Refreshing Reinstall and Another PKD Novel

November 26, 2009

I hadn’t done a full OS reinstall on my MacBook since I originally got it, so I decided last night to remedy the situation with a clean nuke-and-pave of MacOS X 10.6.2 Snow Leopard. As you can see from the screenshot above, I am back up and running with 10.6.2. NeoOffice and CS4 along with a handful of other software goodies are reinstalled, and my files are restored to their rightful places on my hard drive. One thing that I decided to do differently, that I had never tried before, was to encrypt my home folder with FileFault. I know that this can cause a real problem when something goes wrong, but I backup my files often enough that I hope it won’t turn into a nightmare if the FileFault system develops a problem. So far, I haven’t noticed any performance hit or problem by using FileFault, despite copying back many files to my internal SSD.

While everything was being done, I finished Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. I will read A Scanner Darkly next and then switch back to some postmodern theory.

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Posted by Jason Ellis

Freedom of Information Request on Philip K. Dick

September 25, 2009

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Today, I received a letter from the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding my recent Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts (FOIPA) request for their files on the science fiction author Philip K. Dick. Unfortunately, I was informed that:

Based on the information you provided, we conducted a search of the indices to our Central Records System. We were unable to identify responsive main file records. If you have additional information pertaining to the subject that you believe was of investigative interest to the Bureau, please provide the details and we will conduct an additional search.

This is a puzzling outcome considering other folks have successfully accessed the FBI files on PKD (Willis Howard published some of the files on his 1999 dated website here).

In my previous request, I included his full name, Social Security number, dates of birth and death, an obituary, and cities of residence. In my appeal, I have included additional information from Sutin’s biography of Dick, a printout of Howard’s website, and information about Dick contacting the FBI about Thomas M. Disch, which Norman Spinrad writes about in the April/May 2009 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.

My request goes in the mail tomorrow. I hope that I have better luck this time receiving what others have already found.

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Posted by Jason Ellis

Why Is the Digital Future Only Found in Books?

October 23, 2008

Awhile back, Mack Hassler and I were talking about online personas and the differences between created personas in traditional print culture and the new electronic media.  Mack pointed out that the real interesting personae come through print culture and he named examples including Swift, Greg Egan, Philip K. Dick, and David Foster Wallace (think “Lyndon”)–all of whom employ internal controversies and different voices.  Philip K. Dick is an interesting example particularly if you consider his last published novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).  It strikes me how much his supposedly strong female protagonist, Angel Archer, is like the author.  After reading Sutin’s biography of Dick, Divine Invasions (2005), there are unmistakable parallels between Archer and Dick, and I draw the conclusion that Archer is a voice for the author–a persona of her creator–PKD.

What does that have to do with the divide between print and computer media cultures?  There’s something to be said about the complexity and the richness of layers, all of which are probably tempered and strengthened by the publication process including acceptance and editing, present in print media–novels and short stories–that facilitates strong persona creation unequaled by electronic media as yet.  We all create online personae through email, social networking, or blogging (among other personal broadcast technologies). Those who interact with us electronically do so via cyberspace, that shared consensual hallucination, and we meet with only what we bring us–our words and stray bits of data including images, sounds, videos, and our reputation.  It is these things that others use to create an image or avatar of ourselves in their minds in order to make sense of our interactions–that’s just what our brains do with the available data at hand.  However, as Mack observed and I agree, the new media has permitted a proliferation of persona creation, but it is by-and-large thinned out in comparison to what we find in print media.

This then leads to my personal conundrum.  Mack said to me, “You’re serious about print, but you’re not serious.”  I am heavily invested in computer technology.  I built a PC specifically for online gaming–not that my grad student responsibilities allow me any time for that–and I recently decided to invest in Apple due to the economic downturn, which netted me their latest and greatest machined aluminum MacBook with a solid-state hard drive.  Despite the hardware underpinnings of my digital life via email, Facebook, and my blog, I rarely read or encounter stories online.  Yes, I read a lot online, probably more than I should considering my other duties, but the one thing that I don’t read online are SF stories.  The stories, the SF, that creates, imagines, and interfaces with the future is largely nonexistent on the medium that those stories take as its object of interest.  If I want to read about cyberspace, I don’t look online, I turn to pulp, paper, and the book for that imaginative immersion.

Where does that leave us in regard to the new media and books?  Considering my recent conversation with Stephen R. Donaldson, there is change in the wind, but obviously no one has the one answer to what that change may encompass.  I’m curious to hear the thoughts of Robert H. Jackson next Tuesday when he presents on the future of books at the Kent State Library.  I know he won’t have all (if any) the answers, but perhaps the face-to-face interaction will be illuminating in ways that online persona interaction is not.

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Posted by Jason Ellis

David Foster Wallace, Philip K. Dick, and Transgressive Parody

September 28, 2008

Mack Hassler set with an interesting task this week after the unfortunate death of David Foster Wallace. He asked me to consider two questions:

1) Is PKD like Wallace in respect to the concept of “transgressive parody,” which Patrick Novotny defines in his chapter to Hassler and Wilcox’s Political Science Fiction (1997) titled, “No Future!  Cyberpunk, Industrial Music, and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration,” as, “Parody in the postmodernist aesthetic is the transgression of aesthetic and representational norms” (100).

2) How does PKD move beyond parody?

In response to the first query, Philip K. Dick operates in a similar fashion to David Foster Wallace in terms of transgressive parody.  Both authors use their medium of choice, SF for Dick and the non-fiction essay for Wallace (unfortunately, I have not yet read his fiction including Infinite Jest), as the means for their transgressive parody.  Dick parodies the streamlined and perfect futures of Clarke and Asimov through the introduction of kibble, entropy, and the disintegration of reality–a theme that Novotny elaborates in his study of cyberpunk and postmodernism, and Dick obviously is a predecessor of the cyberpunk authors and enjoyed the potential of postmodern play.  On the other hand, Wallace apes the professional essay format and bends it to his own ends through the use of play (there’s that word again), such as through his hyper-footnoting (the best parts of many of his essays are in the footnotes, and his footnotes have footnotes), and his employment of catechresis, or taking the story or argument from one context and applying it elsewhere–much in the vein of Derrida.  Dick and Wallace parody the norms of the writing that they are doing, but they transgress those norms for their own ends rather than making a comic attack on the parodied norms.  The way to think about it is that they take the postmodern sensibility of “whatever” to heart.  They appropriate the norms of the fields in which they work and reshape them, not to make a direct satire of what’s come before, rather to create something new of their own design for their own creative endeavors.  Dick brings the entropic breakdown of the real world and the inner, psychic world to SF, which had largely ignored that important aspect of reality.  Wallace brings a truly reflective mind and sensibility of open curiosity to apparently mundane and boring writing assignments–he grasps those boring moments as a place to begin thinking about more important matters that are, on the surface, only tangentially connected.

PKD moves beyond parody by using his works as a means of exploration of issues of self, identity, and subjectivity in an increasingly complex world.  On the surface, many of his works parody the cornerstones of the post-pulp era of SF.  For example, Ubik parodies aspects of SF such as space opera, but it does so only on the surface.  This isn’t Dick’s real target.  Instead, he uses the novel as a means to critique the nature of reality and the forces of entropy–two issues largely disregarded in SF until the New Wave.  Another example would be Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  In that novel, Dick parts ways with Asimov and gives his androids a real soul and a sense of self-preservation.  However, he isn’t parodying Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw, but instead, he’s appropriating an element of the SF mega-text for his own purposes, which is to work through his own questions about reality, soul, and memory.  

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Posted by Jason Ellis

Blogging, Philip K. Dick, Percy Shelley, and Belief Systems

September 17, 2008

This is the third and final post of a three part series that explores some issues and ideas proposed to me by Mack Hassler as part of the independent study that he’s conducting for me on the works of Philip K. Dick.

What would Philip K. Dick do with a blog? How might he have revolutionized the way we engage and think about belief and our perception of reality had he had a less restrictive method of communicating with fans and passers-by alike?

I use my blog as a means of connecting with people personally as well as professionally. Originally intended as a personal blog about my travels abroad in the UK, it changed over time along with my own professional transformation into a PhD student and active participant in professional organizations. It allowed me to hone my writing ability through additional practice, and it facilitated feedback from those persons who happened to by blog by the almighty digital deity, Google. Also, it is a self-promotion of sorts, not unlike those by SF authors such as Cory Doctorow or John Scalzi, but it represents my life and work as a professional academic who critically thinks about the relationship between science, technology, and culture. It’s more than a calling card–it’s a bulletin board that I organize and run that facilitates a communal response to my observations and thoughts.

Philip K. Dick would undoubtedly have had a different kind of blog than Doctorow, Scalzi, or I. In his work, he questions the nature of reality and the human mind’s ability to perceive and react to the external world. He realized, like Percy Bysshe Shelley, that our relationship to the external world is made possible by our senses and the interpretation of that sensory data by our mind. Thus, the supposed external world is actually a simulation that is ever present in our mind. Dick questions, problematizes, and critiques our relationship to the external world in his myriad works, but it’s the latter works that specifically deal with perception and the questions of belief that Shelley raised in the early 18th century.

Shelley argued that the only ways in which one may believe in a Deity is directly through our senses, reason, and the experience of others. He quickly dispenses with the last two as being unequivocally insufficient for proof in God. However, the first, direct sensory perception is the only sure way to prove that God exists, for the individual. It is here that Dick steps into the picture one and three-quarter centuries later.

In his last works exploratory works, VALIS and the Exegesis, Dick describes his own direct sensory perception of a Deity, or more accurately, a Gnostic revelatory experience. In these works, which would have been the pinnacle of blog writing had he had a digital outlet for communicating his experiences, he describes on the page what he remembers of the experiences of 2-4-74 as well as his reasoning through those experiences. Dick follows what Shelley described two centuries before as the mind actively clarifying the sensory perception. And as a reflective person, Dick offered many interpretations and counter-interpretations for his sensory experience in order to find his own way of understanding the experience. From the extended process of reasoning, Dick arrived at his own set of beliefs surrounding the experience, but he conceded that they were his experiences, and despite sharing them, one must arrive at that kind of belief on their own. Additionally, he envisioned a future with less organized religion and more personal belief based on individualized experiences. In this sense, Dick is taking Shelley to task by establishing his own beliefs in a Deity.

I wonder what Dick would have concluded had he explored these ideas online through blogging. According to Sutin’s biography of Dick, Divine Invasions, Dick corresponded with friends and colleagues, but “he was blue because it seemed there was no one to talk with about the ideas that mattered to him” (273). Those ideas were those that he recorded as his verbose self-dialog in the Exegesis. However, interpersonal communication with friends is a somewhat different dynamic than the largely anonymous online communication (hence the recent flame war initiated by the new SFRA troll). Would an online community foster or impede Dick’s personal exploration of his unique sensory experiences? In addition to the voluminous writing that he was doing at that time regarding his experience, an online forum would necessitate a certain level of response and tailoring subsequent material to his readership. Perhaps this would have enhanced or altered his reasoning based on the suggestions and theories of others. However, as Shelley pointed out, we cannot wholly trust the reports of others in our own interpretation of sensory experiences. I’m confident that Dick would have been aware of this, but it would certainly have had some influence, however insignificant but subtle, on his own thinking.

There are certainly issues today with online communication and the dissemination of ideologies and systems of belief. I have heard anecdotally that online systems of communication assist individuals in finding or establishing smaller groups that share similar beliefs. Hence, Republicans find other Republicans, and Science Fiction fans find other Science Fiction fans. However, there’s certainly a cross pollination where, for example, Republicans find their way to the Science Fiction fan enclaves and either comment positively or negatively on something a SF fan has said, and vice versa. It’s these interactions between borders that I find interesting, because a synthesis at best or a culture war at worst is taking place at these imaginary or invisible dividing lines. Shelley and Dick would probably have found themselves on the same side, looking across the border at the unreflective infidels, and they would most assuredly have “guest blogged” on each other’s site.

One final thought–what would Shelley have done with a blog?  In his day, he used his wealth to print phamplets and he distributed them himself in London.  Was this an early form of blogging?  Perhaps the analogy might be that he was pushing an antiquated RSS feed to the masses (at least to the literate bourgeoise).  It’s interesting to consider the ways in which technology facilitated the ideas of Shelley and Dick, as well as to conjecture the ways in which our contemporary technology might have played a part in the further development or alteration to their ideas.

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Posted by Jason Ellis

Notes on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Refutation of Deism: In a Dialog

September 17, 2008

This is part two of a three part post series that explores some issues and ideas proposed to me by Mack Hassler as part of the independent study that he’s conducting for me on the works of Philip K. Dick.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Extract from A Refutation of Deism: In a Dialog.” Romantic Period Writings 1798-1832: An Anthology. Eds. Zachary Leader and Ian Haywood. New York: Routledge, 1998. 80-81.

You may find an expanded version of this extract online here.

In this extract, Shelley is questioning the prevailing social order, maintained by the monarchy and church, and its requirement for what he calls a “supernatural intelligence” (80). Also, he considers the conflict between order and disorder in that system, and the supposed requirement for a “power” that supports order, and another, malignant, that supports disorder (80).

In a thought experiment, he questions if order might have a penchant for evil, and disorder a hint at good. Why do these divisions necessarily remain diametrically opposed? He answers that order and disorder are constructions that we map onto our understanding of the world and our relationship to it (80). Therefore, what is good for us is heavenly ordained and that which is ill for us is the work of Satan.

He points out that order and disorder cannot be universal, because the criteria for those things are as varied and colored as the different people whose “opinions and feelings” create those criteria (80).

The most powerful passage in this extract is when he establishes that good and evil are relative, not only in effect, but more importantly in the relationship between people and their perception of the external world. It is human attribution of good or evil to objects and events external to the perceiver rather than an extrinsic or universal attribution of those descriptions.

And, connecting this extract to the previous, he concludes that one cannot reason the existence of a Deity, because what is believed to have divine motivation in the external world are really judgments and opinions of people mapped onto the events observed.

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Posted by Jason Ellis

Notes on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Necessity of Atheism”

September 17, 2008

This is part one of a three part post series that explores some issues and ideas proposed to me by Mack Hassler as part of the independent study that he’s conducting for me on the works of Philip K. Dick.  He asked me to consider the ways in which the thinking of Shelley and Dick are interrelated on the level of metaphysics and belief.  Also, he suggested that I bring those things around to the way their ideas were disseminated as well as the way I communicate online through this blog.  This and the following three posts represent my findings.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “The Necessity of Atheism.” Romantic Period Writings 1798-1832: An Anthology. Eds. Zachary Leader and Ian Haywood. New York: Routledge, 1998. 77-79.

You may find “The Necessity of Atheism” online here.

NB: Shelley and his friend, T.J. Hogg, were kicked out of Oxford for publishing this (69).

Shelley begins his proof by examining belief. Mind/active and perception/passive. The mind is active in investigating that which is perceived in order to clarify, but the mind cannot disbelief that which it perceives to be true. What Shelley calls, “the strength of belief,” is determined by, in order of highest to lowest importance, our senses, our experience (reason), and the experience of others. And it from these things that belief in a Deity derives.

Working through these three strengths, he admits that if the Deity appears to someone via the senses, then that person must belief the Deity exists. However, he employs what is best described as Occam’s Razor to seek the simpler explanation for the cause and effect of the creation of the universe or one’s own birth rather than the more complicated idea of a Deity. Finally, he establishes that we cannot trust other’s belief in a Deity that, “commanded that he should be believed, he proposed the highest rewards for faith, eternal punishments for disbelief” (79). Belief for Shelley must be voluntary and established by the perception of an individual’s senses.

He closes the essay by reprimanding those who would punish disbelievers, because one must and should only belief what they experience via the senses. Furthermore, one has no choice but to believe this way without the influence of external pressure. And, any person with a reflective mind will admit that there has been no proof for the existence of a Deity.

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Posted by Jason Ellis

SFRA 2008 – Saturday

July 18, 2008

On the final full day of conferencing at SFRA 2008, we shifted from the Holiday Inn Holidome to the beautiful, (de)constructed campus of Kansas University.  I only note the state of construction on the campus, which is a continual state of affairs for all large universities, because Jason Embry, Melissa Colleen Stevenson, and I got totally lost on the way to the University Union.  Luckily, we had a delightful breakfast at Miltons after we thought the empty Ingredient was closed, so we had the energy to persevere–I to find the parking deck, and Jason and Melissa to hoof it in the rain to the Union through the construction barricade.  They made it to their panels on time, and I ducked into the first morning panel shortly after it began.

The three morning panels at KU were full of great papers, but I decided to go to the “Beginnings and Endings” panel, because Jason Embry was presenting on Philip K. Dick’s Valis and I’ll be working with Mack Hassler on PKD in the fall.

Rikk Mulligan, who I paneled with at IAFA 2008, presented on S. M. Sterling’s Dies the Fire series with his paper, “From the Ashes:  S. M. Sterling’s Novels of “The Change” and the New Postapocalypse.”  I think his connecting Sterling’s work with America in the here-and-now is an interesting take on the present.  His essay was packed with a lot of ideas and details that I think he can turn into a larger paper for publication.

Veronica Hollinger presented a paper title, “Science Fiction and Posthumanism:  Intersections of Story and Theory.”  Her essay is an indepth and insightful survey of posthumanist theory, and it’s taken from her chapter in the upcoming Routledge Science Fiction collection.

The last presentation was Jason Embry’s “Recovering the Third Eye:  Gnostic World-Building in Philip K. Dick’s Valis.”  He brings Lacan and the Real to bear on Dick (no multiple pun intended).  He talked about language in Valis, and how Dick sought to reclaim that which was lost through language.  The idea is that there was a loss through accepting one language and symbolic order. Valis is an attempt at returning to a lost unity, hence the gnosticism in the novel.  This is great stuff, and it comes from a chapter in Jason’s dissertation that he’ll be defending soon–best of luck!

After the panel, Jason and I walked through the widely spaced rain drops to the library and the Science Fiction collection book sale.  When we arrived, it was clear that a lot of stuff was cleaned out, but there were still some jems hidden in the stacks.  Some of my finds included Bruce Sterling’s Schizmatrix (Veronica mentioned this as a must-read in her presentation), a collection of C.L. Moore stories, a handful of collections edited by Judith Merril, and Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions 1.

We had a nice catered lunch in the Big 12, and then it was back to work.  I walked up to the English Room for the “Playing the Universe:  Reading and Teaching Science Fiction with Video Games” roundtable that I participated in with Pawel Frelik (the organizer), Craig Jacobsen, and Donna Binns.  It was my first roundtable, and I had no teaching experience to speak of, but I came prepared with some ideas that I had regarding Pawel’s two discussion leading questions:

Question 1
Are videogames as a medium ready for the mainstream humanities on a par with literature and film? What are the biggest problems that videogames face concerning their acceptance as relevant and attention-worthy texts?

Question 2
As a medium that often captures the imagination of young students much more than books or even TV shows/films, how can games be used to assist teaching fantastic literatures in the older media? Any specific strategies? Any specific examples that you feel would be perfect for teaching space opera, cyberpunk, etc?

Craig and Donna had some great practical advice based on their use of video games in the classroom.  Craig uses video games in a genre studies course, and Donna uses video games as a way to get students writing about games and their relation to other media/genres–she asks her students to make content that makes sense.  Craig made an important point that I had missed in thinking about video games in the classroom–don’t forget small, online games.  He described using the online game Deanimator as an introduction to his “Zombies” class–he has everyone play it at their computer station, and then he has them stop playing and turn off their monitors.  He asks everyone to describe the setting, how the controls work, what else was going on besides killing zombies.  Interesting, no one remembers these things, which drives home the point that students will have to consider these things as texts with deeper meanings than the activity of killing zombies.  Also, he tells them, “I don’t care what you like just like your chemistry teacher doesn’t care what your favorite element is.”  This is an important lesson that I’m going to bring into my classroom.

After a great exchange of questions and discussion, I stuck around for Mack Hassler’s New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction book launch.  Mack had a copy of the book, fresh off the press (make sure your hands are clean).  The panel of contributors included Peter R. Bergethon, Lisa Yaszek, Doug Davis, Mary Elizabeth Ginway, Thomas Michaud, and Marleen Barr.  Peter is a neuroscientist and doctor, who wrote the opening piece, which is about how as our minds physically change with the advent of new technologies, our engagement and ways of thinking about politics will also change.  Marleen wrote the end piece, part of which she read at the 2005 SFRA in White Plains, NY, which is about how Condoleeza Rice is a dominatrix robot controlled by George W. Bush–that’s all I remember about it, besides the boots–but for this one essay’s humor and scholarship alone, you should check out this book when it comes out!  More info here.

The day wound up with an indoor BBQ, complete with stout beer.  There were many thank yous and congratulations on a successful conference.  Also, being July 12, everyone sang happy birthday to Jim Gunn, and then Sue Hassler shouted out, “it was Jason’s birthday too,” so everyone clapped for me.  A good time was had by all, but I was groggy from lack of sleep, so Jason, Melissa, and I drove back to the hotel for a nap before going back out later in the evening.

Meeting back up in the bar downstairs, we had some Guinness, said our good-byes to Melissa who had to leave early in the morning, and then Craig, Sha, Jason, Natasha, a-friendly-bloke-whose-name-escape-me, and I checked out the Lawrence, Kansas nightlife.  We braved hordes of fans, groupie gangs, and the hipster legions at the Bottleneck and another place way too crowded to warrant a name other than “Mathematical singularities for fun and profit.”  Also, Craig conducted experiments on signification.  I had a great time, fell asleep with a nice buzz after talking with Yufang on the phone, and woke up bright eyed and bushy tailed (with hangover) for the business meeting Sunday morning.  More on that next time…

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Posted by Jason Ellis