New Issue of PKD Otaku (#45) Out Now!

The pre-eminent PKD Zine, PKD Otaku hit the tubes of the internet earlier today. Lots of great stuff. Particularly relevant (but not super fun to read) are the letters between PKD and Joanna Russ at the height of their beef over Phil's pro-life short story "The Pre-Persons. Read the new issue here. Find old issues here. 

PKD Otaku #28 Tribute to Paul Williams Available Now!

 Yes, dear readers, you read that right. There is a new issue of PKD Otaku, the best Dick zine out there. And it just keeps getting better. The latest issue is dedicated -- with admiration and respect -- to Paul Williams who probably did more for PKD than anyone. And a truly good, human soul, who is missed. Download issue 28 here.

PKD Otaku 27 Out Now!

Yet another issue of PKT Otaku has emerged, fully formed, from the forehead of Patrick Clark and his band of renegade Dick fans. Inside you'll find some interesting stuff on Dick's ancestry, international academic research centered on PKD, a review of The Man Who Japed, and a look at Dick's weaponry from Lord Running Clam. Download the .pdf here, and enjoy the best semi-regular Dick content around.

PKD Otauku #26 Out Now!

Editor Patrick Clark has done it again. With the amazing graphics work of Nick Buchanan, PKD Otaku issue #26 looks more professional than ever. There's also a pretty interesting piece on The Exegesis (remember that?), Laura Entwistle's memories of the PKD Fest. My favorite thing in the issue, however, is the yearbook picture of PKD first-wife, Jeannette Marlin, uber-fan Frank Hollander tracked down when he was in Berkeley for the Festival. Download a copy and enjoy...

PKD Otaku #25 Now Out

Can you believe Patrick Clark and his band of merry pranksters have produced 25 issues of the best PKD periodical on the net? I know, it's unbelievable, but they've done it again. This time they even included an interview with me about the PKD Fest in addition to all the PKD goodies and insight. An interview with Anthony Peake? Wow, Nice work. Frank Bertrand has a nice interview with a British SF editor, and I love Andre's letter to the editor. One measure of Dick's greatness is his ability to inspire other smart people to do great related work, and PKD Otaku is all the evidence you need.

Download the pdf here. And check out all the back issues here.

New PKD Otaku #23 Now Available!

I feel as if, as I approach the summit of a cold and treacherous mountain, still a ways from the top, that I have seen a well outfitted group of experienced mountaineers headed towards me, having already made a successful climb. I can see the satisfaction in their eyes, and know that they are headed towards a warm bed and a good meal. And me, with so much mountain still to climb.

I feel this way because the good people over at PKD Otaku have delivered a massive dose of PKD, sixty odd pages of it. All of it, witty and urbane and smartly assembled. There are a few reviews of The Exegesis, easily the most thoughtful ones we've seen thus far. Lord Running Clam has indexed Dick's 1974 volume of letters, and the crew over there is taking names and kicking serious ass. It's a smorgasbord of Dickiana. We are indebted to the crew over there: Patrick Clark, Lord Running Clam, Frank Bertrand, Jami Morgan, and Nich Buchanan.

Their efforts give me great relief, as I have sort of dropped the ball. I mean I spent my winter break working on fiction and reading The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe, for the cosmic christ's sake!

Download your giant .pdf here.

Otaku #22 and Umberto's Book

Once again, I'm left with insufficient time to do more than blast you with some links and quick thoughts, as I finish up summer school. Luckily you can enjoy reading through the latest issue of PKD Otaku #22 out this week which includes much to be savored (download .pdf file here). I've only skimmed it a bit but was impressed by Frank C Bertrand's column on "The Magic Flute" allusion in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which I found quite interesting as I've thought about the relevance, but don't really know enough about the opera to make any connections. Frank does some heavy lifting for us yet again.

There's also a great interview with Tessa Dick, and others with Scott Apel and Jami Morgan (whose book I very much hope to have time to read someday)... Near the end John Fairchild says this of Christopher Palmer's "Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern":

"I started to read Chapter 1, “Philip K. Dick and the Postmodern” and just couldn’t finish it. He makes statements like “Today we live in the epoch of the postmodern, and are subject to the condition of postmodernity.” Really? I don’t think we’d get much agreement on that one. At least in the circles in which I travel."

I know and like John very much. I also think we are living in the 'epoch of the postmodern.' Postmodernism is to blame for this communication breakdown insofar as it has never really developed an efficient way to define itself. Let's use, as a starting point, a sentence provided by the Keeblers over at wikipedia:

"Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical direction which is critical of the foundational assumptions and structures of philosophy."

Much of Dick's work is a critique of rationalist philosophy grounded in the trite neatness of Descarte's Cogito Ergo Sum. For Dick, Descartes is like Deckard, futilely searching out differences without distinction, an operation that, because of the complexity of the problem and the subjective bias of the observer, is irresolvable. We are at the epoch of postmodernism because much of our reality has become a subjective bubble - that is to say a Fox News viewer is, to some extent, existing in another parallel reality to a listener of NPR. Advertisers warp reality to try to get you to buy stuff, and now they want to do it without you noticing. Because of this we can't really know if they've already gotten to us, so we are at the epoch of postmodernism, it's just up to us postmodernists to explain why better.

Which brings us to this pretty good read on Dick's Posthumanism (but, I hope the author, Alex Lyras, knows that had he called Dick a posthumanist to his face, PKD would have given him a fat lip). I actually think Dick's focus was on the importance of retaining our human-ness in a world of artificiality. Regardless, it's a good read. Lyras writes:

"In the world of Blade Runner, replicants and humans suffer from the same existential crisis. Both seek answers to same elemental questions. Where do I come from? Where am I going? How much time do I have left? Mid-century language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would answer that our ability to formulate questions like these doesn't necessarily mean intelligible answers exist. Language isn't a tool for unearthing deeper meaning. It's a tool for connecting on the surface. That we endeavor to ask the big questions is far more useful than endlessly confabulating over some metaphysical conundrum. If we're able to find meaning or get relief from an insightful exchange with another being, does it matter if their insides are circuitry?"

Which reminds me, I heard this radio show on NPR which analyzed classical music in great detail. I think it was hosted by Susanne Vega. Now I can't find anything about it. I hope readers can help me identify this show, because there was a half hour on a piece by Beethoven that made it sound like Ludwig was innovating in much the same way as Dick: using unexpected dynamic and key changes, playing in odd registers. So this may be an additional foothold to be further explored, if we can figure out what the show is called and where it's archived on the net.

I got Umberto's book. 10 pages in I can say it's both insightful and readable - two circles who have yet to touch on the "Academic Books About PKD" Venn diagram. I look forward to reading more and reporting back to you, but I can already tell you that the book's premise seems to center on the ontological uncertainty in Dick's work which is a product of Dick's slipping back and forth between subjective and objective value systems. In fact, Umberto, in his intro, quotes this, our recent quote of the day. Citing this key interplay between empirical systems and individual experience as the basis for the ontological instability in Dick's fiction (I'm sure Umberto will correct me if I'm reading it wrong).

The book is a bit pricey. You may want to urge your local library to get it, or you can get a kindle version, but I think you're gonna wanna read it.

The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick: A Reading of Twenty Ontologically Uncertain Novels
by Umberto Rossi

From All Over the Internetz...

Pictured: Matt Damon, in what appears to be a non-dodgy chair, in The Adjustment Bureau...

Here I am again, with just enough time for a quick stroll through the weird world of Dickian effluvia. The Philip K Dick Article Machine can be heard chug-chugging to life amid the dying wreckage of print journalism as the world prepares for yet another PKD adaptation to hit the screen this Friday - which is no good for me because I've got a thing that night. Saturday too. Maybe I could do a midnight show on Friday, but so far it's not looking like it's gonna be a whole lotta theaters. Maybe a Sunday matinee? Any Bay Area Dick-heads up for something like this?

As promised is a quick tour of the PKD article machine's latest sputterings:

My least favorite (that's the polite way of saying it's the worst right?) of the pile was this Washington Post article written by the mysterious Beale... This article's greatest sin is that it's just long enough to include all of the information previously written about Philip K Dick in similar articles. Paranoid? Check. Drug-addled? Check. Bad writer? Check. I have to admit that's the one that gets me. Isn't it kind of like talking about a terrific painter is no good with paints? Cuz that's one of those self-negating statements Horselover liked so much...

1) God does not exist
2) And anyhow he's stupid.

On the plus side, this article has got quotes from a wide variety of sources. I'm not sure if I think more or less of them for not consulting me...

The most annoying thing is that they don't mention Radio Free Albemuth while listing all the upcoming PKD adaptations. Write a little something (keep it respectable) in the comments section, let's see if we can get them to take notice...

I guess that's the only PKD machine article, now that I think about it...

There's this temporal lobe epilepsy article that mentions PKD (hat-tip to Frank Bertrand)

A reader emails: "if you want to see the Philip K. Dick robot in action, this week's ep of Nova ScienceNOW called "What's the next big thing?" has a segment on it. I don't pretend to understand PBS scheduling, but in my neck of the woods (Vancouver), it's on again on Friday and on Sunday." er, uh, sorry, that might be last week, but nothing digital ever really dies so if you find it, point us to it in the comments section please.

PKD Otaku number 21 (!) is now available here. Of course it's chock full of the good PKD-stuff!

PKD Otaku Moves, Continues to Rock

One of the coolest people I met at the PKD Fest was Patrick Clark, one of the founders of PKD Otaku, a fanzine producing meaty PKD content on a semi-regular basis. It's definitely a cool resource. Patrick emailed me yesterday to say the site has moved. You can now download their latest issue #20, or any issue in their back catalog for that matter, here: http://pkdotaku.gezeitenreiter.de/

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!

PKD-Otaku #19 Now Available

Uber Dick-heads Marc Oberst and Patrick Clark have just released yet another issue of their PKD fanzine 'PKD Otaku.' This time it's number 19 and it's chock full of goodies. From Oberst recounting and categorizing his previous loves as either dark haired girls or androids, to Hazel Pierce's essay on The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (which Laura at one point sent to me but that I flaked on posting - oops), to a look at Lord RC's Pink Beam, to Gerard Acosta's list of PKD zines, to Oberst's review of the incredibly Dickian film Cypher, this zine is packed with tons of cool stuff and well worth the download and the read.

The last few pages are old reviews of A Scanner Darkly and VALIS.

I love serious PKD fans. They are tireless in their devotion to the author, and, like me, clearly get a huge charge out of exploring these strange realities PKD churned up in his wake.

Download the PDF file here.