Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I didn't read any PKD until a few months ago, starting with
Confessions of a Crap Artist, again because of the class I sat in on
at San Francisco State.  I started to read one once way back when
but it was so bleak and full of despair I couldn't continue.

IIRC I asked Powers about inviting KW, but I think he said he didn't
know how to reach him.
  

    
Try:  <https://twitter.com/kwjeter>.  I exchanged some tweets with him
a decade or so ago.
  

    
Linda,  when Serena or Jim Blaylock and I would be sitting around in
Phil's living room over a bottle of Zinfandel late at night, he
could convince us of anything. He'd look around, then lower his
voice and say something like, "My researches in the Pre-Socratic
apocrypha have revealed to me a fact which has only been known to
six people throughout history -- each of whom died within a day of
learning it. I'll tell it to you." And we'd be all "No, don't tell
us, we're not listening!" I recall that one time he convinced
Blaylock and I that archeological research in San Diego had found
that one branch of prehistoric man had one eye two noses apiece, and
that the world had not seen the last of these creatures. For reasons
I forget, this was a very scary prospect. Blaylock and I drove away
expecting to see a one-eyed-two-nosed guy at every traffic light.
Apparently someone had claimed such a discovery had been made, and
eventually I read a letter in one of the Collected Letters volumes
in which Phil laughingly derided the idea -- a week before he
solemnly told it to us.
  

    

That form response from PKD to you, Linda, very curious. Funny, but weird 
too and that it suggests a diety above performing a beneficent judgement. 
But I can see how it would be funny between intimates.

Anyway, here's my impression:

The Application for Personal Immortality evaluation response form, 
completed and signed by PKD, sent to Linda, and copied to me 49 years 
later for this inkwell.vue topic.  Received, read, and somewhat cogitated.

On first perusal, it's a fun little thing. A completed form response to an 
application for immortality, from the Director of Immortality his self. 



May I ask, what was the context? Had you and PKD been joking or maundering 
over the immortality that fame lures one into believing? Was it a humorous 
response to something more serious? The sturm und drang of what we've 
reviewed here so far isn't suggestive of a lot of yuks going on - the 
situation and situations though seem fertile for laughs, but I'm not 
getting yet that PKD was intentionally funny with you. The evolving 
rooming situations, the strategic claimings of attention (the typed 
proposal in the midst of group drinks out, colonizing the attention of 
your classes, and the angry harangues..), sure offer tons of material 
though. While I've enjoyed your anecdotes so far, and feel the mise en 
scene, I'm feeling like I'm only beginning to have info needed to really 
see your relationship and the greater scene. Pretty interesting though!


I suppose I should describe the form. It's a nicely formatted typed letter 
divided into two sections after a formal salutation complete with address, 
full name with middle initial, and a Dear Ms. Levy. dated Sept 16, 1975.

----------------

The first section informs that Your application for personal immortality 
has been:

_x_ Confirmed
___ Denied

(Next, we see:)

"If "denied" you may refile during the next calendar year. If "confirmed" 
then you will live forever and it will not be necessary to refile.

Reasons for "confirmed" or "denied" are as follows:

_x_ Beauty or the lack thereof
_x_ Warmth or the lack thereof
_x_ Kindness or the lack thereof
_x_ Other
_x_ Other than other; as follows:


(UL)a good friend whom we Love(/UL).

(followed by a formal complimentary closure and sig. of PKD, "Director of 
Immortality")


(_x_, above, were hand written check marks. )
(UL and /UL are start and end of underlining, the text in between hand 
written something about the good friend..)


----------------


the funny thing about the checklist of qualities is that, to me, they can 
be interpreted both ways - absense of the quality or presense. 
  

    

Tim slipped in with another ripping anecdote.

 "My researches in the Pre-Socratic
 apocrypha have revealed...."


It sounds like all he needed were a robe and scepter.
  

    
craig1st, there was always an element of humor. I remember one time
he called me up and said that his researches the night before had
led him to believe he could forgive sins. I asked him whose sins he
had forgiven, and he said, "Well, none. Today I decided I was
mistaken, and last night I called you, but you weren't hope, and I
called Jeter and he got huffy and said he didn't want his sins
forgiven. So I just forgave the cats' sins."
  

    
-- that should be "you weren't home," obviously.
  

    
Craig, there was no context.  It was just a letter I received in the
mail one day.

Remember how I said that I called the collection “Letters from the
heart, the spleen, and the funny bone”?  That’s because Phil was no
one thing.  Sometimes heavy, sometimes light, sometimes
enlightening, sometimes dark, sometimes deeply paranoid or
depressed, and sometimes really funny.  He was also labile: 
laughing and joking one minute and then some sort of darkness would
descend and it was time to go.

The anecdote that Tim relates really suffers from belong told in
text only.  You can’t hear the humor or tone of voice.  He’s messing
with you, man.  
  

    
It becomes apparent very quickly that Phil is mentally ill.

But it’s part and parcel of his genius.  Without his unique vision
we wouldn’t be talking about him today.  Without his difficult to
consistently categorize brand of insanity, there would be no vision,
and we wouldn’t be talking about him today.
  

    
#84:
Amen, Linda..we/I would not be here if not for his “genius”..when I
first starting reading him, I grokked his creative genius and as I
continued on with everything he ever wrote, it became apparent to me
that he was as far out there as I was..

 I refer back to Gleason’s Law: “No matter how paranoid you are,
they are always doing more than you think they are.” 

In other words, I loved reading his schtuff which happened to
solidify my own paranoid musings which is a good thing and was
wildly amusing to me..I had found, in him, a fellow traveler 

In other words, why couldn’t what he was writing be “true”?
  

    
<71> >I'm realizing how it could sound through your ears.

I love many of PKD’s stories, I feel bad that he suffered so much
while writing them, and I wish he had been able to stay with us
longer.

I’m also in that cusp, born 1959, where I can practically point to
the day on the calendar when a generation of men realized that women
were just people.

“I’m not even sure which figment of a woman I have created in my
mind” is the way that letter reads to me. “But it won’t matter, and
I don't have to try to figure it out.”

It feels like a giant scaly hand reaching out of the swamp to grab
my ankle.

On the other hand, for a writer, I suppose a lack of regard for your
audience could be a good thing.
  

    
<mazz>:
Am agreeance with you about his lack of regard for his audience..I
am just glad he found publishers for his output right up to the
end..he spoke to me, as reader, on a deep level so as I was reading
his schtuff I could identify with his musings while still realizing
that it was just a novel or as friend once told me when his waking
loops kept him up at night: “It’s just the pot.”

I am glad, for one, that PKD did not give a flying f*ck about his
audience
  

    
I haven't read a biography, so maybe everyone else already knows this,
but was he making any real money off of his writing?  Or was he mostly
supported by people he knew, somewhat unofficially?
  

    
jet, yes, he made real money from his writing, and wasn't supported
by anybody. His many books stayed in print and were widely
translated, and he was especially popular in France. When he came
down to southern California in '72 he was pretty broke -- "Our
Friends From Frolix 8" had been published two years earlier, and
"Flow My Tears," though written, wasn't to be published till '74 --
but he sustained himself (if precariously!) on infrequent royalty
payments. 
  

    
I recall reading PKD finally came into some pretty decent money
after Warner Brothers optioned *Electric Sheep*, but don't know many
details beyond that. What was that like to finally see that kind of
financial recognition after so many decades?
  

    
is the story that there was a pet food store on san pablo ave in
berkeley where pkd got cheap food for himself --- true?
  

    
My acquaintance with PKD (not personal) parallels some of those
described above. I picked up something by him -- The Zap Gun? Time
Out of Joint? -- and within a few years had acquired and read at
least 20 of his titles, many of them in British hardbound editions
found in a small bookstore in San Francisco. The books seemed to be
flirting with madness and I was quite concerned at the time that I
might have a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia. (Other big
influences included Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and
The Eden Express, and then there's Samuel Delany ...) (I loved and
still lvoe Blade Runner on its own merits, but of course nearly all
of the PKD had been squeezed out of it.)

Anyway, just from reading the books I am not surprised at all if he
was mercurial, obsessive, at times magisterial, at times gnomic. It
would surprise if he had not been! 

But, Linda, this raises a question in my mind about the letter he
hand-delivered to you in the Chinese restaurant. He quotes Don
McLean's "Vincent," which is of course about Vincent Van Gogh,
another tortured artist -- too beautiful for the world, as McLean
puts it. In the Phil places you on a pedestal; indeed he places you
at the figurative center (at least) of the universe. Do you think
some of that might have been projection of his own unmet need to be,
not adulated maybe, not apotheosized, but adored?
  

    

(The Eden Express threw me for a loop.)
  

    
James, right, he came into a lot of money (I don't recall the
amount, but substantial) when Warner Brothers bought the rights to
Bladerunner. Actually, I think it made him uncomfortable to have a
lot more money than he needed -- he gave away a fair amount, as for
instance to UNICEF and other causes. At one point a teller from his
bank wrote to him and said, in effect, "Mr. Dick, I see you have a
lot of money in your account; I'm having a hard time getting by
financially ..." and he sent some money to her.

     Paulina, yes, in the introduction to his short story collection
"The Golden Man," Phil notes that "back in the early Fifties, when
my writing career began [...] we were poor, in fact we -- my wife
Kleo and I -- were *poor* poor." And he goes on to say that in those
days he was buying horsemeat at the  Lucky Dog Pet Store for them to
eat. 
  

    
i recall seeing that store on san pablo
  

    

same
  

    
>>I’m also in that cusp, born 1959, where I can practically point to
the day on the calendar when a generation of men realized that women
were just people.

<mazz>, I think it's important to remember that Phil was born in
1928, 8 years after women got the right to vote.  He was a product
of his time, and as much as I would love to see that somehow, in
retrospect, he had demonstrated great awareness, it just wasn't so. 
And, for the most part, neither did anyone else.

When I graduated from high school in 1969, my father said that
putting me through college was a waste of time and money because I
would just be married by the time I was 25 and pushing out babies
and that education would go to waste.  He was born in 1927.  

When I started college in 1969, male professors could accost female
students (and probably faculty and staff) with impunity.  Want ads
could specify that they were looking for a woman (more likely "a
girl") and I recall one that even specified height and hair color.

More than once I would be called into a professor's office only to
have to fight him off.  Once a professor took me to lunch, and then,
without preamble or even gauging interest, laid out in great detail
his plan for our domination and submission relationship down to what
time he was coming over, where he wanted me to wait, and what he
wanted me to wear.  Once, at a department party, two of my
professors drunkenly approached me and said, "We wanna get screwed!"
When I failed to be interested in accommodating them, one of them
gave me a D in his class.  I'd never had a D before.  One of my
professors, in the middle of grading one of my papers, started
propositioning me, in writing as he was reading.  There was no
recourse, no one to go to, no repercussions.  And I still have it.

Phil never did any of that.  By the standards of his day, he was a
complete gentleman.

>>But, Linda, this raises a question in my mind about the letter he
hand-delivered to you in the Chinese restaurant. He quotes Don
McLean's "Vincent," which is of course about Vincent Van Gogh,
another tortured artist -- too beautiful for the world, as McLean
puts it. In the Phil places you on a pedestal; indeed he places you
at the figurative center (at least) of the universe. Do you think
some of that might have been projection of his own unmet need to be,
not adulated maybe, not apotheosized, but adored?

<druid>, I think that it was all bait to reel in someone who could
meet his physical and psychological needs.  So yes, probably, he
adored in order to be adored in turn...and then, further, to
withdraw his adoration, while expecting yours of him to continue.

I think that what we are looking at is "love bombing," something I
have only in recent years become aware of.  In retrospect, I can see
how many times I fell for that, usually believing that, at last,
somebody loved me, only to discover that I had been reeled in to
fulfill someone else's need to be loved.  I'm astonished, really, at
the awareness I demonstrated in my 1972 journal entry.  As the years
went by, I let down my guard, and didn't heed my own words. 

<drew>, Vincent would play a role in future communication.  For
example, the short story, "Goodbye Vincent."  And there would be
callbacks in future communication.
  

    
> His many books stayed in print

I was devoted to scifi, and when I stumbled onto PKD's work, it was
all mass market paperbacks - I eventually had a pile of those.
Marsha and I both read them - I recall reading them cover to cover
when I had the flu and was laid up for a few days. I think viral
fevers brought the right attitude for reading novels like _The Man
in the High Castle)_ and _We Can Remember It For You Wholesale_. We
were pretty psyched when we heard they were filming _Flow My
Tears..._ as "Blade Runner," a film we saw several times when it was
released. I recall seeing the image below - those off-WELL might not
see it - of PKD in a suit, standing with Ridley Scott. I realized he
was finally making some real money. 

Incidentally, I found a link to Paul's Rolling Stone article:
<https://philipdick.com/mirror/articles/1974_Rolling_Stone.pdfL<img
src="https://dangerousminds.net/content/uploads/images/made/content/uploads/images/
Ridley_Scott_Philip_K_Dick_1982_465_302_int.jpg"; width=543>
  

    
Clickable:

<https://philipdick.com/mirror/articles/1974_Rolling_Stone.pdf>
  

    
Oops! Sorry...