From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] ...the Tuesaday morning dose... Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 08:15:05 -0500 7/27/99 D is for Dikh He is sick. He writes books in the lowest level of a deep labyrinthine grotto. His books are filled with things no one ever wanted to know. Unsettling things. He became part mushroom many years ago, but even the small lizards who come and feed off his body never realize he was once a man. If he were on a dessert island he would write his awful stories and send them out in bottles. But there, deep in the grotto, no one will ver read a word he has written; written with shards of sharp stone in the blood of lizards; written on walls that go deep into the earth. But one day they will need fossil fuels, and they will break through the wall of his grotto, and they will find the books, written on endless walls. And they will find the thing with a tormented face, growing in the moist soil of the underworld. Harlan Ellison Source: From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet. Written by Harlan Ellison and illustrated by Larry S. Todd. Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, 1978: unpaginated. From: Patrick Clark Subject: a Tuesday morning dose of PKD -- on Friday Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 13:24:15 -0500 I'm out of town next week so the usual Tuesday morning dose of PKD is early this time. (It's also somewhat lame.) Andre, don't freak out! No time disfunction is taking place. It's only Friday...well, it's Friday here, anyway. Regards, Patrick Random selection: that was the operating principle. Positions of power decided by a sophisticated lottery. Everyone had a chance, could live in hope. An opium for the people. One day, you too could be boss. And with it; the Assassination Game, which you could watch on TV. Would the new man be good enough to avoid his killer? Survival of the fittest, formalized into a game. Lots of excitement for everyone, keeps them all happily distracted while the Big Five industrial complexes run the world, the planets, the people, unremarked, unopposed. Then, in the year of 2203, a hitch developed in the system... Source: The plot synopsis from the opening page of the Arrow [UK] edition of Solar Lottery, 1979: unpaginated opening page. From: "Umberto Rossi" Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 22:14:46 +0200 Subject: My Tuesday dose of PKD--Italy! You might be interested in knowing that yesterday Il corriere della sera, Italy's most important newspaper with La repubblica (and the oldest of the couple, since it begun its activity at the end of XIX century, while Repubblica was born in 1976) devoted the first page of its culture section to Philip Kindred Dick. The article attempted an analysis of PKD's opus without first persuading the reader that Dick's works are worth reading--as if the author gave that for granted. A smaller article told readers what PKD novels are currently available, not omitting non- SF works like TEETH (translated by our PKD mate Vittorio Curtoni) and CONFESSIONS. There was one of the classical pictures of Phil (the one taken few days before his death, iiric), and--well, it was something. Also the edition of MAZE I afterworded was mentioned. Well, it was a real pleasure. ON an US scale it's like having an article like that published on The Washington Post or the New York Times. It's a pity I do not have time to write an abstract (that wouldn't be easy anyway, because the author chose to use a rather esoteric style here and there). Umberto Rossi "...io vedea la virtute esser spenta, e i vizi sollevati" Gerolamo Savonarola From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] a Tuesday morning dose of PKD Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 08:07:27 -0500 4/27/98 UNIQUE SINISTER TYPE NOTIFICATION The East Gakville Freedom of Erotica Activity Circle, consisting of J.G. Newkom and Philip K Dick, having been so happily successful in their own private lives (sorry, no additional members wanted or admitted) announce their Phase One Goal: to destroy the institution of marriage wherever it can be unEarthed. In pursuit of this initial goal (to be followed later by various unnamed but highly busy additional stages along the same lines) the E. G. F. E. A. C. will attempt -- against organized opposition or more archaic individual reactionary efforts -- to invade the tight, high, inner circles of Bay Area Fandom and will spread the doctrine by words, deeds and WHATEVER ELSE APPEARS NECESSARY in order to achieve such greatly bountiful and useful and attractive reconstructions of present-day degenerate society. Ed Mesky is to be the medium of communication by which the progress of this new and powerful agency makes known, from time to time, to fandom at large it's successes and -- were they alas to occur -- failures. In hoc signes, et al. Salve! (Salve especially to your little helpmate, fella. And lots of luck.) Signed. Philip K Dick Jack Newkom It is agreed by the above signed not to sue Ed Mesky for any mention in his influential journal of the activities or intentions of the E. G. F. E. A. C. Und Gott mit uns! (Und mit dir auch!) Source: Niekas 10 (Dec. 1964) p. 49(?). From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] the Tuesday morning dose Date: Tue, 4 May 1999 09:19:19 -0500 5/4/99 [From a review of The Golden Man:] The jewel of the book is the introduction, a meditation on the nature of sf and a memoir of his career, in which he tells of grocery-shopping at the Lucky Dog Pet Store and of writing fan letters to Capital Records to prophecy that Linda Ronstadt's next record would be 'the beginning of a career unparalleled in the record industry.' He daydreams of the epitaph to be carved on his gravestone in his alternate existence as a talent scout: HE DISCOVERED LINDA RONSTADT AND SIGNED HER UP! It's that beguiling mixture of bravado and humility that gives his best stories and novels their induplicable air of being centered in something more than an alert intelligence; Dick's fiction seems prophetic, not in the trivial sense of predicting events, or trends, but in the Old Testament sense, in the sense that Dante, Blake, and Shelly are prophetic, because they speak from the burning bush of achieved human wisdom. Readers who feel such claims are not too large will not rejoice greatly in The Golden Man, but Dick is of that stature where even his failures merit publication. Thomas M. Disch Source: "Books," The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; July 1980: pp. 47-48. From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] the Tuesday mroning dose...a day late Date: Wed, 12 May 1999 08:52:54 -0500 [Sorry for the delay. Computer problems at work yesterday.] 5/11/99 Divorce should be listed in REVELATION as one of the tribulations of the Last Days along with fire, famine, plague and flood. The five horsemen, not four. I can just see the horseman titled "divorce"; he is holding in his arms a great scroll reading SPOUSAL AND CHILD SUPPORT CORT ORDER, and he is just grinning to beat hell. PKD to Charles Platt; Dec. 4, 1978 Source: The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick vol. 5: pg. 194. From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] the Tuesday morning dose of PKD Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 09:04:23 -0500 5/18/99 "Yesterday, Chairman Mao died. To me, it was as if a piece of my body had been torn out and thrown away, and I'm not a Communist. There was one of the greatest teachers, poets, and leaders that ever lived. And I don't see anybody walking around with any particularly unhappy expression. There have been some shots of people in China crying piteously, but... I woke my girlfriend up at 7:00 in the morning. I was crying. I said, "Chairman Mao has died." She said, "Oh my God, I thought you said 'Sharon was dead'." -- some girl she knows. Philip K. Dick Source: Daniel DePrez, "An Interview with Philip K. Dick." Science Fiction Review; Sept. 1976: pg. 8. Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 12:50:39 +0000 From: Andre Welling Subject: Re: [PKD] the Tuesday morning dose of PKD At 09:04 18.05.99 -0500, Patrick wrote: >5/18/99 > >"Yesterday, Chairman Mao died. To me, it was as if a piece of my body had >been torn out and thrown away, and I'm not a Communist. There was one of >the greatest teachers, poets, and leaders that ever lived. And I don't see >anybody walking around with any particularly unhappy expression. There have >been some shots of people in China crying piteously, but... I woke my >girlfriend up at 7:00 in the morning. I was crying. I said, "Chairman Mao >has died." She said, "Oh my God, I thought you said 'Sharon was dead'." -- >some girl she knows. > Philip K. Dick > >Source: Daniel DePrez, "An Interview with Philip K. Dick." Science Fiction >Review; Sept. 1976: pg. 8. From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] the Tuesday morning dose of PKD Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 08:17:37 -0500 5/25/99 Dick engaged the mutant logic of late capitalism and the technological simulacrum before Baudrillard knew a megabyte from a baguette, coming to the conclusion that only an antagonistic relationship with reality -- even to the point of madness -- is sane. In a world of crystal-clear transmission, Dick turned up the static between channels, turned up the volume, and listened for hidden messages. His skepticism constituted an increasingly fervent metaphysics. He was obsessed with the Gnostic concept of a demiurge, a false god who obscured the true world with illusory time and space. Part of the authorial fragmentation that pervades Dick's work arises because, though he clearly identified with his flailing characters and their metaphysical morality plays, he remained the demiurge of his own narratives. Erik Davis Source: "Techomancer," [The Village] Voice Literary Supplement; August 1989: page 17. From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] ...Tuesday morning dose... Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 08:50:46 -0500 6/1/99 [From a review of Valis:] As a tract, it's a whizbang. The purpose of the book appears to be to convey a series of epigrams on the nature of reality. It concludes with an appendix repeating the epigrams. These are just sufficiently convoluted and confabulatory to make excellent material for a new, if short, Holy Book. They are absolutely chock-a-bloc with all the enigma required to support a worldwide, millennia-long prophetic religion replete with exegetic enterprises and rife for multiple schism. It's a sure bet Dick has founded a mystic cult with this effort. If it turns out to be an enduring and universal one, won't L. Ron Hubbard be jealous! Algis Budrys Source: "Books," The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; Aug. 1981: p. 53. Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 15:49:45 +0000 From: Patrick Clark (by way of Andre Welling ) Subject: [PKD] "The Tuesday Morning Dose of PKD"(tm) That ancient, great service by Patrick Clark . Sent by proxy this time 'cause Patrick is traveling. Cheers, ~ Andre (who is not Patrick, is he?) ------------------------------ the dose ------------------------------ 6/29/99 Sf writers have been using things like VR for years, under one name or another: parallel universes may serve the same function; drugs are popular gimmicks for altering perception; and a whole array of VR-like devices can be found in the literature. Philip K. Dick has used all of these "gimmicks" to explore his multi-layered vision of reality, so full of fraudulent demiurges and cosmic hoaxes. However, Dick also had the skill to completely jettison the chunky baggage of technological SF explanations when he wished. The deluded human mind was often the only device needed to journey through the layers of illusion, and Dick's ability to "travel light" -- without recourse to any kind of gimmick (apart from mental illness and/or mere insight) -- is enviable. The best of Dick uses every possible effect -- electronic, drug-induced, schizophrenic, meditative, divine -- to disrupt any definite answer to the question "What is real?" Marc Laidlaw Source: Mark Laidlaw, "Virtual Surreality." The South Atlantic Quarterly; vol. 92, no. 4 (Fall 1993): pg. 663. [This was a special issue entitled Flame Wars; The Discourse of Cyberculture edited by Mark Derry. It was published later as a separate monograph under that title.] ------------------------------ the dose ------------------------------ and he employed not only shizophrenic "effects" from the realm of mental illness, I must add (we discussed Capgras Syndrome before): "..what is technically known as _confabulation_. These patients imagine, and believe in, totally fabricated experiences -- some plausible, others less so ('I am a space pirate')." Or a special agent from Mars. Or someone who saved the world in his encounter with Aliens but cannot tell.. ~ A. From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] the Tuesday morning dose... Date: Tue, 6 Jul 1999 09:05:23 -0500 7/6/99 My mother-in-law had one comment. "I'm glad he's off dope," she said to my wife, her daughter. PKD to Rolling Stone magazine: Oct. 24,1975. Source: "I Ching Toward Bethlehem." Rolling Stone; Dec. 4, 1975: pg. 6. These two sentences were edited from the version of this letter published in The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick: Vol. 4; pg. 235. From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] Tuesday dose... Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 08:11:22 -0500 7/13/99 In Dick's universe you take nothing for granted. Not only have all authority figures lied to you, but reality has lied to you as well. Says a character in Galactic Pot Healer, "In our society, everyone is aced out." But however paranoid, Dick's vision isn't despairing. There is always hopefulness within the entropic decay, humor in the absurdity, and redemption in the superhuman abilities of ordinary humans to cope with extraordinary circumstances. We can make it. We may not triumph heroically (but who the hell does, anyway?) but, goddamn it, we'll survive. Humans will survive as long as they retain their humanity, Dick says, and the measure of humanity is the capacity for caring. Lou Stathis Source: "Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)." Heavy Metal; June 1982: page 4. From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] ...Tuesday morning dose... Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 08:41:28 -0500 7/20/99 I've always feared that some day one of my novels would come out with my name as Philip K. Duck on the cover or title page. PKD to Veronica Mixon; Undated; circa early May 1976 Source: The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick vol. 4: pg. 290. From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] ..the Tuesday morning dose -- late! Date: Tue, 30 Nov 1999 15:53:55 -0600 Omigod, I almost forgot to send this. Thanks, Andre, for the reminder! 11/30/99 The principal - and subtly interconnected -- themes in Dick's work include: 1. the survival and evolution of natural and artificial systems; 2. the relation between reality and illusion; 3. the problem of human mortality and behavior in an uncertain world. Angus Taylor Source: Angus Taylor, "can God fly? can He hold out His arms and fly - the fiction of philip k dick." Foundations; no. 4 (July 1973): pg. 46. From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] the Tuesday morning dose... Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 08:55:52 -0600 12/07/99 Now as to the review of my book, THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRICH. Every review of it is different. However the hallucination-environment is always mentioned and the theological symbolism is ignored. Yours is the first to really tackle the latter. The novel is not quite a dream, or even an hallucination; it is a state entered into by the characters, a stage of transformation into another level - possibly a supernatural level - and their attempts to find their way back to "sanity." It consists of a war between Palmer Eldrich (who is absolute evil) and Leo Bulero (who is not exactly "absolute good" but rather a benign form of nonevil life with which we are daily acquainted). In a sense, the novel depicts relative good attempting to combat absolute evil - and in the end the relative good, in the form of Leo Bulero - triumphs. I think it is important to note that this man, with all hi failings, does triumph, and the record of his triumph is found not in the body of the novel but in the paragraph coming before it, his memo dictated after his return from Mars to Earth. In a sense, that paragraph is the real novel, and the rest is autopsy, if you follow my meaning. Leo has come back to Earth and he is his old self; Eldrich did not destroy - or rather consume - him, and he at once dictates a memo in his usual manner. PKD to Mr Shapiro: December 9, 1967. Source: The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 1; pp. 227-228. From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] The Tuesday morning does of PKD Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 08:25:44 -0600 (I'm really pleased with this one.) 12/14/99 (This one is for Carla Bailey) ...WITH A STRANGE DEVICE column by William Gibson Some Blues for Horselover Fat: Some dozen years ago I sat on the grimy hardwood floor in a room that had once been the library of an elegant Toronto townhouse, the walls coated with uneven layers of art students' white latex, a single bulb dangling from the center of an enormous plaster rosette intended to support a chandelier, and watched pale tendrils sprout from my dirty bare feet and take root in the cracks between the floorboards. That night my private picture show was being orchestrated by a substance that put Trumbull's best efforts to shame; I'd eaten an eighth of a minute tab of a chemical the street knew as STP, variously alleged to be either an escaped Dow bid for Barefoot In The Head wars or a methedrine molecule dolled up with assorted baroque tails by a legendary California chemist.... None of the eight people who sampled it that night ever felt the least desire to go back for a second taste; I only mention it now to make a point. After that, we always referred to the night we did the PKD and spent the next 48 hours looking for the way home to Base Reality. Now the writer we renamed the stuff after is dead, it's been years since I've tripped on anything I'd have considered psychedelic in those days, and lately the late night news has been going form bad to weird.... I'm going to miss Mr. Dick, a man I never met. Remarkable the number of Phil Dick's fans who have no desire to read any other sf. It always impressed me. "Well, no, I don't read that stuff.... But do you know this guy Dick?" How did they get on to him? Word of mouth.... He was the only product of the American genre sf scene you could give to hardened Burroughs and Pynchon fanatics without wincing a little. Because, at his best, he was truly Dread, the poplit equivalent of certain moments in rock when an improvised guitar line comes scything out at you like a snapped cable and cuts the mind-body dichotomy eight ways from Sunday.... Reading him, sometimes, I'd get this image: man typing at a kitchen table maybe, stoked on dex and twenty cups of coffee, typing fast; just making it all up, and somehow behind it all his admirable desire to drive us all, if only for a few seconds at a time, straight of our wretched minds. So it's '82 already and I turned 34 today in a world more peculiar in its particulars than anything I could've dreamed up a decade ago. President Ronald Reagan. (Well, Ballard tried to warn us, he did....) Real bad Craziness is loosed again, my dears; the spook juice is flowing from the bunkers under McLean, that old CIA ectoplasm snaking down Nicaragua way to congeal in rancid jizzy clumps along another border.... Every species of Ugly Shit coughs and shuffles in the wings.... Times like these, a good hit of PKD shakes the scales from the tired eyes. Only we can't get any more, now. --Vancouver, March 17, 1982 Source: Wing Window [Seattle fanzine] 1982: pp. 5-6. From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] ...the Tuesday morning dose... Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 08:17:57 -0600 12/21/99 Phil had come to known Pike though this connection and wanted to write a novel about Pike's spiritual odyssey. Somehow, perhaps because he felt he was irrevocably typed as an SF writer, Phil had gotten it into his head that the only way he could get such a novel published was to tart it up with a lot of thriller-cum-SF paraphernalia involving CIA plots, alien invasions, and the usual razzmatazz. "Jeez, Phil," I told him, "you've got a great story here, you don't need all that crap. Why don't you just tell it straight?" "You think I could get it published?' I told him I thought he could, and he decided to discuss the matter with Russell Galen, his agent and friend, whom he really trusted. Galen concurred, encouraged Phil to go ahead, and the result was The Transmigrartion of Timothy Archer, which I believe is one of Phil's three or four best novels, and a return to the level of The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, and Ubik, after too many years of floundering around with lesser works. Certainly it is far superior to Valis or The Divine Invasion, utterly coherent, totally controlled, spiritually lucid, and filled with loving clarity. Norman Spinrad Source: "The Transmorgification of Philip K. Dick" in Science Fiction in the Real World; Southern Illinois University Press, 1990: p. 200. From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] ...the Tuesday morning dose... Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1999 08:52:50 -0600 You found in SCANNER exactly what I wanted someone, somewhere to find: my dear lost friends, still talking, still living. Thank you. I can't tell you the depth of my joy at reading then rereading your wonderful letter. I had promised those people (in my head) that I would get them down on paper, and from your letter, well, for you anyhow I did, and that is it; I did it. There seems to be an almost universal misunderstanding that the author wishes to be immortal. Not so. If he has ever love - and if he hasn't he shouldn't be a novelist; he should write dry articles - he recalls those faces, those voices, those strange little personality habits which his friends had, and would still have if they still existed. He can hear them in his head, and if God is good to him He lets him get them into prose form, in an analog of what really happened, who did it, and the particular way they went about it. The "darkly" in the title of course refers to a darkening of human mental faculties, of both perception and mentation. I saw among my friends (and in myself) such a darkening overcast that sometimes we seemed unable to fathom the most commonplace events; worse, commonplace events seemed animated by evil powers to us, ready to fight us and destroy us as agents of invisible superagencies. And then to make matters worse our occluded activities eventually attracted the attention of the authorities, who were as mystified as we as to what the hell we were up to. Since this was 1971 to 1972, the dark days of the Nixon secret police action, the authorities saw political significance in what we were doing - when in fact our wildest schemes called for nothing more than stealing a can of transmission fluid to keep an old car running. The authorities, we discovered, were as occluded as we...and they had the clout to back it up. PKD to Andy Ellsmore: March 21, 1977 Source: The Selected letters of Philip K. Dick; Vol. 5: pp. 61-62. From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] ...the Tuesday morning dose... Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 08:37:53 -0600 1/04/2000 The greatest menace of the twentieth century is the totalitarian state. It can take many forms: left-wing fascism, psychological movements, religious movements, drug rehabilitation places, powerful people, manipulative people; or it can be in a relationship with someone who is more powerful than you psychologically. Essentially, I'm pleading the cause of those people who are not strong. If I were strong myself I would probably not feel this as such a menace. I identify with the weak person; this is one reason why my fictional protagonists are essentially anti-heroes. They're almost losers, yet I try to equip them with qualities by which they can survive. At the same time I don't want to see them develop counter-aggressive tactics where they, too, become exploitative and manipulative. PKD Source: Charles Platt, Who Writes Science Fiction (1980) pp. 166-67. 1/11/2000 From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] ...the Tuesday morning dose... Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 08:23:37 -0600 1/11/2000 If Dick's protagonists tend to be paranoid, there is always much for them to be paranoid about. For they live in a world dominated by commodities and conspiracies; which is to say, a world not wholly unlike our own. Carl Freedman Source: "Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick." On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from Science Fiction Studies; (1992): p. 115. Originally published in SFS #32 (March 1984). From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] ...the Tuesday morning dose... Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 08:21:54 -0600 1/18/2000 I remember when I was a child on December 7, 1941 and there was the news on the radio about the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor; I phoned my mother to tell her. "We're at war with Germany, Italy and Japan!" I yelled, to which she replied calmly, "No, I don't think so, Philip," and went back to her gardening. I was 12 years old and I was more in touch than a grown person. That made a big impression on me, my mother's failure to react; it was both an intellectual failure and an emotional one, if you ponder it. This is maybe one reason I get along so well with people a lot younger than me; I have little respect for the opinions of people my own age. I think the older you get the dumber you get; I mean people in general. You start losing touch with reality by subtle, gradual degrees until you wind up puttering around with your flowers in the backyard while World War Three breaks out. PKD to Laura Dick, April 2, 1979. Source: The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick, 1977-1979; p. 222. From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] the (penultimate) Tuesday morning dose of PKD Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 08:49:15 -0600 2/01/2000 GR: In VALIS you talk about 1974 and the fall of Nixon as "the break-up of the Empire" and the fall of the walls of the "Black Iron Prison" we were all in. So Ronald Reagan gets elected in 1980. PKD: (laughs) Well, imagine my surprise. Fortunately, in the book, Sophia says the tyranny is going to come back. Fortunately for me. She says the grim king will come back to power. So I'm covered. Several people have pointed his out. Are you asking if I regard the Reagan regime as a continuation of the (the Empire)? GR: Yes. PKD: Oh, definitely. In fact, more so. They're much worse. It's incredible. The first thing the Reagan regime was announce they were going to augment a $2 billion nerve gas program for the pentagon. As their first move. And I though, "Well, shit!" And they said Nixon would never allow this program -- it was too awful for Nixon, but not too awful for the Reagan administration. And they have relaxed all the guidelines on intelligence gathering. GR: It's "The Empire Strikes Back." PKD: It's melancholy. It's so blatant with these guys. And nobody cares anymore! Source: Gregg Rickman, Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament; 1985: pp. 49-50. Subject: [PKD] The *Early* Tuesday Morning Dose (tm) - "beer commercial genuflection" Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 13:30:12 +0100 02/08/2000 PKD: '[...] If the list says, "These twenty people will be mailed a $20 utility bill refund," you then mail it to them; if it says, "These twenty people will be exterminated," you _balk_, you see. But the true insane person will calmly, very calmly, process both the same way. And this is what I regard as insanity, rather than regarding extravagant behavior -ripping off clothes, screaming, carrying on- as insane. In fact, you get this dispassionate insanity at times where great emotions are appropriate: when someone has died, when some terrible calamity has happened, the insane one will proceed as if nothing of great importance has occurred.' Interview with D. Scott Apel and Kevin C. Briggs (07/20/77). in: D. Scott Apel, ed., Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection, San Jose/Cal.: The Impermanent Press, 2nd ed, 1999: p. 39 Cheers, ~ Andre From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] ...the Tuesday morning dose... Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 08:53:48 -0600 Last dose, at least for a while, from me. I want to thank everyone for the kind remarks -- even Brother Deitz, whose opinion, like all opinions, are welcome on the list (though that doesn't mean they go unchallenged, obviously). I hope that some of you will heed cal's suggestion and keep the dose going in an informal way. I see that Andre has already stepped into the breech. Good work. I'll probably help as well once I catch up on things. A lot of times the dose was just a random bit of PKD. Sometimes it sparked a discussion; sometimes it was just out there for people to glance at. And sometimes it was in response to a posting by one of the group that had appeared earlier. This last example today is quite serendipitous though it does, strangely, address last weeks dust-up. Regards, Patrick 02/08/2000 PKD: [...] I have no knowledge at all of what reality is. All I can do is plaintively inquire "Hey, guys, what is really real?" And then here is Terry Carr - the great anthologizer -- and a major figure in the field - and he says "All right!" and he blows on his little whistle like the Recreation Director at camp has..."All right! Time to write about what reality is!" [...] I had a moral obligation. He got me from my Protestant, moral obligation side. [...] So I discovered - as amazing as it may sound - that it was a lot harder to say what it was then to ask what it was. DSA: What was it? PKD: Damned if I know! (general roar of laughter) But I thought: I'll fake it. So in 1970 I started working on Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. And it was my intention to resolve the problem by he discovery of what reality really was. So that meant there was a three year ellipsis in my writing... DSA: When you had to go out and find out what it was? PKD: Yeah. Well, I just sort of sat there at the typewriter. I did eleven drafts of that novel. I had a complicated code system worked out so I wouldn't start feeding the old drafts back in, in which case I guess I'd still be there today. I decided the thing that was really real was love. Then I thought, Y'know, someone else said this; now who the hell was it that said this? Well, actually a lot of people have said it. My revelation which I am about to lay on the world is not going to come as a complete surprise. DSA: St. Augustine said it, and Aleister Crowley... PKD: St. Paul said, "If I have not love then I am jack shit"...or something like that. So anyway, I worked for three years on Flow My Tears, then when Terry Carr wasn't looking, I began to go back to the question of what is real. Source: D. Scott Apel, ed., Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection; 1987: P. 35-36. From: "Umberto Rossi" Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 19:25:44 +0100 Subject: [PKD] A Late Tuesday Music Dose >From the front of the store came the sounds of the superb tenor Gigli singing; Schilling paused a moment to listen. Across from the table his huge, dingy parrot Eeore shifted about in its cage, annoyed by the sharp, pure voice. Schilling gave the parrot a reproving glance. "Thy Tiny Hand is Frozen" Schilling said. "The first of the two recordings Gigli made of that, and by far the better. Ever heard the latter of the two? From the complete opera and so bad as to be unbelievable. Wait." he silenced himself, listening. A superb record," he said to Pete. "You should have it in your collection." "I don't care for Gigli," Pete said. "He sobs." "A convention," Schilling said irritably. "He was an Italian; it's traditional." "Schipa didn't." "Schipa was self-taught," Schilling said. _______________________________________ A nice piece from The Game-Players of Titan, an unjustly neglected novel. The conversation in Schilling's shop seems something out of a minimalist novel. And the details are so precise! The two tenors, imho much better than the current 3 Tenors, were Beniamino Gigli and Tito Schipa. Umberto Rossi "Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news." From: "Umberto Rossi" Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 07:11:49 +0100 Subject: [PKD] Another Tuesday Dose "How about you?" Laura said suddenly to Benteley. "Why can't you put in your application? You don't have an assignment, right now." "It's out of my line." Laura laughed. "Make it your line! Al, don't we have that big tape they put out, all the successful assassins of the past, their lives and everything about them? Show it to Ted." "I've seen it," Benteley said curtly. "When you were a boy, didn't you dream of growing up to be a successful assassin?" Laura's brown eyes were dim with nostalgia. "I remember how I hated being a girl because then I couldn't be an assassin when I grew up. I bought a lot of charms, but they didn't turn me into a boy." directly from Solar Lottery--a book full of such gems! Umberto Rossi "Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news." From: Joey Morris Subject: [PKD] A Tuesday mid-morning Dose Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 10:37:17 -0500 (EST) When I wrote UBIK I constructed a world (universe) which differed from ours in only one respect: it lacked the driving force forward of time. That time, in our own actual universe, could weaken, or even go entirely away, did not occur to me because at that point I did not conceive time as a force at all [...] I thought of it in Kantian terms. As a mode of subjective perception. Now I believe that time, at this point in the expansion of the universe (or for some other reason(s)) has in fact actually begun to weaken, at least in relation to certain other fields. Therefore, this being true, a measure of the UBIK-experience could be anticipated. I have indeed had that experience, or a measure thereof. That is, time still drives on, but counter forces have surfaced and impinge, laying bare the UBIK landscape -- only for a few moments, that is temporarily. Then time resumes its sovereignty. PKD, In Pursuit of VALIS P.65 -- Joe Morris, SysAdmin and Not Insane Atlanta stories: http://www.olagrande.net/users/jolomo/atlanta.html From: andre.welling@sqs.de Subject: [PKD] The Queer Tuesday Morning Dose of PKD Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2000 13:11:02 +0200 3/28/1933 "You can't meet a man like the Fuehrer and then forget you met him. He's a star; he's a comet. You either tag along in his wake or you cease for all intents and purposes to exist. It's an emotional hunger inside me, irrational but it's real. It's an instinct. He's got magic. Without him we're snails. What's the purpose of life anyhow? To drag along in the dust? You don't live forever. If you can't raise yourself up to the stars you're dead." [Interview with Luis Rosen in DER VOELKISCHE BEOBACHTER] From: Patrick Clark Subject: [PKD] the (random) Tuesday morning dose of PKD or 3 Sci-Fi Authors view the future Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 08:48:40 -0500 "Three Sci-Fi Authors View the Future" The PKD bibliography compiled by Daniel J H Levack lists "Three Sci-Fi Authors View the Future" as a "non-fiction" piece appearing in Voice. The citation is repeated in the Phil Stephensen-Payne and Gordon Benson, Jr. updated bibliography, Philip Kindred Dick Metaphysical Conjurerer. Recently, Frank Bertrand listed the piece as one of the out-of-print "interviews" that he is attempting to locate. Bertrand classifies it as an interview because that's what Phil calls it. In a letter to Ursula K. Le Guin dated February 2, 1974 Phil writes, "Also, I was interviewed by Voice, a magazine used in school." This piece has been a bit of a mystery for some time. There are a couple of things wrong with all of this. The article does exist but it is neither a nonfiction article nor an interview. Also, the title of the publication is wrong, or rather it is incomplete. "Three Sci-Fi Authors View the Future" appeared in the January 17, 1974 issue of Scholastic Voice, a national publication for high school students. (My wife, Esther, remembers reading this magazine in her high school days in Kansas City.) The three "sci-fi" authors are Phil, Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Crichton. The short essays are not interviews in the sense of a written questions and answers but are instead general overviews of the writers' books with pull quotes plugged into the narrative. Someone at Scholastic Voice - there is no byline - must have called them up or submitted questions in some manner, then incorporated the results into the essays. The section on Phil is quite short, little more than a column length and most of that is taken up with plot synopses for various PKD titles. There are three direct quotes from Phil. I'll type up the whole article and send it to Jason Koornick's fabulous Web site, philipkdick.com. But in the meantime, here are the three remarks that Phil makes in the course of the article. "Of all its roles, science fiction acts best as a guide by which people can cope with their present environment. It should sharpen our concern and our ability to handle current problems. Science fiction has lost its escapist aspect. It is now deeply rooted in the reality of today, which is always passing into tomorrow. And it's tomorrow we have to control if we are to survive." "I do feel our destiny is tragic in the long run. But we have the power to respond to this condition with dignity and courage. It helps to have a sense of humor, so that you can learn to see the madness in the universe as well as in all of us, and to realize that the universe is trapped as exactly as we are. The mind is a universe, too, and that is why science fiction must deal with inner space." "I think eventually we'll have to emigrate to other planets for survival - but that' at least 50 years away. Until we can do that, I think we'll gradually go back to the kind of existence our ancestors had 100 years ago, to save energy." Regards, Patrick Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 09:07:01 -0400 (EDT) From: Gabriel McKee Subject: [PKD] The Tuesday morning dose o' PKD Something sizzled to the right of him. A commercial, made by Theodorus Nitz, the worst house of all, had attached itself to his car. "Get off," he warned it. But the commercial, well-adhered, began to crawl, buffeted by the wind, toward the door and the entrance crack. It would soon have squeezed in and would be harranguing him in the cranky, garbagey fashion of the Nitz advertisments. He could, as it came through the crack, kill it. It was alive, terribly mortal; the ad agencies, like nature, squandered hordes of them. The commercial, fly-sized, began to buzz out its message as soon as it managed to force entry. "Say! Haven't you sometimes said to yourself, I'll bet other people in restaurants can see me! And you're puzzled as to what to do about this serious, baffling problem of being conspicuous, especially-" Chic crushed it with his foot. Source: _The Simulacra_, Ace Books, 1964, ch. 4, p. 39. From: yr pal cal Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 16:33:55 -0700 Subject: [PKD] The 4:20 Dose of PKD "If I had to come forth with an analysis of the anger that lies inside me, which expresses itself in so many subliminations, I would guess that probably what arouses my indignation is seeing the meaningless. That which is disorder, the force of entropy -- there is no redemptive value of something that can't be understood, as far as I am concerned. My writing, in toto, is an attempt on my part to take my life and everything I've seen and done, and fashion it into a work that makes sense. I'm not sure I've been successful." Philip K. Dick, from "'Introduction' to THE GOLDEN MAN (1980)", in THE SHIFTING REALITIES OF PHILIP K. DICK, edited by Lawrence "Larry Boy!" Sutin, 1995 (p. 94)