Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/5039
73 www.hplusmagazine.com eRIK DaVIS: how did you first encounter Philip Dick? JONATHAN lETHEM: I first saw his books in my friend Carl's house. His dad was a science fiction fan. I was already reading the old classics — the Heinlein and Asimov and Bradbury that were on my mother's shelves. But those books were written and packaged in a style that was very '40s and '50s. And these Philip K. Dick paperbacks from the '70s looked like a whole other flavor of stuff. The first ones I saw were A Scanner Darkly and the Bantam reissues of Ubik and A Maze of Death. And I just immediately connected it with psychedelia and was drawn to it. I was thirteen or fourteen when I was devouring his work and just wanting to read as much of it as I could. By the time I was about eighteen, I had read every Dick book that had been published to that point. One way or another, I found them. I just identified with him totally, and it rearranged my thinking. I moved to the Bay Area. It was like the husk of a plan, to go and meet him. But he died, so I went anyway. I tried to look for meaningful traces, including hanging out with Paul Williams and helping him with the Philip K. Dick Society. So it was a very shaping obsessing. I kind of apprenticed myself to the guild of Philip K. Dick. eD: as a pop culture fan, and an intense Phil Dick fan, I find it incredibly satisfying that this author that I've loved since I was a teenager is now getting his props. on the other hand, I cannot deny that there is something a bit sad about losing the esotericism of the cult. you yourself are a true fan, but one who has been instrumental in Dick's current canonization. how do you feel about that? Jl: I have a very divided conscience. I mean, just as an eyewitness, it's something to be incredibly proud of. It's almost unprecedented: the creation of a real canonical literary reputation when the person is dead and out of print, and when there was a pretty definite ceiling on how far he'd ever gotten while he was still alive and in print. For people familiar with Dick's personal experiences, his biography and his temperament, the ironies in that are deep and bitter and complicated. You inevitably think: if he'd been alive, he would've screwed this up. He would've found some way to make it impossible that he could be treated with such simple reverence, because he was so distrustful of any form of institutional authority. He had a particularly deep, bitter and twisted suspiciousness about traditional literary authority and about academia. And frankly, to some extent, it's academia that's driven his acceptance in a canon. When I was a kid and I discovered Philip K. Dick, I felt that I'd made this kind of soul mate contact with his work. It's a defining experience, and it feels like it's innate. For me, that experience was absolutely bound up in finding these books that were out of print. The books almost seemed like fictional artifacts. I couldn't believe there was such a writer. I still remember thinking his name seemed weird or that his titles seemed preposterous to me. It was like a secret reality unfolding in my life. There's something about the essence of his writing that creates that feeling. And I think it's still creating it for let's say the 14-year-old equivalent of Erik Davis or Jonathan lethem, who's discovering this book in the shiny expensive vintage paperback editions. I still think there's something innately self-marginalizing, self- cultifying (if that's a word) about the writing. You feel like you're the only one who understands it, and he's the only one who understands you. It's like a cognitive version of a love affair. You're making this intimate connection with this other mind. He projected that into the work. eD: In a way, Dick is the ideal highbrow-lowbrow saint. The academics will analyze the social critique, the metafiction, the dense weave of allusions, the importance of the themes as they relate to emerging problems of simulation and consciousness and existential anomie. and at the same time, there's a pop level that's most obviously manifested in cinema, a steady stream of hollywood films which are mostly pretty corny. and both those levels of recognition have shaped the context that allowed the library of america to say, "okay. This guy gets the canon badge." But because I'm one of these cultists, I have to believe that there's something more to it. It's because his books say something about our time, even more, in some ways, than his time — the '60s and '70s. Why are we hearing these books now? What are these books telling us? Jl: I've always agreed with the view that — with science fiction — its predictive powers were the least important or least relevant aspect of its public profile. I always loved stuff like Orwell's 1984, where he explicitly said "It's 1948, reversed." I liked writers that were doing allegorical, satirical, fantastical versions of everyday life. That suggests that Dick's work is dated to the '60s and '70s. And I thought of him very much in this framework, and not as an extrapolative writer. He certainly doesn't have that kind of rigor or scientific chops that you find with someone like Bruce Sterling. But I think that Dick saw the makings of the contemporary reality we experience so profoundly. And this speaks to the difference layers of reality in his work — the way time moves at one clip according to the calendar, but other ways in terms of mental time, psychological time, social time, American historical time. like if you look at the terms of this absurd, hysterical healthcare debate — it's basically McCarthyism again, the Red Scare. "Socialism is coming to get us." Dick looked around his world with a kind of skinlessness. He existed in the world and it just permeated him. Mid-'50s America was overwhelmingly alive in his vision, in such a way that he saw it simultaneously as a present and as a future. He saw the makings of the late capitalist experience embedded in that mid-century triumphalist post-war moment. And it's as though he experienced it all, in all its absurdity and its tragedy, as this overwhelming vision. And he just jotted it down as frantically as he could. And the books are so raw with that perception that they still feel like a desperate attempt to record an arriving moment. I think that's the experience of reading Philip K. Dick. He seems to be frantically trying to transcribe an arriving reality that is urgent and totally fresh. What's missing from both the academic and pop movie descriptions you mention is that Dick is an immensely personal writer. In his own way, he's a Beat or a proto-Beat. He's like Henry Miller. One of these gargantuan, slightly egotistical but insecure, garrulous personas that just pour themselves onto the page, and says, "love me or hate me. This is what I feel. And these are the kind of women I find sexy. And oh my god, I hate them. They're consuming me. And I feel really stupid today, but I'm going to tell you about...." And he just gives himself. And as anyone who's ever tried to write literary novels or stories or a memoir can tell you — it's not a small thing to pour yourself onto the page. And when it's accomplished, totally, you end up with the kind of monumental writers that many people find also unpleasant or toxic or unreadable. eD: Dick set many of his tales in what we might now call a "posthuman" future of cognitive-enhancing drugs, psi powers, and other amplifications of human capacity. Many of the developments he envisioned in his own unique way are now edging ever closer to reality, and there are many enthusiasts. While not exactly bleak, Dick had a generally more dark and satiric — and often funny — take on cognitive enhancement. Was he a pessimist or a realist? how would you characterize his particularly lesson about human for today's enthusiastic transhumans? Jl: While I'm hardly an expert on the reality of cognitive enhancement or the transhuman impulse as it's working itself out on the contemporary frontier, I