Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
NOVA did a brief interview with the first robot.  David Hanson, the
man on the left, is the one who built the robots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot0Fuy34xN0

I should add that I have backed one of his projects on Kickstarter. 
It's delayed by years, but I can't wait to see it.
  

    
> There are some things we have to talk about first, and then things
will become clearer.

OK then, so you will prompt me <castle>.
  

    
Okay!
  

    
That robot is unnerving. He seems way more aware than he can
possibly really be, and I keep thinking the people asking him
questions shouldn't laugh at him! He'll remember.

     And I'm not sure I buy the story that the first one Hanson
built got left in the overhead compartment by mistake, and was lost.
The robot probably made him say that.

     But back to the days when Philip K. Dick was not yet a robot --
Linda, how soon after Phil's arrival did you and he go to L.A. to
have dinner with Harlan Ellison? I assume you drove. Did you know by
that time who Harlan Ellison was?
  

    
(Those robots are so unnerving! Not to interrupt the flow of the
conversation, but as an aside, what is it like to see the face of
someone you knew so well, in that form?)
  

    
Betsy, it's not quite really him -- more like a cousin with a strong
resemblance. And the voice isn't right. Still, I reflexively object
to those people laughing at him when he tries to answer questions!
  

    
WOOOOOW. This is The Best Topic on The Well right now!
  

    
Heh!

The robot looks just enough like him to do a double-take.  David
Hanson is really talented.

So, yes, Tim, the dinner with Harlan!  It wasn't too long after Phil
arrived.  The letter I wrote him was April 7th; the dinner was still
April, certainly.

I absolutely knew who Harlan was!  I can't recall what we read of
his in the science fiction class, I just remember that I loved it,
and I got all fangirl when Phil invited me to dinner with him.

And yes, I drove.  Phil didn't have a car, of course.

We drove to Harlan's house - Ellison Wonderland is what it said on
the mailbox.  It was somewhere off of Mulholland and that's as close
as I can get to remembering where it was.  The plan was to go to a
Chinese restaurant in Hollywood called Ting Ho for dinner.  I drove
my car and Harlan drove his.  It was a twin to mine - a yellow 1967
Chevy Camaro.  His had personalized license plates that said "HE."

When we got there, we discovered that Harlan had also invited other
people, including Ed Bryant, and a student of Harlan's.  He was
teaching a class at his house and had had a drawing to see see which
student would get to come to dinner with Philip K. Dick.  Harlan
apologized to us, "I'm sorry, Phil, she's a real toad; of all the
students who could have won, it was her!"  Ed was picking her up and
they arrived after we were seated.  Phil said, loudly, "Where's the
toad Harlan?  I don't see a toad?"  He repeated words to that effect
long past when it might have been mildly amusing; instead it was
cringeworthy, and I don't know if the woman in question ever knew
she was the butt of the joke.

I just sat back and enjoyed being in the company of these
wordsmiths.  Harlan was the star of the show. talking fast and full
of energy.  Or wired, maybe?  He kept hitting on this seeming young
starlet sitting at an adjacent table.  She wasn't interested, and he
didn't give up.

The banter was fast and furious and it was in the middle of this
that Phil handed me a fat envelope, addressed to me, with a return
address of X-Kalay, which had been crossed out and replaced with a
typed "Philip K. Dick."  

Curious, I started to read.

Dear Linda,

Sitting here, I heard a song on the radio, and it made me think of
you exactly:

"...This world was never meant
For one as beautiful as you.

"...Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me.
How you suffered for your sanity..."

Linda, don't go crazy trying to keep up with your beauty.  It's like
a curse, isn't it, being so lovely.  You're fighting to win a race
with life, not trying to keep up with it -- like the rest of us do,
the less appealing, the less attractive, the ordinary -- but my god
sweetheart, you're going to sprint ahead of it and come out rushing
and spent on the other side; you're going to win, you're already
ahead of it...most of us fight with death, trying to pin it two
falls out of three, but I think you're doing that with life.  Life,
evidently, doesn't want  you.  It can't stand the competition.  A
girl so lovely and gentle and warm, so alight with clear humor that
reality can't keep up with her -- I see you manufacturing your own
reality around yourself to replace it, and your self-created reality
is more poignant, more touching and charming:  soft tales about
dolls, stories by a kind and wistful girl who is really quite
lonely...We are all of us, the rest of us, grey compared with you,
like gray rain-water...We're like babbling objects around you made
of silly putty; we blab away at you, flapping our arms like
windmills, but all we do is scare you...

And on it went for four more typewritten, singled-spaced pages,
ending with:
P.S.  Linda, I am very much, very deeply in love with you.  So this
here is what I'd like to ask you:  Will you marry me?
  

    
Gack.  I didn't know where to look.  Not at Phil, certainly.  I
wanted to run, I wanted to stay, I wanted to do anything except
acknowledge what I had just read.  

Who does this after knowing someone only a couple of weeks?  And how
do I get out of this extremely uncomfortable situation?

Maybe someone else would have loved it.  I was terrified.
  

    
So, Linda, I grok your condition of being at that moment..in other 
words,Linda, in the blink of an eye, had a fervent fanboy..
  

    
Tim: am in agreeance with your reaction to the laughter in that 1st
video,.. I, too, had to bail early on in it when it came to them
cats and kitties laughing..although, in retrospect just now, it
occurs to me that it was highly anxious laughing so there is that
  

    
Excerpted from #21 above:
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.

Response 
So Tim tell us more and are we to conclude that all our heroes have
feet of clay? Am taking PKD at his word, here
  

    
Don’t really mean to interject here my comments and queries but
talking PKD hits so deep in my wheelhouse  that I am unable to
moderate my feed

If that makes any sense
  

    
(Just take a deep breath!)
  

    
This might be the best topic on the Well ever. 

I love reading PKD but I quickly came to the conclusion that I
probably would not have enjoyed meeting him. Meeting him in this
way, though, is absolutely riveting.
  

    
Alex, Leiber may or may not have made any move toward Phil's wife.
"taking PKD at his word" was always risky. Entertaining, but risky.

Feet of clay? I suppose so, a lot of the time -- this dinner Linda
found herself in the midst of sounds like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party
as written by Ionesco.
  

    
That dinner party sounds like exactly the kind of situation a pretty
young girl could find herself in, back in those days anyway. Though
most of us didn't receive four page proposals of marriage at the
table
  

    
That amazing letter raises a thousand questions in my mind. I hadn't
realized he hand-delivered it. In the company of others! Did he
expect you to read the whole thing right then and there? Did you?
Was he just sitting there watching while you read it? Did you get as
far as the proposal of marriage, and if so how did you react? How
*could* you react?
  

    
The whole “money for nothing, chicks for free” aspect of celebrity
in that era is its own conversation.
  

    
One which I will apparently never stop squawking about
  

    
(this convo isnt shown on the well front page and am not sure how to
direct it to friends NOTW who might be interested)

(also appreciating that this is centered on a west-coast public
university, not another iteration of 'dink stover at yale')
  

    
> am not sure how to direct it to friends NOTW

See <inkwell.vue.546.13>. 
  

    
<druid>, from response 34, way up there,

>> Gack.  I didn't know where to look.  Not at Phil, certainly.  I
wanted to run, I wanted to stay, I wanted to do anything except
acknowledge what I had just read.  <<
  

    
Was Phil staying at your house?
  

    



if you'd like to share this fascinating conversation with others, post it
to your social feed, etc. -- they do not have to be Well members to read.

this link should work:    https://tinyurl.com/philipdick


and if not, they can use the long version:
https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/546/Philip-K-Dick-The-Last-Ten
-Years-page01.html


the name of the discussion is:
Philip K. Dick, The Last Ten Years: A Conversation Between a Dark-Haired
Girl and Tim Powers

and it comes to you courtesy of The Well community (well.com), our Inkwell
conference for text-only discussionw with authors and artists. Inkwell
co-host Jon Lebkowsky aka <jonl> will undoubtedly pop in occasionally with
more detailed information about how non-Well-members can participate and
ask questions of our dark-haired girl and Well member Linda Levy Castellani
and her co-interviewer Tim Powers.