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.
