Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Absolutely, Linda, thanks. You're very eloquent on this. I wanted to
try to unpack some of the specific thoughts it was triggering in me:
that dividing people into "empathic" and "cold" was a project from
within a denied experience of being split that way himself...
  

    
With reference to Maer Wilson's experience, Linda, you note that "it
was certainly different from what of the rest of the gang
experienced."

     This is true, and should be mentioned, to forestall the
takeaway impression that he was Heathcliff from "Wuthering Heights."
We used to say that somebody could call him and say, "Phil, I've
been evicted and my car's broke down. Can you loan me $400 bucks and
help move my couch?" and he'd say, "Sure, I'll be right over. Uh --
who is this?" And he was a regular at Thursday night gatherings at
my apartment in the late '70s and up to February of '82, and was
always very chatty and convivial. Among other things, he was
probably the funniest guy I've ever known.

     -- Along with all the rest.

     
  

    
Tim it was a relief to read your last
  

    
>>always very chatty and convivial
Tim, he never went into a catatonic withdrawal or a sudden flip into
silence and heaviness like he did when we returned from the movies
and his party had "been going on for two hours"? 

>>he was probably the funniest guy

Yes, he could definitely be funny.

Like, for example, one of the letters he sent me about Elijah and
Ovaltine.

September 18, 1975

Dear Linda,

My therapist, who is Jewish, says that a Jewish New Year just took
place (or a New Jewish Year, whatever).  

[...]

Why I am writing you is because of a perplexing theological problem
which she could not answer.  Last Passover, being not in possession
of any wine, but wishing to put out a cup for Elijah, I put a cup of
Ovaltine out for Him.  Later on, when I looked, not only was the
Ovaltine gone but so was the cup.

My therapist says that Elijah does not drink Ovaltine, in which case
I think I deserve having my cup back, don't you think?  Myself, I
think it was Elijah.  He knew I didn't have any wine.

[...]

The Orphics believed that milk sweetened with honey was the food of
the gods, which is where we get out (sic) expression, "the land of
milk and honey," or else the Orphics got it from us.  In any case,
my cup is still missing.  Was this a major religious experience, or
did I just lose something?

Hoping that you can shed light on this matter I remain,

your humble admirer,
Phil

P.S.  If I convert, do I get my cup back?
  

    
      Linda, you asked, "Tim, he never went into a catatonic
withdrawal or a sudden flip intosilence and heaviness like he did
when we returned from the moviesand his party had 'been going on for
two hours'?"

        I never saw the full catatonic withdrawal, but did sometimes see
the flip into silence and heaviness. 

        A bit of context -- he and I, often with Joel Stein, would spend
many late nights in ’72 sitting around in the living room of their
apartment, and -- I’m quoting now from a thing I wrote for the PKDS
Newsletter in ’83 -- “over many a jug of cheap Chianti, Phil used to
tell me about his days in Marin County ... murky stories of
insanity, knifings, dope, brain damage ... stories about
experimental disorientation drugs developed for chemical warfare but
stolen from government warehouses and sold on the street  as
recreational drugs ... endless retellings and speculations about the
time his house in San Rafael was so spectacularly broken into in
1971 ... Phil had recently bought the Stones album ‘Sticky Fingers,
and I still can’t hear ‘Sister Morphine’ or ‘Moonlight Mile’ without
instantly being back in that living room, me pouched in an old
brown-vinyl beanbag chair and Phil on the couch, the bottle on the
table between us, Phil frowning as he decided how much of some awful
story he dared reveal to me ...”

        He  had a horror of sexually transmitted diseases , and he was
uneasily impressed with Thomas Disch’s 1968 novel “Camp
Concentration,” in which political prisoners are injected with an
experimental variety of syphilis that makes them geniuses even as it
kills them. Well, one such night I idly mentioned having heard from
a friend that a particularly virulent form of syphilis had shown up
in Vietnam, and that although ground troops were being screened for
it, Air Force pilots were bringing it back to the States. This shut
him down -- heavy frown, total silence, for several minutes. ("So
how about that, eh, Phil? Uh, Phil? Phil?")

        There were a few other instances too, but that’s one I particularly
remember.
  

    
Tim, one of the videos I watched said that Phil had a phobia about
swallowing and about eating in public.

Did you ever observe any evidence of that?
  

    
> Phil had recently bought the Stones album ‘Sticky Fingers,
and I still can’t hear ‘Sister Morphine’ or ‘Moonlight Mile’ without
instantly being back in that living room, me pouched in an old
brown-vinyl beanbag chair and Phil on the couch, the bottle on the
table between us, Phil frowning as he decided how much of some awful
story he dared reveal to me ...”

Wow, this really brings back Marin to me too. But I didn't have PKD
to tell me crazy stories!
  

    

still admiring this conversation!

i think lethem's observation about splitting sounds about right (hi,
jonathan -- i sent you email recently -- we met a few times back in the
day) and, to me, sits well with the whole Borderline Personality Disorder
feel i get from these letters and from Linda's observations.
  

    
wanna say something about how perhaps in 'camp concentration' (which
also left a huge impression on me and equated with some of my
feelings about illness as metaphor) perhaps pkd felt some sort of
uneasy answering spirit.
  

    
By the other D author.
  

    
Linda, no, I never noticed a phobia about eating and swallowing in
public. I can think of a number of lunches and dinners in
restaurants with him -- lunches with me and Blaylock and Jeter at
various places, dinners at that Mexican restaurant by Roy Squires'
house, etc. (Everybody: Squires was a private press printer and rare
book dealer who lived in Glendale. Phil once said that visiting
Squires was the only good reason to drive to L.A. ((though
technically Glendale is in the San Fernando Valley.)))
  

    
Just dropping in to thank you for this conversation. Looking forward
to tonight's class Tim.
  

    
Last night, Tim gave a talk via Zoom to a class about Phil at San
Francisco State.  This has been an in-depth class meeting two times
a week for what, 16 weeks?  18 weeks?  I lost count.

Tim's talk was the final one, about Phil's last days.  Since we are
getting close to the end of our featured time here on inkwell, I
thought it might be time to start heading in that direction
ourselves.
  

    
a question for linda and tim: did you two get what you had hoped for
from this conversation?
  

    
What's more important to me is:  Did you?

Today is the first day of the 3rd International Philip K. Dick
Festival in Fort Morgan, Colorado.

Dickheads Podcast will be livestreaming tonight via Zoom, June 14th,
with special guests Jonathan Lethem <jlethem> and Stephen Graham
Jones, both New York Times Bestselling authors, with PKD trivia by
Professor David Gill.

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9943453997?pwd=ZmZWSEs3TCtscC9sYVVmNjRLRHZUQT09&omn=
86013537008

6-8 PM Pacific
7-9 PM Mountain
8-10 PM Central
9-11 PM Eastern
  

    
Hi, Paulina,

Yes, I had a good time in this conversation -- got reminded of, or
learned for the first time, some colorful things from those days!
It's interesting to say, "Oh yeah, and remember when so-and-so said
this?" and realize that you're talking about stuff that happened
fifty years ago!
  

    
in these situations i wonder tif he conveners (?) were left feeling
'this is all very well but interesting that we werent asked
about...'
  

    
Paulina -- Oh, maybe "He wrote several books during those last ten
years -- was he a different guy when he was in the middle of writing
one?"
  

    
hmm, trying to think how one might map what was going on with
someone when s/he was intensely involved with a partic. act of
creation. would seem hard to do...
  

    
Paulina, true, God knows what was going on in his head! But the way
he worked was incredible. When he was writing a book, he did
virtually nothing else. In my journal I noted on August 14 of '76
that he had just finished "Valisystem A" (published as "Radio Free
Albemuth"), having written it in eleven days. And on November 28 of
'78, I note that he "had got busy" on "Valis (on that day he invited
me over to read the first eight pages of it, and while I was reading
and he was in the other room typing, he called to asked the spelling
of  "nuclear" and Eliot" -- it was nice to read the book and find
the page he was writing while I was there!), which he finished in
nine days.

     He must have eaten and slept sometimes! But given the way he
wrote books, I think writing them was actually bad for his health!
  

    
(There was supposed to be a close-quote after Valis.
  

    
)

You're welcome.

I've heard of other writers who worked like that. I think Simenon
had some kind of thing about writing books in a single day. As
someone who's always needed some externally-imposed structure to
pursue a writing project for long, I envy and admire that kind of
torrential outflowing of creative juices.
  

    
Thanks, Drew! Yes, some of the old pulp writers used to be able to
turn out stories at an incredible rate. Phil would have been doing
nearly ten thousand words a day -- forty typed double-spaced pages.
I could do that myself! -- if nobody demanded actual paragraphs and
sentences.
  

    
thinking of that capote comment about the beats: that's not writing,
it's typing.
  

    
Paulina, if I were to try writing that fast, it would scarcely even
be typing. PKD's mind worked much faster than mine!