'Starseed' finished, out everywhere soon

Expect to learn a lot about Timothy Leary in the new RAW book 

I asked Rasa, who runs Hilaritas Press, what had happened to The Starseed Signals: Link Between Worlds, the new "lost" Robert Anton Wilson book, and he explained the book is finished and will be available everywhere soon.

Here is Rasa's statement:

"We never know if some last minute detail will demand an extra week or so of time to resolve, so we are very reluctant to give exact dates, but we have ordered a proof of the completed book, and if it looks okay, it usually only takes a day or two for the book to become available at all the online outlets after we give the approval. HOWEVER, because of the pandemic, Ingram, our printer/distributor, has been experiencing long delays. It could take as long as two weeks for us to get that proof we requested five days ago."

I have learned more about the book (which I can't share just yet) and it seems very promising, so I look forward to comparing notes with everyone in a few days.

New 'Eris of the Month' at Historia Discordia

I thought the Eris of the Month at Historia Discordia this time was especially striking. 

Go to Historia Discordia for more.  

Robert Shea presents an early Prometheus Award

As the Libertarian Futurist Society puts more of its old newsletter contents online, more material connected to Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea is becoming available. Today, when I read an article from the very first issue of the newsletter, I discovered that Shea had been the presenter when L. Neil Smith received the award for Smith's first novel, The Probability Broach:

“And the winner is …” Opening the proverbial envelope with his Swiss Army knife, author Robert Shea of Illuminatus! fame awarded L. Nell Smith the second Prometheus award for his novel, The Probability Broach. The presentation was made at a special event held by the Libertarian Futurist Society at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago, September 9 [in 1982].

The Prometheus award is a half ounce privately minted gold coin bearing the likeness of F.A. Hayek, one of the intellectual giants of libertarianism. The award was created to encourage and reward outstanding tibertarian fiction. The award was revived this year after a two-year hiatus dlue to money and organizational problems. Credit for its phoenix- like rise goes to Michael Grossberg, the Austin, Texas libertarian who put together a new set of backers and made the Prometheus Award part of an ambitious new Libertarian Futurist Society. The purpose of LFS, in Grossberg's words, is “to cross-pollinate the worlds of libertarianism and science fiction.”

What do the two have to do with each other? Robert Shea, in his speech presenting the award, eloquently expressed the connection:

“From the days when Sir Thomas Moore wrote Utopia and Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels science fiction has used imaginary societies both to show how our society could be improved and to lampoon what is wrong with it. Libertarians are often asked how their ideas would work in practice, and one of the best ways to answer that question is to present fictional models of libertarian societies. Libertarians need science fiction because the idea of maximizing freedom is still so new and strange in the world that there are few examptes in the real worlds past and present, of how a totally free society would works So libertarians have to turn to the worlds of the future and the imaginations. Libertarian writers also like to use their imagination to demonstrate what is likely to happen to our world if certaln authoritarian trends, some of which may seem harmless or beneficial today, are allowed to develop unchecked. The results of these uses of the imagination to explore libertarian themes have been some classic science fiction novels, such as Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Eric Frank Russell's The Great Explosion, C.M. Kornbluth's The Syndic, Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Ayn Rand's Anthem and Atlas Shrugged (which in my opinion is borderline science fiction), and Ira Levin's This Perfect Day.”

More here. (One of the finalists that year was Samuel R. Delany.) Thanks again to folks such as Chris Hibbert and Anders Monsen who have been making these articles available. You can also browse other articles. 

Robert Shea on 'The Dispossessed'

[Ursula K. LeGuin's novel, The Dispossessed, won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 1993, but only after a long debate over its merits by members of the Libertarian Futurist Society. Robert Shea was one of the members who argued in favor of giving LeGuin the award. 

Thanks the efforts of LFS members such as Chris Hibbert and Anders Monsen, much material originally published in the LFS newsletter is now available online, including Shea's two letters about The Dispossessed. I have Shea's two letters below, but anyone who wants to follow the discussion also can read letters from Jim Stumm and Samuel E. Konkin III, There is also a letter from Joseph Martino, and also an editorial from Victoria Varga. 

I had an earlier post about this which only had one Shea letter. -- The Management.]

Volume 7, Number 2: Spring 1989

Dear Editor,

Jim Stumm's letter about Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed. In the Winter, 1989, Prometheus newsletter is a typical example of a libertarian going on at great length sermonizing other libertarians on their errors and expounding the One True Path to Freedom.

Jim calls The Dispossessed "socialist propaganda." I insist that the society descried by LeGuin is an anarchist, not a socialist, society. The difference between anarchism and socialism is quite simple. Socialist societies maintain their economic systems through coercion. Anarchist societies, whatever their economic arrangements, arrive at them through voluntary agreement.

I don't want to debate Jim on the role of private property in an anarchist society. I'm even inclined to agree with him that pockets of free market activity would probably appear rather quickly in a non-coercive anarchist society initially organized along purely collectivist lines. Where I do want to take issue with him is on his insistence that all awards given by the Libertarian Futurist Society pass his particular ideological purity test.

Jim writes that if The Dispossessed were to win the Hall of Fame award it would indicate to him that the LFS is dominated by people who are not propertarians. He's gotta be kidding. Look at the list of books that have won the Prometheus Award and the Hall of Fame Award already. Look at the persuasively propertarian defense of The Dispossessed put forward by Sam Konkin in the same issue of Prometheus.

Might not a Hall of Fame award to The Dispossessed indicate that a majority of LFS advisory members, unlike Jim, opts for a broad, rather than a narrow, definition of libertarianism?

I don't believe in concealing differences of opinion for the sake of outreach. My own philosophy is not identical with those of Ayn Rand, Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, Cyril Kornbluth. But I respect all the authors who have received awards from the LFS. I've learned much from their works. I don't expect to agree with them point for point. For that matter my views differ in many respects from those of L. Neil Smith, yet I still feel honored lo have made the speech presenting the Prometheus Award to him for The Probability Broach in 1982.

Let the LFS Hall of Fame consist of a variety of novels. Let newcomers see that the freedom movement is large and generous, providing a home to many differing opinions. Surely the recognition and acceptance of variety of points of view must be one of the first principles of a free society.

I pledge that if The Dispossessed is not selected for the Hall of Fame this year I will not pick up my marbles and go home. I will stick with the LFS and continue to try to persuade it to give The Dispossessed the recognition it deserves. Surely an excellent novel describing the workings of an anarchist society deserves to be considered for the Libertarian Futurist Society's Hall of Fame award.

ls the society described in The Dispossessed an anarchist society? Yes.

Is The Dispossessed an excellent novel? Yes.

I rest my case.

—Robert Shea

Volume 5, Number 4, Fall 1987

Again, The Dispossessed

By Robert Shea

After reading the two commentaries on Ursula Le Gui's The Dispossessed in the Summer 1987 Prometheus, I had to offer my opinion. I was happy to vote for The Dispossessed for the Hall of Fame award this year. I think Le Guin does a remarkably good job of portraying a real live anarchist society.

The objections I've seen to this novel as libertarian science fiction seem to come from people I would call right-wing anarchists—I can think of no more efficient way to describe them—who believe that freedom is impossible without private property. If Le Guin had portrayed everything as hunky-dory in her anarcho-collectivist society their criticisms would be easier to understand, although The Dispossessed would in that case be a flat, banal, propagandist book. But Le Guin's novel is primarily about the things that have gone wrong in this society.

The Odonians, banished to a world where everything is scarce, have managed to create a society that is, in many ways, quite attractive. It is non-violent, nonhierarchical, ascetic, sexually free. But in the generations since it was established, it has ossified. Shevek begins a rebellion against this ossification.

Annares has oppressive institutions, but not because Le Guin fails to understand the nature of freedom. She understands freedom quite well. The Annaresti, in their struggle to survive on an inhospitable planet, came up with solutions that later led to more problems. Le Guin knows that the business of any revolution—perhaps especially and anarchist revolution—is never finished.

Other sf novels advocating anarchism often show the society's problems as stemming from internal subversives. Everything would be just peachy were it not for the small grop of evil people who want to bring back the state. Odonian problems stem from their society itself which makes a far more subtle and profound thought-experiment.

Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which deservedly won LFS's Hall of Fame award, describes a anarchist society on the Moon which many libertarians find attractive. But his more recent The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, returns a few generations later to find it, like Le Guin's Odonian society, plagued by creeping archism. This does not mean that Heinlein's view of freedom is flawed. Like Le Guin he knows that freedom is never won once and for all and there is no perfect blueprint for a free society.

George Orwell pointed out in an essay on Gandhi that in an anarcho-pacifist society people would be subjected the the most pervasive tyranny of he unlimited power all, the unlimited power of collective opinion. Orwell, who created the archetype of tyrannies that rule by force and fraud, might have given us a novel about tyranny by guilt and shame had he developed his insight. What Orwell did not do, Le Guin has done.

The Dispossessed is a cautionary tale for anarchists. The people who hate it remind me of those who want Huckleberry Finn taken off bookshelves because they see it as a sympathetic portrait of a slaveholding society. Because Le Guin shows that life on Annares has its positive side, people who want their fiction to have a simple good vs. evil message are offended.

Le Guin is too fine a writer to appeal to people who insist of taking their propaganda straight. But that's why The Dispossessed deserves a place in LFS's Hall of Fame.

This podcast sounds like it would be interesting

Podcast announcement for the F23 podcast: "Michelle Olley is host of Journey to Nutopia events, a member of the Cosmic Trigger production team, used to work for Skin Magazine and hosted the most famous fetish night of the 90's Rubber Ball. We talk about the first time we met, the works of Robert Anton Wilson, belief systems and much more. I can't recommend enough attending the (sort of) monthly Journey To Nutopia events and I'm sure after you've heard our conversation you'll want to be there.

"Find Michelle on Twitter @journey2_nu 

"https://www.thecockpit.org.uk/journeytonutopia

"Find me @Jimthediamond"

I will listen soon, I have not had a chance yet. 

The Devil's Masquerade

Back in 2013, I published a blog post which discussed Arthur Hlavaty's speculation that Masks of the Illuminati originally was titled The Devil's Masquerade. 

You can read the whole blog post, but here's a bit of it:

Arthur wrote, "One thing I noticed again is that the original title was probably The Devil's Masquerade, which I like. Presumably changed for commercial reasons." I asked Arthur if he could offer a citation, and he said, "That's a guess. There's the poem where each quatrain ends with the phrase, and it's an obvious theme in the discussion on the train."

I sometimes get interesting comments posted to old blog posts, and the other day, Photovore posted this comment: "Masks was originally titled The Devil’s Masquerade yes. Bob says so in an interview 'the man with the cosmic triggerfinger' (interview can be found at rawilsonfans.org)."

Here is the relevant bit from the interview (with Neal Wilgus in "Science Fiction Review," 1980:

SFR: I understand you’ll have a science fiction trilogy coming out soon and are working on an occult novel called THE DEVIL’ S MASQUERADE.

WILSON: The occult thriller will be published first and is now called MASKS OF THE ILLUMINATI. It’s set in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1914 and the principle characters are Albert Einstein, James Joyce and Aleister Crowley. It should be in the bookstores early next summer. The sci-fi trilogy is called SCHRODINGER’S CAT and is a kind of quantum comedy, based on the most literal possible reading of the Everett-Wheeler-Graham multi-universe interpretation of the Schrodinger equations. That is, it’s the parallel worlds theme that’s been done and redone and al­most done to death in sci-fi, but I really think I have an unusually com­ical slant on it. That’ll be out in winter’ 79- 80, in some universe or other. The action or actions of SCHRODINGER’S CAT are set in various possible realities that might emerge by 1984 and, if the Eveiett-Wheeler­Graham theory is true, the publica­tion of the trilogy should cause the readers’ subsequent experience of 1984 to be more like my Hedonic pro­jections than like the masochistic projections of the doomsters. That is, the writing and publication of the trilogy is a magical and scien­tific experiment — an attempt to demonstrate the creation of an altern­ative reality. It’s very much like the old Marx Brothers routine: “There’s $1000 in the house next door”. “But there is no house next door”. “Then let’s build one”. I’m going beyond guerilla ontology to guerilla Futurism.

 

A new zine from Arthur Hlavaty

Lots of nice content can be found in "Nice Distinctions 33," the new zine (after three years) issued by Arthur Hlavaty. I'm on his email list, but you can go grab your own own digital copy easily enough. (If you get hooked, see the Hlavaty zine archive. )

Much of the zine has an kind of amusing grumpiness about it, as when he says "I  never liked golf. It's not a major problem for me, at worst taking up space on the sports page for some reason." Or when he says he stopped listening to new music 45 years ago. (Doing the math suggests he stopped in 1975. Is it too late to turn him on to 1980s Tom Petty and Elvis Costello? I knew a guy in Lawton, Oklahoma, who thought classical music went bad in about 1775.)

But the jokes also merge into thoughtful content, as when he reviews two books about the "golden age" of science fiction, or writes pithy obituaries, here are two I liked but the others are worth reading too:

Justin Raimondo quite seriously described himself as the #1 gay supporter of Pat Buchanan (he admitted there was not a lot of competition), but that was not the whole story. I have abandoned the hope of having a society without a few elements controlled by a legitimized armed gang, but I still have a lot of sympathy for libertarianism, not just sex&weed&dirty books but two other good ideas: 1) distrusting the cops. Radley Balko proudly upholds that one, now more liberals are noticing, and that may be the one element of vestigial libertarianism in Rand Paul's makeup. 2) staying out of Asian wars. Going back to Woodrow Wilson and continuing today there is the allegedly liberal doctrine that democracy is so wonderful that we must impose it everywhere no matter how many people we have to kill. Justin Raimondo and antiwar.org stood up to that idea. 

Paul Krassner was the first great corrupting influence in my life. _The Realist_ introduced me to Robert Anton Wilson and Albert Ellis, among others, and he himself commented incisively on the follies of our times. In the 70s he went through paranoia and came out the other side. I always sent him my zines, and one of the high points of my writing life was being quoted in _The Realist_.

Wednesday links

From @Kaosreigns23 on Twitter: "The Revelation parchment print by Alex Screen. Showing the birth of the Erisian Movement, when a simian herald of Our Lady of Discord appeared to Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley one night in a bowling alley and unveiled the sign of the hodge podge. https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/468646898/the-revelation-parchment-print?ref=shop_home_active_1

Latest John Higgs newsletter. I've covered some of his news but not all of it. 

Review from PQ: "The Interstellar Corridors of Killah Priest's Rocket to Nebula"

"1970 - The FBI opened a file on George Carlin after his first appearance on the Carol Burnett Show."

Interesting profile of Susanna Clarke, who has been ill and housebound for 15 years and finally has a new novel out. 

James Heffernan's new book

 

[A book announcement from James Heffernan, which he's been posting to the RAW groups on Facebook. I earlier did a posting on Heffernan's book on the Eight Circuits model, Nonlocal Nature: The Eight Circuits of Consciousness. -- The Management.]

I am a longtime follower of and contributor to this group, and so wanted to let you all know that I have just released a book called Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order, based on the ideas of David Bohm, who of course is featured prominently in many of RAW's books. Take a look if you're interested! Here is a brief excerpt:

I think in time we will find that reductionism doesn't make any sense.  The particles we reduce to are themselves abstracted from the unified  background. To say that these abstracted entities called atoms are  themselves the fundamental causal agents of reality is circular, you  see. And this is precisely the circle we find ourselves in when we try  to say, as almost everyone does, that atoms are the fundamental causal  agents of all of infinity. After thousands of years of scientific  development, and the quantum revolution in the twentieth century, we  have been able to infer, and then much later “photograph,” individual  atoms. 

But then, if atoms are the reason everything happens,  where do the fundamental forces come from? These forces are responsible  for how the atoms behave, but they are not “in” the atoms, are they? And  without these forces, the whole notion of an atom would be entirely  meaningless. So we have these mysterious forces which we just have to  throw up our hands and say are a “given.” We also know that atoms are  constantly shifting from matter to energy and back again. And then there  are nonlocal phenomena, which seem to transcend space and time  completely – the dimension in which our atoms exist. 

So we can  see that to suppose atoms are the whole story rather falls apart when we  consider how complex the situation is. And this is to say nothing of  the fact that it goes much deeper than just the atom. We have subatomic  particles, of which there are several hundred! And of course when we  posit phenomena like the quantum potential and the implicate order,  atoms are rather put in their place. So this ultimate reduction to atoms  seems to have some very serious problems indeed. And of course, it is a  primary theme of this book that there are very good reasons for this.

                                                                      -- James Heffernan on Facebook 

RAW Semantics on metaphor in language

RAW Semantics takes on what Robert Anton Wilson wrote about metaphors, and how metaphors are used in language. Excerpt:

When RAW writes that the principle software of the human brain consists of metaphors and disguised metaphors, he appears to be referring primarily to what linguists mean by conceptual metaphor.

Examples of poetic/’figurative’ metaphor

“Juliet is the sun” (popular metaphor relating to romantic love, from Shakespeare)

“The Scum” (popular metaphorical label for The Sun newspaper, from Liverpool)

Examples of conceptual metaphor

Right where you are sitting now, if you’re concerned that you might be wasting your time, then imagine the reality tunnel of a culture with no notion of time as a commodity that can be wasted or not wasted. (Such cultures have existed. The conceptual metaphor of time as a resource or commodity-like thing that can be squandered, utilized, saved, spent, invested, etc, isn’t universal, but owes a lot to the concept of work as it has developed over the centuries – particularly, but not solely, in modern Western societies.)

More here. 

Ad for RAW's newsletter

 

The clever "why you should subscribe" advertisements used to be one of my favorite parts of the old Boing Boing magazine (which came out in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the well-known website). 

It turns out that the ads for Robert Anton Wilson's "Trajectories" newsletter, put out by RAW and D. Scott Apel, were pretty interesting, too. Here is an ad from "Magical Blend," April 1991, posted on Twitter by Michael Clinton.  (Michael and Ken Condon are the folks behind the work featured at the Zendrites.com website; if that doesn't ring a bell, go look at it.) And of course, much of the material for Beyond Chaos and Beyond, edited by Apel and published in 2019, as well as RAW's Chaos and Beyond came from RAW's newsletter. 

This would have been about the time I subscribed to Boing Boing, by the way. I never subscribed to "Trajectories" or even heard about it until years later; maybe they should have run an ad in Boing Boing. (Back issues of Boing Boing are available at the Internet Archive.) 

Boing Boing was put out by Mark Frauenfelder and his wife, Carla Sinclair; I currently subscribe to Mark's new newsletter, The Magnet. 

Knights Templar church may have had crypts, secret tunnel

 

Saint Stanislaus chapel in the Polish village of Chwarszczany, built by the Knights Templars. 

Who doesn't enjoy a little bit of Knights Templar gossip? Smithsonian Magazine reports that crypts and a possible "secret tunnel" have been found beneath a Polish church built by the Knights Templars. 

A Knights Templars member is a major character in Robert Shea's novel, All Things Are Lights, they are mentioned in Illuminatus! and as the Smithsonian piece mentions they of course are featured in many other works, including Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. 

Hat tip, Jesse Walker on Twitter. 

Brenton Clutterbuck on the Illuminati

 

Where is all began, or at least some of it. 

A multiple choice question, blog readers! When Brenton Clutterbuck poses for a photo at Theresienstraße 23 in Ingolstadt, Germany, he is standing:

A. In front of Arthur Hlavaty's house.

B. In front of Angela Merkel's house.

C. In front of Eric Wagner's house.

D. In front of Adam Weishaupt's house.

I'll bet many of you know the correct answer is D (or at least can guess -- it has to be, with that address, right?). And many of you will likely enjoy Brenton's blog post at Adam Gorightly's Historia Discordia web site, "The Illuminati Files, Part One: A Conspiracy is Born by Brenton Clutterbuck." (Mr. Hlavaty's current whereabouts probably are far from Ingolstadt, but you do get to see the "Anti-Illuminati Discordian business card" he designed.) 

British Discordian news roundup

 

1. While the John Higgs play HG Wells & the Spiders From Mars, a one-man production that would have starred Oliver Senton, was cancelled because of the pandemic, the recent news that Venus may have life has inspired the release of one of the songs from the play, "Life on Venus" from Tim Arnold, and you can listen to the song on Bandcamp and also download it. Details from John Higgs. (The song will be up for 23 days but you can buy a copy.)

2. Daisy Campbell is teaching her online "Get Your Show Written" class for writing plays; if you didn't sign up in time for the sold-out course, you can go on a waiting list for the next class. 

3. "The multi-dimensional Michelle Watson - Cosmic Trigger producer/actor - as well as many other things (artist/poet/singer-songwriter) - has the most wonderful collection of poetry and spoken word out now under her Moksha poet moniker." More here. 

4. "Cosmic Trigger" actress Kate Alderton is pursuing her The Dreamfishing Society project: "I held our first sessions of ‘Dream Crossing’ also hosted by The Cockpit -back in August. It was a deep dive, fusing meditation with social dreaming, working with dreams as a complimentary map to waking reality and exploring how our dreams link and connect to create patterns of meaning."

More on all of this here, and see also Kate's signup page for her Dreamfishing Society newsletter. 

Latest from Bobby Campbell, and John Higgs

 

A couple of new items that will be of interest to RAW fans.

Above, Bobby Campbell artwork, Bobby explains (on Twitter), "New commission! CAGLIOSTRO THE GREAT from  @RAWilson23's Schrodinger's Cat :)))" I have Bobby's art hanging on my walls, follow the link for more information. 

I also just listened to the new podcast interview with John Higgs by the comedian Young Southpaw.  I've have listened to or read quite a few interviews with Higgs (and done a couple myself) and this is a particularly good interview that discusses Robert Anton Wilson, Aleister Crowley, the magicians' war against Hitler, James Bond and other topics of interest. The last few minutes focuses on the rock group Iron Maiden. John is apparently a heavy metal fan as well as a Beatles fan. 

This may be a good time to help the Robert Anton Wilson Trust

Rasa and the Hilaritas Press folks are hard at work on Starseed Signals: Link Between Worlds by Robert Anton Wilson, the "lost" RAW book from the 1970s. I believe it will be out soon, but I have no inside information on what "soon" means. It could be 15 minutes after I post this, it could be another couple of weeks.

I do know that Rasa has been working hard on the book, calling in extra copy editing, doing careful fact checking (he asked physicist Nick Herbert for help on a section that discusses interstellar travel at very near the speed of light), fussing over the cover to make sure it is right. Rasa wants to get the book out, but he wants to make sure it is the best possible book.

I suspect the reason for this is that Starseed represents a real opportunity, for the Robert Anton Wilson Trust and its publishing imprint, Hilaritas Press. By definition, Starseed is not a book that most RAW fans already own. We'll all have to buy it, so there might be some actual decent sales for Hilaritas. 

Starseed is also news. A cult author, whose work has been kept alive by an informal, unusual  network of literary activists, is being revived by the publication of an unexpected new book, even as efforts are being made to turn his best-known work into a TV series. 

So this is where RAW fans come in. It would be nice for the publication of the book got enough attention that readers outside of the usual RAW community got a chance to hear about Robert Anton Wilson, his new book, and his work.

If you have a social media account, or a blog, or a website, or if you know someone who writes about the literary world for a newspaper or a magazine, or if you know somebody who works at NPR, or if you can do something else I haven't mentioned here (suggestions welcome), please help publicize Starseed when it is released. Please help get the word out.  

Reminder: Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group starts October 12

 

The above is a graphic created by Rasa (it will appear in an Hilaritas Press newsletter soon) but I thought I would post it as a reminder to get  your copy of the book and join us for the new Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group.  Please consider joining us; it's not an opportunity that arises every day. 

I think I know where the yellow submarine in 'Illuminatus' comes from

A yellow submarine sculpture in Liverpool. Creative Commons photo 

In Illuminatus!, Hagbard Celine remarks that the "yellow submarine" he operates is "right out of a rock song."

Robert Anton Wilson never offered much evidence that he paid close attention to pop music. In John Higgs' excellent KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds, Higgs relates how he met Robert Anton Wilson while researching his book on Timothy Leary, and took the opportunity to ask RAW about the KLF, who of course recorded songs that referenced Illuminatus!, including "Justified & Ancient (Stand by The JAMs)" . Wilson claimed, "I've never heard of them."

On a hunch, I emailed Mike Shea about what kind of music his dad, Robert Shea, listened to and whether his father was a Beatles fan. Here is the relevant part of Mike's answer:

My dad listened to a ton of classical music while writing. He had piles of tapes recorded back to back with classical music. He found that any sort of dialog in his music hurt his ability to work with words on screen. 30 years later, I’ve found the same thing. I listen to video game music tracks. I have a playlist with 49 hours of video game music on it I listen to while writing. I bet he’d have loved that.

My dad was a HUGE Beatles fan (as am I!). My mom shared the story about how he waited and waited for the White Album to come out. He was the first to buy it, take it home, and listen to it non stop. It blew him away.

John Higgs' Paul McCartney playlist, and mine

You probably know who this guy is. (Creative Commons photo)

John Higgs recently put together a "confused and obscure" Paul McCartney playlist, so I thought I would post it and post my own playlist of favorite Paul songs.

But first, a little bit on the individual Beatles. Was it Tom Robbins who said you could tell a lot about a person by asking the person to name his/her/their favorite Beatle? William Breiding recently mentioned (in his fanzine, Portable Storage) that his favorite Beatle was Ringo, which struck me as unusual, and it prompted this exchange between us in the lettercolumn of PS No. 4.

Here is our exchange:

ME: But I wonder how many people are like me. I have not a fixed favorite Beatle all of my life; my choice has changed over the years. As a teen, my favorite was George. He seemed to be kind of an underdog, only allowed a couple of songs per album, and "All Things Must Pass" was the first really good solo album. Then, too, the organized the charity concert for Bangla Desh, which coaxed a great live performance out of Bob Dylan.

Then John Lennon was a favorite for awhile -- he seemed like the intellectual of the bunch, the one who seemed the most interesting, and the one whose songwriting seemed to hold up the best after the Beatles broke up.

But as I aged, I decided Paul was my favorite. In many ways, he seems the most adult of the Beatles, the one who valued children and treated them well, the one who was loyal to women and seemed to treat them well, too, and the one who always seemed to be working hard at his art. He has been the one who has regularly toured, allowing fans to see him, and who has worked all the time on new recording projects, and gone out of his way to challenge himself with different approaches -- he even made electronic music albums that no one  noticed for a long time. I finally got to see him live in Cleveland a couple of years ago. 

WILLIAM: Ever since "A Hard Day's Night" I have identified with Ringo. As I became an adult, Ringo seemed to be the only Beatle that had a sense of humorous perspective. Upon rediscovering the Beatles in my 60s I came to realize that Ringo's drumming completely dominates the sound of the Beatles. Without him they would have been a different band. Your argument for Paul is not without merit. He is probably the nicest of the Beatles. I never liked John. He always seemed like a mean little man to me. George? A lost spiritualist. 

OK, here is John Higgs' Paul McCartney playlist, John explains, "I’ve done this playlist because I know I haven’t quite got my head around McCartney, in the same way that I ‘get’ John, George and Ringo. So this is a personal and idiosyncratic playlist of songs in which I find clues that help understand him."

1. Riding to Vanity Fair.

2. Monkberry Moon Delight.

3. Jenny Wren.

4. Watercolour Guitars.

5. Tomorrow.

6. Temporary Secretary.

7. Here Today.

8. Smile Away.

9. What Do We Really Know? 

10. Goodbye.

11. Letting Go.

12. This Never Happened Before.

13. I've Just Seen a Face.

14. Dress Me Up As a Robber.

15. Spin It On

16. You Gave Me The Answer.

17. Mr. Bellamy

18. Old Siam, Sir

19. Calico Skies

20. Blue Sway

21. Sing the Changes

22 The End of the End

John's Twitter thread discussing his selections is here. 

I was interested in this as a I have a personal playlist on YouTube Music of my favorite Paul songs, here is my list. Unlike John, I have no justifications, I just like the songs:

1. Jet

2. My Brave Face

3. Heaven on a Sunday

4. Did We Meet Somewhere Before?

5. Save Us

6. Jenny Wren

7. Traveling Light

8. Single Pigeon

9. Get On the Right Thing

10. Old Siam, Sir

11. Soily

12. Band on the Run

13. Bluebird

14. Another Day

15. Your Way

16. Live and Let Die

17. The World Tonight

18. Every Night (live performance)

19. Let Me Roll It

20. Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey

21. Maybe I'm Amazed

22. Friends to Go

23. Cut Me Some Slack

24. Junk

25. Mr. Bellamy

Footnote: Portable Storage, referenced above, is a fine genzine. Follow my link above to get PDFs! 

Event announcement

 

Cover from mailing of The Golden APA

 

I ran across this cover for the Golden APA by the artist Pyracantha and thought I would share. If the reference to "Golden APA" puzzles you, see this blog post.  You can also read Pyracantha's own memoir. 

Shea nominates Illuminatus: 'I can always say I'm doing it for Bob Wilson's sake'

[I have mentioned before that the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award is the only literary award that Illuminatus! (that I know of) ever won; it won in 1986, in only the fourth year of the award, in a tie with Cyril Kornbluth's The Syndic, and Shea's acceptance speech is available on this website.  The award is given by a group called the Libertarian Futurist Society (disclosure: I'm a member of it.) 

But what I did not know until the other day is that Shea, a member of the LFS, is the person who nominated the work for the award! Once he made the nomination, his vote was only one among the members, so Illuminatus! won fair and square. The nomination letter is below, and then I will append some notes. My thanks to Anders Monsen, a member of the board of the Libertarian Futurist Society, for his working making this and other documents from past issue of the LFS-- The Management.]

I feel somewhat sheepish about having nominated my own novel. I am not claiming that Illuminatus! is as good as the novels that have already been chosen for the Hall of Fame. There are at least two books on this year’s list of nominees that I would vote for before voting for Illuminatus! But I do believe it deserves to be nominated and considered. Eventually, I feel, there will come a year when all the more deserving books will have already been inducted into the Hall of Fame and Illuminatus! will have its turn.

That it has not been nominated by anybody else must be due, it seems to me, to one or more of these five reasons: 1) It was just an oversight; 2) Everybody was expecting someone else to do it; 3) The Advisory membership of the Libertarian Futurists is not a representative cross-section of libertarian/anarchist science fiction fans; 4) the Goddess Eris wants me to know how she felt when she wasn't invited to the party on Mount Olympus; 5) It ls the work of a Conspiracy.

While liberal Gimps might consider it bad form for an author to toot his own horn like this (one can imagine what Ellsworth Toohey would say). I am sure the individualists. egoists, objectivists, libertarians and anarchists who make up the L.F.S. will applaud it as an act of rational self-interest and healthy self-esteem.

Besides, if I need a more altruistic motive I can always say I'm doing it for Bob Wilson's sake.

Robert Shea

Glencoe, Illinois

[Notes: This letter appeared in Volume 4, Number 3 of the LFS newsletter, Summer 1986. The "novels already chosen for the Hall of Fame" Shea mentions are "The Moon is a Harsh Misstress," Robert Heinlein; "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand; "Nineteen Eighty-Four," George Orwell; "Fahrenheit 451," Ray Bradbury; "Trader to the Stars," Poul Anderson, and "The Great Explosion," Eric Frank Russell. I don't know what else was nominated that year. For more on the LFS and its awards, see this website.]

.net magazine interview with RAW

 

Isn't this a nice photo?

At RAW Semantics, Brian posts an interview with RAW that originally ran in .net magazine, a British magazine, in January 1998. Given the nature of the magazine, there are interesting thoughts about the internet: 

“The Internet helps you get used to the fact that we’re living in a world where everything is being torn down and rebuilt continually. The Buddha understood that, but very few people since Buddha have understood it.”

More here. 

Leary's 'Starseed Transmissions' and Reich and Lilly, too

With the impending publication of Robert Anton Wilson's "lost" Starseed Signals book by Hilaritas Press, it is interesting to read this 1974 article from Gnostica obtained by Martin Wagner, "Angels and Extra-Terrestrials." We'll soon see how much of an overlap there is between the article and the book. 

Among other bits -- there's a lot of offbeat stuff, even for a RAW article -- there's a summary of the interstellar messages Timothy Leary received in prison and this paragraph:

As for the possibility that all this is auto-suggestion, Dr. Leary typically states this without back-tracking a bit on the mind-blowing implications of the message: “If the Starseed transmissions are hallucinations, it does not matter. Since they are the most logical and practical and optimistic hallucinations available, they can be accepted and acted upon until more amusing, hopeful hypotheses come along.”

More here. 

 

Sunday links, and new Rasa meme

 Via Twitter, probably one of the places it ought to be. 

August Eris of the month. 

Oz Fritz is reading Proust. The bit about Proust influencing Led Zeppelin lyrics is speculative. 

August links from Gwern. 

The drug overdose crisis is largely the result of the war on drugs. 

Why sex has been declining (speculative.) 

Eric Wagner on the new 'Prometheus Rising' exercise and discussion group

 

A quarter stuck to the sidewalk with a piece of gum by someone near my home in Berea, Ohio. So long as no one removes the coin from the "Prometheus Rising Sidewalk," I can easily complete one of the exercises early in the book. -- The Management. 

[Yesterday's blog post announced plans for an exercise/discussion group for Prometheus Rising. Here is Eric Wagner, with a guest post on our plans.]

By Eric Wagner, special guest blogger

Prometheus Rising holds a unique place in Robert Anton Wilson’s output. He points back to it over and over again in his later books, essays, and introductions. Over and over again he said that if you want to make positive changes in your mind-body system, do the exercises in Prometheus Rising. I own the Hilaritas edition, but I do not have it at hand right now. On page 28 of the New Falcon Second Revised Edition, it says,

"Sad as it is to say, you never understand anything merely by reading a book about it. That’s why every science course includes laboratory experiments, and why every consciousness-liberation movement demands practice of yogas, meditations, confrontation techniques, etc. in which the ideas are tested in the laboratory of your own nervous system.

"The reader will absolutely not understand this book unless he or she does the exercises given at the end of each chapter."

Tom Jackson had the idea to host a “Do the Exercises” action and discussion group for Prometheus Rising at rawillumination.net facilitated by Tom, Gregory Arnott, and myself. We will begin on Crowleymas, October 12. The group will last for at least 23 months. In preparation I reread the opening pages up until the first exercise in chapter one. I finished reading that at 2:18 PM on August 31, 2020, and I began visualizing a quarter.

The first edition of Prometheus Rising came out in 1983, and I first saw it and immediately bought a copy in March 1985. I have spent a lot of time doing the exercises over the last 35 years. In the early 90’s Bob wrote a lot about E-Prime, and I learned to write, speak and think in E-Prime. In 1997 I decided to translate Prometheus Rising into E-Prime. Shortly after I started I ran across the Revised Second Edition at Borders. To my mind, Bob radically improved the book. He did not put it entirely into E-Prime, but he brought to bear on the text all he learned in the thirteen years since the book had first come out. I highly recommend you get either the Hilaritas edition (based on the Revised Second Edition) or the New Falcon Revised Second Edition.

Announcement: Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group

With the conclusion of the Nature's God reading group a few weeks ago, it's time to talk about which book we'll be concentrating on next. The next one will be Prometheus Rising, and after discussing the matter with Eric Wagner, I have agreed to take a new approach.

The group will begin on Oct. 12, Crowleymas, a date that has been chosen to give everyone time to get on board by obtaining a copy of the text. As with past discussions, the preferred text will be the Hilaritas Press edition. There will be blog posts by Gregory Arnott, Eric Wagner and by me, although I am also open to guest posts. As per usual, there will be blog posts with everyone invited to post comments. 

Some details probably remain to be hashed out. But the unusual feature and the departure from previous practice is that we will take 23 months to get through the book, using a schedule proposed by Eric that spends six months on the first chapter and then takes a faster but still deliberate pace for the rest of the book. Robert Anton Wilson recommended doing the exercises rather than simply reading the text, and the idea of an extended schedule is for everyone to work on the exercises. After hearing Eric's explanation, I was intrigued and agreed to give it a go.

Tomorrow I will have a guest post from Eric that further explains the new approach, and if you have questions or thoughts comments remain open, although unfortunately I have had to moderate the comments for years to keep out the "when you are in India, use our prostitutes" spam that Google apparently makes no effort to block. 

'Mad Mordecai' on freedom

 

Source.  From Robert Anton Wilson Archives (e.g., Martin Wagner): “Freedom” by “Mad Mordecai” (mosprobably Robert Anton Wilson) THE CHICAGO SEED, Volume 3, Issue 7 (February 1969)." More from Martin soon. 

RAW Semantics on 'The Tyranny of Words'

At RAW Semantics, Brian Dean posts about The Tyranny of Words, by Stuart Chase, which he explains was the first popularization of Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity. 

Chase influenced figures such as Robert Heinlein, Dean explains. He writes, "I ordered a copy of The Tyranny of Words from the UK’s lending library system, years ago, and it impressed me enough that I scanned large sections of it and converted to text with OCR software."

The post includes large quotations from Chase, allowing the reader to find out about his views.

If this topic interests you, see also Michael Johnson's post "Why Korzybski Waned: Some Educated Guesses" at Overweening Generalist, which discusses a number of other popularizers of Korzybski. 

Erik Davis on the 'Wilderness of Mirrors'

 

Erik Davis 

Erik Davis in his latest newsletter:

"After High Weirdness was published in 2019, I started doing the usual round of podcasts and readings. I expected to mostly talk about Philip K. Dick, and maybe round out the chats with some takes on Terence McKenna, whose dark-elf charisma is greatly missed amidst the slick nostrums of today’s psychedelic discourse (at least by me). But I wound up mostly riffing about Robert Anton Wilson, the most obscure character in my triumvirate of high weirdos.

"The reason was simple. RAW speaks most directly to one of the central features of our times: the massive uptick of viral conspiracy theories and tricky darkside counter-narratives that, as both symptom and cause, seem to be further eroding the already rickety foundations of consensus reality."

More here.