Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Linda Castellani (nee Levy) was a student at Cal State Fullerton in
1972 when she met Philip K. Dick, who moved to Fullerton in response
to a letter she wrote to him.  Starting in 1972, he wrote to her and
to others about her.  Linda personified the "lost, lovely, lonely,
dark-haired girl" he longed for; the girl he had been searching for
throughout his life:  The Dark-Haired Girl.  

While numerous scholars and intrigued writers have devoted years of
their lives and thousands of pages to Phil through the lens of his
work, his philosophy, his influences and his biography in the hope
of discovering the man, few knew the private side, often the darker
side, the side that only the women he was in love with encountered;
the side that Linda knew.  

Tim Powers was close friends with Philip K. Dick during the final
ten years of his life, a period in which Tim kept nearly daily
journals, not about Phil per se, just detailing the ordinary lives
of ordinary people.  The journals promise to yield some interesting
anecdotes.
  

    
Linda Castellani <castle> has been a member of the WELL since 1991,
and currently hosts the Miscellaneous conference.  Previously she
co-hosted the Mirrorshades conference with Jon Lebkowsky <jonl> and
writer Bruce Sterling <bruces>.  Prior to that, she was a co-host of
inkwell.vue.

In this Inkwell.vue discussion, Linda will be in conversation with
author Tim Powers, whom she met at Cal State Fullerton before Phil
arrived.  Their decades-long friendship encompassed the last years
of Philip K. Dick's life from 1972 to 1982 when he lived in Southern
California; Tim was present for many of the events in Phil's final
years.  Since 1972, Tim Powers has become a prolific science fiction
writer himself; his work includes _The Anubis Gates_, _Declare_,
_Earthquake Weather_, and _On Stranger Tides_,  which was the basis
for the Disney film "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides."  

His latest book is _My Brother's Keeper_, which will be the topic of
an upcoming inkwell.vue interview.
  

    
To say that "in April of 1972, Philip K. Dick moved to southern
California" sounds pretty routine. In fact it was hastily planned,
if it could be said to have been planned at all, and I don't think
anybody, including Phil himself, was ready for it. Linda, you were
really the trigger for the move -- how did that happen? 
  

    
The short answer is, I wrote him a letter.

The longer answer is that, I had taken a science fiction class at
Cal State Fullerton, and followed that by taking a course in Chaucer
from the same Professor, Will McNelly.

One day, Will walked into the Chaucer class and said, "Some of you
were in my Science Fiction class, so I thought I'd read you a letter
from Philip K. Dick the science fiction writer."
 
In the letter he sounded so sad and lonelythat I felt compelled to
respond, having felt the same way too many times myself.  Up until
then, I had never heard the name Philip K. Dick.

There's a link to my letter in the next post.

A few days later, McNelly approached me and said, "Phil wants you to
pick him up at the airport on Thursday."  I was stunned.  I never
expected a response in person!  Who does that anyway?

It would be 50 years before I discovered what had been going on in
Phil's life when my letter arrived.  If I had known, would I have
written?  I was 21 and naive, so maybe.

I discovered that two other female students had also written to
Phil.  I had offered to be his friend.  They had offered him a place
to live.  I gathered them up, along with Tim Powers and off we went
to the airport.
  

    
Here's a link to a copy of the letter that set the whole thing in
motion.  The part about Phil's move to Southern California, that is.
Other things had been set in motion before the letter, which is part
of the longer answer.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gemznbeadz/albums/72177720317557844

My thanks to Tim for having a copy of the letter.  I didn't.
  

    
Yes, Phil cane flying out of a particularly turbulent period in his
life, which we knew nothing about. And fate or synchronicity seemed
to nominate you to be the one driving the car to LAX that night.
  

    
He did literally fly, didn't he?

My stories about Phil are full of synchronicities.  

In order to tell you that one, I need to start at the beginning,
fifty plus years ago...

At the beginning, there was the Viet Nam war.  When I arrived at Cal
State Fullerton  in the fall of 1969, there were anti-war protests
all around me.  Shocking to me, who had grown up in an apolitical
family, in one of the most conservative enclaves in the Los Angeles
area.  I never thought about politics.  And then I moved to Orange
County, more conservative yet.

One day,  I heard a commotion out in the quad.  I was in the
Humanities Building and rushed out to the balcony.  Below me was a
noisy protest, but, I could see in the distance a line of what
looked like white pinheads moving towards campus; riot police.

The first picture below shows when they first arrived. Standing in a
line, facing the crowd.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gemznbeadz/53768163580/in/album-7217772031755784
4/

The second picture shows when they started swinging, striking people
indiscriminately – protesters, students on the way to class,
professors – no one was safe. 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gemznbeadz/53768072029/in/album-7217772031755784
4/

Anti-Viet Nam war protests, anti-draft protests continued at schools
across the country.   On May 4th, 1970, the governor of Ohio gave
the go ahead to the National Guard to shoot the protestors.  They
started shooting into the crowd.  Ten people were shot, four people
were killed.

[cue Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young singing "Ohio."  I'd post link,
but I'd probably have to take it down because I don't have the
rights, but it's easily found on YouTube.]

Campuses all across the country shut down.  Students and professors
went on strike.  The semester ended.  You could take the grade you
had up until that point, or an incomplete.  That was the end of my
freshman year.

I gave a talk about Phil to Professor David Gill's online class at
San Francisco State on April 18th, and these first few posts will
draw upon that.  When I showed these photos, they were shocking. 
Nothing like it had been seen on college campuses for fifty years!  

And then, two weeks later, similar images could be seen again, this
time for a completely different reason...
  

    
Back to the thrilling days of yesteryear...

When I was a freshman, in the deep dark days before computers, we
assembled a class schedule by running for classes.  That meant you
physically went to the room where the class would be held and picked
up a card.  No card, no room in the class.  You'd rework the
schedule, find another class, and then head off to the next
building.  Since freshmen went last, our schedules were a hodgepodge
of whatever we could get to have a full load.

Things were a little better in following semesters.  They changed
the method:  they put all the class numbers on portable blackboards
and wheeled them out in front of the building.  There was a forest
of blackboards, with columns of class numbers; as a class filled up,
the number was erased from the board.  Again, you'd rework your
schedule every time a class closed, and try to cobble together
another one.  The first time they put this method into motion, I
stood in line for four hours hoping to have a reasonable load of
classes by the time I got to the front of the line.

What does this have to do with Phil?  Bear with me; I'm getting to
that.

That night, in keeping with the campus protests and the riots that
sometimes ensued, someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the building
where we had all just gone through the arduous task of registering
for the next semester.  There were no computers, remember,
everything was on paper.  They burned the building down.

We had to do it again.
  

    
What a major pain.  On the afternoon that I attempted to recreate my
schedule, the oddest thing happened:

I was suddenly struck with a compelling desire for a Mad Magazine. 
It was ridiculous.  I hadn't read Mad in years or even thought about
it, but now, I had to have one, and I had to go to the corner
convenience store, the TickTock to get it.

So I did, but they were out of Mad Magazine.  I still needed a
diversion so I idly turned the rack of paperback books, and picked,
at random, All The Myriad Ways by Larry Niven.

I took it home and read it in one sitting.  Pretty good stuff, this
science fiction.  I had an idea:  I looked through the list of
classes to see if there was a class in science fiction.  There was
and miraculously I got in.  

The trajectory that would intersect with Phil Dick's had been set in
motion.

[A synchronicity:  in Professor Gill's class he quoted from an
interview with Phil in which he said that he went to the drugstore
to get a copy of Popular Mechanics, but they were out, so he found a
copy of something called Stirring Science Fiction stories, instead.]
  

    
I came along to Cal State Fullerton in 1970. Everybody had stopped
burning buildings down, but registration was still pretty chaotic --
wait in a long line up with a list of five classes you want, get
into the registration room after a couple of hours and discover that
all your classes are filled, and then crouch under a table
feverishly flipping through the catalogue to find five more. Repeat
several times until you've snagged five classes, i.e. fifteen units.
It was especially urgent for guys, because fifteen units would get
you a draft exemption.

     You and I met in '71, I think at a Witchcraft & Sorcery
convention in L.A., just down the street from the old Clifton's
Cafeteria. (I still can't hear Ten Years After's "I'd Love to Change
the World" without being back there on that overcast weekend.) I
remember that David Gerrold, A. E. Van Vogt, and E. Hoffmann Price
were there -- we had no idea that Philip K. Dick was about to splash
into our pond.

     

     
  

    
I was wondering if you got a draft exemption.  2 S, right?  Student
exemption?  We never talked about it.

Yes, we met at a Witchcraft and Sorcery convention.  What we were
doing there, anyway?  We were in the vendor's room and I had just
bought Blood Monster, really nothing more than a wind-up
Frankenstein, for the princely sum of 25 cents.  I still have him,
although his wind-up doesn't work.

I don't recall David Gerrold, or A.E. Van Vogt being there, but I
wouldn't have known who they were.

Looking at my journal...September 28, 1971, my first day in the
science fiction class.  Phil was seven months away.

So, he would have been living in San Rafael with a rotating group of
druggies.  He was one, himself.  He was on the way down, but still
received an invitation to give a talk in Vancouver, right?  That's
how he got up there?  That's where he was living when I wrote him. 
He had been a guest at someone's house, but they kicked him out
after he became too much for them to handle.  I understand he tried
to kill himself, and ended up in X-Kalay, a rehab center of some
kind?  That's where he received my letter.  He had no possessions to
speak of other than that trench coat, the Bible, and the box.  His
mother got rid of  everything that was left behind in his house. 
When I wrote to him, and Sue and Joanne wrote and offered him a
place to live, we were just in time to be a place to land.

What do you think his reaction was to the letter I wrote to him that
I posted in an earlier response, considering his circumstances?
  

    
Right, in San Rafael his wife left him and, not wanting to be alone,
he let all sorts of street people and runaways stay at his house. I
remember noticing that his Hugo award (which he'd won in '62 for Man
in the High Castle) was pretty beat-up looking and missing the
plaque, and he explained that he had had to use it as a club to
break up a fight, and that one of these "roommates" had unscrewed it
from its wooden base to hide drugs inside it. 

     And then he was invited to be Guest of Honor at V-Con in
Vancouver -- and when the convention ended, he simply stayed on, to
the bewilderment of the con committee.  And yes, he attempted to
kill himself, got rescued, and then checked into X-Kalay, which was 
a rehab place for heroin addicts -- he wasn't one, but said he
wanted a strict, regimented, abstemious life for a while. His life
in Marin County had pretty well evaporated, and he really had
nowhere to go. '71 had been a disaster, and '72 couldn't have been
looking all that much better.

     That's when he wrote to McNelly, who read the letter to a class
you were in, and so you wrote to him. Well -- re-read your letter!
It's hard to overstate the effect it would have had on him, and
clearly did have. It revived him. It's noteworthy that when Sue and
Joanne wrote to him and said, "You can come stay at our place," he
agreed, knowing nearly nothing of who they were or what the
accommodations were -- and told McNelly, "Have Linda Levy pick me up
at the airport."

    And you asked me if I'd like to come along to the airport to
meet Philip K. Dick. I'd only read one of his novels at that time,
but I said, sure.

     
  

    
Greetings Linda and Tim!
A little background on me..in 1968, I took a date to see the
Grateful Dead at the National Guard Armory in downtown St. Louis and
that experience completely changed the arc of my life, going
forward..prior to that fateful night, I was going to graduate, move
to Grand Bahama Island and work as a deckhand on a billfishing
charter boat for a dude we had met on previous trip to the Island
called Captain WhiteTrash who lived there..
which meant no college..which disappointed my parents but after that
concert, I did a 180° change and got into Menlo College in Menlo
Park, CA. essentially, so I could see the Dead on their home turf a
lot..1969 to 1970, I completed my freshman year and then dropped
out..

Anywhoo, skip forward a few years to 1972 and I was then living in
Montara, CA, south of San Francisco when I chose to write a letter
to Ralph J. Gleason, then a music critic for the San Francisco
Chronicle as a heartfelt response to a column he published where he
proposed Gleason’s Law which is:
“No matter how paranoid you are, they are always doing more than you
think they are.”

This Law so profoundly affected me that I did what you did, Linda, I
wrote him a letter about how his Law so fundamentally changed me and
my outlook on life at the time..he wrote me back a very nice note
(which has been lost in the sands of time)

All that preamble to say that basically PKD’s books affected me in
similar ways..I had always been a voracious reader from childhood
forward so when stumbled across PKD (I was already a hard-core Sci
Fi guy, consuming Heinlein, Asimov, Fritz Lieber, etc. etc.) I
immediately knew he was onto something and I then consumed anything
and every thing he had written and continued to write..more later
  

    
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This conversation will last for at least two weeks, through June 17.
Thanks for joining us! 
  

    
Linda, was "the box" like the one in "confessions of a crap artist",
holding cards and clippings that each recorded a True Fact?
  

    
Alex!  Welcome to the discussion.  What a great story!  (I didn't
get to my first Dead show until 1992, unfortunately, but consumed as
much as possible after that.)  I am glad that you were similarly
affected by Phil.  Some things/people just have something that hits
you between the eyes and/or in the gut and nothing is the same after
that.

With one difference, when I wrote to Phil, I had never heard his
name before or read anything he'd written.

Chuck, I don't know what was in the box.  Do you, Tim?  And we
should probably explain what box we're talking about:  when we first
met Phil at the airport.  Do you want to do the honors?
  

    
My first impression of Phil was of a portly, middle-aged man,
wearing a trench coat tightly belted at the waist, which accentuated
his middle.  He was carrying a Bible, and a box tied up with an
electrical cord.

Later, I read descriptions of Phil when he was in Vancouver.  Some
of them mentioned the trench coat.
  

    
I forgot to mention the beard!  A bearded, portly, middle-aged man.
  

    
So is the "I'm So Sorry" letter, from September 1972, the letter
about your first meeting? Is the list of letters in chronological
order?
  

    

Interesting histories. Linda and Tim, specially, thanks for sharing these
anecdotes and the treasury of letters. I was also a hardware SciFi
exhaustive consumer, specially in those years leading up to college. PKD,
respect!


Are we reporting first Greatful Dead contacts? Me, 1972, Winterland iirc.
Taken by new friends in Berkeley were I was to begin a freshman year. Yeah,
changed my life.

I have hear a copy of your completed Application for Personal Immortality,
Linda, of Sept 16, 1975. So good to see that PKD granted your submission, as
of course he should have.
  

    

woops, Frako slipped in a response while I was composing..
  

    
     Well, we got to the airport on time -- after dark, I don't
remember the hour -- and we found the correct gate, and very shortly
Phil got off the plane. Right, Linda, a bearded, portly, middle-aged
man." According to my journal, "He appeared, smiling but not quite
at ease in a sport coat and tie (the sport coat probably fit fine
before all the Ex-Kalay manual labor broadened his shoulders) and he
greeted us all [you, Sue, Joanne and me] as calmly as if it were a
much more conventional meeting. His luggage was a cardboard box tied
shut with an electric cord, like an extension cord. I was interested
to meet him, but I didn't think we'd be any kind of great friends."
I don't know what was in the box -- underwear and a clean shirt,
probably. 

     We all piled into your yellow Camaro, with you driving and Phil
in the passenger seat, and then instead of heading straight back to
Orange County, we drove northwest to Norman Spinrad's hilltop house
in Laurel Canyon, very near where SF cartoonist Bill Rotsler was
living. On the drive I mentioned having read and liked "Time Out of
Joint," which drew no particular response, and I asked him if he
knew Fritz Leiber (a hero of mine too, Alex!), and Phil just said
that Leiber had once tried to rip off his wife.

     I recall that Sue and Joanne were sniffy about your driving,
Linda, though Phil approved of it. And so at God-knows-what hour, we
parked in a wooded sort of clearing adjacent to Spinrad's house.
When we climbed out of the car we heard a serious growl and
fast-approaching barking, and Phil yanked out his belt and quickly
wrapped the end around his fist, with the buckle swinging free --
but the dog contented himself with stopping short and just barking
at us, and Phil put his belt back on. And so we all trudged up to
the house and knocked on Spinrad's door. 
  

    

whoa
  

    
<frako>So is the "I'm So Sorry" letter, from September 1972, the
letter
about your first meeting? Is the list of letters in chronological
order?

No, that wasn't about our first meeting.  My memory has faded a bit
in the last 50 years.  I can't remember which apology letter came
first, I'm only sure that the postcards came somewhere in the
middle.  There are some things we have to talk about first, and then
things will become clearer.
  

    
Have you ever heard about the Philip K. Dick robot?  It was built by
Hanson Robotics, and it was definitely in the uncanny valley, to the
extent that it was scary.  Until it started talking.  He speaks in
non sequiturs.

I didn't see it, but it was part of Phil Dick lore because Hanson
Robotics, so the story goes, left its head on an airplane and never
got it back.

Here's a demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkE6RBlfbXA
  

    
Later, in 2011, a Dutch TV company, VPRO, sponsored a new
replacement robot.

This one is even scarier than the first.  And he has an interesting
dialog.  Still a robotic voice, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9MUg6uk5lg