Selwyn Harris Returns, Sober but Still Nasty; Philip K. Dick in Interviews

A couple weekends ago we went to see the now-closed Target Margin production of Christopher Marlowe's Dido Queen of Carthage at the Ohio Theater on Wooster St. While it was ingeniously conceived, skillfully acted and meticulously choreographed, I got upset with director David Herskovits' decision to present the play as a highly stylized Baroque pantomime more suitable to Purcell's opera than to Marlowe's play. If the intention was Brechtian distance, it worked: Marlowe's tragedy, admittedly not his most fluid or convincing work, came off as a creaky old farce. The actors, understandably, played the whole thing as a deadpan joke, and the audience, most annoyingly, responded with that awful downtown hipster audience's collective smirk, tee-hee-heeing knowingly through the whole thing to signal back to the actors Oh, how droll! We get it! Had the notoriously hotheaded playwright been present, I assure you that room would have been a charnel house of ponyarded thespians and skewered esthetes.

It's not like downtown audiences have to be such buttholes. The night before Dido we were at the Screening Room for the premiere of my old college friend Bob Mugge's new film Rhythm 'n' Bayous, a documentary of Louisiana musics from Delta blues to Rosie Ledet's awesomely sexy and kickass zydeco. The audience got it, boogied along, and only once or twice broke into knowing titters at the expense of the ignorant Southern folk on the screen. This suggests that at least half the fault lies with artists who incite the smug snickers from their in-crowd market.

Had Selwyn Harris been present at Dido, which he wouldn't have been, we might have gotten a rant about it in that week's Agonizer, his new webzine ([www.agonizer.com](http://www.agonizer.com)). Selwyn went on record 10 years ago despising the knowing tee-hees from the crowds at Film Forum and Angelika (he called it Anhellika). Selwyn loathes almost everything artsy, fartsy, hip, intellectual, pretentious, fashionable, downtown, Williamsburg, Astoria or even popular. Selwyn's got a lot of hate in him. But he's also got a fine and vicious sense of humor.

Agonizer presents an older (32), marginally more mellow man than the raging drunk behind the early 90s zine Happyland, one of the very nastiest zines ever kinkoed. "I lay very low these days," he tells me. "I quit drinking a long time ago and am enjoying the new dimensions in boredom and depression... I mean, peace and joy that come with sobriety." There are people he actually likes now, and they're even rather embarrassingly predictable?people like Adam Parfrey and Peter Bagge. And not every movie he's seen in the last 10 years sucked.

Asked what he's been doing lately, he responds, "I spent a big hunk of 1998-2000 writing an encyclopedia of teen sex movies, which was picked up by St. Martin's and then, at just about zero-hour, it was killed by the marketing department... So the book (I Was a Teenage Teenager!) is going to be published as a one-shot edition of a real cool movie mag from Jersey called Vex." He also wrote for a dotcom, "made wheelbarrows of cash (which is all gone now), wore Hawaiian shirts to work in January, and got laid off like everybody else, last Christmas. Now I tap away at a trade journal."

He says he was inspired to get back into a zine by the old-school Sleazoid Express and the magnificently hard-ass webzine The Misanthropic Bitch (bitch.shutdown.com). Agonizer laughs at/craps on/raves against an untamed world of topics, including Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins ("Kill them both... Save her tits"), Fashion Week, "[g]eeky-in-a-bad-way, asthmatic-looking, Manster-belittling, WASP-supremacist word-shoveler Rick Moody," Suck, Amy Sohn ("...the Ivy League bimbo... I've never met a gal this naive who wasn't blonde") and "feel-cool movies" like Kids ("Dirty-birdy caucasoid teenagers catch killer VD the very first time they have sex?just like on all those Afterschool Specials! Oh, the reality!")

In the current Agonizer it's nice to see Jessica Willis back in action, even if it is with a gloomy view of her part-time telemarketing gig and life with "Johnny." ("He's New Bedford Portuguese, he's all crucifix and zero-body fat, a nose thrice-busted by hockey; he's the color of toffee, or honey, or soil, depending on who or what he's been rolling in; he ended up in this place kind of in the same way I did; he wears his baseball hat backward and anywhere else he'd be a menace, or more of a menace than he is here. He thinks blowjobs are sex.") Also in this issue: a lesbian sex contest, the return of Happyland's Fischel Bocephus, some travel insights on "Tokyo sleaze" and more.

Knowing Dick

I'm not a Philip K. Dick otaku, but I am a huge fan. I started reading him as a kid in the 60s and followed him up to his death in 1982, long after I'd outgrown reading other science fiction.

What If Our World Is Their Heaven?: The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick (Overlook, 204 pages, $26.95) is transcripts of interviews conducted by a friend/fan, Gwen Lee, in January 1982. They were edited by Lee and another friend, Doris Elaine Sauter. For fans of Dick, this book is like the conversation you always imagined having with him; he comes off as a funny, thought-provoking raconteur, erudite in an American, widely read-autodidact way (he only completed one year of college). It's also the last talk recorded with him: he died that March of heart failure following a stroke. Sadly, it was just a few months later that Blade Runner, based on one of his novels, came out and vastly expanded his fan base. In the first part of this book he enthuses like a boy about a trip to the set and his glimpses of unedited footage. He would have adored the completed film.

The consensus is that Dick wrote himself to death. He cranked out something like 50 novels and story collections (not all of them published in his lifetime). His career falls into two clear stages. The major part runs from the 1950s into the early 70s. Especially in the 10 years marked by books published 1962-1972, Dick was an amphetamine-fueled novel-writing maniac of extremely prolific output. For a while a new Dick novel or story seemed to appear every month. In fact, this was almost literally true: he tells Lee he "did sixteen novels in five years, sold every one of them... Plus a lot of stories, too, plus a lot of stories." Sauter records in her introduction that Dick would write a novel in one nonstop burst, barely sleeping or eating until it was finished?which often took only eight to ten days. He tells Lee that "if I didn't get writer's block, I'd die. I mean, it's the greatest relief to me." He claims that he actually gave himself internal hemorrhaging writing what turned out to be his last novel.

The 1962-'72 period comprises almost all of my favorite Dick novels, including The Man in the High Castle (published in 1962), Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Clans of the Alphane Moon, The Zap Gun, Now Wait for Last Year, Counter-Clock World, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the one adapted for Blade Runner), Our Friends from Frolix 8 and We Can Build You (published in '72). I've never claimed that Dick was, strictly speaking, a great writer. In fact, the writing per se is often lousy. PKD novels contain some of the largest and most glaring plot holes and clunkiest dialogue I've ever seen in fiction that actually got itself published. They're a speed freak's first drafts, put out by publishers who were hardly paying attention enough to ask for rewrites.

They're great books anyway. For one thing, Dick mastered a delightful subgenre of lo-fi sci-fi in which the characters aren't big space-opera heroes and villains but everyday doofuses going about their humdrum lives when they suddenly find themselves caught in strange circumstances. George Jetson, the space hippies of Dark Star and Futurama's Fry come close to being Dickian characters. It's why I didn't like Total Recall, the second film adapted from his work. I'm not one of those anti-Schwarzenegger sissies?I love Arnold?but he was a crappy PKD character. William H. Macy is more the type.

Secondly, the writing in 60s-era Dick may often be bad, but the ideas are usually fabulous. Dick was a Stanislaw Lem type, using sci-fi as a platform to think big thoughts and ask big questions about the nature of reality (Ubik, The Three Stigmata), time and history (High Castle, Counter-Clock World), personality and identity (Androids, We Can Build You). It's amateur phenomenology and epistemology, unpretentious and often wickedly humorous. In one of his very first short stories, an android has been programmed to think he's a scientific researcher and equipped, unknowingly, with a bomb. It's a story of self-discovery, but with a classic PKD twist: the bomb is set to go off when the android realizes his true identity and utters the sentence, "Good Lord, I am an android." Ka-boom.

A more serious and self-consciously "literary" Dick suddenly appeared in his last six novels, 1974-'82: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; Deus Irae; A Scanner Darkly; and the final "trilogy" of VALIS, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Many PKD fans think that these six books represent the culmination of his oeuvre, but I find them draggy and brooding, the last three mired in pointless theological noodling. Compared to the early speediness, the writing seems sluggish and overdetermined; the once bright and playful mind has become soggy and morose.

A very clear psychological break clove these two periods. Early in 1974, Dick had what we might call a nervous breakdown?though he, and many of his fans, always preferred to consider it a mystical experience. He explains to Lee that he heard a voice warning him that his son had an undiagnosed medical condition. When this turned out to be true, Dick?not without reason, I guess?decided the voice was God's. God continued to converse with him into 1975?and, in my opinion, ruined his creative output for the last eight years of his life.

The really sad thing is that in January of 1982 Dick speaks as though that period was over, and outlines for Lee in fascinating detail the next novel he was planning to write, to be called The Owl in Daylight. It sounds like it would have been a great Dick novel, and his lengthy discussion of it is the gem at the heart of this book. It was to be about a hack composer of tv and movie soundtracks who gets waylaid by a religious sect of aliens, who have mistaken Earth for heaven because Earth has music on it, and where they come from there's no sound. After a while, though, the aliens get bored with the composer's hack work, and tinker with his brain to turn him into a contemporary Mozart. The downside is that the amped-up creativity is literally killing him.

Dick was about to begin this novel when he died a couple months later. He was 53. Fucking aliens.