The Grammar of We Can Build You

As I mentioned in my return-from-beyond-the-way-over-there post yesterday, one of the things that inspired me to get back to blogging about Dick is my recent reread of We Can Build You. I have done a fair amount of work on this book in the past, most of it right here on this blog, and this research turned out to be super useful on this rereading.

Of course, We Can Build You, is a lesser known Dick novel, in fact it sat on his shelf, unsold, for basically ten years. It's not a novel I would give to someone as their introduction to Dick (that would be Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). But it's always been a favorite of mine and I think it's an important "android" novel.

One thing I realized on this read through was that We Can Build You was unsold when Dick wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. One way to read the pair of novels is as existing in the same world, and telling the story of the rise of the Rosen family. There are lots of similarities including the production and use of "mood organs" (still one of my favorite Dick gadgets, and not just cause Wilder Penfield was my grandmother's uncle). But another way to read the two novels is to imagine Dick is cannibalizing his unpublished novel to stock We Can Build You (Dick would similarly pull the Isidore character from DADOES? from Confessions of a Crap Artist (which was also unpublished at the time).

In this way, We Can Build You can be read as a rare first draft of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,  which is a much better plotted, thought out, and executed novel. We Can Build You, while it has a lot to recommend it, has one of the worst endings in the entire Dick irv. I told my reading group discussing this book (with very mixed reviews btw) that this novel felt like a demo-tape, like a bonus track that allows you some additional insight into an artist's creative process.

But here's what got me upon rereading: on the second page of the novel, in a rare first person narration, Louis Rosen explains, "Now, this enormous balance in favor of the spinet over the electronic organs, in terms of sales, led to an exchange between I and my partner, Maury Rock; and it was heated too."

Did you catch it? "led to an exchange between I and my partner"? - check out the grammar error. It should be "me and my partner." Grammatically speaking, in this sentence Louis ("I") is the object and not the subject. I tell my students that to check for this error they should remove the other pronouns in the sentence. You wouldn't say "this led to an exchange with I."

Louis makes this exact grammatical error at least three times in the novel (as of now though I only have the first example marked. If you find the others let me know). I'd be willing to bet any amount money that this is not Dick making a proofreading error.

So what does it mean? Well luckily I already stumbled on the answer. Even though I'd never spotted the grammar issue in previous reads, I had connected the novel to one of Dick's favorite existential psychologists, Rollo May, who had this to say:

"...I have described the human dilemma as the capacity of man to view himself as object and as subject. My point is that both are necessary -- necessary for psychological science, for effective therapy, and for meaningful living. I am also proposing that in the dialectical process between these two poles lies the development, and the deepening and widening, of human consciousness. The error on both sides -- for which I have used Skinner and the pre-paradox Rogers as examples -- is the assumption that one can avoid the dilemma by taking one of its poles. It is not simply that man must learn to live with the paradox -- the human being has always lived in this paradox or dilemma, from the time that he first became aware of the fact that he was the one who would die and coined a word for his own death. Illness, limitations of all sorts, and every aspect of our biological state we have indicated are aspects of the deterministic side of the dilemma -- man is like the grass of the field, it withereth. The awareness of this, and the acting on this awareness, is the genius of man the subject. But we must also take the implications of this dilemma into our psychological theory. Between the two horns of this dilemma, man has developed symbols, art, language, and the kind of science which is always expanding in its own presuppositions. The courageous living within this dilemma, I believe, is the source of human creativity." (Psychology and the Human Dilemma, 1967, p. 20)

I'm sure some of you are thinking that I'm reading too much into this. All I can say is you're wrong. This connection is the reason for the repeated grammar error.

May's observation is literalized in the character of Rosen. The human dilemma involves the fact that we can observe ourselves as objects, taking note of how we feel and what we want, while also conceiving of ourselves as subjects, agents capable of seeking out and satisfying our desires.

Why is this weird? Well, I'll bet there's something you do in your life that you're aware of and don't like. Perhaps you eat more than you feel is right, or you can't seem to stop smoking DMT, or you're dating someone you know is toxic and dangerous for you. You are acting as a subject in a way that you dislike when observing yourself as an object.  We contain multitudes.

In terms of Louis Rosen's character this existential bifurcation plays out in a number of ways, most notably his vacillating between action and reflection. He surprises himself by suddenly threatening Sam K Barrows. At other times, Rosen is simply passive, going with the flow of the family and business associates around him.

I've written about the weird saga of the story's end. When Ted White bought the manuscript to run in Amazing Stories, he wrote a four page ending, sent if off to Dick who changed three words, and then ran it. When DAW bought the novel, after its appearance in Amazing, White's ending was cut.

Here's an amazing PDF archive for Amazing Stories. Scans of the ending can be read at the bottom of this post. I'd never read White's conclusion. And you should read it before going on, because, spoiler alert...

I think White's ending feels gimmicky and half-hearted. I also think White's ending throws the whole mental asylum part of the plot into question: can you drug a robot into a fugue state? - asking for a friend.

But I think White was picking up a thread that Dick dropped earlier in the novel. When Louis Rosen is first shown the Stanton simulacrum, Rosen fears that he, himself, might be an android. I always read this as a revealing psychological insight, but perhaps Dick was toying with this hard reverse before giving it up.

Androids complicate May's dichotomy. Do these robots belong to their creators as objects, or are they entitled to their own identity and freedom? Can they transcend their programming to become more than they are designed to be, agents with a will that can truly be said to be their own?

The fact that Dick could use a grammatical error to open this can of worms, in a lesser known work that very few people think ranks as a great novel, well that was inspiring to me. And the fact that I spotted it and tracked down what I think is its significance made me think I need to get back to reading Dick, cause this kind of stuff doesn't happen with the other writers I love, James Baldwin, Dashiell Hammett, and T.S. Eliot, to name three.

I recognized something about myself, when reflecting on myself as an object, and then I decided to do something about it, as a subject.

My 'Eureka' Moment

Regular readers will remember the whole Did-PKD-See-It's-A-Wonderful-Life debate that's been simmering for the last couple of years. Read this post where I lay out the significance of the film in relation to PKD's irv.. Other scholars have taken note - and this certainly wasn't my idea - but there have also been doubters. Commenters on my various IAWL-related posts have said things like:

"Without looking it up I'd suggest that the theatrical showings of IAWL were during a period when Phil would have generally avoided going to public places such as movie theaters (the Sutin and Rickman biographies should have info concerning this) and I seem to recall that he was essentially a TV non-watcher at least until 1958 or so which would certainly decrease the probability that he saw IAWL on TV before writing "A Glass Of Darkness" or very early in his writing career. As far as I know, IAWL was never cited by Phil as an influence."

and this:

"What proof or evidence is there that he saw the movie, read the story, listened to the radio play or even read or heard about it?"

Readers were naturally skeptical. Both Kleo Mini and Anne Dick said the movie was far too schmaltzy for PKD's taste. It began to look like we'd never be able to prove that Dick was familiar with the film. Maybe you don't care if the story and Dick's work are connected, but, for me, the film offers a unique and useful lens through which we can view PKD's work.

So, today, while reading the final pages of We Can Build You I was rather blown away by the following passage:

Soon we were in a 'copter, the property of the Kasanin Clinic, flying above the rooftops of Kansas City. The air was cool and crisp and below us a million lights glowed in countless patterns and aimless constellations which were not patterns at all, only clusters.
"Do you think," I said, "that every time someone dies, a new light winks on in Kansas City?"

I immediately seized on this as a rather obvious reworking of the famous like in It's A Wonderful Life, "Every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings." Interestingly, Louis Rosen is talking to members of the mental health corps, people who Louis seems to feel have saved him from suicide. Remember an angel stopped George Bailey from committing suicide in the film. Louis continues:

"Do you two know what would have happened to me," I said, "if there was no compulsory mental health program? I'd be dead by now. This all saved my life, literally."

Suffice it to say, I was pretty proud of myself. I thought I had found the proverbial missing link, and so I was eager to share my findings with some folks on the PKD litserv. British PKD scholar Andrew Butler, whose work I respect tremendously, responded quickly, pointing out that the line also seems to resonate with this line in Peter Pan:

"Every time a child says, 'I don't believe in fairies,' there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead."

Could this be the end of our humble blogger's pet theory?

I think Butler's observation is quite astute. Let's look at the passage again:

"Do you think," I said, "that every time someone dies, a new light winks on in Kansas City?"

This 'witticism' (as Rosen terms it) seems to be suggesting that Kansas City is a kind of afterlife. If this is related to the bell ringing/angel winging notion of IAWL then Rosen seems to be suggesting that a person's death (like the ringing of the bell) results in something positive happening in heaven (AKA Kansas City) but this is ass-backwards, in other words Kansas City thrives on death. Its angels (the mental health corp) benefit not from saving people but by failing to save them. To me, this seems consistent with Dick's critique of the soulless psychiatric industry in the novel.

If the witticism is a reference to Peter Pan, Rosen seems to be suggesting a different kind of reversal. Here, instead of a fairy dying as the result of unbelief, death causes a light to come on. In other words, Kansas City thrives on death and faithlessness rather than on life and faith. Both interpretations capture the nihilistic despair Rosen seems to be feeling.

So, I'd say it's time to put It's a Wonderful Life back on my Netflix cue. And if you haven't seen it, you really should. Again, whether Dick is actually referencing the movie here is a lot less important than the insight the movie can provide into PKD's irv.

Commence to skepticizing in the comments.

But let's not forget that TV series pitch in Shifting Realities:

"TV Series Idea" (1967)

Location: The gray, foggy landscape of Heaven. "We Are Watching You, Inc.," a small guardian angel organization consisting of Anastasia Kelp, the owner, a Paul Douglas type; Miss Theola Feather, the phone operator, receptionist, and secretary; Morris Nimbleman, the research director; the protagonist, Herb DeWinter, in charge of field operations; Ludlow Orlawsky, sales manager; Fred Engstrom, repairman for the field equipment that Herb uses on his trips back and forth between Earth and Heaven. "We Are Watching You, Inc.," is a small outfit among several giants, but its record of bailing Earthlings out of jams is virtually 100 percent; it's a small but proud, fine old "handcrafted" firm, beset with worries

We Can Re-Build You

Snapped from the Interaether by devoted Dick-head Laura, this twitpic, captioned "Phil hanging out, having a chat," was posted on January 5th 2011 by @hansonrobotics, an outfit that most recently made headlines when they misplaced the head of the their last PKD-bot on a transcontinental flight (Hanson Robotics subsequently sued the airlines and lost).

So, new head, I'm guessing.

Further research lead to the discovery of this tweet posted Jan. 4:

"We are excited to welcome the new Philip K. Dick robot to the Hanson family."

Then I discovered this video on YouTube, supposedly of the new PKD-bot. I wouldn't know; the video wasn't working when I visited. The caption reads:

"Hanson Robotics just rebuilt the Philip K. Dick Android! To replace the android that we lost in 2005, Dutch public broadcasting corporation VPRO sponsored this new robotic Phil. The robot is smarter and more sophisticated than ever, and is growing smarter all the time. Phil lives!!"

Hanson Robotics' website is not particularly helpful and I was unable to find any further info. But I did find this quote:

"This robot [I think they're talking about the Albert Einstein one] tracks faces and sound, percieves [sic] facial expressions, and mimics the user’s facial expressions. Our belief is that understanding human expressions can help to model human empathy and enable machine empathy."

Straight out of a Phil Dick book, man! Now I'm no cyberneticist, but that sounds like BS to me. Notice how that word 'understanding' suddenly pops up in the second sentence. 'Recognizing' and 'understanding' are not the same thing. Similarly, these machines demonstrate the difference between 'being alive' and 'being on.' Obviously we are a ways away from the technology depicted in We Can Build You, which, ironically, is set in the 1980s.

Here's some video of the PKD-machine 1.0.



But more to the point, now that Hanson Robotics has rebuilt their Philip K Dick automaton, I have to admit that this brings me no joy. I have no desire to meet it, to hear its canned responses to inane questions. The joy people seem to enjoy from these pale homo-imitations, whether they're at Disney Land, Chuck E Cheese, or pretending to be a quirky science fiction writer, comes not from the fact that these automatons mimic our behavior accurately, but that they mimic it at all. In other words, these robots get laughs whether their responses are uncannily human, or idiotically out of place.

These machines don't get any closer to consciousness than my answering machine, but I think we tend to see consciousness in something shaped like us. And that's weird and fascinating to me, but I'm not going to lose sleep imagining that sentient beings are being constructed and exploited against their will by Hanson Robotics. I prefer to imagine Hanson Robotics as a harmless, blooper-prone operation toiling away at the impossible while foolishly insisting it is almost within its grasp.

This new PKD-bot has a sort of Michael Savage-separated-birth-thing happening.

Diving Into We Can Build You

I'm about a hundred pages into We Can Build You and am just loving it. This is a book I've read a number of times - even wrote pretty extensively on it in grad school (I'm looking for the file and hope to post it) - but, for some reason, I'm getting a lot more out of it during this read.

First off, pictured above and below is a mural Anne Dick made in the bathroom of her Point Reyes home during her marriage to PKD. I took the photo during one of my visits to Anne a year or so ago. This is the never-before-seen thing I mentioned in the last post.

This is how PKD describes the mural in WCBY:

"[Pris] was seated on the floor in the living room wearing pink pedal pushers. Her hair was cut short and in the years since I had seen her she had lost weight. Spread around her lay colored tile; she was in the process of cracking the tile into irregular pits with a huge pair of long-handled cutting pliers.
"Come look at the bathroom," she said, hopping up. I followed warily after her.
On the bathroom walls she had sketched all sorts of sea monsters and fish, even a mermaid; she had already partially tiled them with every color imaginable. The mermaid had red tiles for tits, one bright tile in the center of each breast" (23).

Apparently the tile mural was damaged a few years ago when a full-figured maid slipped in the tub while cleaning it and fell through one of the walls, but this has been repaired. One of the things that interests me about this book is the character Pris and how closely she has been associated with Anne, which of course makes sense, but when looking a little closer, I see the biographical origins of her character as more complex.

I think it's interesting that at one point, Dick ascribes his own psychological history to Pris. Louis narrates:

While he ate his breakfast Maury told me about her development. Originally she had been a withdrawn child, what they call encapsulated or introverted. She kept to herself, had all sorts of secrets, such as a diary and private spots in the garden. Then, when she was about nine years old she started having fears at night, fears so great that by ten she was up a good deal of the night roaming about the house. When she was eleven she had gotten interested in science; she owned a chemistry set and did nothing after school but fiddle with that--she had few or no friends, and didn't seem to want any.
It was in high school that real trouble had begun. She had become afraid to enter large public buildings, such as classrooms, and even feared the bus. When the doors of the bus closed she thought she was being suffocated. And she couldn't eat in public. Even if one single person was watching her, that was enough, and she had to drag her food off by herself, like a wild animal. And at the same time she had become compulsively neat. Everything had to be in its exact spot. She'd wander about the house all day, restlessly, making certain everything was clean--she'd wash her hands ten to fifteen times in a row" (32).

So, at this point I think it's an oversimplification to say that Pris is a depiction of Anne.

I'm actually looking forward to seeing what Rickels has to say about WCBY. As difficult as his prose is, I think he may be able to offer some insight. Specifically, I am intrigued by Louis Rosen's reaction to meeting the Stanton simulacrum: Louis begins to suspect he, himself, might be a simulacrum, a mechanical replacement of a man no longer living. This is odd to me. Many people with mental illness, especially paranoia and schizophrenia, see others as possible simulacra - this is actually quite common, and I think related to Viktor Tausk's notion of the "Influencing Machine" in schizophrenia. But Rosen's preoccupation with his own inauthenticity is different and I hope Rickels can point to a specific case study that features this idee fixe (as he does with Richard Kongrosian's phobic body odor in The Simulacra). Perhaps this may shed some light on Rosen's preoccupation. Rollo May wrote:

"I have described the human dilemma as the capacity of man to view himself as object and as subject. My point is that both are necessary -- necessary for psychological science, for effective therapy, and for meaningful living. I am also proposing that in the dialectical process between these two poles lies the development, and the deepening and widening, of human consciousness."

I think Pris shares a lot in common with Ellen West, one of Ludwig Binswanger's more famous patients. The problem is most of Binswanger's work is written in German so it's hard to study (interested parties should consult Rollo May's anthology on Existential Psychology Existence). You can read a very short account of West's life here. West was an anorexic who battled depression, but as a gifted poet she provided her analysts with incredibly vivid depictions of her mental illness and elements of these accounts appear almost verbatim in some of Dick's books. West talked extensively of a 'tomb world.' Boeree writes:

"Ellen, somewhere in her childhood, has split her life into two opposing camps: On the one hand there is the "tomb world," which includes her physical and social existence. Her body, with its low needs, distracts her from her purposes. It gets older every day. Her society is bourgeois and corrupt. The people around her seem oblivious to all the evil and all the suffering. In the tomb world, everything is degenerate and degenerating, everything is being pulled down, into the grave, into a hole.

On the other hand there is the "ethereal world," the world of the soul, pure and clean, a world where what needs to be done is done, where acts are effortless because unencumbered by the weight of matter. In the ethereal world, we can be free and fly.

There are some people who try to ignore the "ethereal world." They don't like the anxieties and responsibilities that come with freedom. Some would rather be told what to do, and so join a cult or a gang or a multinational corporation. But they are still frightened, because they know this isn't right. They are not living their life, and so they can never be happy" (read the rest here).

Like West, Pris battles weight loss and despair. Louis describes Pris:

"...the skinniness of her body put the capper on the effect: she looked to me like a dance of death creation animated in some weird way, probably not through the usual assimilation of solid and liquid foods . . . perhaps she chewed only walnut shells. But anyhow, from one standpoint she looked good, although unusual to say the least. For my money, however, she looked less normal than the Stanton" (23)

I'm going to stop here. Not that I don't have a lot more to say, but the first rule in blogging is 'Don't write too much because people won't read it'

Stay tuned for more, including the hidden double meaning in the title....

We Can't Read It For You

Other projects have kept me from my reading and, to be honest, I'm just a few pages into We Can Build You. I haven't delved into secondary sources yet either. Just want to kind of read the book with an open mind. I noticed a couple things right off the bat:

WCBY is written in the first person! I've never made a serious survey of the different perspectives Dick used and when, but stories of his written with the 'I' voice are not particularly common - especially during this period in Dick's career. According to most of the bibliographic studies, Dick wrote Man in the High Castle, then Martian Time Slip, then We Can Build You (Dick characteristically mis-remembers this ordering in his most famous interview with Paul Williams) - and of course WCBY hiked a long, painful road to publication. But PKD's blending of high-brow literary techniques and science fiction settings makes his writing particularly interesting to me.

Much like Galactic Pot-Healer (and many of Dick's other books) lots of PKD fans have mixed feelings about WCBY - the most common criticism being the slow pacing which makes the book boring for some. I have a new pet theory that the first-person narration may not allow the novel to switch perspectives, a technique Dick uses to keep his early books moving. Question for the comment section: Are there any other early novels written say after Man in the High Castle but before Ubik that are in the first person? Dick's most famous use of first person is in the remarkable personage of Angel Archer in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. What we may be seeing in WCBY is an early stab at the immediacy of the first person voice lifted from mainstream or high-brow literature and spliced into pulp-sf. This experiment may be boring for some, but I think the mundane aspects of the novel are precisely the place where it gets interesting.

We Can Build You is very autobiographical - from the very first organ ad seen in the paper which was inspired by PKD and Anne Dick's search for a piano in the house. And of course, there's the Jaguar:

"The Mark VII Saloon Model Jaguar is an ancient huge white car, a collector's item, with fog lights, a grill like the Rolls, and naturally hand-rubbed walnut, leather seats, and many interior lights. Maury kept his priceless old 1954 Mark VII in mint condition and tuned perfectly, but we were able to go no faster than ninety miles an hour on the freeway which connects Ontario with Boise."

Sutin writes: "For Phil, one of the greatest joys of his new "good life" was sports cars. [Phil and Anne] bought a used Peugot then traded it for a '53 white Jaguar Mark VII Saloon with a mahogany dashboard, gray leather upholstery, and a sunroof. Phil cranked it out to 96 MPH on the freeway."

Anne Dick writes a lot about the connection the autobiographical connections in We Can Build You and I'll get into those soon enough. For now, I just wanted to let you know I'm reading the book and should have more to say about it over the weekend.

We Can Build You It Is!

The results are in! I've just one last stack of essays to grade before diving into We Can Build You. A cursory search reveals there's been more written about WCBY than I would have first expected. So I will begin reading the book and gathering secondary sources for our upcoming discussion as soon as I get these essays out of the way.

Obviously, Ubik was a close second. Let's plan on getting to to that over the summer!

Ted White's Response

Yesterday, I posted a long excerpt from a PKD interview, during which Dick goes off on Amazing Stories editor Ted White. Read that here. At least one commenter requested an airing of White's side so here it is. White responded to Dick's allegations about We Can Build You in a letter to the Philip K Dick Society Newsletter:

"I've been wondering when the Appel/Briggs interview with Phil Dick would crop up in the newsletter. I was shown a copy of this interview in ms. form in 1979 or 1980 and I was disturbed at the time by the wholly erroneous description of the events surrounding the publication of We Can Build You in Amazing as "A. Lincoln, Simulacrum." I write now in an effort to set the record straight, although my disappointment with Phil has worn off since his death.
[...]
I'd heard about the novel, as he says, from someone at Scott Meredith - maybe from when I worked there (1963), or perhaps later, I no longer recall -- and when I became editor of Amazing I asked for it. Scott was glad to send it out; it had been unsold for ten years by then, perhaps the only remaining unsold SF property of Phil's. I read it and realized what the problem was, and I asked Phil about two things: changing the title (to "A. Lincoln, Simulacrum," my choice) and adding an ending. Now to put this into context I must point out that I had met Phil in 1964, lived in his house, had him read the I Ching for me (a startling experience, the validity of which I believe to this day), and had been publicly described by Phil as the man who knew his work and understood it best. In 1965 or 1966 he had given me the first fifty pages and the synoptic essay for Deus Irae and asked me to finish it for him. In other words, this was a man who professed admiration and respect for me and wanted me to collaborate with him. (As a jape, he gave Penguin a photo of me and it was printed [as a photo of the author] on the back cover of the British Man in the High Castle. [Any readers out there with a copy of this edition, please scan the back and send it to me!]

So I called Phil up; he had no objection to my proposed title change and suggested I write the ending of the novel. I counter suggested that I write a first draft and send it to him for him to rewrite, and he agreed. So I wrote somewhat off-the-wall final chapter in skeletal form. I expected Phil to reject it out of hand or rewrite it and flesh it out. He did neither. He returned it to me with three words changed and praised its economy.

As far as I knew when I ran "A. Lincoln, Simulacrum" it was in a form satisfactory with Phil. Because I considered myself a friend of Phil's, I tried to do more for him. I knew the novel had been rejected for every market that had seen it, and that undoubtedly included Ace (his original publisher), but ten years had passed and now it had an ending, so I gave a copy to Terry Carr, who was then the editor of the Ace Specials. He didn't like it, but passed it on to Son Wollheim -- who had rejected the original version -- who also refused it. However, after Don went to DAW he must have had second thoughts, because he bought it for DAW and published it under a third title, We Can Build You, sans my ending."

So here's the thing. PKD and White seem to agree about the facts. It's also obvious Ted White was really bummed out about PKD's comments. But I was listening to a recording of that interview between Appel and PKD and Appel sounds really young. It's him and another guy and they're both totally fanning out on Philip K Dick - and he's clearly loving the attention. If you look at PKD's language in that quote, he's clearly milking the story for all it's worth. It's a shame White took the comments so personally, and that this incident is often pointed to as an example of PKD's exasperating demeanor. I think it was all in good fun and perhaps PKD is guilty of being impolitic rather than 'difficult.'

So if anyone has the Penguin British edition of We Can Build You, or that anthologized version with White's ending, please scan them and send them. They warrant further study.

Update: Reader Bruce Berls kindly scanned the back cover of the British Edition of We Can Build You. That's apparently Ted White pictured.

Double Update: Henri over at The Philip K Dick Bookshelf, points out the obvious, this is the back cover for The Man in the High Castle, not We Can Build You, and this is consistent with what White says. Thanks for keeping it "real" Henri!

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.