD's life in Orange County in Orange Coast Magazine. Not only does the article include interviews with Tessa Dick, Linda Castellani, and Tim Powers, it also has a shout out to this blog. Read the whole thing here.

Second, there's an exclusive interview with Jonathan Lethem about PKD's third volume from the Library of America. Download the PDF file here. The volume hits stores July 30. I'm interested in seeing how thoroughly footnoted VALIS and Transmigration are in this edition.

Pre-order your copy:

Lethem Discusses The Preserving Machine

On the cover of the most recent New York Times Sunday Book Review Jonathan Lethem discusses Dick's short story "The Preserving Machine." Goddamn Lethem's a good writer, and oh yeah Dick had one hell of an idea. Lethem writes:

"In Philip K. Dick’s 1953 short story “The Preserving Machine,” an impassioned inventor creates a device for “preserving” the canon of classical music — the sacred and, he fears, impermanent beauties of Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven and so forth — by feeding it into a device that transforms the compositions into living creatures: birds, beetles and animals resembling armadillos and porcupines. Outfitting the classic pieces in this manner, then setting them free, the inventor means to guarantee their persistence beyond the frailties of human commemoration, to give them a set of defenses adequate to their value. Alas, the musical-animals become disagreeable and violent, turn on one another and, when the inventor attempts to reverse-engineer his creations in order to prove that the music has survived, reveal themselves as a barely recognizable cacophony, nothing like the originals. Or has the preserving machine revealed true essences — irregularities, ferocities — disguised within the classical pieces to begin with?"

Soon the article becomes a review of Roberto Bolano's 2666.

Read the rest here....