So, When the Heck is 2-3-74?

PKD biographer, Lawrence Sutin, dates Phil's "pink beam" experience following a dental procedure when a dark-haired girl delivered some pain medication to Phil's door to February 20th, 1974. 

Sutin writes, "What precisely happened on that February 20 after Phil gazed upon the golden fish?" (210)

Sutin's source notes at the end of the book, usually quite thorough, offer nothing to substantiate that date. He points to a letter Dick wrote to Ursula LeGuin in 1973 that confirms the delivery took place in February. Phil writes, "... in February I had major oral surgery, and was home recovering, still under the influence of the sodium pentathol, and in severe pain." (SL 1974, 247)

So I asked biographer Gregg Rickman, who responds, "Phil refers to the Valis event as "2-3-74" many times in the Exegesis, as shorthand for the months of February and March." 

So, I asked PKD's friend Tim Powers who responded, "And I don't know if he talked about it to anyone right after it happened. I lost track of him for about a year right after he married Tess -- in fact I wonder if he was talking to anybody but Tess at that period!" 

PKD's friend Bill Sarill and ex-wife Tessa reconstructed the day as a Thursday, making it either the 14th or the 21st of February. 

As Erik Davis says, "There's too much noise on the line" to determine exactly what happened and when. Dick fans looking for certainty in life have obviously not been paying attention to Dick's work, which foregrounds this radical uncertainty the characters must work through. 

At the end of last semester a student asked if I had a time machine, where and when would I go. My answer without hesitation was "Orange County, February 1974." I've been thinking the last couple of days about what I would've seen if I'd been lurking outside PKD's apartment that fateful day. 

Would I have seen the pink beam? Doesn't seem like the delivery girl saw it, so why should I? Honestly, I'm not even convinced anything really happened. I could see PKD flashing on how intense it would be if it had happened and maybe moving straight to creating elaborate fictive narratives around it. But the flurry of activity prompted by the event (a million words of notes on the subject) suggests the truth of the experience for Dick, even if the ferocity and manic quality of the belief argues for skepticism. 

This is a long way of saying, take some time next Tuesday and think about the difference between what you know, that is your empirical experience, and what you are given to know through revelation, known as transcendental experience. Now deconstruct the false binary. Even in empirical experience our perceptions still leap this magical and mysterious chasm between external reality and our internal subjectivity, and in doing so, sure act a lot like revelation. And revelation has to be processed by the mind and made sense of, which involves all the standard tools of experiential thinking. 

In other words, this anniversary is a chance to inject a little of the mystery that animated the end of Dick's life into your own. 

Illustration from R. Crumb's "The Religious Experiences of Philip K. Dick."

A Little Good News

It doesn't take much more than a quick look around to realize our society is far from being a true meritocracy. Seriously, PKD himself toiled in obscurity while lesser authors were enshrined by our society. Dick's friend KW Jeter has never been given proper respect as one of the forefathers of cyberpunk. But, in a nice turn of events, the makers of the Pirates of the Caribbean juggernaut are using Tim Powers' novel On Stranger Tides as the basis for the fourth film in the series! To be completely honest, I've never seen any of these movies so I don't really know if they're any good or not. My students sure write about the films though. Either way, this deal probably means Powers has a nice little chunk of change in his pocket and perhaps even more clout as a writer. I met Powers and found him to be one of the nicest, funniest, best-hearted people I've ever met. It was easy to see why PKD found him such a great friend.

Anyhoo, there's a great article in UC Fullerton's daily paper about Powers and James Blaylock, another Fullerton alum and PKD scotch party attendee. Oh, and lest you think this post is only tangentially connected to PKD, he gets some cool attention in the interview. I particularly like this quote from Powers:
“He gave me a few early pages in VALIS while he was in typing,” Powers said. “From the other room he’d shout, ‘How do you spell nuclear?’ I’d tell him. ‘How do you spell Eliot?’ I told him. Then I said, ‘This looks really good, Phil. I’m gonna leave. I’ll let myself out.’ And then when the book was published, it was fun to see nuclear and Eliot right in the same paragraph. That was the paragraph he was typing when I was there.”

So, I did a little research and found the part of VALIS that Powers is talking about. What's interesting is that it's much more than just a paragraph. Clearly, PKD got a couple pages done while Powers was in the other room:

"The one about the nuclear wastes that contaminated most of central Utah," I said. "That disaster the newspapers reported two years ago but TV was afraid to talk about; the government put pressure on them. Where all the sheep died. The cover-story that it was nerve gas. Rockoway did a hardball film in which the true tale of calculated indifference by the authorities came out"
"Who starred?" Linda said.
"Robert Redford," I said.
"Well, we would be interested," Linda said.
"So we should get back to southern California," I said. "We have a number of people in Hollywood to talk to."
"Eric!" Linda called; she walked toward her husband, who stood with Kevin; he now had Kevin by the arm.
Glancing at me, David made a signal that we should follow; together, the three of us approached Kevin and Eric. Not far off, Sophia ignored us; she continued to read her book.
A flash of pink light blinded me.
"Oh my God," I said.
I could not see; I put my hands against my forehead, which ached and throbbed as if it would burst.
"What's wrong?" David said. I could hear a low humming, like a vacuum cleaner. I opened my eyes, but nothing other than pink light swam around me.

"Phil, are you okay?" Kevin said.
The pink light ebbed. We were in three seats aboard a jet. Yet at the same time, superimposed over the seats of the jet, the wall, the other passengers, lay the brown dry field, Linda Lampton, the house not far off. Two places, two times.
"Kevin," I said. "What time is it?" I could see nothing out the window of the jet but darkness; the interior lights over the passengers were, for the most part, on. It was night. Yet, bright sunlight streamed down on the brown field, on the Lamptons and Kevin and David. The hum of the jet engines continued; I felt myself sway slightly: the plane had turned. Now I saw many far-off lights beyond the window. We're over Los Angeles, I realized. And still the warm daytime sun streamed down on me.
"We'll be landing in five minutes," Kevin said.
Time dysfunction, I realized.
The brown field ebbed out Eric and Linda Lampton ebbed out. The sunlight ebbed out.

Around me the plane became substantial. David sat reading a paperback book of T.S. Eliot. Kevin seemed tense.
"We're almost there," I said. "Orange County Airport."

Congratulations Tim! Couldn't happen to a nicer guy!

Mindblower of the Day

Any PKD fan worth his salt knows that the character Horselover Fat in PKD's VALIS is a transposition of Philip Dick, as Philip means 'lover of horses' in Greek, and the word 'dick' means 'fat' in German. But did you catch this one:

Scholar Robert Galbreath suggested in a 1982 essay in Science-Fiction Dialogues edited by Gary K. Wolfe that the characters Kevin and David (commonly thought of as pseudonyms for PKD's real-life friends KW Jeter and Tim Powers), may represent other aspects of Horselover's fragmented personality. After all, taken together, the first initial of characters Phil, Kevin, and David, create the acronym PKD.

Interesting to note that there seems to be some sense of reintegration of the Horselover personality into Phil's at the end of VALIS, but if this naming convention is indeed intentional (it certainly explains changing Tim's first name but not Jeter's) then PKD (as the author) may be suggesting that the faithful and the skeptic are not intergrated as one.

I stumbled onto this discovery during an email exchange between PKD scholars Umberto Rossi and Andrew Butler - Thanks guys! I never would have thought of that - and it's so damn obvious!

Ubik Screenplay Out Now

The ultra-rare, and until now difficult-to-find screenplay PKD wrote for a cinematic adaptation of his novel Ubik, is now available as a hardcover from Subterranean Press.

I have yet to read this, as I was reluctant to shell out well over $100 bucks to read the previous edition and just yesterday discovered this new edition was out.

According to Subterranean's website:

"The screenplay features an ending that differs markedly from that of the novel."

What else does the screenplay feature?:

"Dick included far more parenthetical description and interpretation than can be standard for screenplays, and so we have here his considered, after-the-fact portraits of Glen Runciter, Ella Runciter, Joe Chip, Pat Conley, and Ubik itself. And too, with a facility that's scarce among novelists, he smoothly adapts his story to the wider, deeper ranges of the film medium. The Ubik 'ads' are much more effective as actual intrusions than as chapter headings, the soundtrack becomes a central element (and makes us wonder what music Dick would have chosen to complement some of his other novels), and he presents the dysfunctions in time and perception even more effectively when he imagines them enacted on a movie screen. In some ways, in fact, it almost seems as though we're getting a purer version of UBIK—something closer to the original conception than the text of the novel." - From Tim Powers' new Forward to the screenplay.

Sounds good. Interesting to note that Dick seemed to both enjoy writing the screenplay but also benefited from it by learning something about his process as a writer.

In an interview with Paul Williams on Halloween 1974, PKD said: ""When I was doing the [Ubik] screenplay, I realized I've got a little screen in my head, and the people walk around on it"

Williams says: "They're real" [unclear if this is a question or a statement]

PKD responds: "They're little, Paul, they're about that big - [laughter] - Yeah, they move around, you know, I was going like this, looking up, talking and saying, 'there goes Joe out the door, slam.'...I didn't realize it until I did the screenplay [for Ubik] where I had to visualize, and I realized I didn't have to 'cause that was -- I didn't know any other way to do it. And I got to going -- I was literally looking up, type type type and look up" (Only Apparently Real 76)

PKD was originally asked by Jean-Pierre Gorin to write an adaption of Ubik, with hopes that Francis Ford Coppola might finance production, alas, funding fell throuh and the Ubik adaptation was scrapped, that is until recently when a production company called Celluloid Dreams optioned the novel. It's unclear whether or not the production will be using PKD's screenplay. I seem to remember a Hollywood friend of mine saying that PKD's script was on the long side and contained so many directions that many filmmakers might balk at trying to shoot it.

The screenplay is still on the expensive side: hardcover editions are listed $35 and the Wub-fur bound 'lettered' editions, signed by Powers and Tad Williams (who wrote the Afterward), are $150. So the screenplay went from expensive and difficult to find, to expensive and easier to find. At least we seem to be moving in the right direction, though I wonder, perhaps it'll be cheaper when (and where) we're all dead.

Buy it new at Amazon for $25.15

Lunch with Powers

Yesterday, Linda Levy and I drove an hour south to San Jose to spend the day at BayCon 2008 - yeah, a science fiction convention. But we weren't there merely to ogle the busty goth girls in corsets and Frankenstein boots (yes, I realize 'Frankenstein' refers to Victor Frankenstein and he probably didn't wear that style of boot - his monster creation did. I'm not ignorant of the way people conflate the two, I'm a victim of it) or the guys in their Columbine-shooter-chic outfits of combat boots, trench coats, and vaguely fascist haircuts - we were there to meet Tim Powers, one of the con's guests of honor.

Linda and I had a wonderful lunch with Tim and Serena Powers, talking about old times and of course PKD. Tim and Serena are lovely people and Tim really seems to have a heart of gold. It's not hard to see why PKD thought of him as such a good friend. I found him to be smart, funny, and very kind.

Tim told a great story about the time late one night after a bottle when PKD told him and Jim Blaylock that a race of one-eyed, two-nosed Neanderthals had been discovered to have lived in the LA area in prehistoric times. Tim and Jim left PKD's absolutely convinced this ancient race of dual-nosed cyclops lay waiting to pounce on them around every corner. Tim told me that PKD could convince anyone of anything, and he had me convinced. Anyway, Powers noted in his journal the exact date that PKD had told him and Blaylock this story. Later when Powers read PKD's published letters he found one, dated exactly one week before PKD lay this number of Powers and Blaylock, in which Phil tells a correspondent that the article about the ancient race of cyclops with two noses that this person had sent him was the most ridiculous thing ever and NOBODY would ever believe such a stupid story. I guess he wanted to test that theory.

Linda and I watched Powers speak on a panel for aspiring authors about how to manage detail in your fictional universe - you don't want your orcs using spears during the bronze age, er, uh, maybe you do, what the hell do I know?! Then Powers was part of an hour-long panel on PKD, which was a little disappointing - mostly because I wasn't on it, while other members of the panel admitted that Sutin's biography was the extent of their knowledge of Dick. As you can imagine, I didn't learn any new stuff from them. Finally, Powers did a one-on-one interview as the guest of honor.

Powers (he refers to himself in the third person using his last name) certainly does have a huge fanbase, all of whom enthusiastically lined up to have their books signed by him. Phil would be very proud to see how Tim's made a name for himself.

Linda and I drove home talking about PKD and old times. OK so it's not the best picture of me and Powers, but, on the bright side, I managed to resist buying Spock ears for an entire day!