Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I immediately assumed it was just like fathom, which the freebie oed
entry confirmed. I can imagine it with the Gaelic softened Dh
consonant asa well.
  

    
I love this drift, and a shiny new word is a bonus!

Tim, is there anything left unsaid about Phil's last years?  Do you
have any questions for a Dark-Haired Girl?
  

    
I'm amazed to learn that you haven't read his books. 

I'm close to (icenine) in having read all of it, and also some
reflections on the work by others. I have always thought that much
of it is pretty deeply cynical, but it keeps proving out. We keep
finding ourselves where he warned we would.

I can understand that you might have an allergy to the expressions
of someone who treated you so badly back then. That he was such a
social chameleon seemed likely, but hearing the descriptions of his
actual interactions takes it away from the abstract, making it clear
that it was unnerving and scary. I always thought that A Scanner
Darkly came from a pretty odd place. Even odder than I suspected, as
it turns out.
  

    
Linda, I guess the summation would be that his last years were
comparatively calm and very productive! I remember him at our
Thursday night gatherings -- where most of the attendees were
friends and fellow employees at the Tinder Box tobacco shop, not any
sort of "writers' group" -- where he was always cheerful and funny.
I remember that when some guest seemed isolated and ill-at-ease,
Phil would get chatting with him.

     Everybody was always turned out at midnight, and I remember
that the week after his death a big stuffed emu was discovered on
our back porch at midnight, and I wondered if he could somehow be
responsible. (What are you talking about, Powers?) (I don't know, it
was a long time ago and I can't have been sober.) 

     I guess I'd ask you what you'd says to 21-year-old Linda, now,
if you had a time-machine that allowed five-minute visits.
Alternatively, if you like, I'd ask you -- as I'd ask myself --
isn't it disconcerting to find things you said and did fifty years
ago, when we were not quite, or barely, old enough to drink, being
scrutinized today by literary historians?

     William, I don't think cynical is the right word. Remember the
factory-reject  brain-units huddling under cardboard in the rain, in
"Now Wait For Last Year"? It effectively evokes pity! Or, from that
same book, the dialogue on the last page: Eric Sweetscent asks  an
automated taxi if he should leave his hopelessly brain-damaged wife,
and the taxi tells him  that it would stay with her because "To
abandon her would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have
to have uniquely special easier conditions." And when Sweetscent
agrees, the taxi tells him, "God bless you, sir. I can see that
you're a good man." And in many of the books, all the little people
with jobs and rent -- sweeping the sidewalk before opening their
shops in the morning --  are never portrayed mockingly or
condescendingly.

     You could call the God or gods of his books cynical -- careless
and perverse and uncaring -- but the viewpoint is on the side of the
poor characters who have to live in those terrible worlds.
  

    
-- Vonnegut, on the other hand, I think could be called cynical. He
puts his characters in situations that should evoke pity and
compassion, but he always seems to be at least somewhat making fun
of them and their small concerns. "So it goes."
  

    
<yesway> I did try to read one of his books once back then - I don’t
remember which - but the world  it portrayed was so bleak, and the
male-female relationships were so devoid of light, or love or hope
that I didn’t want to contemplate what it might portend for my own
future.

But I did read most of the books that were assigned to the students
at the SF State class and I was blown away by how good they are.

The downside of some of them, like Confessions of a Crap Artist,
were that I couldn’t help but see that the main characters were Phil
and his third wife
  

    
…and some of the situations and settings were so close to real life
that it took me out of the story.

Don’t know why I got truncated just then.
  

    
>> I guess I'd ask you what you'd says to 21-year-old Linda, now, if
you had a time-machine that allowed five-minute visits.>>

I’d say don’t let Will McNelly [the professor at Cal State Fullerton
who taught the Science Fiction class that started this whole ball
rolling] encourage you to write a cute letter to a strange man.  Pay
attention to your intuition that McNelly is somehow providing you
for Phil; in retrospect, I can see how McNelly would have earned
appreciation from Phil for providing him with a Dark-Haired Girl. 
There was always a whiff of lecherous old man about it.  Maybe Phil
didn’t even ask him to tell me he wanted me to pick him up at the
airport.  Maybe McNelly suggested it himself.

>>Alternatively, if you like, I'd ask you -- as I'd ask myself --
isn't it disconcerting to find things you said and did fifty years
ago, when we were not quite, or barely, old enough to drink, being
scrutinized today by literary historians?>>

Oh, yes.  I wish I had been wise beyond my years and said more
portentous things.  We should have discussed his work and I should
have written scholarly articles examining the meaning of things he
said that would give us valuable insights that would continue to
reveal truths that only become apparent in hindsight.  I should have
taken pictures.  As it is, I think you were a genius to have kept a
journal.
  

    
And I wish I could have been part of the gang.

I reread my notes for the talk I gave prior to this discussion and I
was amused to note the following two bullet points:

Phil assaults Linda
Everyone goes to the movies
  

    
Thanks for your perceptive answer Tim. I guess my sense of his
cynicism is tied to the sources of people’s travails in the futures
he envisioned. Palmer Eldritch, and all of the other ruthless types
running those worlds, shaped my own sense of the prevalence and
dominance of greedy narcissists in our own. Also the willingness of
society to just take the deterioration of society in stride. 

Your point about Vonnegut is well made, but I have always felt the
humor was sort of the point. It’s how the Irish sustained their
culture in the face of degradation and oppression. 

Linda, your description of his obsessiveness and propensity for
violence, and other forms of cruelty, brought me a new understanding
of the way a warped sense of self can inform a creative person’s
work. I will revisit some of the books with a new perspective thanks
to both of you. 

The thing that has always unnerved me is the way the scenarios Dick
imagined keep becoming part of our actual reality. Elon Musk seems
to be emulating Eldritch. Ubik points to the surveillance economy we
now inhabit. His cynicism about the capitalist juggernaut has always
seemed to me to be earned wisdom. I share that sensibility.
  

    
Linda, wow, you make some good points there! McNelly providing Phil
with a Dark-Haired Girl ... ugh. In fifty years that never occurred
to me. 

   And yes, we should have taken pictures! Lots of them!
  

    
And the "smart" door in Galactic Pot-Healer that threatens to sue
protagonist Joe Chip is a premonition too.
  

    

linda, thank you for noting this about PKD and the crowd:

 
-  Phil assaults Linda
-  Everyone goes to the movies


though i would like to think this is changing, in the #MeToo era, i think
this is pretty standard-issue behavior in our society. add in fame, cult
following, etcetera, and you get even more of that denial. no one wants to
believe that the Special Person in their midst -- their special SF author,
their indie rock star, the cool person who makes their whole crowd seem
more awesome -- is doing terrible things, even if they secretly know or
suspect that's happening.

fame and power, even smallish-potatoes level fame or power, seem to create
these situations.

thank you for telling your side of the story. this is ultimately a #MeToo
story, and we need to keep telling those. over and over. until stuff
changes. 
  

    
Word.
  

    
>>The thing that has always unnerved me is the way the scenarios
Dick
imagined keep becoming part of our actual reality.

I know!  Was Phil a visionary and prophet?  There are many
synchronicities around Phil.  Are they just coincidence, plain and
simple?  Today, the technology in Minority Report, looks dated, when
at first it was mind-blowing!  Using a transparent board as a
screen?  Grabbing items on the screen and moving them around?  

>>McNelly providing Phil with a Dark-Haired Girl ... ugh. In fifty
years that never occurred to me. 

It's in the letter I wrote to Phil, posted early in this discussion,
that I had the impression I was being provided to him.
  

    
Thanks to all, fascinating conversation.
  

    
Am most emphatically in agreeance with Robin, all the way around..

thanking Linda and Tim for being open to such a conversation about
PKD, arguably one of the towering giants of Sci-Fi and Alt-Universe
fiction whose prophetic and visionary musings have provided me with
untold hours of reading and pondering and most of all, enjoyment
even though at times it was rough going due to his content..

Being able to see through Tim and Linda’s eyes, PKD in all his
foible-filled and crippling realities of how he got through each day
was truly to me, revelatory..I came away from this discussion with a
renewed sense of how great a writer he was even though his visions
and writings cost him, his loved ones and his close friends much, in
the end..

on a personal note, as survivor of two separate strokes, I am
grateful beyond measure that I did not succumb to either of them and
lived to tell tale while sadly PKD did not..I am left with an
awareness that PKD might not have said or wrote all that he could
have had he survived into old age but what he left behind was simply
some of the best shit*  out there and only he could have written it
*I use that term with the utmost respect and admiration for what he
accomplished 

And I end this missive with the fervent hope that PKD did not suffer
in the end as he had in life..
  

    




as a footnote: i just read a book called "Monsters" by Claire Dederer that
might be useful to anyone who is trying to process their uncertainty or
confusion about how one can reconcile our knowledge of an artist/writer's
biography (and bad doings) with our love of their work. Dederer's book
doesn't really solve the problem, but it's a nice read and offers
perspective and possibilities. to men especially i would suggest reading
it, particularly the last 3/4. for women some of that might feel redundant.
we've already lived it. 
  

    
Thanking you, T
May have to get that book
  

    
I collected some highlights from this chat and with permission, put
them on my blog, which (doctorow) kindly retweeted:

https://x.com/slhamlet/status/1804272692943901088

(Bit of stretch, as my blog is about the Metaverse, but PKD had a
pretty big influence on virtual worlds/cyberpunk/etc.)
  

    
good job of excerpting
  

    
Yes, and thanks!