{"id":1016,"date":"2010-01-22T15:02:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-22T23:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2010\/01\/philip-k-dick-and-the-suburbs.html"},"modified":"2010-01-22T15:02:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-22T23:02:00","slug":"philip-k-dick-and-the-suburbs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2010\/01\/philip-k-dick-and-the-suburbs.html","title":{"rendered":"Philip K. Dick and the Suburbs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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THE science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was a bearded Berkeley bohemian — the last guy you’d expect to move to Orange County, Calif., at a time when its John Birch reputation was still well-deserved. But after a disastrous year or so, the author relocated from the Bay Area to SoCal, and wrote some of his most important work.<\/p>\n

Dick has also become the first sf writer to land in the Library of America’s prestigious series of out nation’s foundation texts; the third volume, mostly of work written in OC, came out last summer. To me and many others, PKD was a flawed writer (and flawed man) who also, often in great haste, wrote the work that best anticipates the world we’re inhabiting and heading toward.<\/p>\n

If all this is old news to you, I recommend you wait until Monday when the director’s cut — six daily installments on Dick’s final decade — unspools on the LATimes’ celebrated Hero Complex<\/a> blog. (That blog, \u00a0which looks at sf, fantasy, comics, and other assorted fanboy fare, is run by my tireless and obsessive old colleague Geoff Boucher.)<\/p>\n

If you’re interested in the more modest Sunday paper version, by all means go here<\/a> for my new LATimes piece on what might be the most serene and most tumultuous period of this author’s life.<\/p>\n

Whatever version you prefer, I spoke to a number of figures in Dick’s life and afterlife: The sf\/fantasy writer Tim Powers, Dick’s daughter Isa and his fifth wife Tessa, the mastermind of the exhaustive Total Dick Head<\/a> website, and the keeper of PKD’s flame — novelist Jonathan Lethem.<\/p>\n

I’ll be posting each of next week’s installments here — please keep your eyes peeled for more on this complex and contradictory figure!<\/p>\n

Photo credits: Tessa Dick and Electric Shepherd<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was a bearded Berkeley bohemian — the last guy you’d expect to move to Orange County, Calif., at a time when its John Birch reputation was still well-deserved. But after a disastrous year or so, the author relocated from the Bay Area to SoCal, and wrote some of his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[205,144,186,29],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1016","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-lethem","7":"category-orange-co","8":"category-philip-k-dick","9":"category-west-coast","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}