January 08, 2005
Phil Dick Letters
Claudia Krenz has placed the first year of her correspondence with psy-phi master Philip K. Dick on sale. Dick was a prolific letter writer. That year alone he wrote Krenz over 60 letters. At the time Krenz was writing a master’s thesis on Dick’s UBIC. Her initial interest was mainly in trying to better understanding what Dick was getting at in the novel, but a quick gloss of excerpts shows how instantly broad the exchange became. At the time Dick was writing VALIS (a four book trilogy) in which he really began adamantly to break down the author / narrator / character distinction. The letters describe dreams in which scenarios from past novels and his actual life begin to merge and become inseparable in the authors mind. The normally paranoid world of the author is complicated by visitations by a white bearded man. Dick is perplexed because these dreams are in Greek, a language he did not know he knew. In a statement, Krenz claims it was her desire to make the letters widely available to the public on-line but that her efforts were thwarted by US Copyright code.