Gary Larson is an Illuminatus! fan?

 

Michael Johnson's book reviews

Michael Johnson's latest Overweening Generalist Substack episode, "Book Reviews on Acid." , is a roundup of reviews of three books: Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium by Erik Davis; The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary by Susannah Cahalan and Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age by Norman Ohler. 

The reviews are well-written and Michael brings considerable knowledge of his own to bear; these reviews would not be out of place in a slick magazine or the New York Times book review section, but we get to read them in a Substack sent out as an email (or if you prefer, at the website or in your smartphone app.) If you haven't checked out Michael's newsletter, this would be one place to start. 

The book on Rosemary Woodruff Leary is not a flattering portrait of Timothy Leary, as other reviewers of the book have noted; I thought Michael handled it well. 

RAW biography now available in Spanish

 

Here is something interesting: the RAW biography, Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson, by Gabriel Kennedy,  is now available in Spanish. Details here.  Aurora Dorada (e.g., "Golden Dawn Editions") is located in Spain. "Independent publishing house of underground esotericism, counterculture and Lovecraftian themes founded in Xàtiva in 2019 ... Among its most notable authors are: H.P. Lovecraft, Austin Osman Spare, Arthur Machen, Aleister Crowley, Thomas Ligotti, Clark Ashton Smith, Phil Hine, Michael Bertiaux, Phil Baker, Peter J. Carroll, Nema Andahadna and S.T. Joshi." The book can apparently be ordered from the publisher, but if you want to search for it from another vendor, the title in Spanish is La Capilla Peligrosa. Vida y crímenes mentales de Robert Anton Wilson.

'Tales of Iluminatus #2' close to being finished

 

Bobby Campbell reports that the second issue of his Tales of Illuminatus! comic book series will be out soon:

"I'm very happy to announce that we are in the final stages of production on Tales of Illuminatus! #2!

"Specifically, I only have 5 pages left to draw :)))

"We didn't win a lottery spot to exhibit at the Small Press Expo this year, so our hard deadline got a little softer, but the end is still very much nigh!

"I'll be shutting down late Kickstarter pledges next Friday (9/19) and begin the process of collecting addresses for shipping out our pre-orders.

"I'm not quite ready to nail down a specific date yet, as circumstances remain variable, and I'm leaning towards quality over speed, so I hope you will accept an amorphous, yet incandescent, 'SOON'."

More details at the Substack, which you can subscribe to. 

RAW Semantics on physicist Roger Jones

 A new post from Brian Dean, "‘Physics as Metaphor’ & RAW." It begins:

"Here’s a book that Robert Anton Wilson cites intriguingly: Physics as Metaphor, by Roger Jones (1982). And what an unexpectedly wide, deep and luxuriant read. Bob W. references it several times, and it’s on at least one of his book lists (’50 books from the library of Robert Anton Wilson’, RE/Search #18). I said 'unexpectedly' as I haven’t seen it mentioned before in the wider Wilson world. Hence this post, and a query."

As is usual with Brian, the accompanying artwork is arresting, and as is usual with me, I've nicked one. 

I keep running into Yukio Mishima

 

Yukio Mishima in 1955. Public domain photo by Ken Domon. 

If you are a serious reader, you have probably heard of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, who died in 1970, age 45, in a ritual suicide after a failed coup attempt. 

For years, I didn't consider reading him, in spite of his literary fame, as I assumed he was the sort of ultranationalist, far right wing nut who could be safely ignored. Lately, though, I have wondered if he falls into the Ezra Pound category, i.e. a person with terrible politics who is nonetheless worth reading. I keep running into references to him by people who have nothing to do with Mishima's  political views.

I am a fan of the surrealist American poet Charles Henri Ford (1908-2002) and when I read one of his anthologies, I noticed a poem about Mishima (titled "Mishima," as part of "Four Elegies.") It's not entirely flattering ("Actually you were more attracted to power than to people or to art") but the fact that Ford bothered to write about him at all interested me.

I don't know what Robert Anton Wilson thought about Mishima, but Robert Shea was a fan. Here's an interview with Shea is Science Fiction Review:

SFR: What contemporary authors do you get the most out of reading?

SHEA: The list is continually undergoing revision as my taste changes and my reasons for reading change, but John Fowles, Romain Gary, Norman Mailer, Yukio Mishima, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Thomas Pynchon, J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert Penn Warren seem to have taken up permanent residence in my literary pantheon.

I am currently reading Kumano Kodo: Pilgrimage to Powerspots (about an old pilgrimage trail in Japan) by J. Christian Greer and Michelle K. Oing, and it relates a short story by Mishima.

So: Should I read Mishima? 

 

'Vineland' online reading group, Chapter 11

By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger

"The informal slogan around 24fps was Che Guevara's phrase 'Wherever death my surprise us.' It didn't have to be big and dramatic, like warfare in the street, it could happen as easily where they chose to take their witness, back in the shadows lighting up things the networks never would ..."– Vineland, p. 202-203

"Those thinkers in whom all stars move in cyclic orbits are not the most profound: whoever looks into himself as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence."

– Nietzsche, The Gay Science 

The character Weed Atman has an interesting name. Sometimes Pynchon goes opaquely occult with his signifiers, other times he's screamingly obvious. Atman is a Sanskrit term for the True or Deep Self. It's the part of you that survives obliteration in death and gets reincarnated, according to Hindu doctrine. Atman can also get thought of as the essential nature of something. In philosophy they talk about the being of this or that. To give one example, Deleuze wants to find the being of the sensible in his philosophy of difference. Weed Atman could signify the being, or the essential character of Vineland given that various forms of cannabis consumption - weed - run throughout the book. Not necessarily the character Weed Atman, but his name, the only name in the book with this blatant a definition.

To state the obvious, marijuana has an explicit role in Vineland. After breakfast, Zoyd begins his day (and the book) smoking half a joint. If a reader proved highly suggestible, they'd already be stoned in the second page of text. We find two or three amusing cannabis references in the working practices of the 24fps enclave in chapter 10. There's another weed reference in chapter 11; I think a character turns up with a joint in their mouth. To state the less obvious, marijuana has an implicit role in this book. In chapter 10 we find DL's initials given a number of times and at least once in chapter 11.

DL = 34. Chapter 34 in The Book of Lies is called "The Smoking Dog".  Pynchon seems quite fond of both smoking (weed) and dogs. Vineland starts (the Copeland quote) and ends with a dog. I'll leave that for the reader to unlock.

DL's initials appear capitalized (although reversed) as Love and Death in "The Smoking Dog." I highly recommend reading that chapter and commentary as an adjunct to reading Vineland. It's easily found online and clocks in at less than two pages long. Crowley calls Love and Death "greyhounds" that chase us. Pynchon puts us in a greyhound bus station with Zoyd and a baby Prairie in a later chapter, 14, I believe. DL herself seems all about death and love with the vibrating palm delivering death and her love for Frenesi, Takeshi, and the gesture of love she showed Prairie. Also, D = daleth = Venus, the goddess of love.

Apart from entertaining his audience in such a delightful way, Pynchon provides keys for establishing a presence in the higher dimensions – Leary's brain circuits or systems 5 through 8. Weed Atman appears as one of two characters who starts out living but ends up dead, in the bardo as a Thanatoid. In general, the bardo can be thought of as the territory "in between." Metaphorically speaking, an explorer of higher modalities (brain circuits 5 - 8) needs to temporarily die to their conventional self image, their mundane identity (as determined by their experiences and actualizations in C 1 - 4) in order to establish a lasting awareness in C 5- 8. We can think of that presence in the higher circuits as our Atman, our True Self. Weed Atman, the being of Vineland, seems an obvious key for getting there. According to Wilson and Leary, marijuana activates C5. Though I suspect Pynchon doesn't care much for Bob Dylan (I could be wrong) the 24 fps slogan 'Wherever death may surprise us' reminds me of "Rainy Day Woman #12 & #35."

Weed Atman, the being of Vineland. I submit that atman symbolizes the land of the vine, the territory of the higher dimensions. Ingesting cannabis seems one easy way to start off in that direction when somewhat adhering to set, setting and dosage guidelines. According to Google AI's Overview: "A true vine is a long-stemmed plant that uses other objects for support as it climbs to reach sunlight. It develops specialized climbing structures like tendrils (eg., grapevines) or clinging aerial roots (eg., ivy) to attach to surfaces." This seems isomorphic to connecting more consciously with the inner galaxies that make up the atman.

* * * * * * 

This appears the 4th chapter in a row giving an emphasis on attention: "Then, in a shot of the whole crowd, she noticed this moving circle of focused attention as somebody made his way through, until a tall shape ascended to visibility. "Weed!" they cried, like a sports crowd in another country, the echo just subsiding before the next Weed!" This quote also could serve as an illustration of someone moving into the higher dimensions ("another country"). It will be observed by those who pay attention to these things that Pynchon's use of the SC combination has noticeably increased in frequency since Prairie made her Spinach Casserole with its UBI (universal basic ingredient though universal basic income works just as well in the occult symbolism of SC). Most of this chapter takes place at the College of the Surf; the quote has "sports crowd."

Earlier someone mentioned family as a recurring trope or theme in Vineland. In Chapter 11 we hear about "Weed's infamous family weekend get-togethers, when everybody was supposed to wallow in retro-domestic Caring and Warmth ...". Vineland ends with a big, annual family reunion. The only other main character who dies (maybe) in the book does so at the end. I have no idea if this has any relevance.

The storm that occurs when Frenesi and Brock are in Oklahoma that they also track on the Tube shows parallels with Pynchon's first published story, "The Small Rain." It's set in the aftermath of a weather event responsible for a lot of death. Like Wilson, Tom spreads his characters and themes throughout his written output. For instance, 86 has come up a bit in the Vineland discussion. Speaking of his younger self in the 3rd person on page 1 of his introduction to Slow Learner: "I mean I can't very well 86 this guy from my life." In the same introduction Pynchon explicitly connects the SC code with "The Small Rain" by informing us that the characters in it comprise a branch of the military called Signal Corps. The SC combo doesn't appear in the story at all.

The College of the Surf recalls a brief but scintillating adventure in my younger days. In 1978 a friend and I hitchhiked down to California from Western Canada. We spent a few days at Isla Vista, the locale of the University of California at Santa Barbara. One evening we hung out around the small night life area buying beer for underage students. We were underage too, the drinking age was 21 at the time, we were 18 but I guess we looked older due to our scruffy appearance from living on the road. The night before, we had tried staying in Santa Barbara on the beach, but were accosted by the police with their guns drawn on us – the only time that's happened to me. After searching us and failing to find any drugs, they took us to an area where homeless people camped and told us to get out of town before sundown the following day. After helping the students obtain their drug of choice, we dropped some acid and had a wonderful all night adventure finally crashing at dawn by the ocean. LSD gets a mention in Chapter 11.

The chapter ends with an interesting passage showing Frenesi reflecting on life, time and the way of service: "...time was rushing all around her, these were rapids and as far ahead as she could see it looked like Brock's stretch of the river, another stage, like sex, children, surgery, further into adulthood perilous and real, into the secret that life is soldiering, that soldiering includes death, that those soldiered for, not yet and often not in on the secret, are always, at every age, children" (p. 216). We see a lot there – Frenesi comparing her life to a river recalls Finnegans Wake; maybe a reference to Chapel Perilous; soldiering for children aligns with some lines from The Book of the Law, etc.  What struck me the most was that I had never considered surgery as a stage in life. But I guess as you get older and the body starts to fall apart all the medical stuff one has to go through does become a stage in life. I can relate to that.

Synchronicity: when researching atman I found out that the root word it comes from means breath. On Wednesday, someone I know very well went in for a lung biopsy and relayed a coincidence. One of the nurses asked what kind of music would he like to hear during the procedure. He said older Pink Floyd, please. When they wheeled him into the operating room the song "Breathe" from Dark Side of the Moon was playing. It couldn't be a more perfect choice, he thought.

Next week: please read Chapter 12, pages 218 - 268.

More on basic income

 

The links-with-commentary is one of my favorite items in the Astral Codex Ten Substack, and the "Links for September 2025" did not disappoint. After I did the recent posting on new basic income information, and read the comments that followed, I discovered that Scott also had covered the recent controversy (item No. 54). Scott adds this bit:

"GiveDirectly, a charity involved in basic income experiments, has a response here; they say that some studies are positive, and that the ones that aren’t might have tried too little cash to matter, or been confounded by COVID making everything worse. They also point out that basic income is harder to study than traditional programs like giving people housing, because if you’re giving housing you can measure housing-related outcomes directly and have a pretty good chance of getting enough statistical power to find them, but since everyone spends cash on different things, the positive effects might be scattered across many different outcomes (and therefore too small to reach significance on each).

"Everyone involved in this debate wants to emphasize that the poor results are for First World studies only, and that studies continue to show large benefits to giving cash in the developing world."

There are also other points Scott makes.

Also in the same newsletter, interesting news about AI, age of consent in different European countries and other matters, including the observation, "Andy Masley’s AI art is good." An example is above. 

'Magnificent Ambersons' to get AI treatment

Photo from the Magnificent Ambersons, with Anne Baxter in the middle. 

From the Hollywood Reporter:

"Since the rise of generative artificial intelligence in 2022, the technology has mostly been plugged into parts of the production pipeline as far as its deployment in Hollywood. Think visual effects, dubbing and storyboarding. As it stands, it’s mostly thought of as a tool to streamline certain processes and cut costs.

"But others have their sights set on completely overhauling the entertainment industry’s use of AI. At the forefront: Showrunner, which plans to reconstruct the destroyed 43 minutes of Orson Welles‘ The Magnificent Ambersons."

More here. 

This is an update to some news I reported back in 2023, but AI wasn't mentioned yet. 

Still no word on using AI to restore the lost pages from Illuminatus! That's a joke, of course. Well, I think it is ...

New studies don't cast basic income in a good light

Photo by Colin Watts on Unsplash

I've done past blog posts on the basic income guarantee, the idea that the government should use cash transfers to make sure everyone has a minimum income, because it's an intriguing idea and Robert Anton Wilson was interested in it. 

I've noticed recent news here and there that recent studies of such programs haven't been very encouraging, and Substacker Noah Smith, in a recent piece, has a good summary, excerpt:

"In recent years, some new research has come out that tempered my enthusiasm for the cash benefit revolution. First, a basic income trial in Denver failed to decrease homelessness, which is one thing you’d really like to see basic income do. Then, an even bigger basic income trial in Texas and Illinois found that just $1000 a month caused 2% of people to stop working — a very big disemployment effect, contradicting the results of earlier studies. Worryingly, this study is much more believable than any of the more optimistic studies, since it’s a very large randomized controlled trial. (Of course, it’s just one study; the papers showing little effect are still more numerous, even if no single one is as reliable.)

"Meanwhile, a lot of these studies are finding that cash benefits aren’t really doing much to improve quality of life for the people who get the cash. You can measure various things we think curing poverty ought to improve, like health, education, employment, housing, etc. And unfortunately, these recent studies show that cash benefits aren’t making those indicators look much better."

There's more at the link. I should note that Smith still favors cash transfers:

"A more valid counterargument — and one that Bruenig touches on, but could have been a lot more explicit about — is that poor people having more cash is simply a good thing in and of itself, whether or not their kids become healthier or they get a better education or they report less depression. Being able to afford more food, more transportation, more housing, etc. makes your life better, even if it doesn’t make you lead a healthier lifestyle."

In his newsletter, in an issue that I can't link to because its behind a paywall, Richard Hanania says those results are unsurprising. "The underlying premise was wrong. There's this idea that poor people are just normal people with less money, rather than understanding they're poor in the first place because they have dysfunctional traits. Money will not solve low intelligence, poor impulse control, an inability to cope with unexpected challenges, etc. This is something conservatives have been historically more likely to take for granted."

 

Who's our greatest living novelist?

Richard Powers (Creative Commons photo by Phoebe Ayers, details here.)

In his recent piece on Thomas Pynchon that I blogged about a few days ago, PQ writes, "Pynchon is arguably the greatest living novelist on the strength of Gravity's Rainbow (1973) alone ... "

This is obviously not an unreasonable opinion, but it made me wonder what other writers plausibly could be suggested. (For the sake of discussion, let's limit this to writers from the U.S.) Colson Whitehead? Don DeLillo? Anne Tyler? N.K. Jemisin? Alice Walker? Stephen King? Percival Everett? Barbara Kingsolver? Who am I missing?

My three favorite "name" writers are Richard Powers, Neal Stephenson and Tom Perrotta. Whenever any of those three issues a new book, I have to read it, ASAP. 

Powers probably would be the writer among those three with the biggest literary reputation. He won the National Book Award for The Echo Maker, the Pulitzer Prize for The Overstory and was awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant. The Gold Bug Variations is another well-regarded novel, and I liked Playground, the one that came out last year. 

I actually interviewed Powers via email after another novel I liked, Orfeo, was published, here is my interview. 

What we read last month

What I read last month:

The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin, Michel Krielaars. About musicians and composers who faced persecution in the Soviet Union. I especially liked the chapter on Prokofiev.

Keys to a Successful Retirement: Staying Happy, Active, and Productive in Your Retired Years, Fritz Gilbert. Some good ideas.

Salt, Adam Roberts. First novel by a British writer I have gotten interested in. Roberts is consistently a good read. 

The Sex Magicians, Robert Anton Williams. A re-read to participate in the online reading group at the Jechidah blog. 

The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism, James Warren editor. A good collection of essays. I've now read 14 books on Epicureanism.

The Book of Forbidden Words: A Liberated Dictionary of Improper English, Robert Anton Wilson. An easy read, I learned some things. Not a core RAW book for me. 

What Mark Brown read last month: 

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem  8/2  

Beyond Apollo by Barry N. Malzberg  8/8 

The Jonah Kit by Ian Watson  8/16  

The Illuminati Papers by Robert Anton Wilson  8/20   

Mythologies by Roland Barthes  8/21   

The Deathworld Trilogy by Harry Harrison  8/31

I'm busy reading classic science fiction this month as a judge for the Prometheus Hall of Fame award, so my list next month will look more like Mark's. 

 

An 'Illuminatus!' anniversary

Alerted by an anonymous comment to Sunday's post about Illuminatus!, I pulled my old copy of The Eye in the Pyramid, dating to the 1970s, off my bookshelf and read that the first printing was September 1975. In other words, this month is the 50th anniversary of the publication of the first book of the trilogy! I am particularly delighted about this for reasons that will become clear shortly.