All I Wanted For Christmas Were Links, Links, Links!

I've been away; now I'm back. Before we look back on the year that was, let's stroll through the internets for a moment to see what people are saying about the world of Dickiana.

I know a lot of you have had weird Phil Dick-style, pink-beam-esque mystical experiences of your own. I know this because you write me emails about them. Well, now we all have a place to share our inexplicable Dickian synchronicities: a new blog called The House of Ubiquity dedicated to "Mystical and Mysterious Encounters in the World of Philip K. Dick." Someone has already posted a super interesting entry about a dream involving the drugstore in Ubik. That site's not going to work without your input, so get on there and start talking about how weird you are.

That was the one really cool thing I had to blog about. Sigh.

Did you see that Adjustment Team was one of the best SF movies of 2011 according to ScienceFiction.com? Go here and you can learn that and other fascinating things. For my money Moon was the best SF movie 2011. You're probably saying to yourself, 'but that movie came out a long time ago!" But it, in my opinion, so far outshines any of the entries in this year's list (*admittedly I haven't seen a whole lot of these), that it deserves to win every year until something better comes out.

I found this weird site where people ask and answer questions, and they have some weird questions, like this one:

I have just finished reading VALIS, and I remain puzzled by something. It seems to be made clear that Horselover Fat is, in essence, an alter ego of Philip Dick - a separate personality of someone experiencing multiple personality problems, or just a literary device to cover talking to himself. Anyhow, Horse clearly does not have an existence of his own.

Admittedly, it's not exactly a question, and if it were, it wouldn't be a good one, but answer is pretty insightful. Read it here.

Reader Mr Hand turned me on to this crazy blog where PKD gets compared to Ken Wilbur, who I looked up, and is not really anything like PKD, except they both had esoteric ideas. And the blog entry is really weird because it's super reverential about Wilbur and kinda snarky about PKD, but the whole thing is set on a background composed of Dick's book covers. Sample sentence:

"Philip K. Dick, on the other hand, was a sprawling disaster of a man, who wrote bizarre science fiction stories."

Never gets old, does it guys?

Anyhoo, there's this piece about Lethem and Vonnegut and Dick's Exegesis... Sample sentence:

It's a shame then that the book is more or less a flood of babble. Dick's religious experience—some have called it an undiagnosed stroke—may have filled his head with concepts, but it surely didn't bless him with coherence.

Oy.

Ever wonder about Portuguese States of America from Radio Free Albemuth? Well it's not without historical precedent, at least in the world of weird, esoteric maps, as Big Think explains:

In one of those parallel universes, there exists a country called the Portuguese States of Africa, spanning southern Africa from its Atlantic coast all the way to the Indian Ocean. This country, a transcontinental Lusophone giant perhaps one day to rival Brazil, is based on more evidence in this world than PKD’s possibly merely psychotic visions. It was envisaged in this Mapa Cor-de-rosa (the ‘Pink Map’).

"The Pink Map," huh? Read more here.

Tessa Dick sold an autographed copy of Flash Gordon from Art Spiegleman. It went for what I consider to be a pretty good price.

SFF Audio is contending (with a fair amount of corroborating evidence) that PKD's short story "Upon the Dull Earth" is now in public domain.

That's it for now. Stop reading! Get some fresh air. Maybe tell your loved ones that you appreciate them.

Another Weekly Amalgamation of PKD Reading (This week with Listening!)

We have yet to hear even the rickety ignition sequence of Philip K Dick Article Machine, but I imagine it's coming out of mothballs this weekend with the release of The Exegesis last Tuesday. There are two reviews of the book at Amazon already, both of which are positive. Slate published a nice excerpt here. It's from earlier on in the text and is part of a letter.

Our own Mr Hand has already received his copy and is digging in over at his Philip K Dick and Religion blog.

Jonathan Lethem is out on tour in support of his pair of books released last week. Here's the New York Time's review of his collection of essays The Ecstasy of Influence. And here's Lethem on video talking about the Exegesis on video.

And here's a cool entry on PKD written by fellow Exegesis Annotator Gabriel Mckee over at freq.uenci.es... "a collaborative genealogy of spirituality."

Doug Mackey contacted me by email to say he's written up and posted a review of Ganymede Takeover on his book review blog Orbis Biblios.

Here's a blogger digging into some of the later stuff in the Exegesis, a very interesting set of themes about a dead king and a usurper that ties in Hamlet and the end of Flow My Tears.

I read here that they printed 100,000 copies of The Exegesis, whoa.

Annotator and Afterword author of The Exegesis, Rich Doyle posted his talk, Stairway to Eleusis, about PKD here.

The Science Channel is premiering a new series, Prophets of Science of Fiction, and one of the upcoming episodes is about Philip K Dick, and it looks, from the screengrab they are providing as a publicity still that Philip K Dick will be played by a re-purposed, animatronic Abraham Lincoln, with a cheap, fake beard. Don't believe me?:

The Dick episode is this Wednesday, November 16, 2011.

Reader and blogger MDK is raising money via Kickstarter for a memoir. Check that out here.

Speaking of PKD coinkydinks (MDK has had a few) check out this blog entry I stumbled on about Dick's apartment in Wash - 35.

That ought to keep you busy for a couple of days. If you've got your copy (or even if you don't), head to the comments section to talk about it.

The World Sucks, and My Lack of Posting Isn't Helping

I'm finding it increasingly difficult to find the time to post here. Now I've got a second band, a side-project that I'm involved with, and I've been slaving away late at night working on this story, which if all goes according to plan, should get submitted tomorrow. At that point my attention will turn towards the Philip K Dick Conference planned for next year. Time to get going selling t-shirts, raising funds, maybe even getting a Kickstarter project going. Our list of notable attendees includes: Jonathan Lethem, John Simon (director Radio Free Albemuth), Tommy Pallotta (producer A Scanner Darkly), Erik Davis, Ted Hand, and me. That list is sure to grow as I begin the process of tracking folks down in earnest.

The amazing thing is, while I've been away from this blog, the world has gone full Black Iron Prison:

First, Pat Robertson fails to have even the heart of the robot taxi cab at the end of Now Wait For Last Year, as he recently suggested a husband could leave his wife suffering from Alzheimer's, Nice work, Mr Robertson:

“I know it sounds cruel, but if he’s going to do something, he should divorce her and start all over again, but make sure she has custodial care and somebody looking after her,” Robertson said.

To quote another famous android, "That's the spirit."

But a quote in this article about Amazon seemed to sum up best the way our world now resembles the apathetic futures in PKD's books:

"People who run companies like Amazon operate as though it never occurred to them that it could have been them crawling through the aisles. And the people who run labor unions possess little empathy for how difficult and risky and remarkable it is to build something like Amazon."

And it's starting to really bum me out.

If you've been pining for more Phil Dick content, cursing my name and blog for my seeming indifference, you need to head over to Mr Hand's PKD and Religion blog where our friend has been a very busy little Phil Dick scholar and has all kinds of good posts. Talks are underway to bring Mr Hand's content to us directly here at TDH. So don't give up on us yet.

Semi-Weekly Amalgamation of PKD Links

It's been too long, dear readers. This blog has been at the back of my mind, while I've been busy with the first weeks of the Fall semester, getting the band's album done, and working on my own fiction. I dare say, I was feeling a little burned out on PKD, friends! That is, until this morning when I picked up Rickman's To The High Castle, a biography of PKD I haven't read in awhile, and I was struck by all the great info in there. It's a much rawer bio than Sutin's, and it leaves you with a distinct impression of PKD that somehow the Sutin bio flattens a bit. Like any totalizing lens, the stuff about molestation gets old, but again, the interviews, particularly with Vince Lusby, impart a fuller sense of PKD. We really must do something to recognize all of Rickman's many contributions - hopefully at the PKD Conference next year.

So, without further ado (if, in fact, that is ado above which I have already written) let's get to the link round up. Radio Free Albemuth continues to be the big PKD subject the Internetz are tubing about these days, as the film continues to blow minds at festival showings here and abroad.

The Australian Arts Portal tosses another shrimp on the barbie, writing, "What finally distinguishes Radio Free Albemuth from all previous adaptations is that this film has soul, and I am pretty sure that Philip K. Dick would agree. You don’t have to be a fan of Philip K. Dick or science fiction to enjoy this film. Radio Free Albemuth should be mandatory viewing for anyone who is interested in vital, independent cinema. If you get the chance to see it, don’t miss it."

Former Los Angeles Weekly film critic Michael Dare writes: "The lack of chase scenes and pumped-up CGI lunacy is actually one of the charms of the film. It's low budget because this is all it takes to tell the story, which is intellectual, political, musical, and scientific, in fact, everything good science fiction should be. The fact the SyFy channel has degenerated into one cheesy monster flick after another, as though nothing has changed in the science fiction world since Creature from the Black Lagoon, instead of featuring films like this that stretch the human imagination, is just appalling. No wonder they changed their name. They're to science fiction what Sunny Delight is to Orange Juice."

The other big news is RFA won the Best Feature Film at the Renovation Film Fest, following the Hugos a few weeks ago. I talked a big game about going, but, of course, wussed out at the last minute, opting instead to stay home and slave over a short story. Regular reader Mr Hand went, however, and wrote up some short impressions of the film - all of which I agree with.

With all this hoopla we should be seeing RFA in wider circulation soon.

You may have noticed the old Palm Tree Garden website has left the internet realm. While this is a loss, one of the principals has started PKDTV.net - which makes this blog look like a clunky old webpage from the 1990s with all its fancy links and so forth.

There's also this really cool PKD aggregator site. Sorry to keep you in the stone age over here on the Dick-Head folks.

Archives of the old PhilipKDickFans.com site are now available for perusal. Just one glance and it will become clear how much we lost (or almost lost). There's a treasure trove of old stuff waiting to be rediscovered there.

Also, Norman Spinrad has made his essay "The Transmogrification of Philip K Dick" available at scribd.com.

Like I said, I've been hard at work on my band's new album, which you can check out online here.

Just a bit of fair warning. I am still working on the same short story, preparing it for submission (while I have tried to mimic many of PKD's writing strategies, I cannot match his pace), so posting will be a bit light here until I send the story off.

Weekly News Roundup

Here I am with a bit of a Sunday respite and plenty of recent Dick news to recount.

There was a minor media blitz by Isa Dick-Hackett last week, talking about PKD adaptations at both io9.com and then later in an article in The Wall Street Journal. The interviews were both done to promote Adjustment Bureau which went to DVD recently. Gondry is still set to direct Ubik which is being scripted as we speak. I have high hopes for this one.

Radio Free Albemuth was screened at the Science Fiction Hall of Fame on Friday. In a surprise bit of promotion there was a pretty good article on msnbc.com's Cosmiclog about the movie. I liked this line: "The movie seems certain to win over the sci-fi master's hard-core fans, who call themselves 'Dick-heads.'" I like this because I was careful, when I started this blog, to hyphenate Dick-head to see if I could affect the way the term is written. Before the blog (and with Deadhead) Dickhead was not, traditionally, hyphenated. In other words, kneel before the semantic power of Zod! My ripple is a mighty hyphen!

The future of Philipkdickfans.com is in doubt as the site has become a prime target of spam bots and requires extensive upkeep and monitoring. If you're interested in changing the name of the site and transferring it to another server let me know in the comments section. It's a good site, with, I think, more traffic than I get, and just needs a dedicated webmaster.

I skyped in a short talk to the fourth annual PKD Day at Nottingham Trent University. It was a very Dickian experience for me as it was 7:30 in the morning and I found myself connected to a small classroom full of Dick-heads. I had no idea how well they could see or hear me; indeed, I had very little connection to the room, and yet I had to speak off the cuff about PKD for about a half an hour. I felt like I was communicating from space. I should have recorded it.

Umberto Rossi's new book of PKD criticism is now available on Amazon:

Buy it from here so I can get a cut. I'm gonna need it to buy my own copy.

Orthogonal Weekly Round Up

Too big to be just a weekly wrap-up, what you are about to encounter is an orthogonal week's worth of Internet PKD stuffery.

First off, check out the pic above. My guess is that that's the cover for the first volume of Exegesis excerpts due out November 11, 2011. I can't say a whole lot right now on this subject, but I am involved with this, actively working on it this week, and it's going to be really cool. You can pre-order the book already on Amazon.

Second, well this sounds like self-promotion, but I did an interview for a zine called Reglar Wiglar (turbo attaboy to anyone who can identify the reference of the zine's title) with an old friend and solid Dick-head, Nick Sondy, about being a scholarly Dick-head and the blog and stuff, a weird experience since it was an actual phone interview (with a guy I've shot the shit with for two decades) and then they transcribed the whole thing. Weird to see what you sound like just talking, which apparently is how Frederic Jameson composes his essays. But I got some good lines in, including this one:

"It’s like [Dick]’s given us a guidebook on how to operate in this century and how to stay sane and how to stay centered and how to stay positive, even though those aren’t characteristics that are used to describe his work or him."

I think it's a pretty good interview. I know Nick really well and we can talk about stuff like this for hours so I was comfortable. We mostly talk about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner. Read the whole thing here.

Speaking of interviews, here's yet another with director John Simon talking about Radio Free Albemuth. I know he needs to keep the movie's name out there. I also know that the economy has taken its toll on the indie film biz. Instead of asking when we'll get a chance to see this in theaters, you must first like the film on facebook, and tell all of your friends to do the same. We need to help make this happen. Ask not what Radio Free Albemuth can do for you, and so forth.

Tessa Dick has published a memoir, now available on Amazon. If enough of you order it through this blog I may earn enough Amazon credit to get a copy for myself.

Regular reader Jacen Kemp has a new blog, The Clockworm, devoted to Psychological SF Esoterica. I'm especially taken with this post about PKD.

Last but not least, I'm re-reading Ubik in the short break between grading and summer school and hope we can have some discussion about it in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

Weekly News Roundup

Lacking sufficient time these days to properly post about each of the exciting new Dickian developments, I have reluctantly promised myself that I will at least update the blog once a week. In these posts I will try to serve up all the news that's fit to print, and hopefully sometime in the near future I can write up some longer posts on some of the stuff I've been thinking about.

For now a little of the pressure is off because dedicated Dick-head Cal Godot has taken over philipkdickfans.com from Jason Koornick. The site was languishing, besieged by malware, spammers, and Can-D. Cal has moved the site to new servers, forever banishing the Black Glimmung's malware to the frozen seas of our rapidly degrading memories. So cruise over, register a username and let's get the chat boards going over there. philipkdickfans.com was always a really good resource, one that'll be nice to get back. As you can see when you click over there, Cal is still moving in, but there is a really good interview with PKD from the Harvard Advocate [er, make that the Hartford Advocate] in 1981.

Check out this exchange:

In an interview in 1976, you indicated that VALIS had already been sold to Bantam Books. Yet it didn't appear until early this year. What caused the delay?

"Bantam held it up for awhile because they had a change in editorship. The version that has been published was written in 1978. I guess they had a backlog; they didn't print it right away. But the real origin of the delay was the fact that I did, for the first time in my life, two completely different versions of the same book. The first version appears in the second as the movie they go see. I wasn't satisfied with the first version. I wanted to do a book that was better than my previous novel, A Scanner Darkly, and even after Bantam had purchased VALIS and all that was required was that I type a final draft, I simply was not satisfied that I had done the best book I could do." [Emphasis mine]

He's not talking about Radio Free Albemuth I don't think. It's an interesting remark. Read the whole thing.

Also, our pal, Umberto Rossi is posting over there and the organizer of the Philip K Dick Festival, Mr Lord Running Clam has even penned a review of Too Big Too Fail.

Speaking of the Philip K Dick Festival, there are some new pictures from the fest.

So Radio Free Albemuth premiered in New York. The Wall Street Journal wrote about it, but they also thought capitalism saved the Chilean miners, so I'd go with Gabriel Mckee's review of the film. Mckee writes:

"There's also a strong emphasis placed on the novel's political message. It gives a sinister illustriation of an America gradually transforming into a police state that reminded me of Southland Tales.** In this context, those contacted by the alien satellite from Albemuth become not just religious visionaries, but revolutionaries as well."

The man makes a good point. I really hope I can see a cut of this in the near future - hopefully before the government takeover.

Hopefully a bright light will fire from the sky soon enough with information about when and how this film might make it to a theater near you.

Speaking of Gabriel Mckee, he's pointed out in the comments that his DADOES exhibition is now online.

The Internetz are still buzzing about Ridley Scott producing Man in the High Castle. It is pretty exciting. I want to go back and read the book again, but my memory is that the book is fairly internal. How will that translate to the screen. Will the story still be set in an alt-1960s? We'll just have to wait and see, but somebody at the New Yorker was on about it:

"I read a lot of Dick in my teens and twenties. I’ve still got a row of crumbling PKD paperbacks on my bedroom bookshelf—sixteen of them, seventeen if you double-count one that’s an Ace Double Novel, with two stories upside-down from each other. I haven’t reread any of them for decades, but they seem to occupy a permanent place in my brain, judging from the way they pop up when I’m writing about something unusually weird."