The Philip K. Dick Conference, April 30, 2016
Sousa: We’re going to be talking about Philip K. Dick today, and then maybe branching out a little bit more into Southern California and science fiction within the realm of Southern California.
My first question for you, since we’re talking about PKD, is a three-parter. The second part of all three is the why, but here’s the three-parter. What’s your favorite PKD book? What’s the one PKD book, if you could, you would wish you had written? What is the one PKD book you would want to be in?
Lethem: Best one to live in? That’s great. I’ve fought over and over not to have to pick one absolute favorite, but then again I have Ubik tattooed on my arm, so I think I probably made my life alliance with Ubik.
Really, I would prefer to be allowed to say [six]: Ubik, Stigmata, Martian Time-Slip, VALIS, Scanner, and then the [sixth] spot open…. There are a lot of them that I love. But Ubik is at the summit, and then maybe just below it, Scanner, Stigmata, and VALIS.
VALIS maybe changed my life the most, in some ways. It was the first book I read when it was new. I was his fan while he was alive for a chunk of time, but I was reading old books that he’d written long ago. That book came out in ’81, and I read it in ’81. This emanation from the present of Philip K. Dick’s brain, and just the difference in that book and the way he had changed into this other writer, and the way in which that book—now I see it as a very strong bridge to a kind of autobiographical fiction that I often write, and read a lot of by other writers.
I think that book is very emblematic for me. Finally, Ubik and VALIS. Maybe VALIS is the one I most would have liked to have written, although it’s also the one I’d probably have been least qualified to write, among my favorites.
I almost think that I could be audacious enough to think I could have come up with Ubik and maybe executed parts of it even better because it’s so slovenly in some ways. Other things about it I find intimidating and awesome and probably I couldn’t have done.
VALIS requires the arcane obsessions that drove him hard at that time, and I don’t have those, so I probably couldn’t have written VALIS. To put together all that Gnosticism and make it drive the characters and the content of the book in the way that it does is unimaginable to me.
But I guess I could do an analogous project where a gravedigger is into old Funkadelic records … and that information could drive the book. If, instead of Fortress of Solitude, I’d written a book about a character driven insane by the suspicion that a certain musician appears on a certain track on a Parliament Funkadelic record from 1971, but he can’t prove it, and he goes into another world… Maybe I could have done that.
Sousa: Want to write that down?
Lethem: Yeah. That’d be good. That’d be good. To live in is a very different problem. Do I get to be… I don’t think I’d want to be the protagonist in very many of his books, but I might like to stand to one side and survive the mess.
Sousa: Why would you avoid that protagonist role?
Lethem: Well, I think one of the things I most admire about his writing is that the narratives are so conceptually extraordinary. The reality breakdowns, the paranoia, the metaphysics are so intense. But that makes him sound like a writer like Borges or something.
At the same time, what makes him really special is that the subject, the character undergoing these reality breakdowns, is so emotionally labile. So helpless. So at their mercy, and that seems extraordinary for the reader. It seems very, very challenging to be that person.
Because the beauty—the humor and the emotion and the sadness and the intensity, the real human aspect of his books—is that he comes up with these conceptual things and then, for the characters, everything actually depends upon them. They’re not a sport, they’re life itself.
That’s not really a way to live, day to day. I might opt for one of the early absurdist ones. Maybe it would be best to live in the right part of Clans of the Alphane Moon. I could probably hang out with the hebephrenics and just spin records and smoke dope.
Be a hebephrenic, why not? That’s OK. I found my people. You had a question?
Audience Member: The topic today is Dick’s SoCal Dream. I’m just wondering what role you think Southern California … what effect Southern California had on PKD’s writing, especially the last decade while he was here in Southern California?
Lethem: I’m going to take your question and I’m going to back up and do some frameworks, including explaining our difference in relating to the subject matter.
I’m from New York City and my understanding of and interest in California was cultivated by … it was mediated. I knew both Southern and Northern California because of the Beat Generation, reading Jack Kerouac, reading Philip K. Dick, reading Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Watching movies, seeing it in the backdrops, seeing it as the subject, watching a Robert Altman film like The Long Goodbye.
It was endlessly a series of images and ideas, notions. It was anything but a real place for me. One of the reasons that I was interested in having this conversation with Sam, apart from the fact that he and I just like to talk, is that he’s the ultimate opposite. He’s totally rooted in this place, knows it from the ground up.
Now he studies Californian culture, he thinks about it, and he’s a devotee, as I am, of some of the people who’ve mediated it, like say Nathanael West, we share a love for Nathanael West, but all of those mediated experiences for Sam are laid on top of innate, rooted, local knowledge … somatic knowledge of this place.
That sets up us, and where I’m starting from.
When I tried to understand California or think about California, initially I was a very, very avid consumer of a lot of those things I just mentioned, Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick and Hollywood films, long before I got to come out here. Even though I got to come out here when I was nineteen, I’d already developed such an exaggerated sense of what this place meant and what it was for and what was interesting about it.
A lot of what I’d absorbed was really wrong because, of course, it was a sensorium, it was images, it was a simulacrum. It was a fiction, and this is a real place. But a lot of it was right because one of the things that strikes me about California, having arrived here, is that it is a place made up partly of reality and fantasy, fictions.
It’s a place very deeply informed by utopian concepts, of the idea of the American self-reinvention kind of meets its western edge here, right around “Go West, young man.” It’s a place where history has been expunged. Europe is very far away and instead you get to, ostensibly, start fresh and make a utopian dream here, and self-invent. Now this has lots and lots of positive and negative results.
It’s also a very dystopian place, precisely because those ideas are insupportable, and in their collapse, in their unsustainability, you get all sorts of disasters. You get people like in Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, who come here from the Dust Bowl, essentially, with a dream that they’re all going to be in the movies and they end up just staring through a screen at a magical world that they can’t enter.
Sousa: It makes me actually think … probably the book I identify most with what you’re saying, especially the idea of the west and hitting that edge, is They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which quite literally takes the most nagging, or negative, character in the book out onto the edge of a pier, into the middle of the ocean, and kills her.
Lethem: It’s like, could there be another place outside of this? No, actually. One of the things that always fascinated me was learning—I don’t know if this statistic holds true anymore, but there was a point at which the greatest number of per capita of suicides in the United States was the Bay Area, which seems really paradoxical because isn’t this a place…
First of all, the weather is temperate, it’s marvelous. People come there to fulfill themselves, but it’s precisely, I think, that if you’re living in a bleak place, if you’re living in Pittsburgh or the Dust Bowl or North Dakota, if your life is shitty, you can project that and be confirmed that the environment tells you, “Well, of course it is.” Right? It’s a condition of reality.
But if you go to a place where everyone is avidly selling themselves and their environment as “We’ve reached it! We’re fine, we’re great! You can do whatever you want here, total freedom! It’s wonderful,” then any bleakness you discover must be … you must be the problem. So you kill the problem.
You can’t kill North Dakota or Pittsburgh, but if you’re in the Bay Area and everyone is living the dream and telling you that all the time, then if you’re bummed out, you’re the sore point. That was a theory of mine.
I’m still backing up in a way, to set up an adequate answer to your question. For me, a lot of what I responded to in Philip K. Dick’s vision of California, because remember, I was young enough I wasn’t reading the LA books yet. He published A Scanner Darkly when I… Whatever, I guess I would have been sixteen, fifteen, but I didn’t find him right away.
I was reading about Dr. Bloodmoney, I was reading about the Rim, and San Francisco in his books. Again and again, I was reading about Oakland and Berkeley, even without really completely putting the geography together. Some of this connected to what was already a lot of fantasy for me because I had read a lot of the Beats and I had this idea that the Beat Generation was still a living thing.
Well, if you go to North Beach, there are poets, it is still a concept there. My parents were hippies, so even just the residue of Haight-Ashbury, the idea of the Bay Area as a place for alternative culture, for specifically anti-New York … the Old World hierarchies, the Ivy League crap, Columbia University that Ginsberg had fled. This whole sense that the Bay Area was a place to get free of that kind of thing was very powerful for me, so when I discovered Dick’s novels and I identified with them and I saw these signifiers, that seemed to connect and feed me.
One of things is that, from the distance of New York, Southern California by contrast is presented to you a little bit like the Annie Hall-Woody Allen moment. The flat, grotesque, superficial car culture, writers going there to have their lives ruined by Hollywood.
You get a certain amount of that, having lived in the Bay Area for a while, the Bay Area also digs caricaturing Southern California that way, too. Since I went from New York to the Bay Area, both in my imagination and then in my life—I lived in Berkeley and Oakland for ten years in my twenties when I was becoming a writer, and I didn’t come down here at all.
I had that weirdly, doubly reinforced. Even as I was discovering California and finding out the ways in which it was a real place and not just a fantasy, LA remained to me this very bad cartoon. I understood it very poorly and I thought it was all one thing, and that one thing was contemptible.
What’s interesting, too, if you see early references to Southern California in Dick’s writing, he’ll participate to some extent. I can’t remember which novel it was, but … it’s glimpsed in the backdrop of some book as being only a place where there’s just a permanent race riot and it’s gotten taken over, it’s one big race riot.
You also find early references, mostly to, in a way, the simulacrum culture down here, like Disney’s Lincoln robot, who actually is a very sympathetic and marvelously humane character because Dick loved that kind of paradox. But his identifications are with emblems like Disneyland, or a race riot. He’s not dealing with this as a real cultural geography.
When he ends up here, it’s not just, of course, that his life has changed. The culture has also changed. Through the sixties, especially in the science fiction demi-monde, into the seventies, although it begins to curdle in the seventies, but you can still feel it in a way, when you go back to Berkeley, that you’re entering a bubble where the counterculture was never completely…
Sousa: Dissolved.
Lethem: Dissolved, right.
But in Dick’s life, and in the culture, things were different by the time he’s writing something like VALIS. A Scanner Darkly, of course, is the pivotal book because it’s the one that says, “This world that I’ve been a part of is exposed in this landscape.”
There’s something about this landscape and the way people are living in isolation in these apartments that’s obviously a transmission about his own experience of how his life has changed. It’s relatively barren, he waits for visitors, and he’s in this spatiality.
There’s no downtown, there’s no Tupper & Reed, there’s no university as an emblem of the authority he hates, but the intellectual life that he cravenly admires. There’s just the highways and the apartments, and it’s like, “What is going on?” and “Who am I?” It’s me and my record collection in a room, and then we take drugs and we pass out.
It’s a really different cultural geography for him. It’s one, I think, that mirrors the exposure of the ideals of a communitarian counterculture existence which would…. Even as he’s a writer who is so alone and classic and unique and strange and distrustful of affiliations, in his Bay Area writing, he is nevertheless still subscribing in a certain way to an ideal of community, and a lot of those books are about the challenges, the fractures, or the violations of tribal identities, kinds of freaks of various natures.
Dr. Bloodmoney obviously being the outstanding example of how he turns dystopia into an opportunity for people to form a new kind of tribalism or a new collective identity. Even in the horrible Martian books, the networks, the systems of human beings are trying to sustain some form of community in a challenged, radical circumstance.
The psychics in Ubik, they’re like a tribe. Down here, he begins to deal with this inevitable fragmentation and isolation.
Audience Member: What year does he come to Southern California?
Lethem: Well, the move is, what, it’s in ’70…
Sousa: ’72, I think.
Lethem: ’72? Yeah.
Sousa: … so how much of that do you think is comparable to the sort of a collapse of the ’60s? … How much do you think the collapse of that dream influenced the worlds that he crafted?
You’re talking about isolation, and that’s really what you’re seeing in the sixties—the shortcomings of civil rights, the shortcomings of the hippie movement, counter-culture, the anti-war protests, feminism—all of these things that were going to bring us a utopia and, for whatever reason, were battered out of existence.
How much of that do you think affects the writing he does?
Lethem: … Dick was always of his time, but always set himself apart from it. I think these things were very influential on him, but unlike some other writers. You could pick a science-fiction writer like Theodore Sturgeon or a literary writer like Richard Brautigan. You could say, there are some writers, who, despite being very unique sensibilities, were able to identify fully, and say, “This is all… I’m part of this counter-culture.”
I don’t think Dick ever had an unambivalent relationship to the sixties, because he was prone to seeing new authoritarianisms or perverse ideological pitfalls opening up, even in idealistic or utopian scenes.
Also, I think you could even just say he was an instinctive contrarian or dissident. He was a dissident against anything, and everything, like “What do you got?” Kind of like Marlon Brando in The Wild One. But of course he was also a product of and a participant in these things, at other levels. I think he had deep affiliations with just the idea of…
You could hear him writing about this in certain places, where he starts to only want to hang out with young people, because, at a certain level, he’s identifying with a “never trust anyone over thirty” kind of concept, even though he himself is a little old in the tooth.
Sousa: I’m over thirty, and I can’t blame him.
Lethem: He’s got this sort of permanent “the kids are all right,” even when of course the kids are not all right. He wants to be around them because he feels like there’s something that they’re suffering or seeing, that they have access to a sacred reality just by being on the outside of institutional authority.
Yes, I think that of course it was costly to him, as it was costly to so many people, to see those kinds of Utopianisms fragment at the end of the seventies…
Sousa: We were talking before this about Art Spiegelman or Gary Panter and Slash magazine, that dissident attitude, and that’s why they are identifying with him. Do you think there’s something inherent about it? I guess what I would say is that there seems almost to be something inherent about…
The primary goal, the primary focus of Southern California seems to be the individual, and any kind of encroachment on that is cause for unrest, whether emotional or physical violence. So we were talking about Slash, which was an early punk magazine, and so many people associated with that were making a pilgrimage to see the PKD…
Lethem: … coming to find him.
Sousa: Yes. But then also just expanding that world out thinking about Black Flag or X, these punk bands. Because Southern California punk was so distinct, it seems to me that maybe there’s a draw there. Maybe it wasn’t what drew him here but a connection he found.
Lethem: Yes. We’ve talked about this in other contexts. It’s so funny. We are also a generational… We talk across the generational divide, as well as the geographical one.
I identify with punk. A version of punk came along to galvanize me at a crucial time in my coming of age, as it did for you in yours, but they’re two different punks. Mine was the New York, very decadent, arty—Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads.
Even though it set itself up as a counter-culture by contrast to something like SoCal pop, it’s quite privileged and it has a bohemian privilege to it. It’s immediately surrounding itself with things like connections to Paul Verlaine.
Kids identified with it, but it’s not really a blue-collar, pure indigenous thing. It’s kind of fancy, and it was much more strongly connected to the hierarchy of preceding rock and roll. Patti Smith comes out of Bob Dylan and says so. There isn’t that much of a returning it to the lower classes, even though that fantasy is in there somewhat.
Sousa: Even though she comes from that. If you’re going to pick someone like Smith, she comes out of the working class, for example.
Lethem: Right, she does, but there’s still this royalty in the way that that kind of punk is formulated, which has to do with New York City. It has to do with at least the ease of connection both in time and space to the record industry.
Whereas the L.A. punk that galvanized you growing up really was a kind of exile culture. You have a few things in the background that succeeded, kind of succeeded, like X.
Sousa: Even that’s minimal.
Lethem: Even that’s minimal. Mostly it had this lineage of cult bands—the Screamers, and so forth—that are just really only for the people who saw it. You had to be at the show.
The truth is, you could buy a Patti Smith record. Yeah, it’s a great bragging point if you went and saw them at CBGBs once, but it’s also true that they’d continue and you could see them at the same New Jersey theater and it was really just a rock show.
But the Screamers, it was like a secret occurrence. It was really avant-garde, very blue-collar avant-garde. I do think that Dick is a good emblem for that permanently dissident, non-affiliated kind of cultural expression.
Now, of course, Art Spiegelman actually gentrified himself quite nicely. He’s got Pulitzer Prizes, on the cover of The New Yorker all the time.
But the atmosphere around Slash magazine, the kinds of things that were uprising, and the fact that they were looking for … to me this connects very strongly also to another underground. Not a music underground, but the Zap comic, the cartoonists Robert Williams and Robert Crumb and Spain Rodriguez—those guys, who were essentially non-assimilable.
Crumb, eventually, sort of, he’s in museums and stuff, but for the most part they were true dissidents, and their work contains a strong grain of skeptical amusement about the sixties counter-culture. It doesn’t tend to subscribe to it fully.
I think that Dick’s relationship to hippiedom, in some ways, it seems to be similar to the Zap Comix guys. It was like, “Yes, but … a lot of freaky stuff is great, but I don’t want to start signing up for your new revolution. Or maybe you forgot this other old stuff is good, don’t forget to do stuff and fantasize about it.”
Sousa: It’s almost like they don’t want to play for any teams. This fits better into Southern California, the sense of individual self-reinvention.
Lethem: I’m going to go on another tangent. This is where I wish Erik Davis had shown up to talk with us about SoCal indigenous mystical traditions. In a weird way, there’s a lineage from the Aimee Semple McPherson stuff, the Nathanael West era apocalyptic religion and what you find in VALIS, and that is that, as the sixties fragmented, there was so much disaffiliation and so much isolation and disappointment… I really owe it to Erik for identifying this for me, helping me believe that it was a thing… The girl who shows up at the door wearing the thing is not in a vacuum in VALIS, wearing the fish symbol. That in Southern California culture specifically, one of the places the hippie dream went to hide when it was unsustainable, politically or in other places, was in Christian freaks. That that was a place where there could still be a tribalism. That there was a very powerful movement of some of the idealism and some of the sense of crowd identification or affiliation or identity that took some of the elements of the sixties counter-culture, but switched them from being political or drug-cultural or based in rock and roll culture and moved them instead into mystic Christianity, specifically like putting the fish on your car and going door to door and being a Jesus freak.
And that that was something that Dick was also catching the scent of and seeing. This idea that emerges in the late books that’s there going to be an underground and it’s going to be a Christian underground is a residual idealism that I think connects to the way… You talk about Southern California being fundamentally about the individual, but I think things are always themselves and their opposites.
When you come into this environment—this is to go back to my big generalization about California being the final destination of the American dream of self-reinvention and leaving behind all the old orders of hierarchies, old religions—then you’re in a vacuum and the individual is in a panic, “Who do I follow? What do I do?”
That’s why we get L. Ron Hubbard and Aimee Semple McPherson and Jim Jones. You get people stepping into that vacuum, sweeping up the energy of all these atomized individuals and saying, “Here’s the new thing. Yeah, we threw off the shackles of the old, but I’ll be your new leader, don’t worry.” Because the isolation that comes with the possibility of self-reinvention is also terrifying.
Sousa: It makes me think about Chuck Smith—I think, if I got his name correct, he was the founder of Calvary Chapel—who was doing just that in Costa Mesa, right down the road from Santa Ana, in the seventies. This idea of taking, of creating a church, a Christian church of Calvary Chapel…
I’m sure if you’re from Southern California, you will certainly be aware it’s a chain of churches around the Southland. A very, very large church, broad membership, but also a very, at this point, a very right-wing, very almost what you could predict as being sort of Christian.
Anyway, when he starts the church, it’s a freaks’ church. That’s his goal, that everybody can come in with long hair, with sandals. Anything goes here. Take that utopian ideal that you were getting from rock and roll, from the counter-culture and mold it into your Christian faith.
Now if you look at that, it’s become something much more conservative, much more right-wing, but it seems like… There’s a vacuum and you can’t instantly connect to that definition of what you’re going to be; there’s a vacuum that can’t be rectified.
Lethem: Another result is to participate in a mob or a riot, which is what Nathanael West is portraying at the end of The Day of the Locust, is that there’s, in that vacuum, just a collective identity of tearing down like lemmings, or lemmings marching into the sea or destroying the temple.
I want you to talk about what you, as a witness to California punk … that whole era, what was your route to connecting coming of age in that music scene, in skateboarding, in the instinctive attractions of that culture to a local version of the literary? Because you have a very interesting image of…. You’re very conscious of small press publications and local authors. There almost is a corresponding literacy in this area that you’ve turned me on to.
There were some things I was aware of, like Aaron Cometbus, the great Berkeley-Oakland zinester, though I think he’s living in New York right now—a documentarian of Berkeley’s and Oakland’s counter-cultural life, of the Gilman Street Project and so forth.
How do you trace your own awareness from skateboarding to Philip K. Dick?
Sousa: I probably have a pretty typical mid-thirties avenue into punk, which was Green Day. But almost instantly, and I can even go back before that and say I always identified with stuff that was outside of whatever was in my immediate culture. I grew up in Chino Hills, very conservative, white, very run-of-the-mill, small-town Southern California. And so early on, late eighties—I had an older brother who gave me all the access to this stuff—when gangster rap culture [was] happening in its early form, there was an immediate response to me because it’s something so different. Something so exciting and so against everything else that I could see with my eyes, like everything that’s visually happening.
For example, this isn’t Southern California, but on the Public Enemy album, Fear of a Black Planet, there’s a song called “Burn, Hollywood, Burn” that’s about the fact that there’s a lack of black actors and black characters in the mainstream movies. And this was the song I probably identified with most as a kid. It’s totally absurd. I wasn’t in the industry, I wasn’t a part of it or anything like that, I’m not black, but there was a desire in me to just identify with being outside things.
Just to give you how dedicated to not being on the team and trying to be an individual I was, even when I went to Catholic high school, that was a choice. I went to Catholic high school for two years. It was like, “I got to get away from all the people I grew up with and meet a new set of folks in a new environment.” It failed miserably; I couldn’t have felt more alone than being in Catholic high school.
When I got into punk, I already skated, and there’s just this outsider sort of counter-culture that you can access at various levels. You can be from Huntington Beach. You can just touch a tip of the iceberg, maybe listen to a few punk bands. Or you can go to a surf show, where there are bands playing. Same thing with skating. But you could also dive deeper in and follow any kind of avenues there were—there were blues punk bands and crust punk bands, there were street punk bands—any kind of avenue you wanted to go there.
Probably the thing I take most from punk is a sense that, for lack of a better term, that nihilism can work. That allowing people to live and exist in their own realities with a certain amount of respect can work.
I remember there’s a great zine called Fire Is Metaphor, and the last line in it is, “Nihilism works.” Basically, the idea is that if you allow people just to be themselves, you can find a sort of currency with which everybody can make their lives work. I don’t know that that is actually plausible on a grand scale, but it’s an attractive outsider idea.
It was definitely something that attracted me because I felt like when I came into the punk community I could be whatever, go down whatever avenue. I also know and have said multiple times, I don’t want to join anyone’s team. I don’t want to be on anyone’s team. I keep my team small.
The next step then was to go down these avenues of zine culture. You access places like Rhino Records or, when I was growing up, Fullerton was the spot for Bionic Records over on Chapman and State College, which was the best place to go. Both these shops had great zine selections and all kinds of obscure music and curiosities to get into.
I have to say that still exists here in Fullerton in two different ways. With Black Hole Records downtown, which is very much dedicated to that early eighties, almost that cross where Black Flag meets Christian Death—that kind of macabre punk. Then also with Burger Records, which is down State College and is much more of a rock and roll freak thing. I don’t say that negatively, I just mean they have long hair and the place smells like dope every time you go. They’re committed to aesthetics. Both places, as well as the other record stores mentioned, all had this zine selection, all had this culture to access.
It’s interesting to have come of age in what seems like, and I know it’s not totally what it seems like to a certain degree, the last little bit of that searching, because now I can get zines from anywhere, all over the country.
All I have to do is get online, find the zine distributor, and access whatever looks most interesting, whether I’m getting it online, digitally, or I’m ordering a copy. Whereas before, I got every new issue of Cometbus because I determined the distributor.
Lethem: There used to be a thing called “Factsheet Five,” which a lot of people who were in concurrence with the Philip K. Dicks Society environment … [followed]. It was run by a guy named… Mike Gunderloy… He was the Internet before there was any Internet. He would just list every zine in America and give you their address. He fostered a culture of swapping zines. He would say the best way to get the zines is to make one yourself and to swap them with another.
It was a remarkable example of something I think you and I are both interested in, which is the black hole, the gulf that exists between what’s scanned and digitized because either corporations or boomer-age fans with resources at the helm of cultural projects have digitized them and reissued them now [and what’s not digitized].
When the Internet starts there’s a gulf. There’s a dead spot or a blind spot. That’s where a lot of the zines that you and I care about and grew up with are still dwelling. You google them and you can’t get barely any reference whatsoever. There isn’t evidence of them. Ironically because they’re too near, they’re too close to the beginning of the Internet.
Sousa: I’m always surprised when I google something and it seems not to exist. I somehow feel like my memory is wrong. I’m getting the title of the album or the band wrong. When you’re talking about zine culture that you can find, when you do that, you do that alone. I mean you were talking earlier about the PKD Newsletter, but even that is going to be … not only is it a small, very specific group or setting, it’s going to be a small group that is assembled.
Most zines are done by one person and it takes time and work to photocopy everything, staple everything together. What’s interesting about, and different from say, like, Calvary Chapel or the underground community, is that there are people who in the underground are trying to retain a sense of individualism.
They want to retain the liberty that comes with it. They’re checking to make sure it embraces something that really feels like their own, but they’re also desperate for community. That’s why they go to shows and they slam into each other.
They’re desperate to feel that physical connection that someone else exists in a manner of speaking, sort of marinating in this stew of loneliness and self-determination.
Lethem: Let me circle around in this weird way to the part where we began, with this framework of California as real and then [not] at the same time…
When you and I first met, you were talking about rewriting a Nathaniel West novel. I come, as I said, from this California is the myth of the idea and the image of the catastrophe of the utopia, all these things before it’s a real place for me.
I then come and see it and I begin to work out, conjugate on the ground, the somatic experience with all this baggage. What’s it like for you coming up from inside Chino Hills, when you hit people writing in various ways, contending with the utopia and dystopia? The whole West, how do you conjugate that…?
Sousa: Oh, I connect with it… We had a conversation in one of the courses I teach last week about the fact that people in the Mid-West don’t necessarily always have fences around their property.
It was kind of this thing where students couldn’t wrap their head around, “well, how do you know where you’re property line is?,” you’re not going to worry about it. If you drive outside of Chicago and you’re heading west, you’ve just been on the highway, out towards DeKalb, you go by past miles, and miles, and miles of track homes, where there are no fences. Nobody is concerned about the property. Here, it’s extinct. You’re not just putting up a fence or wrought iron fence. You’re most often putting up brick walls. Or you’re putting up a…
Lethem: Cinder block walls.
Sousa: Right. Cinder block walls. Thank you. It is the same thing with the cars. Mass transit has grown here only really over the last decade. It’s become more and more accessible, so it’s not Chicago. It’s not like New York. It’s not like the Bay Area.
Lethem: Yeah. It’s not built into the concept of the city.
Sousa: No.
Lethem: It’s right on top of it.
Sousa: In fact, you know that from the way history … it was actively fought against. There was—what was that—The Good Earth Foundation? Which was Ford, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tires that fought to actively end the rail system, in Los Angeles.
When they succeeded in that, they created a real … individualism, at that point, was woven into the fabric. Especially, because…
Lethem: It became infrastructural.
Sousa: Right. Because, especially, ten-fifteen years later, as the suburbs just expanded in the post-war era. That’s exactly what it is. Everyone is going to become the individualist. Now, look there are sincere moments of attempts at utopia… In City of Quartz [Ed.: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990) by Mike Davis], he writes about, I think it’s Llano Del Rio and this idea that people are setting up this circle of utopia out here in the West. I just think that is a space where that’s impossible. It’s impossible, I think, to ultimately forge…
Lethem: Something like Victoria Gardens is a nightmare vision. I don’t know how many have been to that place, but it’s a place where the post office and the library are incorporated into the mall. The mall has swallowed the town.
Sousa: Yeah. That actually also happened to Chino Hills, and its base would be Irvine Spectrum or the Block, here in Orange, where they created these outdoor malls, ostensibly to function like downtown areas. What they’ve done now, and really, it’s kind of really interesting to see, if you go to the Shoppes in Chino Hills or to Victoria Gardens, they have relocated all of the city services to the mall. Even in Chino Hills, the fire department, the sheriff’s department, City Hall, the county library, it’s all located across from the Barnes and Noble. It’s all located across from the Vans store and Trader Joe’s.
They’ve incorporated, with like you’re saying, the bureaucracy into the commerce. What’s even great, even better about this place, is that they’ve tried to design them like small towns. When you go to Victoria Gardens, it’s not like it’s just an outdoor mall, you can literally drive through. There are streets, and stop signs, and crosswalks, and parking spaces where you go to.
Lethem: It’s sort of like going to Lego Land getting in one of the Lego cars. It’s like a little pretend car. Your car becomes like a pretend car in a pretend town…
Sousa: Just after I read Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra I went to Victoria Gardens for the first time, and you become just aware of everything. Almost everything he’s saying is exactly true. It’s becoming a map for a small-town experience.
It’s a simulation rather than reality. I was aware of the way things were really commercialized here, and I think that was part of what drove me. Just to look for something else, anything else I could find. Dos Lagos is coming to mind, too. That’s another place where the city hall is at the mall. It’s nice that you want to try to this… It’s very, very, very, earnest, wholesome idea to want to be able to create that kind of downtown atmosphere. It’s nice that you are trying to do that for your city and kind of, hopefully, give your city that small town feel.
Jonathan and I both live in Claremont. Claremont naturally has that feel.
Lethem: It’s a simulacrum of a small, college town in New England.
Sousa: Yeah. For something in Southern California there’s nothing similar to it. It’s such an anomaly that it seems natural. Whereas now with these towns, you talk about the fact that every three exits there’s a Kohl’s and a TGI Chili’s Applebee’s. It just becomes like the map gets regenerated.
Lethem: It’s like the background in The Flintstones where you see this tree and the rock. I suspect that we should open this up to questions. I know we’ll keep talking.
Audience Member: Could either of you speak to the specific places that Dick lived, Fullerton and Santa Ana? What did it mean to be in those places in the seventies, that are particular from the rest of Southern California?
Lethem: It’s a question for you, more than for me. Apart from the fact that we are occupying some of that ground right this minute, I know them essentially through his fiction…. What I know about, apart from once visiting the Nixon Museum twenty years ago, having some Vietnamese food, I think about these areas through his letters.
Sousa: I don’t know that I can speak specifically about that, but what I find fascinating both about the late seventies and Santa Ana and Fullerton is the paranoid response. I feel like that comes through in A Scanner Darkly, that kind of paranoia that’s there.
If you think about the band The Middle Class, who are coming out of Santa Ana in ’77, ’78, often referred to as the first hardcore record, it’s got that same kind of detachment from the mainstream, where people are looking at the status quo and wanting to get away from that.
If you look at what’s going on here in Fullerton, you’ve got Social Distortion, Agent Orange, Adolescents, Black Hole Records, it’s the same type of thing. People are looking into getting away from the status quo. Or even if you fast forward, and the guy’s name is going to escape me now, but his first name is Steve.
He was the guy who, about a decade, decade-and-a-half ago, was elected to city council in Santa Ana. It was done on a fluke. It was a write-in campaign. I can’t speak extensively, but here’s a guy who his first claim to fame was that in the ’80s he was arrested for shoplifting from Albertson’s.
At that point, he wrote a book in which he believed that the Bank of California, Albertson’s and, I want to say, McDonald Douglas were in a conspiracy with the government to control minds. This guy, eventually, about fifteen, twenty years later, gets elected to city council.
It’s totally worth your time if you look him up on YouTube, you can watch him use the city council platform as just a way for himself to vent about mind control, about corporate conspiracy, about gun control. At one point, he brings his gun to the city council to talk about how safe it is that he can bring a gun to the city council.
There inherently is in Southern California, whether Dick specifically was attracted to it or not, a paranoia that is in his work, a sort of cynicism and paranoia about the system.
Lethem: It’s funny, it popped into my head, just the atmosphere also of that film Repo Man. “Ordinary fucking people, I hate ’em.” The sense of the completely anodyne reality, that the only thing you can do is abreact and freak out, like the characters in A Scanner Darkly.
Sousa: I have my own question for you now. Do you think there’s any connection between Philip K. Dick and They Live, and what that connection is?
Lethem: There’s a very literal connection which you probably don’t know. The guy who wrote the short story that was the basis for “They Live,” Ray Nelson, who’s still around in the Berkeley area or the Bay Area, collaborated with Philip K. Dick on that—and was one of the two writers who ever collaborated on a full-length novel with Dick—so there’s a traceable link.
Obviously, They Live is like a super distillation of a really simple Philip K. Dick idea, in a way made more viable by eliminating some of the kinds of elaborations or paradoxes that he would have been prone to saddle it with.
He would never have stopped with just the glasses showing you the aliens and now we can kill them, he would have turned it a hundred different ways. Of course, when I wrote about They Live, one of the things that I enjoyed doing, if you watch that movie ten, fifteen times. The paradoxes of John Carpenter’s simple allegory start to permeate in the places where it gets a little weird around the edges, you realize with Philip K. Dick, implications sneak in anyway. Our sympathy for these creatures, in a way.
How does it feel to be from a place where everyone knows that our entire species is ugly and all we want to look like is other species? All of these weird Philip K. Dick vibrations just helplessly attach themselves to this, even as John Carpenter’s trying to keep it a really radical, simple allegory of Reagan yuppies, but I think it’s got his DNA in it, in a sense. Absolutely…
Audience Member: Just a comment about Santa Ana. I visited there for the first time two days ago. Very noticeably, his neighborhood really looks like a neighborhood of churches. It’s also a big Mexican village that was there at the time.
He wrote about feeling like he’d moved to kind of a healing land with all the streams and such. I just wanted to make that comment.
Lethem: It’s something, again, that was touched on this great panel yesterday. His glancing motifs of race difference. That’s something that he never really engaged with full throttle. It sneaks into his work in interesting and odd ways. The black president here, the race riots in LA that are looked at for a moment there.
The existence of indigenous, or native cultures, crops up in the mainstream books in the form of the jaw … his interest in Cro-Magnon Man. The idea that we are living in a place that isn’t our own—that there are predecessors, ancient histories and civilizations.
It is the great counter narrative to the fantasy of the blank slate. That California is a place for civilization to reinvent because it’s empty. Is a fiction, right? It wasn’t. It required a violent displacement and eradication, an amnesia, to make it work.
The idea that that amnesia might make itself and reveal itself is obviously a very Dickian motif…
Sousa: Any other questions?
Lethem: Maybe that’s it.
Sousa: Thanks very much, everyone.