Special "K."

Another day, another trip to Wikipedia. I never knew this about Philip K. Dick!

"Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin--perhaps his only peer in terms of academic and literary reputation among late 20th-century science fiction authors--were members of the same high school graduating class (Berkeley (Ca.) High School, 1947), yet did not know one another. Le Guin (then Ursula Kroeber) had been accelerated a grade, while Dick missed much of his senior year with the agoraphobia that would plague him as an adult. Le Guin later became one of Dick's great champions (calling him "our own home-grown Borges") and wrote The Lathe of Heaven as a conscious Dick homage; the two maintained a friendship and correspondence until Dick's death."

They also have . . . the same middle initial.

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I was doing some PKD surfing after seeing Richard Linklater's excellent film of A Scanner Darkly.

Random notes:
1. ASD > The Matrix.
2. Reread Lawrence Sutin's PKD bio!
3. PKD's interesting middle name: Kindred.
4. SF writer Octavia E. Butler wrote a book entitled Kindred.
5. Essential supplementary reading (per my old comrade James Stubenrauch): Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Scanner came out just one year after Bicameral; both take the brain's hemispheric makeup into fascinating speculative dimensions. Jaynes is an audacious thinker and elegant writer, and this book has haunted me over the years.

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And in the Dizzies gossip pages:

"[Christie] Brinkley was previously married to Frenchman Jean-Francois Allaux, singer Billy Joel and developer Richard Taubman."
—Associated Press

I like how "Frenchman" is an occupation . . .