Pittsburgh Maybe Day meetup called off

After discussing the matter with Apuleius Charlton, I have decided to call off our planned July 23 Maybe Day dinner meetup at a Pittsburgh restaurant. About a week ago, I fell down and got various injuries, the most significant being a bone fracture in my wrist. My wife thinks it would not be prudent for me to do a long car drive in the near future, and after thinking it over, I decided she was likely right. (I will have what I hope is an interesting Maybe Day blog post instead). See above, and please consider attending Bobby Campbell's event if you can. 

'Vineland' online reading group, Chapter 3

 

Photo by Elaine Glusac

By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger

"But the games Joyce played – and the games played by Welles, and M.C. Escher, and Borges, and Pynchon, and a lot of our current post-modernists – while just as cute as Doyle's games, have a serious side, just like cutting-edge science and philosophy, which also have encountered Uncertainty. A Final Answer seems impossible, to post-modern artists ... Ergo, the post-modern artist now offers us, not the Problem Solved, but the Problem as Puzzle." – Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger Vol. III.

Hector Zuñiga, Sylvester the cat to Zoyd's Tweety bird, experiences this great uncertainty with his career as described at the top of page 25. His uncertainty with life gets compared to the labyrinthine Casbah topography. The Casbah describes the old, fortified part of a North African city. I know the Casbah of Tangier, Morocco which proved extremely easy to get lost in with its narrow, winding streets and high walls. We were strongly advised not to enter that area without a guide. In Tangier, multilingual kids with 5 or 6 languages hang around the hotels hoping to get hired as a guide. Casbah architecture makes a good metaphor for Pynchon's writing, in general.

Last week I got some sense of the Vineland locale when I went there to record a Queer Country show in Mendocino. I arrived the day before at the house of their drummer and bassist Reyna Cinnamon Coupe and her partner Cynthia Coupe who generously put me up. Reyna met me at the door and we talked for about an hour about the area before I left to record another show in Fort Bragg. I don't recall how we got there but when she mentioned the bombing of Earth First! activist Judi Bari in 1990 and the apparent collusion of the FBI with said bombing, it started sounding like the same violent and fascist tactics employed by law enforcement in Vineland. With all the humor, satire and parody Pynchon uses in his story it's easy to regard the over-the-top police tactics as fiction, but after hearing about some of the things that went down in that era, I realized this shit really happened; Pynchon isn't making it up. We returned to the subject at a later time.

Reyna herself had been an Earth First! type of activist in a former lifetime engaged in non-violent civil disobedience with the intention to protect the environment from destruction by the thoughtless, careless and destructive tactics of the timber industry. In an interview in The New Settler, issue 68, July 1992, Todd, as they were known at the time, details step by step their protest method of tree sitting and how to go about doing it. He even describes how to monetize climbing trees by collecting seeds for the California Department of Forestry. Cinnamon reports that at the time, "they paid $35 a bushel for Douglas fir seeds, $45 a bushel for incense cedar, $20 for Ponderosa pine, and $45 for Redwood. You can get three or four bushels in an hour." After the bombing, Reyna became Judi Bari's virtual bodyguard for the next few years. Darryl Cherney was in the passenger seat when the bomb exploded, but fortunately had relatively minor injuries. He made a low budget film called Who Bombed Judi Bari which is available on You Tube. Along with Bari, they sued the F.B.I. and the Oakland Police Department for negligence (they didn't conduct an investigation), false arrest, illegal search and seizure, and falsifying evidence. "A predominantly conservative jury awarded Judi's estate and Darryl Cherney $4.4 million dollars in compensatory and punitive damages." Quoted from The Ghost Forest - Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods by Greg King. 

Though not central to the story, the malfeasance of the logging industry plays in the background in resonance with the war on drugs. The first American edition of Vineland shows a black and white photograph of a massive pile of dead trees. It's the same image used in the introductory post for this group. It was taken by Darius Kinsey known for his photographs of the logging industry. This one shows a logging camp with the title "Crescent Camp Number One." It makes a great visual metaphor for the struggles and battles in Vineland. Trees, in general, play their part in Vineland, especially at the end.

I asked Reyna and Cynthia if they recalled anything about the war on drugs. They said all through the 1980s it was like a war zone. Choppers were constantly flying overhead. The CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Production) program as it appears in Vineland was a real thing operated by the California Department of Justice from 1983 - 1996. A multi-agency task force, it comprised one of the largest conglomerates of law enforcement at the time. Now we have Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the top of the American fascist heap. Coincidentally, Gabriel ICE, a tech billionaire, shows up as the evil and antagonistic character in Pynchon's Bleeding Edge (2013).

The third chapter describes the relationship between government agent Hector Zuñiga and Zoyd starting with when they first met. The cartoon duo Sylvester and Tweety seems an apt comparison. Hector brings various Spanish words and phrases into the novel. According to Christine Wexler, Pynchon's lover at one point, he knew enough Spanish to read in it. Looking at the Spanish spoken by Hector in this chapter, it starts with an exclamation, "Caray" (p. 28) = Wow in English followed shortly by ése = that; next we see "Ay se va" = Oh it's gone; then "¡Ja ja!" = ha ha; finally "¡Madre de Dios! = Mother of God. The Spanish in this chapter reiterates the theme: Wow, that, oh it's gone ha ha Mother of God.

Pynchon's fondness for the letter "v" comes out in this chapter. Van Meter, one of the Corvairs hopes to score from Hector. The latter uses the phrase "Vaseline of youth" later on. My favorite in this week's offering (p.28):  "there's gonna be some local person about your age come runnin' up, two fingers in a V, hollerin, 'What's your sign man,?' or singíng 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' note for note.

Two fingers in a V symbolized peace in the 60's. In the 40's Winston Churchill used it to represent V for victory. Some say it also presented a semiotic weapon to counteract the swastika, a symbolism of fascism in Nazi Germany. A well-known story in the music biz holds that the song "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly was originally supposed to have the title and lyrics "In the Garden of Eden" but the singer got too stoned to sing that properly so it became as we know it now. Whether true or not, Bart Simpson used it for a joke on an unsuspecting congregation.

p

The bit on p. 25 where Hector plays with his food to sculpt something meaningful only to him recalls a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This foretells the UFO scenario coming up, but it also qabalistically connects with Hector giving Zoyd news about his ex-wife Frenesi. I believe this marks the first mention of her in the story.

I'll end with a statement by Hector that can be heard in at least two different ways (p. 30):

"'The Lord, as they call him around my office, created all of us, even you, with free will. I think it's weird you don't even want to find out about her.'" The "her" refers to Frenesi whom they've been discussing, but it can also refer to the Lord in that sentence. This seems another possible link to E.J. Gold who wrote a two person play called Creation Story Verbatim featuring the Lord God Herself and the Archangel Gabriel. 

Next week: please read chapter 4, pages 35 - 55.

Normal blogging to resume

Unsplash.com photo by Johnny Gios

Here is some information that may turn out to be useful for other people, even if you don't have a fractured wrist. It turns out that Google documents will allow users to use their voice to dictate text.

Unfortunately, the feature was turned off on my phone, and it took me about 90 minutes to find the one person on the internet who could supply a fix. Anyway, now that it is easier to write without hurting my hands, I expect to be able to resume normal blogging.

RAW letter to William Burroughs

William Burroughs (Creative Commons, source).

Something I had missed: RAW biographer Prop Anon posts a letter from Robert Anton Wilson to William Burroughs, then writes commentary. If you are a serious RAW fan. you should get a copy of Prop's book.

Hat tip, Jesse Walker.

Prometheus Awards announced

 

[As I have mentioned before, I am an active member of the Libertarian Futurist Society. RAW was the presenter for the first Prometheus Award and Robert Shea was active in the Libertarian Futurist Society. -- The Management]

The Libertarian Futurist Society, a nonprofit all-volunteer international organization of freedom-loving science fiction fans, has announced Prometheus Award Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction winners.

The 45th annual Prometheus Awards will be presented online in a Zoom awards ceremony open to the public, most likely on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon in late August or early September. David Friedman, an SF/fantasy novelist and a leading economist and libertarian thinker, will be a speaker and guest presenter.

The Prometheus Award for Best Novel

In the Belly of the Whale, by Michael Flynn, won the 2025 Prometheus Award for Best Novel for novels published in 2024.

The posthumous work, published by CAEZIK SF & Fantasy, explores the complex lives, work, challenges and conflicts of 40,000 human colonists aboard a large asteroid ship two centuries into a projected eight-century voyage to Tau Ceti.

With its intricate world-building, believable characters in conflict, and profound grasp of human nature, the epic social novel freshens the SF subgenre of the multi-generational colony ship while raising deeper questions about the enormous difficulties of our species expanding beyond our solar system.

Beyond the usual technological and interpersonal issues of maintenance and survival that naturally arise, the colonists suffer from a dysfunctional bureaucracy, crew class divisions, and a traditional shipboard command structure that has calcified into an authoritarian hereditary aristocracy with enforced eugenics and a loss of focus on the mission goal.

Flynn’s kaleidoscopic novel is a wise cautionary tale and poignant libertarian tragedy about the underestimated challenges facing our species as we dream of someday establishing a beachhead of human civilization beyond our solar system.

Without sustaining the culture of liberty, self-reliance and voluntary cooperation that helped lift Earth civilizations to unprecedented levels of knowledge and prosperity, humanity may be doomed even if such ships reach their distant destinations.

Reflecting Flynn’s well-earned reputation for a high level of craftsmanship and a wintry poetic style, his last novel is an ambitious saga of power, decay and revolution embodying an enduring theme: The price of freedom (and survival) is eternal vigilance.

Visit the Prometheus blog for a full review of In the Belly of the Whale that illuminates how it fits the distinctive dual focus of the Prometheus Award on quality and liberty.

In the Belly of the Whale was the last novel Flynn wrote before his death in 2023 at 75. Flynn previously won two Prometheus Awards for Best Novel for In the Country of the Blind (in 1991) and Fallen Angels (in 1992), the latter co-written with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

The other 2024 Best Novel finalists were Alliance Unbound, by C. J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher (DAW); Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, by Danny King (Annie Mosse Press); Beggar’s Sky, by Wil McCarthy (Baen Books); and Mania, by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins Publishers).

The Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction

Orion Shall Rise, a 1983 novel (Timescape) by Poul Anderson, won the 2025 Best Classic Fiction award and will be inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.

First nominated for the Prometheus Award in 1984, when it was a Best Novel finalist, Orion Shall Rise explores the corruptions and temptations of power and how a free society might survive and thrive after a post-nuclear-war apocalypse on a largely depopulated Earth.

A nearly pure example of social scientific world-building in its plausible economies, polities and cultures, the novel depicts four renascent but very different civilizations in conflict over the proper role of technology. Among them: the Maurai, a constitutional monarchy derived from Polynesian societies; the Mong, a feudal society descended from Russian, Mongolian and Chinese refugees who conquered much of North America; and Skyholm, a technologically advanced aristocracy centered on France and dominated by a lighter-than-air city structure.

Perhaps most intriguing is the Northwest Union, a decentralized and strongly technophilic society that extends roughly from Oregon to Alaska: a culture founded in resistance to the Mong invasion. The Union’s minimal central government, voluntary Lodges and other strong tendencies to libertarianism embody one of Anderson’s more attractive portrayals of this idea.

Avoiding a straight-forward clash of good people with evil, the story creates believable and sympathetic characters representing the best of each culture. Anderson plays fair to all sides, a hallmark of the work of the SFWA Grand Master.

Ultimately, Orion Shall Rise offers a hopeful vision of forward-thinking visionaries who dream of reaching for the stars while trying to revive the forbidden nuclear technology that destroyed their previous civilization.

Visit the Prometheus blog for a full review of Orion Shall Rise that illuminates how it fits the distinctive dual focus of the Prometheus Award on quality and liberty.

Anderson (1926-2001), the first author to receive a Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2001, was a major American science  fiction writer who won the Hugo Award seven times, the Nebula Award three  times and the Prometheus Award seven times (including this year’s award).

This is Anderson’s fifth work to be inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame, following Trader to the Stars (in 1985), The Star Fox (in 1995), “No Truce with Kings” (in 2010) and “Sam Hall” (in 2020.)

The other Prometheus Hall of Fame finalists were “As Easy as A.B.C.,” a 1912 story by Rudyard Kipling; ”The Trees," a 1978 song by the Canadian rock group Rush; and Singularity Sky, a 2003 novel (Ace Books) by Charles Stross.

Prometheus Awards History

The Prometheus Awards, sponsored by the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), was first presented in 1979, making it one of the most enduring awards after the Nebula and Hugo awards, and one of the oldest fan-based awards currently in sf.

For more than four decades, the Prometheus Awards have recognized outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy that dramatize the perennial conflict between liberty and power, favor cooperation over coercion, expose the abuses and excesses of coercive government, and/or critique or satirize authoritarian systems, ideologies and assumptions.

Above all, the Prometheus Awards strive to recognize speculative fiction that champions individual rights, based on the moral/legal principle of non-aggression as the ethical and practical foundation for peace, prosperity, progress, justice, tolerance, mutual respect, civility and civilization itself.

All LFS members have the right to nominate eligible works for all categories of the Prometheus Awards, while publishers and authors are welcome to submit potentially eligible works for consideration using the form linked from the LFS website’s main page at www.lfs.org

While the Best Novel category is limited to novels published in English for the first time during the previous calendar year, Hall of Fame nominees — which must have been published, performed, broadcast or released at least 20 years ago — may be in any narrative or dramatic form, including novels, novellas, stories, films, television series or episodes, plays, musicals, graphic novels, song lyrics, or verse.

The Best Novel winner receives a plaque with a gold coin, and the Hall of Fame winner, a plaque with a smaller gold coin.

Update

I have a wrist fracture. Blogging may be a bit light for a little while.

News from Bobby Campbell

Hurt my wrist so this will have to be short, but please see Bobby Campbell's latest news. Tales of Illuminatus, Maybe Day, music news and more! 

'Vineland' online reading group, week two

Vaslav Nijinsky in his rose costume for 'La Spectre de la Rose'

This week: Chapter 2, pg. 14-21 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger 

Attitudes towards mental health have changed since 1984. The phrase “laughing-academy outpatient” (pg. 14) probably would not occur on the news in 2025.  The discussion of the personality which prefers jumping out of windows reminds me of Nijinsky’s leap out the window at the end of the ballet La Spectre de la Rose choreographed by Fokine. Bob Wilson discusses this leap in Prometheus Rising. That ballet portrays another dream narrative, when a young lady (about Prairie’s age) comes home from her first dance with her first rose, and she dreams of dancing with the rose. 

Isaiah Two Four’s idea about a gun themed amusement park seems to presage the rise of Republican ad’s featuring politicians firing guns and Christmas cards featuring their armed families.  

I like the way Pynchon creates fictitious movies in the novel, as well as the way he gives the dates for real movies. 

How do you read?

I've enjoyed the responses to yesterday's post.  If you read Brian Dean's comment, he writes, " I tend to have several tomes on the go at once, which I dip into and read over a long period, rather than "Wham bam thank you ma'am, my quota sorted for the week!" and then gives a long list of books. (Alissa Nutting one of the authors he mentions, used to live in Cleveland, and talked to my book club about Tampa shortly after it came out. It's the only book of hers I've read.) 

I wasn't clear on how many books Brian will read at the same time, but it sounds like a lot.

I typically have 3-4 books going at the same time, although I typically concentrate on finishing one. I just finished Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer (it's due today and the library won't let me renew it, so I had to get it done.) I am currently reading Platinum Pohl by Frederik Pohl (essentially a selected stories) and Sell More Books! Book Marketing and Publishing for Low Profile and Debut Authors: Rethinking Book Publicity after the Digital Revolutions by J. Steve Miller. Also the two online reading group works, Vineland by Thomas Pynchon and the Testament comic book series. 

I'm pretty sure Mark Brown usually has several books going and in fact keeps them in separate rooms of the house. I am mostly sitting in my favorite chair in the living room, though I will sometimes read in the bedroom, on a plane, etc. I go back and forth from paper books to Kindle. I have also been known to read entire books on the phone; that's what I had to do with Tampa, mentioned above, it was the only way I could read it on short notice before my book club meeting. 

While I have a library of paper books at home, I have tended to whittle it down to the essentials. I have hundreds of Kindle ebooks, mostly bought on sale. 

I am on Goodreads as "Tomj." 

What we read last month

 

What I read in June:

The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds, John Higgs. This is the updated version with the thousands of words of new footnotes, a good excuse to read it again. Some comments here. 

Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. I'm told Jill Biden has instructed Biden diehards not to read the book.

Lake of Darkness, Adam Roberts. A horror story about black holes, pretty well done. Mentioned in this blog post. 

Eight Million Ways to Die, Lawrence Block. I have been reading all of the Matt Scudder novels. This is the fifth in the series. 

What RAW fan  Mark Brown read in June (I have myself read the Silverberg novel more than once)

The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick  6/2   

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit  6/6   

A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg 6/24   

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman  6/30

Pittsburgh Maybe Day 2025: Meet the RAW bloggers

Bobby Campbell has asked people to hold in person events on July 23 this year for Maybe Day. 

Bobby is holding a major event on the East Coast, the free Wilmington Comic Fest from 5-9 p.m. July 23 at The Queen Wilmington in Wilmington, Delaware. 

This seems like an excellent event, but I just can't be present. So instead, I've arranged to meet Apuleius Charlton, of the Jechidah blog, who also can't make it to Wilmington. We will meet for dinner at 6 p.m. July 23 at Church Brew Works, 3525 Liberty Ave. in Pittsburgh. Other RAW fans are welcome to join us.

"I think RAW would approve of meeting in a brewery inside a church," Apuleius says. 

So now there are two Maybe Day events, and I'll announce others as they become available. 

Santa Cruz weirdness, Neil Young edition

The Ducks: From left, Johnny Craviotto, Bob Mosley, Jeff Blackburn and Neil Young. (Creative Commons photo, via Wikipedia.) 

Santa Cruz is not a particularly large California city (about 63,000 people) but it has its share of weirdness. For one thing, Robert Anton Wilson lived there for many years in the last years of his life.

I have been listening to a lot of Neil Young lately (my favorite albums so far are Harvest and Rust Never Sleeps) and I recently read about the odd story of The Ducks, a short-lived summer of 1977 rock band that featured Neil Young and three lesser-known musicians. The Wikipedia article details various oddities, such as the fact that Neil Young's contract with Crazy Horse said he could only tour with them, so The Ducks could only play in Santa Cruz and could not leave the city to tour. Young tried to live in Santa Cruz but suffered important losses in a burglary, one factor  that apparently helped spark his exit from the band.

I want to live in a town where I am in a bar with a live band, and I suddenly notice that the bar band has a guy who looks and sounds a lot like Neil Young. 

Is Trump hampering SMI2LE?

Timothy Leary in 1970 (public domain photo).

Richard Hanania, apparently commenting on the Trump administration's attacks on research funding, science, the university system, etc., boldface mine: "The idea that 'let's just shake things up and see what happens' might have made sense at one point, but it's become increasingly clear that with a movement like this, the worst will rise to the top, as will those whose instincts and ideas are closely aligned to right-wing twitter and the uneducated and geriatric Republican TV watcher. This is not how you get to genetic engineering, radical life extension, and space travel." (Source, item 14).

The Peter Thiel interview Hanania references deals with SMI2LE topics.