William Sarill Chronicles His Dick-Fest Experience

William Sarill, the name sounds vaguely familiar, right? Perhaps you've been reading Maze of Death and remember the little introduction by Dick explaining that the novel is borne out of late night discussions of religion with, you guessed it, William Sarill. Or maybe you've been looking at that picture of PKD and Nancy (the one where it looks like PKD's got a ponytail), that was taken by William Sarill. No doubt Sarill was one of the more interesting grain patterns to step out of the woodwork for the PKD Fest, peppering the crowd with anecdotes and insights about Phil Dick and his work. Now Bill has written up his thoughts for the Boston Phoenix. Read it here. And check out that awesome illustration (I pasted it above). It's quite a nice article about PKD, written by flesh and blood.

Sarill writes: "It's that spiritual yearning for answers that drew me to him in the first place — that and an appreciation for his wonderfully weird ideas and the occasional brilliance of his characterizations, so unlike those of other science-fiction writers of his era."Amen, brother.

If you're not in our Facebook group, you've missed a bit of hullabaloo introduced by Bill, regarding Dick's time rooming with Duncan and Spicer. I don't think we've talked about this. Interesting, eh?

Perhaps we can liven up the comments section with a little old fashioned debate.

More Pot-Healer Secondary Sources

Just as I suspected, PKD has a good bit to say about Galactic Pot-Healer in Rickman's indispensable interview book: Philip K Dick: In His Own Words.

Rickman and PKD are talking about how PKD occasionally writes himself into a corner. Rickman asks if PKD makes up the books as he's writing them and PKD says this was especially true of GPH:

PKD: ... Ol' Brunner, John Brunner said to me one time about Galactic Pot-Healer, that one got away from you completely, didn't it? And I said, yeah, it completely got away from me.
But it didn't get away from me in the sense that it was running ahead of me, that I was trying to catch up with it. I mean, I was the one who was dragging it along behind me. I was winging it, but I was the one who was doing the work. That novel did not write itself. That was a very difficult novel to write. But once I established that kind of soaring quality, you know, where they just move so rapidly, it was hard to maintain. I was afraid I would fall back into that opening sort of dreary monotonous thing that [Joe Fernwright] is stuck with, and lose the whole point of the book that way.
So once I took off, I had to keep it going. In a way the book got away from me, but in a way I had to carry the book all the way to the end.
I liked that book. You know, you made some interesting points in your essay, like the Books of the Kalends tell the truth, and sometimes they lie" (90).

In the essay PKD is talking about, Rickman actually compares the Kalends' Books and the Tench (in Maze of Death) with the I Ching, which PKD used famously in writing The Man in the High Castle, among other things. One could certainly trip out for awhile on how writing science fiction is like casting the yarrow, and to have these other oracular elements in PKD's texts that use language in a dynamic relationship with reality... (sorry too much Rickels). In other words, the Books of the Kalends' seem to shape and alter reality, rather than just reflecting or recording it, however, their power to predict future outcomes is flawed (the question of free will versus destiny is indeterminate). Of course, in Maze of Death (MoD -- SPOILER ALERT!) the Tench is an avatar representing the computer that is creating the characters' reality; like the author of the novel, the Tench is the weaver of the illusory world. I'm pretty sure, I Ching folks think that you alter the future when you cast and divide the yarrow, but I don't honestly know. These kinds of Schroedinger's what-if conversations are probably best left to the people properly versed in quantum mechanics, and that ain't me.

In another chapter, Rickels talks at more length about The Game in GPH. Did you get that? In a chapter unrelated to GPH, Rickels talks again about GPH. That's why the book so desperately needs an index! Rickels draws our attention to the way the game is introduced. First Fernwright goes for a cigarette, but then, realizing he will be caught and fined, he puts the cig away and starts thinking:

What do I really yearn for? he asked himself. That for which oral gratification is a surrogate. Something vast, he decided; he felt the primordial hunger gape, huge-jawed, as if to cannibalize everything around him. To place what was outside inside.
Thus he played; this had created, for him, The Game.
Pressing the red button he lifted the receiver and waited while the creaking, slow relay machinery fed his phone an outside line.
"Squeeg," the phone said. Its screen displayed nonobjective colors and segments. Electronic crosstalk made blurrily visible.
From memory he dialed. Twelve numbers, starting with the three which connected him with Moscow.
"Vice-Commissioner Saxton Gordon's staff calling," he said to the Russian switchboard officer whose face glowered at him from the miniature screen. "More games, I suppose," the operator said.
Joe said, "A humanoid biped cannot maintain metabolic processes by means of plankton flour merely."

Interesting, right? From the very first mention, Dick associates the game with a kind of oral fixation. Rickels talks about Ludwig Binswanger's dissertation work under Jung which involved testing word association in schizophrenics (I didn't know about this) and then writes:

"The word association game whereby otherwise suicidal nerds keep themselves from killing themselves or taking a psychotic break produces, in the one patch of writing that is clinical evidence of Dick's own sense that Galactic Pot-Healer was his one completely psychotic work, the other schizophrenic word for world and time and of the things in it. In Martian Time-Slip it was 'gubbish,' which enters sentences as gubbler gubbling that which, once the sentence is delivered, is gubbish" (149)

What Rickels is getting at there (and I'm at least partially guessing about this -- I mean did you read that?) is that the following exchange in GPH introduces the world 'kipple.' (Yes, even though that lady said she made the word up in The Gospel According to Philip K Dick):

Fernwright thinks to himself:

Q. Do you like Yeats?
A. I don't know, I've never tried any.
For a time his mind was empty and then he thought this:
Q. Do you like Kipling?
A. I don't know, I've never kippled.

Kipple, a word seemingly derived from similar play with language, goes on to become a central term in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a term for the all-consuming disorder that slowly destroys all form. Rickels calls 'kipple' "the schizophrenic word for world and time of and the things in it." (He astutely notes that 'gubble' is the other PhilDickian word for this universal entropy). This is precisely where The Game takes its players: to that schizophrenic isolation where words and concepts contain only personal meanings.

I think what Rickels is getting at here is that this Game is sort of schizophrenic in the sense that it involves unhooking words from consensual meaning. The collection of words 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' contains most of its meaning in a social context; the phrase coheres for all those who understand the collection of words as being a) a reference to John Donne's famous line, or b) Hemingway's lifting of Donne's phrase for the title of one of his novels, or c) a Metallica song of the same name (which could be traced to either Hemingway or Donne's use of the phrase). The cohesiveness of this phrase, its meaning, is embedded in a social context. You could not explain the significance of the phrase 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' to an alien without mentioning art, literature -- in short, culture. A schizophrenic is locked in a private world, where all meaning is personal, idiosyncratic. The Game involves transposing a familiar phrase we understand based on our shared cultural knowledge into a collection of synonyms which are meaningless without their unifying cultural referent(!). In The Game, language moves counter to meaning, and yet, while this seems like a metaphor for schizophrenia (the condition under which personal meanings subsume societal meanings and perceptions), the goal of The Game is to restore the collective meaning of the phrase, to emerge from the isolation of the Idios Kosmos.

But, and this is important, I read The Game as symptomatic of the dystopian Earth portrayed at the beginning of the novel. The Game, like the cubicle, and Fernwright's windowless apartment (con-apt?) with the artificial view projected on the wall, is an agent of derangement. But perhaps it is therapeutic as well.

Now here are some discussion questions, things to think about as I begin writing up my thoughts on the novel:

Is the Glimmung a God?

Is the Glimmung a Christ-like figure?

What is the significance of Fernwright's journey in the book? How does he change?

What is the significance of Joe's decision to exit the Glimmung rather than staying inside?

Starting Galactic Pot-Healer

So, here we go. Let's keep our discussion of GPH here in the comments section, since I've learned that many of my readers avoid Facebook like the plague.

What I'd like to do is start by talking about the dystopian future where (when?) the book begins. Reader PAK writes in the comments section: "The description of a managerial-society on Terra, especially the apparent merging of the US and USSR into one bleak, super-bureaucratic edifice, is especially reminiscent of Erich Fromm's description of mass-neurosis in The Sane Society." I will ask Anne Dick if PKD talked about this book, or Fromm in general. The Sane Society came out in 1955 so it may very well have influenced Dick's future world.

Erik Davis, in an email to me, writes that he especially loves the beginning of GPH because "it's so...now: people working in shitty cubicles, trying to connect to one another by playing networked games..."

Now I've thought a lot about The Game and I'd like to write a bit about it. The Game suggests, like much else in PKD's irv, that he thought of language as living, dynamic, and capable of changing the world outside itself. Think of the T.E.N.C.H. in Maze of Death. But The Game is slightly different. It exploits an aspect of language (the fact that we have more than one word to denote something) to create recreation, a way to pass the time. Insofar as the The Game is unproductive, it is actually counterproductive, as it distracts citizens from the degraded state of the society around them; it's an opiate of the masses. I was especially struck by the example 'water sheep,' which, it turns out, is a transliteration of 'hydraulic ram.' By translating the individual words in the sentence, players of the game are able to eliminate the meaning of the sentence, thereby destroying the phrase's cohesiveness. The object of the game is then to translate the words back by apprehending the original meaning of the sentence. In other words, you begin by imagining cohesiveness and then trying to attain it in the sentence. Do we play a game like this in our society? Yep. When you talk to Conservative Uncle and he says something about 'Global Climate Change' and you think to yourself 'oh, Global Warming!' When you go to buy a used car and they insist on calling it 'Pre-Owned.' This use of language is as mundane, circular, and unsatisfying as the rest of the society. I need some more time to suss out exactly what it is I'm trying to get at here - maybe in the comments section.

The opening of GPH reads very much like the beginning of any hero's adventure (Joseph Campbell anyone? PKD knew his work well): the protagonist struggles with a mundane and unsatisfying existence - think Luke Skywalker under uncle Owen's thumb. The Glimmung seems to be offering exactly what Fernwright is looking for. Isn't that usually a bad thing in literature?

I love the little touches, especially the simulated panoramic view projected on the wall of Fernwright's home, the broken component in the closet that tricks your brain into thinking the view is real.

What say you?

Back in the Future

This week I taught PKD's 1980 short story "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" in my second-year literature course. The experience has reinvigorated my sense of purpose, and I've been thinking about some big changes I'd like to make to the blog. I've got the new kid, an additional class (due to a friend and mentor's grave illness), my band's playing out, and, subsequently, I can't keep up the Dick Head on a daily basis, and to be honest, for the next few months it will be difficult to post on a weekly basis.

As this site has become a great place for PKD fans to discuss the texts and media happenings, I've decided to invite a few readers and fellow Dick scholars to become contributors here. If you're interested in writing something or leading a discussion, please let me know. I'm thinking of remaking this blog more in the model of the Philip K Dick Society Newsletter with myself acting as the Paul Williams, editing and publishing work done by garage scholars and academics motivated by curiosity rather than currency. We've had great discussions about Palmer Eldritch, Maze of Death, Flow My Tears, and others. I'd like to feature more of these types of discussions, starting with "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" (also published as "Frozen Journey"). Get a hold of this story and I'll post some interesting discussion questions from my class in the next couple of days. Let's try to dig a bit deeper than this...

Even More on Maze of Death

Man I had a crazy day. Being an adjunct lecturer at a California state school with the Terminator running things is crazy! A full eight hours of teaching sure gets my mind revved up though, and on my BART ride home, I kept thinking about A Maze of Death. That novel is kicking my ass.

Got home and did some research:

Ian Watson in his essay Lathe of Heaven and the Role of Dick [published in SFS]:

"The religion of A Maze of Death is a construct imposed on the crew of a starship during a voluntary trance state by a computer originally provided as a toy to while away the long years in space, which has become their only form of mental "salvation" once their ship is crippled. Yet the godlike figure of the Intercessor, invented as part of the false reality, reaches into the reality of the ship objectively, to offer salvation of a kind. (Seth Morley's salvation is to be reborn as a desert plant on a world where no one will bother him, where he can be both conscious of life, and yet asleep, enjoying a vegetable dream consciousness [§16]). Thus the human generates God."

I like this.

But better is the notion of the starship at the end of the novel as a stage in the Bardo - the nebulous worlds between lives. Remember the polyencephalic world ends when Seth dies in the noser crash, and the scenes in spaceship with the rest of crew read like the liminal state of the Bardo: as Seth is guided by the intercessor (bodhisattva?) to his next life as a desert cactus.

From Wikipedia (I know, not the best source, but, well, it's late):

"Used somewhat loosely, the term "bardo" may refer to the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth. According to Tibetan tradition, after death and before one's next birth, when one's consciousness is not connected with a physical body, one experiences a variety of phenomena. These usually follow a particular sequence of degeneration from, just after death, the clearest experiences of reality of which one is spiritually capable, to, later on, terrifying hallucinations arising from the impulses of one's previous unskillful actions."

My question for anonymous (who asked in a previous comment thread if Seth has any corporeal form outside the polyencephalic worlds) is if the rest of the crew have any corporeal form outside of Seth's consciousness? The only problem with the theory that they don't is that the book starts with Ben Tallchief's POV. I think Erik Davis did his master's thesis on Maze, and I think if he did he probably tackled this angle, so I'll drop him an email and see what he's got to say.

Regardless, the novel's narrative devours itself like an oroboros in a really brilliant way that makes me think I should read more PKD books. Tomorrow I'll find and post PKD's description of his bad LSD trip with Ray Nelson in 1964 that he included in Maze - the part with the snow world and the Latin.

Chime in in the comments!

Maze's End

I finished the novel over the weekend, and just in the nick of time. Classes start tomorrow.

[SPOILER ALERT]

Oh man, it was just a big simulation in their brains! "This is a huge oversimplification, but you can think of it as The Matrix times a million!" But, I gotta say, I wasn't disappointed with the ending. However, I think if you tried to adapt the movie to the screen now, with the ending intact, you'd have audiences rioting in the aisles, hurling Jujyfruits at the screen.

I had a sneaking suspicion that Delmak-O was going to be an illusory world. In fact I kept remembering this quote where PKD lists all of his 'solipsistic novels' (that's a term I use to describe his stories in which a reality turns out to be contained in someone's head). It's from the Exegesis:

"Eye," "Joint," "3 Stigmata," "Ubik," & "Maze" are the same novel written over and over again. The characters are out cold & lying around together on the floor.* (*Mass hallucinating a world.) Why have I written this at least 5 times? [...] What's to be gotten over is the false idea that a hallucination is a private matter. Not hallucination but joint hallucination is my topic, inc[luding] false memories" (Sutin, Divine Invasions 95-96)

I couldn't remember if Maze was on that list and I didn't want to look and ruin the ending. What's interesting to me about the ending is that it opens outward. PKD spends two chapters connecting the hallucinated world with the 'real world' aboard the spaceship. This is certainly an area for further research and discussion in the comments section.

Another thing I liked about the ending is how depressing it is - especially my reading of the ending: you see we're all on a pointless journey to nowhere. Maybe some of us will see more interesting territory on the way, or blaze a better trail in our wake, but the end is pretty bleak, and so, in a way, all of us (and a certain underrated science fiction writer) are members of this crew, cast adrift in purposelessness. This is where that initial tension between technology and faith returns to complicate matters - like Beethoven, Dick can build endlessly upon a theme. People of faith, like Seth Morely, can achieve some kind of salvation (if you believe he actually left the ship - raise your hands, how many think so?), but for the rest of the group technology (their spaceship) has failed them, they are stranded, thrown into an unfair drudgery that ends only when they die. This is what the existential psychologists that Dick was into thought about our lives. They must have been fun at parties.

But back to that faith/technology thing. Near the end of the novel, Dick dissipates the tension between technology/science and faith/prayer that he so brilliantly developed earlier in the novel. At the beginning of Chapter 15 it's clear that all the experiences of the characters can be explained technologically: their reality is simulated by an advanced computer system. Even Seth's memory of his encounter with the Walker on Earth before departing for Delmak-0 was part of the illusion. A SF writer like Asimov would leave a science fiction story in this place - with a plausible, materialistic explanation rather than a supernatural one. But Dick reignites the tension and cranks it up when we see Seth talk to the Walker-on-Earth and the Walker leads Seth off the ship and to a better reincarnation.

Commenter giospurs wondered after the last post: "What's the significance of the Intercessor existing outside of the polyencephalic world?" which brings up an interesting connection to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which was written pretty close to the time of A Maze of Death. In DADOES? you see Wilbur Mercer, this semi-real religious figure who helps Deckard out in his time of need. When I teach DADOES? one of the most frequently asked questions is "is Wilbur Mercer real?" and the response is a frustrating, 'yes, and, no.' For while something clearly happens to Deckard when he meets Mercer, there is no explanation for his appearance (or Deckard's wounds), at least no explanation that doesn't involve something supernatural. I guess I'm getting around to answering giospur's question by saying that if the Walker on Earth appears at the end, and saves Seth, doesn't that imply that the Walker was created by Seth's belief? After all, the Walker was created by the computer as a religious figure, an assemblage of savior archetypes that had no corporeal form outside the computer.

In these two novels it seems like if someone has enough faith, their faith can literally be 'embodied,' personified, but the manifestation requires faith . Deckard and Morely must believe - or be so bad off they're willing to believe anything for some simple relief. This faith, of course, compromises their objectivity which introduces doubt. The weaving of faith and technology in the these novels (Mercer uses a TV-like box to connect with his followers) makes it almost impossible to untangle these supposedly mutually exclusive world views at each novel's end.

As for the chapter headings: I think these are summaries of what the participants thought they would be seeing and doing in their planned polyencephalic world, but that their world didn't pan out as expected, not through the fault of technology, but because the characters themselves act out, in the polyencephalic world, their worst fear they have about their lives on the ship: that they will slip into private worlds of insanity. I love this bit:

"We could have survived the twenty years, Seth Morley said to himself, Knowing it would end; that would have kept us sane and alive. But the accident had come and now they circled, forever, a dead star. Their transmitter, because of the accident, functioned no longer, and so an escape toy, typical of those generally used in long, interstellar flights, had become the support for their sanity.
That's what really worries us, Morley realized. The dread that one by one we will slip into psychosis, leaving the others even more alone. More isolated from man and everything associated with man" (174)

This is a deep novel, and I think I still have a bit more to say about it. But this post is long enough. I'll pass this to you for more discussion in the comments section.

More Thoughts On Maze

Reading A Maze of Death late last night, I just about lost it when the crew of the raft encountered the gelatinous Tench beside the river. What an amazing scene! For some reason the cryptic written responses provided by the Tench reminded me of an image from the beginning of the novel I haven't been able to shake. Ben Tallchief holds the punch cards encoded with the information about his assignment,:

"Frowning, he studied the coded information, trying to decipher it. In numbers, punch-holes and letters it spelled out his new life, his world to come."

A few paragraphs later, Ben elaborates:

"He could not discover what his job would consist of. The letters, numbers and punch-holes failed to say, or perhaps it was more correct to say that he could not get them to divulge this one piece of information--a piece he would much have wanted."

I don't know why this image stuck with me, but I know why I remembered it when the Tench began responding in cryptic riddles. Wikipedia sorta gets that the Tench answers with particular hexagrams from the I Ching, but there's something more at work. The Tench conceives of language as an object, that's why it can communicate with the colonists only through the same kind the assimilation it uses to duplicate wristwatches. Language isn't information transmitted verbally, but from the Tench's perspective language has form. Isn't it interesting to compare the Tench's responses to the encoded info contained on the punch cards? In both cases the reification of language is literal, and the resulting signal loss obscures the meaning of the communication.

Here are some of the I Ching chapters that coincide with the Tench's responses:

"There are secret forces at work, leading together those who belong together. We must yield to this attraction; then we make no mistakes"

"Often a man feels an urge to unite with others, but the individuals around him have already formed themselves into a group, so that he remains isolated. He should then ally himself with a man who stands nearer to the center of the group and can help him gain admission to the closed circle"

"Every step, forward or backward, leads into danger. Escape is out of the question. The danger comes because one is too ambitious."

Notice that both the encoded information on Ben's punch-card and the Tench's prophesies concern future events. I think it's important to pay attention to how texts are working in Dick's novels. Here, we see two examples where the future seems to be laid out, set in stone, beforehand, but even so, this future is inaccessible and therefore unknowable.

Lost in A Maze of Death

Chapters 5 - 10 [minor spoilers ahead]

Something's rotten in the state of Delmak-0! Colonists are dropping like flies, inscriptions on buildings are changing, tiny model buildings (made on Earth) are shooting at people! It's crazy. What can I say? I have some theories about what's happening, but they're not very good.

Here are some things I'm paying attention to:

Numerous references to the egocentricity of the group. This is borne out not just by the doctor's psychological profiling before Ted and Morely arrive, but by the anguished inner dialog of the characters:

""I don't agree," Frazer said. "My preliminary testing indicates that by and large this is an inherently ego-oriented group. As a whole, Morley, they show what appears to be an innate tendency to avoid responsibility. It's hard for me to see why some of them were chosen.""

and

"Why aren't I in there? [Morely] asked himself. Functioning as part of the group. But the group didn't function as a group anyhow; it was always a finite number of self-oriented individuals squalling with one another. With such a bunch he felt as if he had no roots, no common source."

I think this repeated theme is significant -- especially in light of the building's inscription which seems to each person to indicate that they alone should enter. Anyone else entering the building would be killed, defeated, etc.

Please note, that although it has nothing to do with the story (so far at least) the cover of this DAW edition is awesome!

As I would say to my class, "Let's explore some of the imagery." In the comments, talk about what images are jumping out at you, what interpretations you've developed, details you think are relevant etc.. I'll get you started: How about Betty Jo Berm's suicide/murder by malaise?:

"The water will help, she said to herself. Because in water you no longer have to support your heavy body; you are not lifted into greater _mekkis_ but you do not care; the water erases everything. You are not heavy; you are not light. You are not even there.
I can't go on dragging my heavy body everywhere, she said to herself. The weight is too much. I cannot endure being pulled down any longer; I have to be free."

Reminds me of Ludwig Binswanger. Read this, then you'll know:

“Loneliness is an unhappy compound of having lost one's point of reference, of suffering the fate of individual and collective discontinuity and of living through or dying from a crisis of identity to the point of alienation of one's self.”

REMEMBER NO SPOILERS! (I've read through chapter 10)

The Maze's Entrance

I finished the first five chapters of Maze of Death yesterday and am enjoying the book. I think I either read it a really long time ago, or this is my first read, since it doesn't seem at all familiar to me. Maze was written in 1968, the same year PKD wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and I think the two books are quite similar, right down to the poop sheets and the kipple.

In Maze, Dick creates some amazing tension immediately by creating a science fictional world with a religious element - more specifically, a reality where matters of faith are 'technological,' where prayers are transmitted not on faith but by technological means (by connecting your pineal gland to the ship's transmitter). The disjunctive nature of this reality, where opposites like religion and technology overlap, works immediately to confound the expectations of the science fiction reader. Personally, it makes me suspicious. Dick later revisited this teleological juxtaposition brilliantly in Divine Invasion.

There have already been some very astute comments on the book in the last post. I agree with Joshua about the value of work, more specifically, doing something satisfying and creative as a vocation, rather than just working as a bureaucrat somewhere. I also think Nick made a good comment about each of the characters using a particular problem-solving mindset related to their career. This certainly seems to be a component in many mysteries (and of course Maze is most often compared to a kind of space age Agatha Christie murder mystery) and I remember this trope on repeats of 'Fantasy Island.'

Here are a few other things I noticed:

Interesting literary allusion to the Lord of the Rings in chapter one: Ben appears to be watching a 3-dimensional cinematic adaptation. Anyone know the books well enough to tell us if 'unsaying' is significant to Gandalf's character or the story in general? Here's a link to the passage quoted from The Two Towers. I think this allusion is relevant, but perhaps Dick just picked up the book closest as hand.

Ubikcan, in the comments of the last post, noted that the theological overtones of the book appeared relatively simple. Could be, I honestly don't know know where Dick is going with this, but I associate the term 'Destroyer of Forms' with Dick's novel The Cosmic Puppets. Rickman, in his intro to In His Own Words, writes:

"...Dick is fundamentally a moralistic writer, with a strong belief in Good and Evil literally battling for men's souls, battling on the shifting, untrustworthy fields of an ever shifting "reality." On the one hand, generally dominant, is Evil -- entropy, the Form Destroyer, the gubble god, the tomb world[...]"(26)

We'll simply have to wait and see where Dick takes us, but this reminds me of the bi-theistic cosmology Dick borrowed from Zoroastrianism, and used in novels throughout his career. I'll have more to say on this if it develops as a core theme of the book.

Did the repeated bits of dialog throw anybody else for a loop? For instance the bit about Color Theory prior to 1800, or the bit about the bugs that squeak at night. It's not the same conversation being heard by two different people, because it happens twice. Near the beginning of Chapter 3 the group discussion starts with the topic of cucumbers on Betelguese 4. Then the same conversation is repeated after Morley (the last colonist) arrives, this time at the beginning of Chapter 4. I'm hooked!

It was interesting to see the reference to, "Specktowsky's theory of God entering history and starting time into motion again" - as this is a central preoccupation in the Exegesis, from what I gather. I think it's worth noting that this idea appeared at least once in Dick's fiction years before 2-3-74.

Finally, from a character perspective, Morley is a fascinating protagonist, and Dick does some very economic characterization, during which we learn that, while likable and sympathetic, Morely has some issues. If I were teaching this book in a class I'd point my students to this quote:

"What have we in fact accumulated in eight years of work here? he asked himself. Nothing of any worth. And in addition, he could not get it all into the noser. Much would have to be thrown away or left for someone else to use. Better to destroy it, he thought gloomily. The idea of someone else gaining use of his possessions had to be sternly rejected. I'll burn every last bit of it, he told himself. Including all the nebbish clothes that Mary's collected in her jaybird manner. Selecting whatever's bright and gaudy" (pg 14).

Like Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Morley has a way to go, but the beautiful bit about Morely loving his mean old tomcat just the way it was, shows us he's capable of moral transformation - though in Dick's books these evolutions are often overwhelming, stirred by grave misfortune, and tend to last only as long as the protagonist remains in mortal danger. On a personal note, I have a very cranky cat, whom I love very much, so I figure I'm pretty well set.

Let's put the following quote in the file, so that when these 'writers' come along and proclaim Dick couldn't string a sentence together we have exhibit A:

"The Walker said, "Once years ago you had a tomcat whom you loved. He was greedy and mendacious and yet you loved him. One day he died from bone fragments lodged in his stomach, the result of filching the remains of a dead Martian root-buzzard from a garbage pail. You were sad, but you still loved him. His essence, his appetite--all that made him up had driven him to his death. You would have paid a great deal to have him alive again, but you would have wanted him as he was, greedy and pushy, himself as you loved him, unchanged. Do you understand?" (17).

What do you think about the first 5 chapters? (NO SPOILERS PLEASE) Keep those fantastic observations and discussion questions in the comments section.

Summer Reading Club

That's right, the fates, and your votes have spoken. I'll start reading Maze of Death tomorrow morning and hope to have a post or two up by the end of weekend. For now, use the comments section of this post as a place to get the discussion started.

I'll be reading the super-cool Bantam edition pictured above. My copy appears unread, and comes from 'Book Rack' in Paducah Kentucky (part of a collection of PKD paperbacks I bought on ebay). It'd be cool if someone had the LoA edition any case Lethem has added any footnotes.

Which One Will It Be?

So I've got about 11 days between the end of my summer semester and the beginning of the fall semester - just enough time to read one PKD novel. Let's pick a book and read it together. Based on the number of comments the idiocy in the last post generated, I know you're out there, looking for ways to stay out of trouble, so lets do a close read of something - nothing as ambitious as my attempt to blog The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (dont' worry I'll finish that as soon as the Chew-Z wears off), we'll just look at the themes, autobigraphical elements, allusions, literary analysis.

I have some preconditions. I don't want to read any of the later books, as I've read them all pretty recently, and they require too much research. Also, I don't want to read 3 Stigmata, Time Out of Joint, or Now Wait for Last Year. I'd like to read something I'm barely familiar with, or may not have even read, so here are some of my suggestions:

The Simulacra - don't think I ever finished it.
Martian Time-Slip - it's been too long
We Can Build You - a favorite worth revisiting
Dr Bloodmoney - East Bay locales, I could provide current photos
Maze of Death - probably Lethem's most interesting choice to include in the latest Library of America edition

Let's be democratic about this: makes suggestions and cast your vote in the comments section.

Update: Just to clarify, you are not obligated to vote for one of my picks above, you can suggest another novel. We'll decide on a book before the end of this weekend.

Just asked the I Ching which novel we should read, the result:
The present is embodied in Hexagram 43 - Kuai (Resolve): It is required that the culprit's guilt be exhibited in the royal court, along with a sincere and earnest appeal for sympathy and support, with consciousness of the peril involved in cutting off the criminal. He should also make announcement in his own city, and show that it will not be well to have recourse at once to arms. In this way there will be advantage in whatever he shall go forward to.

Any idea what book the oracle is suggesting?

Double Plus Good Update: After a casual tallying of the votes so far, Dr Bloodmoney and Maze of Death seem to be our two nominees, but the vote is quite close. I just looked at my bookshelf to discover I don't own a copy of Dr Bloodmoney.... so Maze of Death it is!

Third Library of America Volume to Include.....

I've been getting a lot of email regarding the third PKD volume from the Library of America. I went to the source and asked the volume's editor Jonathan Lethem. He responded this morning. Drum roll please.... Volume Three, titled VALIS and Later Novels, due out July 30, 2009, will include:

A Maze of Death
VALIS
The Divine Invasion
The Transmigration of Bishop Timothy Archer

The inclusion of A Maze of Death in this edition is perhaps Lethem's most controversial choice yet. Dick's irv is tailor-made for long-winded discussions over Cheetos and Mountain Dews about which books should be included in these kind of faux-canon-making endevors, but it is interesting to note that Lethem chose A Maze of Death over Radio Free-Albemuth. I like this selection as it compiles, in one edition, much of Dick's later, more overtly religious/cosmological work.

This has all got me thinking. I mean the Library of America is supposedly dedicated to 'preserving America's best and most significant writing,' but from my vantage point, there would be no volume three if the first two volumes had been duds. Perhaps the most Dickian assembly of this edition would include excerpts from the Exegesis, which would undoubtedly sell well (especially if it included previously unavailable entries), but would sort of undercut the LoA's reputation. Very few people have read the Exegesis in its entirety - perhas Sutin is the only one - so, by virtue of its obscurity, it cannot really be America's most significant writing.

In the world with that edition, Dick has managed to expose the LoA's hypocrisy and vault even his most far-flung theories onto the literati's bookshelves. His pulpish search for meaning has been upgraded, evolved onto onion skin paper - the literary establishment's seal of approval. To legitimize his own search for meaning, while de-legitimizing the medium of distribution, wow, that's pretty Dickian.