As someone who spends a lot of time writing I can often be found at my desk at home or at the library or in a corner of a coffeehouse typing away with my headphones on. Here’s a little secret: I’m almost never listening to anything. If I’m reviewing a film or working on my blog I might be reviewing random scenes here or there or spending a minute browsing videos on YouTube, but mostly I don’t listen to anything else while I’m writing. Most writers can’t listen to words being spoken or sung while attempting to conjure phrases of their own, and unless I’m on an instrumental jazz jag music without lyrics mostly isn’t my thing. Lately when I’m driving I’ve been listening to Wilco and Donovan, and MMA podcasts, and the Hillbilly Elegy audiobook. I couldn’t indulge any of those and also crank out an insightful movie review or even the text for one of my photo essays. It’s this particular clash of music and writing that made this Open Culture post about Philip K. Dick catch my ear…

What did Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Scanner Darkly author Philip K. Dick, that visionary of our not-too-distant dystopian future, listen to while he crafted his descriptions of grim, psychologically (and sometimes psychedelically) harrowing times ahead? Mozart. Beethoven. Mahler. Wagner.

Yes, while looking textually forward, he listened backward, soundtracking the constant workings of his imagination with classical music, as he had done since his teenage years. As Lejla Kucukalic writes in Philip K. Dick: Canonical Writer of the Digital Age:

After graduating from high school in 1947, Dick moved out of his mother’s house and continued working as a clerk at a Berkeley music store, Art Music. “Now,” wrote Dick, “my longtime love of music rose to the surface, and I began to study and grasp huge areas of the map of music; by fourteen I could recognize virtually any symphony or opera” (“Self-Portrait” 13). Classical music, from Beethoven to Wagner, not only stayed Dick’s lifelong passion, but also found its way into many of his works: Wagner’s Goterdammerung in A Maze of Death, Parsifal in Valis, and Mozart’s Magic Flute in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

At his Forteana Blog, author Andrew May credits Dick with, given his pop-cultural status, “a decidedly uncool knowledge of classical music.” He cites not just Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in the introduction to A Maze of Death, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis in Ubik, or the part of The Game-Players of Titan where “a teenaged kid forks out 125 dollars for a vintage recording of a Puccini aria,” but an entire early story which functions as “(in my opinion) a pure exercise in classical music criticism.” In 1953′s “The Preserving Machine,” as May retells it, an eccentric scientist, “worried that Western civilization is on the point of collapse, invents a machine to preserve musical works for future generations” by encoding it “in the form of living creatures. Unfortunately, as soon as the creatures are released into the environment, they start to adapt to it by evolving into different forms, and the music becomes distorted beyond recognition.”

Here’s an 11 hour playlist of Phil’s favorites for you to write your own visions by…

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Mitch Hedberg was one of my favorite contemporary comedians before his death from a heart attack in 2005. Hedberg had only just solidified a national reputation and looked to be on the verge of breakthrough stardom when news of his death hit the airwaves. Hedberg combined a stoner sensibility with the obtuse observations of Steven Wright and the old school one-liner formulas of elder statesmen like Henny Youngman. His performances were brilliant, but their power came first from Mitch’s writing. Here’s a great Modern Comedian episode featuring Mitch’s widow, comedian Lynn Shawcroft, talking about Mitch’s writing process…

Stay Awake!

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Film director Barbet Schroeder’s nearly four hours of interviews with the late poet Charles Bukowski have taken on an air of legend since their initial release on VHS in 1987. Various segments from the captured conversations have appeared on YouTube in the past, but this is the first time I’ve found the entire interview available as one streaming video, connected by the somber piano score that accompanied the original — the music was the sign-off tune for the German television station that aired the footage in 52 separate segments.

Schroeder shot the interviews over three years leading up to the filming of Bukowski’s autobiographical screenplay Barfly, which was also released in 1987. This version was culled from a reported 64 hours of footage, and it finds Schroeder and Bukowski talking about alcohol, violence, writing and women, and even includes a tour of Buk’s childhood home. Some of this footage ended up in the excellent documentary Born into This including the infamous scene of Bukowski kicking and chasing after his future wife Linda.

The Charles Bukowski Tapes has become a cult classic and it’s a real thrill to share these with you here:

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