PKD Otaku #28 Tribute to Paul Williams Available Now!

 Yes, dear readers, you read that right. There is a new issue of PKD Otaku, the best Dick zine out there. And it just keeps getting better. The latest issue is dedicated -- with admiration and respect -- to Paul Williams who probably did more for PKD than anyone. And a truly good, human soul, who is missed. Download issue 28 here.

Paul Williams 1948-2013

Sad news, everyone. PKD's friend and former executor Paul Williams died last night after a long battle with early-onset dementia. According to Paul's wife (and dedicated saint) Cindy Lee Berryhill, "Rock-writer Paul S Williams, author and creator of CRAWDADDY magazine, (and my husband), passed away last night 10:30pm PST while his oldest son was holding his hand and by his side. It was a gentle and peaceful passing." 

Paul's contributions to Dick's career were the stuff of legends, and in addition to writing a feature on PKD for Rolling Stone Magazine, he also helmed the Philip K Dick Newsletter for a number of years with an embryonic Jonathan Lethem. 

I use an essay of Paul's in my freshmen composition class. It's about The Beatles song "The Things We Said Today" and it is has some of the best topic sentences I've ever read. 

Update: you can read that essay (Part of Williams' book The 20th Century's Greatest Hits) here - hopefully.

Name That Novel...

An interesting mystery emerged recently as I was researching Dick's use of multi-foci plots: In two separete interviews eight years apart Dick uses almost the exact same wording to describe where he got the inspiration for The Man in the High Castle's multi-foci plot.

First, Dick talks about multi-foci plots with Paul Williams in 1974, in interviews for the Rolling Stone article printed in Williams' Only Apparently Real.

Williams sets up the interview: "This theme of the relationship between an author and the worlds he creates was also touched on in a conversation a day earlier Oct 30, 1974. We had been talking of Phil's interest in the multicharactered realistic novels produced by students in the French department of Tokyo University after WWII....

D: What fascinated me was the economy of it, same structure [as the French realistic novels], but sparse. That's what I used in The Man in the High Castle.
Williams: Where you start off with one character, and then, in the next chapter introduce a new character and set them in motion towards one another, that sort of thing?
D: Right. And if you'll draw a diagram, you'll find that Childen is the first character, knows Tagomi, and ultimately they're all linked, but you can't say that any character knows all the other characters. I once diagrammed it.
W: And you never brought them all together in one room?
D: No, 'cause I thought that was dumb. That was like towards the end of this Japanese novel's structure, the grotesque scenes required to bring them all together, it became most of the work was spent figuring out how to get 'em all together.
What this all seems to me to, looking back on why I was drawn into it, why I didn't think much of the conventional novel structure,English/American, was that, well, first of all, the idea of a single protagonist. I never could understand that too well. But that's been forced on me, finally, that you have a viewpoint character who must subsume all the others, really, um, I guess [his voice gets squeaky], usually you gotta do that, but the thing that I've felt, Paul, is that problems are multipersonal, they involve us all, there's no such thing as a private problem"

This is such an important quote, as it explains where Dick got the inspiration for multi-foci plots, but, more importantly, it explains why Dick used the model and what he wanted to accomplish with it.

But Paul Williams never asks Dick to name either these students, or the novel where they used a multi-foci plot.

Then, almost eight years later, in 1981, Dick tells Gregg Rickman, in an interview printed in Philip K Dick: In His Own Words:

Rickman asks Dick about MITHC and Dick credits editor Pete Israel demanding significant revisions of Dick's draft. Then Dick says, "The structure of that novel [MITHC] is based on a structure used by students in the French department of Tokyo University after WWII [These are almost exactly the same words as Dick used to describe the structure to Williams]. That's an Oriental structure based on a French model. That's not a mainstream structure. That's a structure I worked out based on many diverse sources.

Notice, he's just made two different claims in almost adjoining sentences. So is it a structure he 'worked out' or did he borrow the whole thing from a novel? And how on Earth would Dick know about students' work at Tokyo University?

Also, Rickman doesn't bother to ask the name of the book or author.

So, Italian Dick-Head Scholar Umberto Rossi did a little Wikipedia research and discovered two writers who fit the bill:

Kenzaburo Oe:

"At the age of 18 he began to study French literature at the University of Tokyo, where he wrote his dissertation on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. He began publishing stories in 1957 while still a student, strongly influenced by contemporary writing in France and the United States."

Oe was 18 in 1953.

And

Shohei Ooka:

"He graduated from Kyoto Imperial University School of Literature. Raised to study literature from early childhood, he mastered French while in high school. (...) After graduation, Ōoka became a journalist (...) but quit after one year to devote himself to the study and translate the works of the French writer, Stendhal, and other European writers into Japanese. (...) He was also a lecturer on French literature at Meiji University in Tokyo."

Ooka was born in 1909.

There are two problems with these guys: 1) It doesn't look like Oe's work was translated and published in English prior to Dick writing The Man in the High Castle [though Umberto and I are still looking to confirm this] and 2) Umberto has read Ooka's novel Fires on the Plain, of which he says, "It's a wonderful war novel, translated into English in the late Fifties, but it's terribly single plot."

So who the heck is PKD talking about and where did find this model for his multi-foci plots? Anyone out there have a clue about this? I've got a couple sources I can ask, but I love that this mystery is so utterly Dickian. More later.

Stuff From All Over

I'm right in the middle of a huge stack of papers to grade, but the PKD-related news stops for no man. Here are a few interesting items.

First, this touching story from the Fort Morgan Times in Colorado about people leaving stuff at Phil's grave. "Toy and stuffed sheep are frequently placed at the tombstone of Philip K. Dick, who was buried at Riverside in spite of his family's wishes because he wanted to be interred next to his twin sister, who died in Fort Morgan in infancy." Except of course, Jane died in Chicago, not Fort Morgan....

Second, a few MP3s of interviews Dick did with Paul Williams have turned up on the web. Nothing new, but perhaps if you've been trying to find these interviews you're now in luck. They're worth listening to. In the interview Dick talks about Robert Heinlein, parenting, Now Wait For Last Year, Mussolini, writing novels, along with some great stuff on Jung, Freud, and Kurt Vonnegut. Interesting error. Phil is totally wrong when he says "Freud never left Vienna."

Finally, in this review of Lethem's new book, Chronic City, which is garnering a lot of attention, the author writes: "Lethem's love of New York, his heartfelt appreciation of the city and its boundless possibilities, enables him to not get lost in the ether in the way that Dick (who, it must be said, was absolutely a child of Los Angeles) almost always did."

Why must that be said? Perhaps because it isn't true, and without at least one person unafraid of error we may never have heard that sentence uttered...?

Now that these are all assembled I notice the common theme is that each article contains at least one substantive error, but such is life.

Paul Williams Benefit Concert

I received an email yesterday from Electric Shepherd Productions announcing a benefit concert for former PKD-executor and founder of Crawdaddy magazine, Paul Williams, who as I recently wrote, needs full time care after a long, slow decline following a bicycle accident. The concert is in San Francisco on June 28th, and sounds like a good show based on the lineup they've put together, above and beyond the good cause it's supporting. Perhaps this is an opportunity for a gathering of bay area Dick-heads, as we could meet up and get some drinks while we watch the show. Let me know in the comments if you are interested. If you don't know about Paul Williams's contributions to our culture's ultimate embrace of PKD's novels, well, you just aren't paying attention. Redeem yourself by reading Paul's 1975 feature on PKD for Rolling Stone magazine here. And if you doubt Paul's (and Crawdaddy magazine's) contributions to pop culture, remember, he rode to Woodstock in the Grateful Dead's limo. Then read this interview Crawdaddy arranged between William Burroughs and Jimmy Page. More on Williams here.

Buy your tickets here. Hope to see you at the show.

Paul Williams Website and Support Fund

Jonathan Lethem emailed me recently to let me know that he and the family of Paul Williams have set up a great website and support fund for Paul. Paul suffered a rather serious bike accident in 1995 that resulted in a serious brain injury . According to the website, Paul has developed early-onset dementia and now needs full-time care.

If you don't know who Paul Williams is (no, not the 'Rainbow Connection' musician), you're probably only reading this website after Googling the word 'Dick' for one reason or another, as Paul basically introduced PKD to the world at large with his Rolling Stone article and interview that focused on the break-in at PKD's Santa Venetia apartment. Paul Williams got John Lennon to read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Paul Williams got Confessions of a Crap Artist published. Paul Williams started and maintained the Philip K Dick Society Newsletters, which is where I learned about half the stuff I know about PKD, stuff you can't read anywhere else.

Be sure to check out the Writings section at PaulWilliams.com, to get a sense for how wide his interests and expertise ranged. As Lethem wrote in his email, "He stands as a signal figure in the history of "fan writing", too -- at that crossroads where blogging was a twinkle in a mimeograph eye." Not only that, Paul rode to Woodstock in the Grateful Dead's limo.

I use a couple sections from Paul's book The 20th Century's Greatest Hits: A Top 40 List in my freshman composition class. It's brilliantly written, very conversational, yet at the same time, deep, wide-ranging, touching, and passionate. If you're dying to discover the real artistic jewels of the last century, it's a great read.

I know these are tough times for many of us economically, but I'm asking you to donate. I've donated $20 - I wish I could give more, but I'm a teacher in California....

Helping Out the Internets!

First the paid aggregators over at Boingboing dug up Paul Williams' 1975 interview with PKD and posted a link on their site. I chimed in with some additional information about Kent Bellows' illustration:

"Excellent find! This is a fantastic article, probably the best ever written about Philip K Dick. Williams’ interviews (which he eventually collected in a book titled Only Apparently Real) capture Dick had his bullshitting best. In the book Dick even tells Williams that the amphetamines he had been taking for years had been filtered out of his bloodstream by his liver before he even got high!

But I wanted to add some information about the illustration, which was done by GK ‘Kent’ Bellows, who was given the assignment by his friend, Greg Scott, an assistant art director at Rolling Stone. Scott wrote in an email regarding the picture:

“Paul's accounts of the break-ins plus Phil's general paranoia led to Kent's idea of an alien sneaking into Phil's house. The tentacled monster was inspired by the 50s movie 'It Came From Beneath the Sea' (Google image search for it, you'll see a few stills of the monster).

Kent always did extensive photo research for his paintings, thus, his chair, lamp, rubber plant, and so forth were used for props. Personal photos of Phil that were provided by Williams inspired the open corduroy jacket, hairy chest and necklace….Kent himself did model for the body, posed in the chair, and yes, I do think that there was a somewhat vicarious self-portrait lurking within the whole idea. Like Phil, Kent was an artist; he used drugs to enhance the creative process, had tempestuous relationships, an unusually wild imagination, etc... There's no question that Kent identified with Phil on many levels.

(Later, Kent was obsessed with self-portraits in general... which you may have gleaned from much of his work that can be found online).”

Kent, who unexpectedly passed away in 2005, was a huge PKD fan. Dick very much liked the portrait, and, in fact, met Kent and even officiated an informal marriage ceremony for Kent and his girlfriend Liz. Check out Kent’s work here. And order Williams’ book here. "

Then, yesterday, the paid aggregators over at io9.com got a hold of the interview and zeroed in on this quote from PKD:

"With High Castle, and Martian Time-Slip, I thought I had bridged the gap between the experimental mainstream novel and science fiction. Suddenly I'd found a way to do everything I wanted to do as a writer. I had in mind a whole series of books, a vision of a new kind of science fiction progressing from those two novels. Then Time-Slip was rejected by Putnam's and every other hardcover publisher we sent it to.

My vision collapsed. I was crushed. I had made a miscalculation somewhere, and I didn't know where. The evaluation I had made of myself, of the marketplace, went poof! I reverted to a more primitive concept of my writing. The books that might have followed Time-Slip were gone."

Of course, Williams and PKD biographer Gregg Rickman have pointed out PKD is misremembering Martian Time-Slip as following The Man in the High Castle. In fact, Dick wrote We Can Build You immediately after TMITHC, and it's a much better fit for the novel PKD is describing in the interview. In fact, We Can Build You is one of my favorite PKD novels. While some fans feel the novel moves too slowly, I enjoy the pacing, which I would call Pastoral SF.

Of course my long-time readers remember my semi-regular, self-righteous tirades over schlocky PKD reporting like this when the blog first started. What can I say? I'm mellowing....

We Can Build You was a very difficult sell for PKD, and was serialized in Amazing Stories in 1970. Dick talks about We Can Build You in an interview with D Scott Appel:

"I wrote [We Can Build You] while I was trying to fuse my mainstream stuff with my science fiction stuff, so it's not quite science fiction, in the usual sense of the word. Finally Ted White [the then-editor for Amazing Stories], who knew of the existence of manuscript, asked for it so he could publish it in a magazine. Ted added a final chapter to it, because -- as it well know -- writers are incapapble of writing their own books. (...) If it wasn't for kindly editors, who are your best friends, who'll help you out by adding another chapter, or removing one here or there, or turning one inside out, or changing all the names or whatever, you'd never have gotten off the ground" (as printed in Pink Beam: A PKD Companion 107).

Of course, Ted White remembered it differently.

Regardless, We Can Build You should be noted as a significant milestone in PKD's career, as he was able to successfully (at least in my opinion) combine intense character study (of dark haired girl Pris and her relationship with protagonist Louis) and a SF story about a manufacturing firm that begins manufacturing simulacrum to avoid going out of business.

Lord RC, however, disagrees, writing in Pink Beam: "We Can Build You, then, cannot be said to be a successful melding of science fiction and mainstream writing. In this novel PKD scrambles through the science fiction aspects in his rush to explore the relationship between Louis and Pris. And this relationship is, like many in his mainstream novels, about as gloomy as you can get."

Read the book and decide for yourselves.

PKD's Relationship to Academia

Loyal reader Giovanni posed this thought-provoking question to me in an email:

I know that something you often discuss on your blog is how Dick would react to the LoA releases and a "new-found" importance attached to his work by literary critics. I found an interview (in the PKD Otaku #4) that was in The Aquarian in 1978, in which Joe Vitale posed an interesting question to PKD:

AQUARIAN: "In terms of broad acceptance, science fiction has undergone quite a change in the last few years. Always considered a popular, inferior brand of writing, it has now been accepted, not only by the masses but by the academic community. Science fiction courses are now part of almost every English department, people are doing theses and doctoral dissertations on science fiction. What do you think of all this?"

DICK: "I hate it. I just hope we can survive it. You know, we've survived complete obscurity. We survived complete condescension, the "are you people really doing anything serious?" attitude. I hope we can survive acceptance. It's really the most dangerous thing. You know, sometimes I think it's all a plot, to praise you and accept you and treat you like a serious literary form. Because in that way they can guarantee your demise. The only thing that's worse than being treated as "not serious" is being treated as "serious." I'd much rather be ignored. And this "scholarly" science fiction criticism is the worst. You know, if they can't destroy you by ignoring you, they can destroy you by annexing you. They, the literary critics, write these incredibly turgid articles which see all this "meaning" in your writing. The end result, I guess, is to drive all your readers away screaming."

Perhaps a more interesting example of PKD's reaction to academic interest can be found in an interview PKD did with Paul Williams Oct 30, 1974:

PKD: "...Nobody can get as much out of a book of mine as I did. Because I'm deeper into it. I know more than they do. But that isn't really true, because people will point out things -- especially academic people will point out things that I didn't know about my books, that I never noticed... I read this article... New Worlds for Old [David Ketterer's book--New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature]...there's a thing about Man in the High Castle, and it explains that the pin on Juliana Frink's blouse is the symbol that holds everything together...And actually it holds her blouse together. But I didn't know it held everything together...he sees the relationship between the fact that the pin is jewelry...Now he's probably right and I never realized it."

Williams adds in brackets [From his tone of voice, Phil brought up the subject to mock the critic, and then as we spoke convinced himself that the critic was probably right]

Immediately after this bit in the interview Dick realizes the connection between the pin holding Julia's blouse together and the fish necklace the delivery woman wore that fateful day she delivered his pain medication. This is an example of criticism at its best: right or wrong, if it gets someone (even the author) thinking about literature in new ways it can't be bad. Of course this notion is complicated when, for PKD, thinking about his literature meant thinking about the events in his life that inspired it, but this is different, not impossible. In an earlier interview with Williams, Dick describes his attitude towards his own education:

PKD: "...I was very lucky, I had a powerful unconscious. It drove me out of the academic community, it drove me out of double-domed intellectual pursuits... Egghead stuff that I was into. It drove me out of cloistered realms where I would have been cut off from the broader, truer world, and drove me into the real world. It drove me into a job, and marriage, and a career in writing, and a more substantial life.... I found that I couldn't go into a class and listen to discourses on Locke and Mill and Hobbes, but I could read the books. And I could drive all the way across the Rocky Mountains and things like that and fix my car and stuff, you know, I carved out a broader reality."

I think these quotes shed a lot of light on Dick's attitudes. I mean who needs college if you can teach yourself about anything you're interested in? What's more, if you're a scholar in your free time, you might think professional academics are little more than paid dilettantes. But at the same time, Dick throws around so many high-powered literary allusions it kind of seems like he expects a more serious reader than the average Asimov fan out for a jaunt on the dark side.

But you send PKD back to the twelfth century and he'd be a world-class scholastic (the word Scholasticism is derived from the Latin word scholasticus, the Latinized form of the Greek σχολαστικός scholastikos, “scholastic”); they were the first serious academic types to attempt to fuse and/or reconcile Biblical theology and Aristotelian thought. Something tells me a professor who had both PKD and Thomas Aquinas in his class would have a tough time getting a word in edgewise.