The Philip K. Dick Playlist

By Pete Welsch from Washington, DC, USA via Wikimedia Commons

By Alex Dalenberg

September 29, 2013 

Greetings from your editor. I've been meaning to put up a post on this for a while here, but a friend of mind bringing home a copy of Philip K. Dick 's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  (1968) from the The Strand in Manhattan inspired me to log into Squarespace. 

Spotify users, behold: The Philip K. Dick Playlist.

 Jason Boog over at publishing blog Galleycat compiled this playlist of Philip K. Dick's favorite music based on this two-year-old blog post from a fellow named Andrew May . Bottom line: the great science fiction author was a lover of classical music. 

Read the whole post, but here's the general idea, via May:

For an icon of popular culture, Philip K. Dick had a decidedly uncool knowledge of classical music. In an article written several years ago I mentioned his interest in Wagner's opera Parsifal, and the numerous references to it in VALIS. But classical music features in one way or another in many of Dick's works. Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen is mentioned in the introduction to A Maze of Death as the source employed for some of the material in the book. Mozart's Magic Flute is described, in considerable detail, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the hard-boiled cop Rick Deckard is an opera buff, naturally). In Ubik, a helicopter plays Beethoven's Missa Solemnis (one of the most sublime musical works of the nineteenth century) as background muzak. In The Game-Players of Titan, a teenaged kid forks out 125 dollars for a vintage recording of a Puccini aria. And so on.

According to one biography, Dick said he worked as a host of a classical music program on KSMO Radio in California 1947. On another note, Dick led the list of Library of America backlist bestsellers last year.

'Tell the Rabble My Name is Cabell'

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

September 22, 2013 

Almost forgotten by the American reading public today, but still exerting far-ranging influence among fantasists, and a cornerstone author of the Dalenberg Library, we come to James Branch Cabell.  Like most people, I used to say his name with an emphasis on the BELL.  But I’ve seen it parsed out to be pronounced like the word CABLE.  Then, I came across the poem the author himself wrote to convince people to say it his way—“Tell the rabble my name is Cabell.” 

I came to Cabell in the 1970’s when Ballantine books were on their 2nd printing of 6 of his wonderful fantasy novels set in a fictitious French medieval province called Poictesme.  After that it was important to seek out his most famous (and notorious) novel, Jurgen, which became an important footnote in literary history as the subject of a famous obscenity trial in 1919.  Cabell speaks with a gentle and urbane voice that is drowned out in the din of modern times.  He comes from a julet-sipping gentlemanly time from the old South, but he remained a fantasist in a more European mold throughout his literary career, and he never moved on to tackle all those Southern themes, like issues of class and race, that made others of his contemporaries immortal.  Cabell is a very funny writer, but his humor is subtle and his voice is droll.  You either “get” him or you don’t.

As a dedicated Cabell fan, I can’t resist showing off the Dalenberg Library, which has several really nice Cabell editions.  One of the rarest books of importance in all of fantasy literature is The Soul of Melicent, published by Frederick A. Stokes Company of New York in September, 1913, one-hundred years ago this month.  There was only this one edition, as the book was later re-titled Domnei (actually Cabell’s original title) when it was reissued in 1920 after Cabell had become famous in the trial over Jurgen.  Cabell later wrote that The Soul of Melicent only sold 493 copies in the autumn of 1913, and he was discouraged to continually find it disparagingly discounted in bookstore remainder piles for the next 6 years (until his sudden rise to fame in 1919.) A search on abebooks.com found only 11 copies for sale, and only one of those was inscribed by the author, and that one not until 1920.  

The Dalenberg Library copy of the book is a unique presentation copy inscribed by the author “To Martha Hamilton Paxton from James Branch Cabell September 1st, 1913.”  It was therefore inscribed upon the date of publication or right away when the author got some pre-publication copies.  The identity of Miss Paxton is a mystery.  A cursory Internet search suggests that she may have been born in 1881, making her about 32 years old at the time and very close in age to Mr. Cabell (who was born in 1879). 

The mystery of Ms. Paxton’s identity is made even more tantalizing by the fact that the Dalenberg Library copy of The Soul of Melicent has, tipped in, an undated postcard in Cabell’s unique hand depicting a Northwestern View of Rockbridge Alum Springs, a resort that Cabell frequented in those days.  On the picture side of the card, Cabell has drawn a forearm and hand pointing to a room on the upper floor of the hotel.  On the reverse, he has written “Just to remind you of my present address” and addressed it to “Miss Paxton, Natural Bridge Hotel, Natural Bridge, Virginia.” 

Since Cabell married in November, 1913, and moved at that time to his famous residence Dumbarton Grange, and since he was seemingly inviting Miss Paxton (not his future wife) to his room, and since he sent Miss Paxton this romantic book of his very much “hot off the press”—I cannot help but imagine that we have evidence here of a romantic assignation of 100 years past.  Whether Miss Paxton and Mr. Cabell ever hooked up is a detail that died with the principals, but it is amusing to note that Miss Paxton saved the postcard with the book, so that now, years later, they are still together. 

Incidentally, the Howard Pyle illustrations are full page color plates including the onlaid cover, frontispiece, and a few scattered through the book.  The publication date is posthumous for Pyle.  I believe that the plates that were used were not original for this book, but that they were archival Pyle works that were appropriated for this project.  To make matters more confusing for collectors of Howard Pyle:  Pyle did do some original paintings for Cabell stories published in Harper’s Monthly Magazine.  Parts of the source material for The Soul of Melicent were published in Harper’s in 1908 and 1911.  The Pyle illustrations for the original story publications were original works intended for the Cabell stories, but the same paintings were not used for the book. 

Bob Dylan has the last laugh

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

September 10, 2013 

After 41 albums, now starting on his 6th decade as an American musical icon, Bob Dylan’s saga is nothing short of legendary. For those of us who care about such music, and there are a lot of us, we know the story by heart. Shiftless boy from Minnesota learns to play the guitar & harmonica, taps into a rich vein of American folk music, worships at the feet of the dying Woody Guthrie, starts channeling Leadbelly and other aging bluesmen, becomes the darling of the folk/protest song movement, turns his back on the folkies, gets booed for “going electric” but morphs into a rock’n’roller to greater fame than he ever had before, has a motorcycle wreck that puts him out of commission for 2-1/2 years, makes a comeback that puzzles and frustrates everyone who wants the old Dylan back, gets written off as a has-been over and over again but always comes back stronger than before, has a religious conversion and pisses everyone off when he won’t play anything but his religious tunes, gets through the religious phase but gets written off again as a has-been, resurges with a Grammy for Best Album of the Year, and coasts into his later years sounding like the aging black bluesmen and blue collar folk singers he used to emulate, no longer the poster child of protest everyone wanted him to be in the 1960’s, but now the voice of American music of the last century.  If you’ve seen Dylan in recent years (and I’ve seen him about a half dozen times), you’ll know that he is resplendent in his timelessness, backed by a crack band that is essentially a country ensemble.  His music is more anthemic than anything anybody else is doing.  But, as always, he is playing more for himself than his audience.  He rarely acknowledges the audience, almost never picks up his harmonica anymore, often spends an entire show at the keyboard rather than picking up a guitar, often sings his old standards with different melodies than what everyone knows, always re-inventing and toying with his art.  But as frustrating and infuriating as he sometimes can be, as self-absorbed an anti-showman as he often is, he still puts on a great show.  I saw the crowd go crazy with a Dylan cover of the Rolling Stones “Brown Sugar” that kicked ass more than I think the Stones themselves could achieve.  I’ve seen his band launch into a country jazz improvisation with the string bass player slapping and twirling the bass like he was some kind of a crazed caricature in a cartoon.  And Dylan always caps a show these days with a fired up, hard rocking version of “All Along the Watchtower,” which is Dylan paying homage to Jimi Hendrix, who recorded the song in the first place to pay homage to Dylan.  A Dylan show is an event not to be missed.  I took a friend once who was indifferent about Dylan before he walked into the concert—he left the show a die-hard Dylan fan and remains one to this day. 

Which brings us to this month’s release:  “Another Self Portrait: The Bootleg Series Vol. 10 (1969-1971).” This is the latest in a long series of official bootleg releases from the Dylan camp. The Bootleg Series has been a joy, consisting of unreleased and alternative tracks, plus several of the volumes have been pivotal live concerts from various periods in Dylan’s long career. When Volume 10 was announced, it must have seemed to some that they were running out of material and scraping the bottom of the barrel.  Dylan’s 1970 album “Self Portrait” was not well received by the critics.  In fact, it was reviled by most critics. The album was puzzling in its day and fostered endless speculation on whether it was an attempt at serious music or some kind of joke that Dylan was perpetrating. Greil Marcus famously began his review in Rolling Stone with the words “What is this shit?”  Now, Dylan has the last laugh.  He has the very same critic who trashed his album in 1970 doing a serious re-evaluation of the music in the liner notes to the current release. Apparently, Mr. Marcus now thinks this is important enough shit to listen to and write about again after 43 years.  

Given the benefit of over 4 decades of hindsight, the original “Self Portrait” album is not nearly as bad as the critics made it out to be.  Granted, it is a hodgepodge, made up of covers of other peoples’ pop tunes, traditional tunes, some live tracks from Dylan’s 1969 Isle of Wight appearance with The Band, and a few throw-off originals. Dylan came back from his motorcycle wreck toying with the Nashville sound and affecting a country crooner voice that was off-putting for some people (not that Dylan’s usual voice is all that pretty.)  Some of the choices of covers were perplexing picks, like Dylan’s version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.” After his pre-accident masterpiece album “Blonde on Blonde,” which was also a double LP, the “Self Portrait” double album must have seemed like a bad joke at the time, an ugly foil to that greater earlier record.  But listening to “Self Portrait” nowadays, and putting it in the context of 41 albums spanning a long career, it’s really rather fun.  Even the Simon and Garfunkel cover is hilarious, with Dylan duetting with himself, parodying the original by singing both the Simon and the Garfunkel parts in a comic send-up of the Simon & Garfunkel style.  The live tracks with The Band are great, and some of the traditional tunes are reminiscent of Dylan’s first album, which consisted of all covers recorded before he started writing songs of his own.  “Copper Kettle” stands out, a traditional folk number that was part of ex-girlfriend Joan Baez’s repertoire going back to 1962. 

“Another Self Portrait” has been released as a 2-CD boxed set with a booklet, and also as a 4-CD boxed set with two hardcover books, one with the same content as the booklet in the regular release, and the second a book of photographs of Dylan from the 1969-1971 period.  The 2 CD’s of “Another Self Portrait” contain mostly stripped down versions without overdubs of a number of the previously released tracks, plus unreleased tracks, and also a few tracks that have been fancied up with extra overdubs.  The expanded, deluxe edition has a third disc which is the complete, historic Isle of Wight Concert from 1969.  This was Dylan’s first paid appearance after he came back from his motorcycle wreck.  He was living in Woodstock, NY, at the time, and it was widely rumored that he would appear at Woodstock (he didn’t.)  In fact, he left for the Isle of Wight the day that the famous Woodstock music festival started.  This is the historic concert he gave at the Isle of Wight with The Band.  Finally, Disc Four is the original remastered “Self Portrait” album, sounding better than ever, written off in its day as a colossal failure, but standing up better than ever in 2013.    

To be sure, Dylan wasn’t back on top again until the mid-1970’s with albums like “Blood on the Tracks” and “Desire.” But whether it was originally intended as a joke or a serious release (or just Dylan thumbing his nose at a world that still wanted him to be the Messiah), this revival of “Self Portrait” and Dylan’s controversial 1969-1971 period begs a re-evaluation of this music. 

Self-Destructing H.G. Wells Paperbacks from the 1960s

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

August 25, 2013 

Now that science fiction has achieved respectability, showing up regularly on the New York Times Best Seller List and filling half the screens at the megaplex, we forget that in the early days, all we fanboys had was H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Back then, in the 1890s, there was no category of fiction called “science fiction” yet. The works of Wells, Verne, and a smattering of others like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger stories, came to be known as “scientific romances.” The early novels of H.G. Wells (1866-1946) are without debate the most readable, timeless, and literate of all the science fiction that was published before the advent of science fiction specialty magazines in the 1920s. 

I came to these novels mostly via the old Airmont Classics paperbacks of the 1960s. In the mid-1960s, my mother was enamored of the idea of a required pre-college reading list.  She was that classic mid-20th-Century housewife who had gotten married and had babies right out of high school, lived to be a domestic engineer, self-effacing, supporting her husband and two boys in all their endeavors. She didn’t read much in those days, but she ardently believed in the value of reading. She regretted not being able to go to college herself, but she instilled in her children the notion that going to college was expected to be in their future, and that there were a lot of important books to read before they got there(later, in the 1980’s, Mom did start reading books, got divorced, went back to college, and lived an entire second life as a high school librarian and English teacher.) So, when Airmont Publishing Company offered cheap paperbacks through the mail of the 100 greatest classic novels, my mother subscribed to the series, and I lived the rest of my childhood in a home containing the shelves of books I was supposed to read before college. 

I never got through all the books, but I did have an uncanny sense for sniffing out the science fiction, and it turned out that Airmont had included plenty of that. The only thing was, the books were so cheaply made—with brittle glue, yellowing paper, and cheesy cover illustrations-—they tended to self-destruct upon first reading. You could only read an Airmont Classic once and then consign it to the trash, because all you were left with was a bunch of loose pages. I remember reading Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island and holding it together with a rubber band between reading sessions. 

I’m not sure what happened to Airmont, but they ceased to exist sometime back in the 1960s. All the books have prefaces copyrighted about 1964-1965. Our classics series was supposed to be a subscription with so many books arriving per month. But, before long, we just got a large box containing about 75 of the books all at once. I suspect Airmont went out of business and honored their outstanding subscriptions by simply cleaning out their warehouse. I still remember the day that big box of books arrived.  I was probably 7 or 8 years old, and I already loved reading. That day was like Christmas. I spent countless hours putting the books in alphabetical order, studying the cover blurbs and prefaces, and every now and then, delving into the books, often years before I could really comprehend the contents. I did a 6th grade book report on Dostoyevsky. I read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness years before I would ever accumulate the life experiences that could even halfway allow it to mean something to me. 

The Airmont Classics look today like a reading list from years gone by. I think they might have been created from the same reading list that formed the basis for the old Classics Illustrated comics. The Airmont Classics come from an era that still regarded Longfellow as an important poet (children used to memorize Evangeline), when kids still read Ivanhoe in junior high school, when Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper were the main purveyors of Americana in literature. Hardly anybody reads Longfellow, Sir Walter Scott, Irving, or Cooper anymore.  Because I am a curator of a collection of antique popular literature, I have a certain enthusiasm for those old classics.  However, the old reading list also comes from an era when the only history of the world was the history of Europe and North America. An era when Columbus was still a hero and it wasn’t yet politically incorrect to celebrate his holiday. An era when the only African-American accomplishment taught to schoolchildren was that George Washington Carver did a lot of things with peanuts. It was an era when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was considered subversively radical rather than almost Biblical.  I enjoy the quaint nostalgia of the old curriculum, but at the same time I try to be firmly rooted in what I believe to be our more enlightened modern times. 

Over the years, our Airmont collection diminished. The books were either read (in which case, they self-destructed), or they were lost. During one of Mom’s moves, several of them flew out the back of the pick-up truck onto the highway, never to be recovered. She finally gave me the pick of what was left, when she was culling discards from her library. I remembered the H.G. Wells novels fondly from my childhood, so I decided to feature them here on the blog. You’ll notice that Wells’ first novel, The Time Machine (1895) is missing from this blog page, even though Airmont had an edition of it.  That’s because I read it to the point of self-destruction. I’ve seen it in used bookstores since. I should probably replace it. 

Wells wrote “scientific romances” throughout his career, but the majority of the ones we remember are his earliest novels, starting with The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Popular wisdom often credits Wells with being the originator of many of the great science fiction ideas, such as time travel or alien invasions. I agree that Wells’ science fiction output is a fertile vein that was mined by many later writers.  But what interests me more these days is how Wells’ scientific romances fit in with themes that were already popular at the time he was writing. The Invisible Man (1897) is fundamentally a meditation on the same Victorian concepts of good vs. evil that interested Robert Louis Stevenson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Much of the pre-science fiction of Wells’ day concerns future war predictions in the run-up to the destruction of the European monarchies and the advent of World War I; that is more or less the sub-text of The War of the Worlds (1898), although Wells’ variation on the topic is brilliant and original. Wells expanded on his concept of “total war” in other books, notably The War in the Air (1908).  Another major concern of H.G. Wells, and many of the pre-science fiction writers of his era, was socio-economic extrapolation, often under the guise of utopian or dystopian fiction. Along these lines, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward had already been a big bestseller starting in 1888, with the book starting a political movement that lasted through the 1890’s. Wells returned again and again in his novels to utopian/dystopian scenarios. Such scenarios show up in The Time Machine, The First Men in the Moon (1901), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), The Food of the Gods (1904), A Modern Utopia (1905), Men Like Gods (1923), and other works. In fact, as his career went on, the science fiction more or less disappeared from Wells’ work and was replaced by thinly plotted stories that are mostly platforms for sociological discussion. Most of that was lost on me as a 10-year old devouring these books.  Having read them so young, it is fascinating to rediscover them 40 years later. 

An Edgar Rice Burroughs Gallery

By Dale Dalenberg

August 5, 2013 

 Note: You can click through the slideshow above.

Disney may not have succeeded in making Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter a household name, but few characters in popular literature are more universally known by name amongst even people who don’t read than Burroughs's creation: Tarzan. 

2012 was the 100th anniversary of both great Burroughs’ heroes, John Carter of Mars & Tarzan.  The US Postal Service celebrated by releasing a commemorative Edgar Rice Burroughs Forever Stamp, sporting a portrait of Burroughs in the background, behind his creation, Tarzan, dagger drawn, shirtless in a leopard skin loin-cloth. The Dalenberg Library couldn’t resist buying a First Day Cover, cancelled in. . .you guessed it . . . Tarzana, California, a town founded by Burroughs and named after Tarzan.  

The postage stamp and the John Carter movie are the two latest Burroughs’ tributes to come along, but there are sure to be more (once the sting fades on Disney’s $200 million dollar loss on John Carter .)  It seems that every new generation gets a shot at Tarzan, with major movie versions in recent memory released in 1981, 1984, and 1999, and now a new 3-D motion capture animated production out of Germany announced for later this year (no word on when or if it will play in the USA.)

Burroughs relied on the movie rights to his stories for his sometimes tenuous wealth.  Nobody ever got rich selling stories to the pulp magazines for less than a penny a word.  But before there were movies of Tarzan and John Carter, there were many illustrators who tried their hand at Burroughs.  Here is a sampling from the Dalenberg Library.  

James Allen St. John is best remembered for his illustrations in the early Burroughs editions.  He was a mentor to the greatest Burroughs artist, Frank Frazetta (represented below), and he is known occasionally as “the godfather of fantasy art.”  Tarzan with bow and arrow is the frontispiece to “Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar,” published in 1918 by A. C. McClurg & Co. (Chicago.)  

Ace Books reprinted a wide variety of Burroughs’ novels during the Burroughs revival of the 1960’s, many of them with covers by Frank Frazetta.  Long considered by many fans to be the quintessential Burroughs artist, it was a questionable decision when Disney purposely decided NOT to design the John Carter movie to look anything like Frazetta’s art work.  In an ironic twist, Burroughs threw some comedy into “Tarzan and the Lion Man,” when he had John Clayton, Lord Greystoke (the real Tarzan of the Apes) travel to Hollywood to try out for the part of himself in the latest Tarzan movie—only to have Greystoke get rejected by the casting director as “not the type.”  

Several of Frazetta’s most iconic images from Burroughs novels were the covers and frontispieces of the Doubleday editions of the Mars novels in the early 1970’s, which were in wide circulation as book club editions of the Science Fiction Book Club.   The spirit and composition of this cover for “A Princess of Mars” is not only an iconic fantasy art work, but it was undoubtedly an inspiration for the original Star Wars movie poster.  

The Ballantine paperback editions of the Mars novels have sported various covers over the years, but my favorites were the ones I grew up on with the cover paintings by Italian artist Gino D’Achille.  “The Chessmen of Mars” was the 5th of the 10 volumes in the Mars series.  The story introduced Jetan, or Martian Chess, and included an appendix that gave the rules, purportedly as reported to the narrator by John Carter himself.  Around the age of 15, I actually built a Martian Jetan board and chess set according to Burroughs’ specifications and played the game a few times with my childhood friend and fellow science fiction fan, Dennis Troyer.  Mars and all things Martian were clearly important to my formative years as a patron of “antique popular literature.”