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“Jon’s World”/”Jon” 21 October 1952

Time to Come NY: 1954
PKD V2 (53–81)

A time ship is nearly complete, and two men––Kastner, a businessman and Caleb Ryan, a League representative––will make a journey to the past to get the papers of Schonerman, a researcher who pioneered an artificial brain, which led to the creation of the “claws,” robots used in the war, who then turned to fight one another. First the Soviets and the UN fought, then men fought robots, Terrans fled to Luna, the claws killed each other, and Terra was basically destroyed. This is a longer story with more characterization than is sometimes the case in Dick. From the beginning we see the aesthetic, historical, philosophical interests of Kastner juxtaposed with Ryan’s extreme rationalism. Ryan’s son Jon has been having attacks, which the son views as visions of a reality more potent than the one in which he lives. Ryan sees these visions as a “retrogression,” an atavistic manifestation of the metaphysical claptrap that the hyper-rationalists of this world have put behind them. Ryan has his son submit to a lobotomy, after which he seems little more than an empty shell, but at least he is “cured.” Ryan and Kastner return to the past, making stops along the way to witness the claws and different stages of the war. They find Schonerman and steal his papers, but accidentally kill him. They stop at intermediate points on their way back to their own time and see a world that never had Schonerman’s ideas, and thus never built the claws. Consequently the war has ended early with a UN victory. People are returning to Terra and planting crops. Kastner and Ryan return to their own time and see the vision Jon saw before he was lobotomized: parks and nature, lots of animals, houses but no large cities, people wandering about in robes, discussing “the problem of the universe.” Ryan wants to return to the past and give Schonerman’s papers to the government so the future can revert to the one he knows, but Kastner destroys the papers, and the vision of Jon’s world becomes the only reality. Kastner looks forward to discussing metaphysics in this new world, a world he obviously finds preferable to the rational one represented by Ryan.

Bloomsday 2015

Tomorrow (16 June 2015) is #Bloomsday. Frankly, we haven’t planned for it very well, but do stop by The Civil Life and pay your respects to one of the great products of modernism. Read a little or listen a little. We hope to have some sort of amplification. I’ll start reading chapter one shortly after 4.

Here’s what that looked like last year.

Bloomsday 2014 at Civil Life – Ulysses Episode 1: "Telemachus" from Patrick Hurley on Vimeo.

Great Advice from a Great Writer

I got a late start. I don’t know why, exactly. I always wanted to be a writer, yet I didn’t really write much, besides pointless academic papers. Then I wrote a couple of bad novels and several bad stories and some pretty mediocre poetry. That’s what writers write, right? Meanwhile, I was teaching college students composition, and in the texts we used, there were lots of great essays. Of course there were classics from Montaigne to Orwell, but also new writers who focused on the essay rather than fiction. I finally realized what I really wanted to write was the essay.

But as much as I try to focus on my work, it’s easy to get disillusioned. I’m too old to be a writer now. Look at all the time I wasted. It’s too late. Vague excuses. It’s nice to read some very blunt words that remind us to quit whining and keep writing:

Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

You need to do the same, dear sweet arrogant beautiful crazy talented tortured rising star glowbug. That you’re so bound up about writing tells me that writing is what you’re here to do. And when people are here to do that they almost always tell us something we need to hear. I want to know what you have inside you. I want to see the contours of your second beating heart.

So write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.

This was Cheryl Strayed’s excellent advice to Elissa Bassist, who was struggling with writing as a young woman.

I need to keep this in mind. I can’t write like a young man and I don’t need to write like an old man, I just need to write like a motherfucker.

Geoff Dyer… and Frietag Bags

I wanted to write about this really cool bag. This time it’s actually the last bag I’ll ever need. But there’s some background involving, as usual, what I’ve been reading, in my usual desultory fashion.

It’s no secret that I think Geoff Dyer is one of the best writers out there. I admire his clean style and his phenomenal range of interests. And for what should be obvious reasons, I really like that his essays and books are invariably about something other than what they are about. Or, better, say, something, many things, in addition to what they are about. This line he wrote about John Berger could easily be applied to him as well:

It is not just that he has written on photographers, artists, thinkers and peasants, or zoos, museums and cities he has travelled to; these diverse concerns are often combined in the course of a single essay.1

And it is generally these threads that contain some detail that ends up changing my life. Take “Is Jazz Dead?” for example. This essay appears in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, which happens to be the first Dyer essay collection I read (I had read Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi … a great novel). In this essay exploring some of the new forms “jazz” is taking, Dyer discusses the brilliant—what does one call them … post-jazz or ambient jazz?—trio out of Australia, the Necks, especially their album Drive By.

Drive By glides through an ambient dream-time of “found” sounds: a children’s playground, crickets, a beehive. Where the previous albums are reliable, slightly embellished records of sustained improvisations in “real time,” this one was built out of segments that were then overdubbed and restructured in the edit, like a sound track for a road movie waiting to be made. I don’t know if it’s jazz, but it’s a great record and I love it; you’d be mad not to.

I ordered it immediately. I seem to remember Dyer suggesting somewhere that Drive By was the best of the albums by the Necks. I ordered them all, some directly from Australia. Ultimately, I decided Drive By was my favorite.

But it was my experience after reading Zona, Dyer’s brilliant and idiosyncratic treatment of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, that is relevant here. He recounts in a lengthy aside (all parenthetical) his experience of losing a much loved bag, an experience that gives him greater insight into the character of the professor, who wants to return to where he lost his knapsack to retrieve it.

It so happens that, right now, I identify absolutely with Professor’s desire to be reunited with his rucksack. Six years ago my wife came back from a trip to Berlin with one of those Freitag bags made out of recycled truck tarps and seat belts. Unlike some Freitag bags it was rather plain—plain grey in fact—and initially I was a little disappointed. Over time, though, I came to see that she had made the wisest possible choice and I came to love that bag absolutely. And then, ten days ago in Adelaide, in the course of a long, multifaceted, multi-drinks evening, I lost it, either in a restaurant, at a party, in a taxi or at the gardens of the Arts Festival. No one handed in my bag. It was gone—and is not identically replaceable.

One of those Freitag bags … I checked out the Freitag website and, yes, I loved those bags. I went back and forth for some weeks, as the bags are pretty expensive, but ultimately, I had to have one. It’s vegan. (I had stopped buying leather bags, but even fabric ones seem to have decorative trim or reinforcing straps made from some kind of hide. And while we’re on the subject, what’s up with those pointless little leather rectangles they sew on the back of jeans? Maybe they recall some former functioning thing, like a giant off-center belt loop. And now it’s just a skeuomorph. I don’t like it.) But I do like my Freitag bag. It’s sturdy and beautiful and one of a kind. I love it. I hope I never lose it.

I resent the fact that Geoff Dyer makes me spend so much money when I have so little. Not only must I buy all of his books, but I have to order records and pricey bags. And go places, too. Have you read Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It? It’s a book of travel essays. It’s worth it for the name alone. Shove it in your Freitag bag and by a ticket … to anyplace, really.

1 From the introduction to Selected Essays of John Berger.

“We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” August 1965

Fantasy & Science Fiction April 1966
PKD V2 (35-52)

Douglas Quail is a minor government clerk who dreams of going to Mars. But even if he could afford it, only Interplan agents go there. He decides to have Rekal Incorporated implant a detailed memory of such a trip. Something goes wrong during the process. Under the drug used, he remembers actually going to Mars as an Interplan agent. Rekal sends him away without implanting any memories. Two Interplan agents appear at his apartment and he remembers almost everything. He was sent to Mars to kill a man. The agents can read his thoughts and decide they will have to kill him, but he escapes. He suggests that his memory be altered again, but Interplan points out the paradox: if he is made “normal,” he will crave the excitement of a trip to Mars and return to Rekal, where he will remember the truth yet again. He suggests they find some wish he has and implant a memory of it being fulfilled and they agree. A psychiatrist identifies the deeply buried wish. He imagined that as a child he witnessed the landing of an alien craft and learned that they planned to invade. He shows them “kindness and mercy” and they agree not to invade as long as he shall live. Interplan takes him to Rekal to have this memory implanted. But trouble arises again in a passage that parallels that recounting of the first procedure. He already has the memory of saving the world because it actually happened, exactly as he wished. In a nice twist, Interplan must not kill him now, or the risk of alien invasion would return.

Related, on Lit Reactor: Book Vs. Film: Total Recall / We Can Remember It For You Wholesale

“Prominent Author” May 1953

If May 1954
PKD V2 (21-34)

Henry Ellis works for Terran Development. His wife Mary is proud that they have a prototype Jiffi-scuttler, which gets him to work instantaneously. A 160 mile commute is collapsed handily into the fourth dimension. Henry starts to see little people through a thin spot in the wall of the tunnel. They start to give him sheets with questions. He has them translated and answered by the Federal Library of Information and retranslated then given to the mysterious little robed figures, which Henry takes as some sort of aliens using a non-Terran language. Soon he sees they are erecting a temple to him, making sacrifices, etc. But it all ends when his boss finds out. The little people are not aliens but ancient Jews. The answers Henry gave them have been compiled in a book called Holy Bible. Henry is fired, but he seems happy in his new career as a writer, even though his wife and her friend think he has gone mad. He is working on his second book. Holy Bible was “just a little thing [he] threw together.”

“Beyond the Door” August 1952

Fantastic Universe January 1954
PKD V2 (15-20)

Larry finally gives his wife the cuckoo clock she has always wanted, then announces that he got it wholesale and would not have been able to afford it otherwise. Doris loves the clock and the cuckoo, who pops out to see her more than is strictly necessary from a time-telling point of view. The cuckoo does not like Larry. Doris tries to show the clock to her “friend” Bob, but Larry arrives home unexpectedly. Realizing there are two “cuckoos” in the house, he throws Doris and Bob out, but keeps the clock. Finally, angry that the cuckoo consistently refuses to show itself, Larry comes at it with a hammer. The cuckoo launches itself out into Larry’s eyeball. His body is found and his death ruled accidental by the doctor, but Bob suspects otherwise.

Photo courtesy of our dear friend Sarah.

“The Cookie Lady” August 1952

Fantasy Fiction June 1953
PKD V2 (7-13)

Fat Bubber Surle can’t resist cookies. He goes to old Mrs. Drew’s house for the cookies that she bakes. She enjoys his company and his youth, but he is only in it for the cookies. When he returns home, his parents notice how tired he has become. Mrs. Drew, on the other hand, briefly grew younger while Bubber read to her. But it didn’t last. She has been moving her chair closer and closer to where he sits. His parents tell him not to go and see Mrs. Drew any longer because of the effects these visits have on him. He can go back one more time to tell her. When he does so, she is alarmed. This time she sits very close and touches him as he reads. His youth flows into her, and this time it stays. She is young and beautiful again. Bubber starts to head home, but is weak and cold and the strong wind is too powerful. When his anxious parents open the door to a faint tapping, they find only what seems some scattered gray rags and weeds on the porch.

Moon Head, or How Not to Write Comic Books

A few years back, I decided to create a series of heroes and villains and write some sort of cheesy comic book featuring them. The heroes would be flawed of course. And the villains would have quirky powers of destruction. All of the characters, in fact, would have bizarre powers that seemed rather dubious when put into action. I found this relic from that (wisely) abandoned project.

Ah Moonhead. What a hero. On the left are his “powers,” including striped bellbottoms, the ability to dance well, and a monocle. Given his asymmetrical face, conventional eyewear was clearly not an option. I guess the razor-sharp hand constitutes an effective weapon.

Somehow I reversed the debit side and credit side on my hero ledger, even though I was briefly an accounting major at what at the time was the number one university in the country for that major. Luckily I changed my major and dropped intermediate accounting.

Incorrect recording aside, the column listing my hero’s weaknesses is more interesting. Most of his head is missing, since his archenemy Canonpants rendered him a waning crescent. Always the fashionista, Moonhead has put style ahead of comfort as well as common sense by wearing a massive, sharp belt buckle capable of eviscerating or castrating our hero should he ever attempt to sit down. As if that’s not bad enough, his own weapon is a liability. He must leave his highball and cigarette behind whenever he needs to relieve himself. Of course he could let his smoke dangle from his lips and hold his highball after unzipping.

I guess the lesson is, even your best traits can be your own undoing. Shakespearian motif or tired cliché? Either way, it’s a good thing Moonhead never saw the light of day. But what ever happened to Canonpants anyway?

“Nanny” August 1952

Startling Stories Spring 1955
PKD V1 (383-397)

The Field children are watched over by a robot nanny. But Mrs. Field is worried about what the nanny does at night … she goes outside. It turns out the robot nannies are designed by different firms to fight one another. The Field’s green nanny is badly damaged by a neighbor’s more advanced blue one. Mr. Field takes her in for repairs and learns the truth from the service man, who urges him to upgrade to a new larger model. Mr. Field angrily resists, insisting on getting his repaired. The next day at the park, she is destroyed by a large orange nanny. Mr. Field shops for a new one, choosing a huge black one. He counsels his children to go where they wish without fear now. The next day, the orange nanny is killed by the Field’s powerful new black nanny. The orange nanny’s owner Mr. Casworthy is not amused. He will get the biggest nanny there is, even if one of the robotics companies has to design a new more advanced model. These firms are happy to do so, practically necessitating that owners replace them frequently with ever more advanced (and expensive) models. The story nicely parodies the foolishness of both the arms race and planned obsolescence. With Mrs. Casworthy’s question “Can we really afford it?” sounding a poignant note near the end.

Photo credit: edvvc (Flickr: 1952 Abarth 1500 Biposto BAT 1) Creative Commons 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons