Finished Fr 11/16/18
The author's page at wikipedia-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Carr%C3%A8re
I remembered how much I loved his film 'La Moustache', and it was most definitely a 'phildickian' movie.
His mother sounds like a real piece of work. She got caught up in the beginning of the pharmaceutical industry. Trading her pills and theories with her friends and family as if they were baseball cards.
Phil was in therapy (because of his mother) since the age of fourteen. He was savy in taking the tests and answering the questions and he could manipulate most counselors.
I wonder how much his dead twin, Jane, really had on his makeup, or was he just using this to create 'a character'.
His drug rehabilitation in Vancouver, CA 'X-KALAY, was really a harsh environment. Started in 1967 and the guy is still alive and is now a talk show host on the radio. Maybe Phil craved the hard-line discipline since he had been spending so much time with shiftless and aimless people.
"VAST ACTIVE LIVING INTELLIGENCE" came during the writing of Ubik
FEBRUARY 3, 1974
From Dick's page on wikipedia-
"Throughout February and March 1974, Dick experienced a series of hallucinations, which he referred to as "2-3-74", shorthand for February–March 1974. Aside from the "pink beam", Dick described the initial hallucinations as geometric patterns, and, occasionally, brief pictures of Jesus and ancient Rome. As the hallucinations increased in length and frequency, Dick claimed he began to live two parallel lives, one as himself, "Philip K. Dick", and one as "Thomas", a Christian persecuted by Romans in the first century AD. He referred to the "transcendentally rational mind" as "Zebra", "God" and "VALIS". Dick wrote about the experiences, first in the semi-autobiographical novel Radio Free Albemuth and then in VALIS, The Divine Invasion and the unfinished The Owl in Daylight (the VALIS trilogy)."
This is the link to the excellent Youtube interview and many of the incidents that he mentions in the book are covered in this discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=YEohNAXLSOE
He had an amazing number of women in his life and it wasn't that he was a Casanova as much as that he was just terrified to be alone. His real view of woman was very 1950-ish and not 'modern' at all. Women were there to serve and console him, and they should just fade into the background when he didn't need them. Even though they lived in squalor, he refused to let any of them work although some of them did anyway.
For most of his life he lived in houses, but in the end he lived in an apartment complex. Here is where he met KW Jeter and Tim Powers. He was also living with his wife Doris who was dying of cancer. This woman later moved into the apartment next to his and recovered.
No explanation is given as to how Phil was able to correctly diagnose his son Christopher's hernia. Maybe it really was a divine manifestation.
The breakin that shattered his life is revealed to be a pretty much normal occurrence that was fairly common during the time that he lived in that area. He ties it from everything to the Black Panthers to aliens from outer space, but he was convinced that the American federal government (FBI) was keeping close tabs on him his entire life. After the Freedom of Information Act he saw that there was only a single page in his file, but this 'proved' that the surveillance was real because they obviously had redacted his file- He makes the negative prove the positive.
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