Another Look At PKD Otaku with Walker Morrow

Thanks for being patient gentle readers. I have finished my semester and now have almost two months off before summer school starts. I have a backlog of posts that I'll be rolling out over the next week.

First off we have another guest post, this one by regular reader Walker Morrow who takes a look back at some of the great stuff posted in the PKD Otaku electronic fanzine. Take it away Walker:

With the recent excitement about the upcoming Exegesis' two-volume release, I thought now might be a good time to highlight some things from the PKD Otaku archives on PKD's exegesis project.

So, here are a couple of things that popped up throughout PKD Otaku's short-lived existence:

In issue 11, I thought the reprint of Robert Anton Wilson's "Memories of Phil", written after PKD's death, was rather interesting:

"Phil Dick and I had a long conversation one afternoon at Santa Rosa, and it was only a year later that I found out that he and I had exactly similar experiences at approximately the same time, which left both of us wondering if we'd been contacted by god, by the devil, by an extra-terrestrial from Sirius or by some evil parapsychologist working for either the CIA or the KGB, or if we had just gone temporarily crazy. Then I realized this whole long conversation was Phil's attempt to find out how crazy I was. If I was sane, there was a chance that he was sane too. But if I was crazy, that increased the probability that he was crazy. He apparently decided that I was sane enough that could trust that he was possibly sane took, so he started publishing some of his experiences, which now are in several books: Valis, The Divine Invasion, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Radio Free Albemuth and the Exegesis. My accounts of similar experiences are in Cosmic Trigger Vol. 1."

Again, this little snippet can be read in PKD Otaku's issue number 11.

Meanwhile, I thought that Benjamin Adams wrote an interesting account of his contact with PKD over the years. Adams' father, an Episcopal priest, seems to have been consulted by Phil during or just after his feverish exegesis days. I won't copy out Adams' piece, but you can read it in PKD Otakue issue number number 7, in the article "Nobly Wild, Not Mad: Memories of Phil Dick."

I'll be the first to admit that my knowledge of the fanzines is less than complete, so feel free to leave tips on other exegesis-related content from the fanzines in the comments. I'll do my best to follow up on them.

*Walker Morrow is a BC-based freelance writer and blogger, and obviously a PKD fan - although not a Dick scholar. He's enjoying the journey so far, though.

Thanks, Walker!