I just finished reading “Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” by Phillip K Dick. He’s kind of an odd writer. He writes in an almost infantile way, with dialogue that’s stiff and plastic and barely does more than gets the job done–I really wonder if, at the time that he submitted his works (not specifically this one, but any of his novels), the publisher truly realized what exactly it was that PKD was handing to them. I wonder if the agent entrusted to sell this work saw it as just another commodity, or the words of an honored master. Would an agent even see it that way? Does anyone else but sci-fi nerds see it that way?
I had kind of a hard time sticking with that book to tell you the truth–things happen very, very rapidly, action doesn’t come across in a terribly visual way. He’s not real wordy on description when it comes to action and, let’s face it, sci-fi is kind of a more juvenile form of the action/thriller genre, but what really makes his work a treasure in this instance is not so much a heavy hand on science prediction as often seen in scifi pulps of the 1950′s-1970′s, but subtle–an incredibly subtle and slow–build up in the glorification of the gritty. An ode to the ultimate end to our age of consumption, our relationship to our “creator”, and whether that relationship ultimately holds any meaning.
The reading of this book was rather timely for me. These last few months, I have had so much of what I’ve had faith in utterly obliterated by this circumstance and that, and at least reading “Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep” restored one fundamentally missing element of faith that I’ve been completely lacking ever since graduating college: a faith in literature as an art.
but after everything that’s happened in the last week or so I’ve really been asking myself what art is really good for. What’s my art good for?
PKD’s art was good for the enrichment of the scifi genre. As Pris Stratton points out to Chickenhead JR isiodore, scifi novels with big-busted women with shiny breastplates parading about the jungles of Venus were all the rage in pre-colonial days . . . When I was a kid I kind of thought of sci-fi as being costumed fun, you know–ray harryhausen special effects and screaming women and giant bugs/rabbits/brains/men. I think he must have thought the same thing, but I wonder if maybe there was a kind of self consciousness behind the enjoyment of such things, a desire for there to be more meaning to enjoying the genre than simply enjoying the scenery.
Why sci fi? Why Art? Why bother? It’s not like I’m writing on the level he is, not like I’m writing what the public wants right now or what would fit right into the shelves at Barnes n Noble. Even if I had an agent and a publisher who were on the same page as I was and we were in total agreement with everything and they said OMG you are the greatest writer EVA and we would never dream of letting you slip through our fingers and blah blah blah, would I, as it stands right now, be happy with putting my name on what I’ve created?
. . . sort of.
I’m pretty pathetic compared to the writers I admire. I don’t have the balls to quit my job and spend all my time typing and creating and living off sheer production, even if that means I only get 3k or 5k a year between advances and royalties and all that. I know I wanna write. I know it can be done. I know I have the passion for it. I know how to do it. But . . . in the end, what does it prove?
If I had a safety net, a crystal ball, something that could tell me with all certainty that I was going to make that life work for me and I couldn’t fuck it up, is what I’m working on now be the crown jewels so to speak, of my reader’s experience?
. . . no, but it’s a start.
PKD didn’t start with “Do androids dream . . .”, hell, he didn’t even end with it. I don’t think he even thought of it as his finest work, and I kind of wonder if it was regarded as a work of significance among the reading public when it came out. But the art is there, and I can safely tell you that it has all the qualities of those precious works of literary heavyweights of yesteryear . . . and I always wondered who today’s Goethe’s and Yeat’s and Shelley’s and Byron’s were. probably not Nora Roberts or Stephanie Meyer–I think authors like that make for better studies for students of economics more than literature. Lots of people say the same thing about Stephen King but I think in time he’ll prove he owns his own little hill of literary authority.
There’s so much crap going on in my personal life right now that it’s hard to think about this stuff and apply it to my own writing. Hell, I haven’t even looked at it since I got everything prepped for the conference that I couldn’t make it to. I can’t look at it right now. Mentally, I am just black and blue, spiritually black and blue, physically black and blue and all I can really do is live in the moment and focus on survival, but always it lingers, this feeling, this love, this desire, this strong, strong desire–but what does it want from me? Really? what does it want??
My grandmother is in the hospital, and now my stepfather is in the hospital, and both of them are close to death. I’m not any one bit happier with life 13 years after starting life on my own as an adult. I have nothing to show for my years of doing the right thing on the job except for debt and the same type of living arrangements I had when I first graduated. What do I really have in real life? Newbie writers always ooo and ahh when I tell them I’ve written two books, but what do those books do? They sit in my harddrive. They get pecked around on. I turn the puzzle pieces this way and that trying to think of ways to make them better but, couldn’t I just as well have said 13 years ago that I’d written a book–two books–and had people believe me just the same? I mean, no one’s really READ them. No one but me. Like something out of a PKD novel huh–the books that only exist in my head and not in print.
Writing them added meaning to my life . . .made me feel a sense of accomplishment where everything else (except for having kids) has been, by and large, a failure. If I could just enrich someone else’s life by writing something that makes another human being think about life in a way that I think about it, in the way that I have loved life and have seen the beauty in it, then I’ve accomplished something! Then I’m successful in something. I could give two shits if it made me a dime . . .I’m kind of looking forward to running my own pizzaria or bookstore or coffee shop someday 
But my art, my art–to what end do you tie me? At what end will I say to you that I won’t or can’t give to you anymore?
