Total Dick-Head Reaches Two Million Views!

Almost twenty years ago, when I started this blog, I couldn't possibly imagine all the ways it would change my life. The Dick-Head's early success, spurred on by mega aggregator boingboing.com, catapulted me into the world of Dick-dom. Within a year I was visiting Anne Dick in Point Reyes Station. A year after that I met Kleo Mini for lunch. Three years later, I attended my first Dick-Fest in Colorado. Five years later, I organized the 2012 Dick-Fest at SFSU. 

In the last ten years my dedication to the blog has wavered, but never completely, but the internet never rests and the blog continues to do a brisk business of disseminating Dickiana. 

Such brisk business, in fact, that very quietly sometime early Saturday morning, the Total Dick-Head blog hosted its two millionth visitor!

Blogger makes it difficult to get much granular detail on the site's traffic, and the info they do provide suggest many readers are likely bots, but, NEVERTHELESS, two million views is a testament to the never ending interest in Phil Dick's life and work. 

Of course, more recently, this blog connected me with a tech bro who changed my life, helping me to form the Point Reyes Reality Investigation Center. 

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: Next year I plan to release THE BEST OF THE TOTAL DICK-HEAD which will mine the blog's more than 600 posts to distill the best PKD article machine takedowns, interviews, rare photos, and reader's guides to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Galactic Pot-Healer, so stay tuned! 

The 2026 Dick-Fest is Coming!

If there is one overarching change to the community of Philip K Dick scholars and fans that I've witnessed in my quarter centruy of participation it's that we've all met and discovered we like hanging out. This is the reason for the increase in frequency of Dick-Fests, which have multiplied from once a decade, to once every three years, to their now biennial cadence. 

Case in point, Dick-Fest 2026 (they're trying to take the more mature road and call it PKD Fest, but we know what it is) is scheduled for August 20-23 in Orange County!

Here's what you need to know: 

It's free. 

Now, having said that, there is a registration option that allows you to donate just $20 and walk away with a grab bag of PKD-related goodies. There is also a festival t-shirt you can buy. 

But basically, rank consumerism aside, you can show up at this Fest and listen to some talks about PKD, witness some of PKD's old friends and acquaintances (like Gregg Rickman and Bill Sarill!) wax nostalgic, take in the first ever Pink Beam awards wherein we stroke our many Dick-related achievements (Oh, grow up!). There's even a table reading of a Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch script (which of course you never really leave). 

Not only is the Point Reyes Reality Investigation Center a full-on sponsor of the Fest, but I'll be there talking about Phil's life in Point Reyes Station as well as selling PRRIC merch, including a special collection of t-shirts, more on this soon. 

You can thank David Agranoff, host of the DickHeads Podcast on YouTube, for his tireless efforts to assemble a ragtag cadre of authors and weirdos to talk Dick for a couple of days. 

Check out the Fest website here, replete with schedules, mailing list sign-ups, and more! 

But wait, there's more! 

On August 26 the Point Reyes Reality Investigation Center will be hosting a post-Fest-adjacent dinner in Point Reyes Station with special guest Bill Sarill, who not only surfed Dick's couch, but, according to a note of at the beginning of Dick's 1970 novel A Maze of Death, helped brainstorm the novel's theological dimensions during late night sessions "to develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that God exists."

RSVP for the dinner here. ($25 donation suggested, but no one turned away for lack of funds).

Prepare for the Global Time-Slip

I'm a little late to the rodeo, in part because I've go so many plates spinning currently, but Dick-Head Podcaster David Agranoff has organized a very special all-day online PKD symposium for this Sunday, April 26th. Specifically, serious Dick-Head scholars and fans including Erik Davis, Christopher Palmer, Andrew Butler, Umberto Rossi, Anthony Peake, William Sarill, and Ted Hand. Joining us will be several best-selling authors including Ray Nayler, Lavie Tidhar, Brian Evenson, and Ken Liu. 

The whole thing is a fundraiser for the Dick-Fest in Southern California at the end of August. 

Not get this: tickets are like $12 with Eventbrite fees -- imagine seeing all this PKD content for less than $15!

Find more info, and buy your tickets here. 

PKD-Fest 2026 -- Get Your Ass to Orange County!

It's time once again for yet another Dick-Fest! Has it been two years since the last one already? Well, no, but it will be. This summer Dick-Head podcast host and overachiever David Agranoff is taking the reins and looking to bring the Dick-Fest to a wider audience with more events! Paul Shelton, who I met at the last Dick-Fest and who has since become a good friend and colleague, has put together a video, replete with some of the "PKD at Disneyland with Norman Spinrad" footage people have been searching for for years!

More info at the Festival website: https://www.philipkdickfestival.com/

Including a call for papers.

Looking forward to seeing you all there! 

Confessions of a Crap Artist Reading Resources Part 1-- St. Isidore of Seville

We're just a week away from my community read of Confessions of a Crap Artist in Point Reyes Station. To say I'm excited would be an understatement. 

So, to get my wiggles out (as my mom used to call it), I thought I'd provide some resources for readers of the novel, whether they be Point Reyes Stationians or internet bound. 

First off, readers may have noticed that some of the novel's geography doesn't quite work.

Chapter two begins: "Seville, California has a good public library. But the best thing about living in Seville is that in only a twenty-minute drive you're over into Santa Cruz where the beach is and the amusement park is. And it's four lanes all the way."

Google's driving directions don't lie (except when they do): Seville California is just a bit more than three hours from Santa Cruz. 

So what's Dick up to here? 

Anne Dick recalls in her memoir: 

“One afternoon not long after the discussion about Phil's career, we were lying on the bed in the study, our arms around each other. We had just made love and I was feeling happy and relaxed. Phil started laughing and laughing. He said, "I have a great idea for a novel. It's about this guy, Jack Isidore. I'm naming him after an early encyclopedist, Isidore of Seville, who collected weird bits of knowledge. The novel will be in the first person. The opening line Jack Isidore says is, 'Let me tell you about myself. The first thing is: I'm a pathological liar." (In the published version it is, "I am made out of water.") And Phil laughed and laughed some more. For some unknown reason I felt a little chill of unease, but nevertheless I smiled encouragingly. Phil began working on this novel, Confessions of a Crap Artist, during the honeymoon period of our relationship.”

So, the name Isidore, when combined with the location of Seville, becomes a reference to St Isidore of Seville, who Wikipedia tells us,

“At a time of disintegration of classical culture, aristocratic violence and widespread illiteracy, Isidore was involved in the conversion of the Arian Visigothic kings to Catholicism, both assisting his brother Leander of Seville and continuing after his brother’s death. He was influential in the inner circle of Sisebut, Visigothic king of Hispania. Like Leander, he played a prominent role in the Councils of Toledo and Seville.

His fame after his death was based on his Etymologiae, an etymological encyclopedia that assembled extracts of many books from classical antiquity that would have otherwise been lost. This work also helped standardize the use of the period (full stop), comma, and colon.”

Next, you gotta see the French adaptation of the film, "Confessions d'un Barjo" (available for free on YouTube):

I'll discuss the film version in my next post. 

Confessions of a Crap Artist Community Read in Point Reyes Station

I never met Philip K. Dick. He died when I was ten. Over the course of the quarter century I've been studying his life and work, there have only been a few times I've felt him spinning in his grave. Mostly when I was hanging out with his ex-wives. But there have also been a handful of times when I sensed his excitement from the cold storage of half-life: hanging out at various Dick-fests, footnoting The Exegesis for publication, discussing his life and work at Harvard University. 

But I think Phil is really excited about this: on January 17th, I'll be leading a community discussion of his literary novel Confessions of a Crap Artist in Point Reyes Station, where the novel is set, and where Dick lived, off and on, between 1959-1964. 

For those of you living under a rock, I have spent the last nine months as the "Chief Troublemaker" at the Point Reyes Reality Investigation Center, or PRRIC!

As part of my PRRIC-ular duties, I have been getting to know the locals in the tiny town of just under 850 people. I spend a couple days a week inhabiting Dick's slow-paced pastorale landscape: walking by Cheda's Garage, shopping at The Palace Market, and working in my office above The Old Western Saloon. The experience has enriched my reading of Confessions of a Crap Artist, which is about Dick's time in Point Reyes Station, as well as his marriage to Anne, who I knew pretty well. 

So for an expert, which Henry Kissinger famously said is someone who knows more and more about less and less, it doesn't get much better than this. I will post some study materials for those of you interested in reading the novel along with us. Until then, enjoy these pictures of locations from the novel courtesy of Henri Wintz and The Philip K. Dick Bookshelf. 

If you're in the Bay Area, GET YOUR ASS TO POINT REYES, on January 17th. 

Phil's 97th Birthday in New Orleans

I've just returned from the future, and it's New Orleans, people. A whirlwind week in The Big Easy with

incredible music (I reconnected with a saxophonist I played in a band with 30 years ago), interesting sights (for instance an outlet mall's foodcourt on the Mighty Mississipp), all culminating with an absolutely incredible art show titled Reflex Machines at local gallery Chemical 14, curated by Dick-Head artist extraordinaire Brent Houzenga! 

Just look at this picture of Brent and me with Phil's birthday cake, burning with the fire of a thousand suns and 97 candles. Now there are a couple of guys happy to be Dicking it up. 

Below are some photos from the gallery. The exhibit will be up until early January, so if you're in the area, do not miss this. Highlights included, stylized wardrobe inspired by Blade Runner's Pris, the "Dissbot" which takes a picture of you before hurling an insult your way, the ridable Isomorph bug which growled and gurgled malevolently as people clung to its bucking thorax, PRRIC's own Reverse Psychic, an exploded and neon-gutted wall-mounted dolphin, and so much more... Oh and I gave a thought-provoking lecture replete with PowerPoint slides.