Vote for PKD!
By:
August 18, 2010
Kevin Kelly’s COOL TOOLS website recently published a list of suggestions for “the best magazine articles (in English) ever.”
My essay “Hermenaut of the Month: Philip K. Dick,” which I published in Hermenaut (#15: FAKE AUTHENTICITY; long out of print) in 2000 was voted onto the list by a COOL TOOLS correspondent — to whom (whoever you are) I am grateful.
Excerpt:
Besides empathy, then, for Dick a cranky stubbornness is the most vital quality a person can have. In a 1970 letter, Dick writes that “I know only one thing about my novels. In them again and again, this minor man asserts himself in all his hasty, sweaty strength…. Perhaps [my critics] are bothered by the fact that what I trust is so very small. They want something vaster. I have news for them: there is nothing vaster.” The humble pot-healers, doctors, musical instrument-makers, and tire re-treaders of Dick’s stories are survivors, heroes-as-failures, “the guy who has to pick up the tab.” Unable to manage their own lives (Joe Chip, in Ubik, is threatened with a lawsuit by his own front door, to whom he owes money), their very inertia often becomes a form of heroism. Unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall — which is based on the 1966 Dick story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” — who instantly goes from being Joe Lunchpail to, well, Arnold Schwarzenegger, heroism for Dick is expressed by a schlemiel like Barney Mayerson, in Palmer Eldritch, who decides to stay on in the mind-numbing Martian colony, to “work on my garden up top and whatever else they do. Build irrigation systems and like that.” This sums up Dick’s mid-’60s notion of Right Action.
If you’d like to see my PKD essay make it onto Kelly’s final list, drop him an email saying so. Here’s the address: articles@kk.org.