Philip K Dick

The first Philip K Dick book I ever read was A Scanner Darkly (1977). [Yeah Linklater made a fucking movie of it recently] The first Philip K Dick book I ever read was A Scanner Darkly (1977). [Yeah Linklater made a fucking movie of it recently]

I thought I found it at the long defunct Cooper Square Books, in Astor Place, I'll say winter of '91/'92 because of the date given inside the paperback copy I still have in my possession: First Vintage Books Edition, December 1991. The store had one of those sections for all the most frequently stolen authors in the East Village: William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Louis Borges, probably Jim Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, maybe J.G. Ballard, surely Hunter S. Thompson, and others, including Philip K Dick. So it was a good bet that any book found there would be pretty good, or at least something you should read if you wanted to be in the know. Flipping through my copy however, I found printed inside the back cover: SAINT MARKS BOOKSHOP 12 ST. MARKS PL. NEW YORK, NY 10003. OK, ha, that's cooler anyway. They're over on 9th St and 3rd Ave now.Fuck it. I can't remember anything properly, and I'm in no mood to dismantle my papers in search of the evidence right now, and I throw in this disclaimer for the very very few who may read this and absurdly nitpick to the contrary; I've had many, many addresses, but it's likely I was living alone at the time, uptown, in an SRO, spending the bulk of my days shooting speedballs and jacking off, still prowling the Deuce like Travis Bickle, listening to Deep Purple and Motorhead, and reading alot, especially Aleister Crowley and Nietzsche, in search of answers, always in search of answers.

The opening pages of A Scanner Darkly deal with a guy obsessively tripping out about these bugs' aphids, which of course, in nature prey upon plants not animals---but he claims they're everywhere, filling his lungs, devouring his flesh, tormenting his poor dog, being carried in on the skin of his visitors, the hapless patsies. It's a classic paranoid hallucination scenario somehow familiar to every heavy drug user. (Tracy Letts wrote a whole play/screenplay about the subject called Bug, which was staged in 2004, and William Friedkin directed the film version in 2006, starring Michael Shannon.) So the guy's house is littered with bottles and cans of bug sprays and pest poisons and glue strips, really sick shit, and you think: Ah! the writer has been there. The main character is an undercover narc, a fictional Joe Pistone/Donnie Brasco who instead of infiltrating the mob, goes deep into the hippy drug culture. In the author's note at the end of the book, PKD writes:

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. By punishment he means death, psychosis, permanent damage. Dick dedicates the book to a bunch of his old friends who were drug casualties of the '60s. Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like a decision to step in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgement.

[ --Hey, the book Alcoholics Anonymous has a whole bit about an insane jaywalker who habitually runs in front of cars, trucks, buses, eventually breaking his back on a fire engine, as an analogy to the booze craving. But they say alcoholism IS a disease--]

He continues: When a bunch of people decide to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is 'be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,'but the dying begins almost at once, and then the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years.

He goes on to claim: "There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were." This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.

My memory of the book doesn't include any of this shit. What I recall was the "scramble suit," the high tech device worn by the undercover narcs that obscured the true identity of the agents when reporting back to headquarters from the field or whatever. PKD's books are classified as Science Fiction for these kinds of details.

[Listen; I have no fucking OCR software and after what seemed like too much searching already, came up empty handed for a quick technological solution so I had to type all this out by hand from the book but evidently I thought it was worth it to quote the damn thing at length for my readers. Jeezus--Respecognize!]

*******CHAPTER 2 :
"Gentlemen of the Anaheim Lions Club," the man at the microphone said, "we have a wonderful opportunity this afternoon, for, you see, the County of Orange has provided us with the chance to hear from, and then put questions to and of an undercover narcotics agent from the Orange County Sheriff's Department." He beamed, this man wearing his pink waffle-fiber suit and wide plastic yellow tie and blue shirt and fake leather shoes; he was an overweight man, overaged as well, overhappy even when there was little or nothing to be happy about.
Watching him, the undercover narcotics agent felt nausea.
"Now, you will notice," the Lions Club host said, "that you can barely see this individual, who is seated directly to my right, because he is wearing what is called a scramble suit, which is the exact same suit he wears, and in fact must wear, during certain parts, in fact most, of his daily activities of law enforcement. Later he will explain why."
The audience, which mirrored the qualities of the host in every possible way, regarded the individual in his scramble suit.
"This man," the host declared, "whom we will call Fred, because this is the code name under which he reports the information he gathers, once within the scramble suit, cannot be indentified by voice, or even technological voiceprint, or by appearance. He looks, does he not, like a vague blur and nothing more? Am I right?" He let loose a great smile. His audience, appreciating that this was indeed funny, did a little smiling on their own.
The scramble suit was an invention of the Bell Laboratiries, conjured up by accident by an employee named S.A. Powers. He had, a few years ago, been experimenting with disinhibiting substances affecting neural tissue, and one night, having administered to himself an IV injection considered safe and mildly euphoric, had experienced a disastrous drop in the GABA fluid in his brain. Subjectively, he had then witnessed lurid phosphene activity projected on the far wall of his bedroom, a frantically progressing montage of what, at the time, he imagined to be modern-day abstract paintings.
For about six hours, entranced, S.A. Powers had watched thousands of Picasso paintings replace one another at flashcut speed, and then he had been treated to Paul Klees, more than the painter had painted during his entire lifetime. S.A. Powers, now viewing Modigliani paintings replacing themselves at furious velocity, had conjectured (one needs a theory for everything) that the Rosicrucians were telepathically beaming pictures at him, probably boosted by microrelay systems of an advanced order; but then, when kandinsky paintings began to harass him, he recalled that the main art museum at Leningrad specialized in just such nonobjective moderns, and decided that the Soviets were attempting telepathically to contact him.
In the morning he remembered that a drastic drop in the GABA fluid of the brain normally produced such phosphene activity; nobody was trying telepathically, with or without microwave boosting, to contact him. But it did give him the idea for the scramble suit. Basically, his design consisted of a multifaced quartz lens hooked to a miniaturized computer whose memeory banks held up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people: men and women, children, with every variant encoded and then projected outward in all directions equally onto a superthin shroudlike membrane large enough to fit around an average human.
As the computer looped through its banks, it projected every conceivable eye color, hair color, shape and type of nose, formation of teeth, configuration of facial bone structure---************
[OK, enough, fer crissakes, yous get the idea]

Anyway, all this business lit me up like a christmas tree back then. The phosphene activity immediately evoked my personal LSD experiences, the painting references summoned my artschool history into attention, and the Rosicrucians, Crowley talked about them as did Henry Miller, Colin Wilson, and didn't Umberto Eco also in Foucault’s Pendulum? [---that was a book--] I knew this was the author responsible for inspiring movies like Bladerunner and Total Recall, trippy stuff. I always liked any source that dealt with the liquidity of reality perception, the arbitrariness of convention, schizophrenia, alternate consciousnesses, paranoia, hallucination, conspiracy, the one against the many, time travel, implications of quantum physics begetting multiple universes and so on. I loved a Scanner Darkly and wanted to read more Dick. In the summer, without any guidance I next selected The Game-Players Of Titan. I cannot speculate how I came to that unfortunate conclusion other than imagine it had to do with a history of both Craps shooting and Dungeons & Dragons. The terrible book remained unfinished for many years. I abandoned reading Dick. Still, his name kept popping up and the fascination for his work continued to manifest in my travels. One day then, I can't say how, I came to have the title lodged in my brain: Flow My Tears The Policeman Said (1974) --it had to be read---for some reason, I recall it wasn't easy to find. Turned out to be a good one. I went back to Game-Players and forced myself to finish it but it still sucked. I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the one BladeRunner was based on ostensibly. That I highly enjoyed. Felt very different than the movie. I was bitten by the Dick bug then. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Aldritch followed. That one was the best yet! I went on a tear and read a novel a day for a fortnight, completely obsessed. UBIK, Martian Time-Slip, Man In The High Castle, and Time Out Of Joint, stand out as head and shoulders above the rest. In most circles they're considered the best. I very much liked The Crack In Space although I don't believe it's usually considered all that favorably. The crack led to an alternate world where evolution went in a different direction with the human. They had these crazy inferior technologies like engines made out of wood that ran on ice or something.
I enjoyed a Jonathan Lethem article in Book Forum called 'You Don't Know Dick,' I think. He was a truly obsessed PKD fan, claimed to have read everything he ever wrote at least twice or something. Hilariously he told of his boyhood quest for "Vulcan's fucking Hammer!" discovered finally, stashed away in the back of some old used bookstore. How apparently he's inadvertantly responsible for it's republication by Vintage, and how, Dick's legacy was better off before Vintage began it's quest to put back into print the entire PKD ouvre. His point was that Dick was a bit notorious for his highly sporadic output quality-wise and Father Time did a fine job of editing his catalog down to the best works, leaving the rest to rot out of most readers reach, in rare corners and dusty bins, as long forgotten Ace doubles and other obscure pulp printings. Perhaps he's correct---I wouldn't have wasted my time and money on Game Players Of Titan and could've gotten around to The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, UBIK, Martian Time Slip, etc. much sooner. On the other hand I probably wouldn't have gotten to enjoy Clans Of The Alphane Moon, which was completely bananas.

*******************************************************************************************************************************

P.S. Savvy readers would have noticed my neglecting to mention a key detail about the author: his conversion experience. I won't go into it. There is already plenty of documentation on the matter. Personally, I hated VALIS when I read it years ago although I'm inclined to say it's surely worth reading if his religious experiences are of interest to you.