Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, episode 67, Chapter 11

By Eric Wagner
Special guest blogger

In the Hilaritas edition of Prometheus Rising it says: 

The avant-garde 20% of the population, due to the Consciousness Movement (a secularization of much ancient shamanic wisdom), already understands every “wild” idea in the last few pages. They have had enough neurosomatic experience to know that they were once totally robotized (as most people still are) and are knowingly engaged in acquiring more neurosomatic know-how. When this reaches 51% of the population, a major historical revolution will have occurred, as profound as the Life Extension Revolution.* 

 * Please re-read this sentence, and think about it. 

(pg. 166-167) 

This passage becomes a strange loop, telling the reader to re-read “this sentence” over and over again, as well one should. Speaking of the Life Extension Revolution, I find interesting how many people in 2022 still consider death inevitable. Also, the phrase “neurosomatic know how” appeared earlier in Wilson’s “8 Basic Winner and Loser Scripts” from The Illuminati Papers: 

(For circuit 6, “Luck, synchronicities, and destiny” makes a more interesting acronym.) 

A couple of paragraphs later Wilson says,  

Everybody “knows” that the Sixth Symphony is “pantheistic,” but whether Beethoven was an ideological pantheist or not, that way of responding to nature is normal and natural right-brain Circuit V functioning. That is, anybody on the Fifth Circuit will “talk like a pantheist” whether or not he has developed a “philosophy” about pantheism. 

(pg. 167) 

I find it interesting that many people have accused Ibn ‘Arabi of pantheism. At the end of this chapter Wilson tells the reader to “Attend a Sufi week-end seminar.” I have taken a few online Ibn ‘Arabi classes, and last month I had a virtual “Sufi week-end seminar” which included an online Dhikr and an online Ibn ‘Arabi study group as well as reading some Ibn ‘Arabi on my own. Perhaps my whole life has become a virtual Sufi week-end seminar. 

 

On page 171 Wilson quotes Scottish psychiatrist Ian Suttie, “The physician’s love heals the patient.” I have taught many children of doctors in high school classes. Some of them have suggested that money means happiness. Perhaps “The physician’s love of money heals the patient.” (No, Eric, that sounds bitter. I have met many physicians that I like and respect.) 

 

On page 172 Wilson quotes Ezra Pound. I started read Pound because of Bob Wilson's writings. I bought ABC of Reading in either 1982 or 1983. I enjoyed the beginning of it, but I put it down when he started quoting Chaucer in Middle English which I didn’t understand. In the summer of 1983 I got Pound's Guide to Kulchur out of the library, and reading that made me fall in love with Pound's writing. I read him voraciously, becoming horrified by his fascism. I would stop reading him for a while, but then I would return to him, learn more and become horrified again, and stop reading him for a while. In the first few years of the current century I taught the whole Cantos three years in a row. Each time I said I would never do it again. I found it exhausting but very rewarding. I haven't read much of him since then, although I did use the anthology he edited, Confucius to Cummings, for about twelve college courses, and I used ABC of Reading for a creative writing class. 

Wilson discusses marijuana in this chapter. I find it interesting that California legalized recreational pot in the same November 2016 election that saw the election of Donald Trump. I have not noticed much change in California since this legalization except for the presence of pot billboards along the freeways. 

RAW on John Thompson; Thompson on RAW

Via Martin Wagner's website, we get Robert Anton Wilson's introduction to Cosmic Trigger artist John Thompson's Book of Dreams:

"When And/Or Press informed me they had hired John to illustrate my book Cosmic Trigger I was thrilled as a cat getting loose in a tuna factory. If And/Or hat managed to bring back Blake to illustrate my text my text by means of necromancy I wouldn’t have been more thrilled. John Thompson is the contemporary American Blake: An artist of such technical versatility and mythic-magic-mystic intuition that leafing through his work is like a guided tour through heaven, hell, and the collective unconscious and the past and future terrestrial & extraterrestrial evolution."

See also this interview with Thompson (hat tip, RAW Semantics on Twitter) in which Thompson discusses his love of Blake, his opinions on RAW, etc. 

Higgs on RAW and Leary

Mike Gathers

I've been trying to get caught up on the Hilaritas Press podcasts; there are five so far, and the other day I listened to the Timothy Leary episode, featuring host Mike Gathers and guest John Higgs. About 51 minutes, and I thought it was pretty good.

A couple of points stand out for me. Mike is a professional counselor, so he's good at looking at Leary's influence on the psychology profession. 

And Higgs is good in pointing out Wilson's loyalty to Leary. It would have been easy, Higgs notes, for Wilson to distance himself from Leary when Leary was coming under attack, but Wilson never did, something that says something about the kind of person Wilson was. 

Gathers himself was the guest on a recent f23 podcast, which I suspect is worth a listen and which I hope to get to soon. 

An encounter with Robert Anton Wilson

Aleister Crowley in 1929, later the target of a seance attempt in Boulder, Colorado

After Lauren Modery asked on Twitter, "Tell me the strangest interaction you've had with a celebrity," Anders Lankford described an unusual encounter with Robert Anton Wilson, in Boulder, Colorado, in the late 1980s. (Source).

"Also, when I was 16, I participated in a murder mystery party with the author Robert Anton Wilson where we had a seance to raise Aleister Crowley, and failed to provide his spirit with real cocaine. Afterwards, I led the group to a Chili's

"I swear this is true.

"If I remember correctly, the 'real' cocaine was baking soda and the "fake" cocaine was flour or powdered sugar. Mr. Wilson lounged on a couch the entire night answering questions and probably tripping on acid and denying the existence of Peru.

"This was probably because of the guy whose assigned character was from Peru and he decided to embrace the character and so he introduced himself as the king of Peru.

"The radio occasionally stopped playing music for 'news breaks' that had this whole story arc about Atlantis rising. As I recall, that's why we needed Crowley so we could stop the Atlanteans.  but we screwed u the cocaine and he turned us into toads.

"And then chili's. After Chili's a very nice couple drove me home and offered me a snoot of actual cocaine which i politely declined.

"Anyway, it was a very weird way to spend Suunday night.

"Did I mention this was Boulder, CO in the late 80s?  Yeah, it all makes sense now, doesn't it?"

Anders Lankford is in Broomfield, Colorado, and describes himself as follows: "Writer of comedy. Mostly sketch comedy. Also: Trekkie, he/him, dog lover, esperantist, leftwinged idealist, and cynical as a result."

Lauren Modery Twitter bio. 

Robert Anton Wilson in a California newspaper

Sal Rodriguez (official OC Register photo)

The Orange County Register,  a newspaper in southern California, runs a column on Robert Anton Wilson, "Musings on Robert Anton Wilson and the prevalence of conspiracy theories," by Sal Rodriguez, opinion editor and columnist for the newspaper chain that owns the paper. 

It's not unusual for newspaper pieces to make a reference to RAW; I run across them from time to time. What is noteworthy about the Rodriguez piece is that it is illustrated by a big photo of Wilson, and it's all about Wilson and the continued relevance of his ideas to looking at the current prevalence of conspiracy theories in the U.S.:

"I first came to really appreciate the nuttiness of humanity as a high schooler when I came across the work of the late author Robert Anton Wilson.

"Wilson, also known as Pope Bob to the Church of the SubGenius, was one of those old-school counterculture journalists who liked to dabble in mysticism and psychology. Oh and psychedelics, can’t forget the psychedelics.

"One of his guiding ideas was that 'belief is the death of intelligence.' And he meant that in the broadest possible sense. He was dogmatically anti-dogmatic and encouraged people to explore as many alternative explanations for what’s going on as possible, for edification and entertainment."

Incidentally, the Orange County Newspaper was owned for many years by Freedom Communications, and during that time it had editorial stances that were unusually libertarian. The Wikipedia article on the paper offers examples:

"Although it sometimes supported Republican politicians and positions, it was the largest newspaper in the country to have opposed the Iraq War from the beginning and opposed laws regulating issues such as prostitution and drug use. It was one of a handful of newspapers that opposed the internment of Japanese aliens and Japanese-Americans during World War II. It also opposed Proposition 8 in 2008, which proposed a ban on same-sex marriage."

Freedom Newspapers went bankrupt (the newspaper industry in the U.S. has been in a deep recession for years) and the Orange County Register was bought by an outfit named Digital First Media that owns many California papers. 

But Rodriguez, listed as opinion editor for 11 newspapers in the Southern California News Group, the local family of Digital First newspapers, apparently has kept up that libertarian tradition. I am pretty sure this opinion is not a stretch, as Rodriguez worked for the Reason Foundation before he entered the newspaper business.

Rodriguez joined the Register in 2014, when it was still owned by Freedom Newspapers, and the list of column topics on his official page shows a definite libertarian tinge: "Speaking frankly, we could use a new dose of Zappa now," "The gradual, overdue dismantling of the War on Drugs," "Stop enabling California’s taxation addicts" and "The right shouldn’t completely dismiss the BLM movement" seem like typical headlines. 

Chad Nelson talks about the new Robert Anton Wilson book

Last year, as one of the volunteers who helps Rasa with the publications at Hilaritas Press, I helped copyedit what is now the newest Hilaritas book by Robert Anton Wilson, Natural Law Or Don’t Put A Rubber On Your Willy And Other Writings From A Natural Outlaw. 

The book is not simply a reprint of the long essay, long out of print, in which Wilson argues against the idea of "natural law" as a basis for libertarianism, an argument he carried out on the pages of New Libertarian in 1985. In the new book, the reprint of "Natural Law: Or Don't Put a Rubber On Your Willy" takes up about 80 pages. But there are another 145 pages of additional Wilson -- articles and two interviews -- selected by Chad Nelson, the book's editor.

The book originally was intended as a collection of RAW's political writings. Instead, as Nelson writes in the book's introduction, the book's material actually focuses on model agnosticism, a bedrock RAW philosophy. Or to put it another way, it's not a libertarian book, it's a RAW book, and a really good one.

I read the new Natural Law last year, minus Nelson's introduction and the reprint of John Higgs' "Happy Maybe Day" newspaper column for the Guardian. I became very enthusiastic. I resolved to do my best to promote the book when it came out. (Full disclosure: I am mentioned in the acknowledgements, although I actually had little to do with helping the book take shape.)

Nelson is an attorney and Robert Anton Wilson scholar.  He is the Senior Planned Giving Officer at the Rhode Island School of Design and also a practicing estate planning attorney. (The name of the school nagged at me, it somehow seemed familiar, until I realized it was where the three founding members of Talking Heads, David Byrne, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, had been). 

When I asked Chad if he would take some questions about the book, he agreed, so here we go: 

RAWIlliumination.net: What do you think of the new book? Are you satisfied with how it came out?

Chad Nelson: I am thrilled with how the book came out. I'm biased, of course, but it might be my new favorite in the Wilson essay collection genre. 

I'm as much thrilled with the finished product as I am with the process it came out of. It evolved conceptually in a way Wilson fans might find interesting. It was initially conceived of as a collection of essays showcasing Wilson's political thought over the course of his life, with Natural Law, Or Don't Put a Rubber on Your Willy, as the lead essay. We were  thinking of a companion to TSOG, but one that covered more of Wilson's earlier political thought from the '50s through the '70s. 

Eventually, after we had assembled about 20 "political" essays, we realized that most of them were concerned far less with politics than with model agnosticism. There is certainly overlap between the two themes in much of Wilson's work, but we decided that model agnosticism was really the predominant theme we were seeing in what we had pulled together. I also tend to think it's more foundational to Wilson's philosophy.

So we had a "lightbulb moment," as it were, where we looked at each other and said, "Gee, maybe we can pivot and create something far more interesting than we'd originally envisioned." We shelved several of the more overtly political tracts and focused exclusively on Wilson's writings on model agnosticism. The project really became fun when we made that pivot explicit. Wilson scholars know how much model agnosticism underlies his worldview, so the idea that there would be a newly published book of essays and interviews spanning five decades where we get to see him riff on that theme very directly, over and over again, in a variety of different ways, was one of the coolest moments for me. 

I've probably read the book 5 times through the course of editing it, and with each read I realize just how special the content is. Of course, there is no single book one can pick up and understand the breadth of Wilson's scholarship. You really need to take it all in. But if there was one non-fiction piece to start with, this might be it.

Chad Nelson

RAWIllumination.net: When you talk about "we" as the book evolved, do you mean discussions between you and Rasa? Were you given complete leeway to make the final decisions on what would be included in the book? And how hard was it to obtain the various permissions? 

Chad Nelson: Rasa and I collaborated on content decisions. He gave me pretty broad license on decision-making though, and in the end, everything I felt belonged in the book wound up included, and the essays I didn't feel were a good fit got shelved. We were both reassured knowing that we had you and Jesse there to offer input on what you'd seen as well.

Getting permissions was a surprisingly easy process. All of the publications that are still in existence offered their material without issue. It was fun to engage with them and explain what we were up to.

RAWIllumination.net: Have you read "Email to the Universe"? I ask because the new edition of "Natural Law" reminds me of "Email," i.e. a carefully curated collection of some of RAW's best short pieces, written over a span of many years.

Chad Nelson: I love Email. I wanted "Left and Right: A Non-Euclidian Perspective" in this volume, but Rasa reminded me that it was already in Email.

Murray Rothbard (Creative Commons photo)

RAWIllumination.net: I loved the bit in your introduction about Murray Rothbard coining the term "Natural Outlaw" to refer to RAW. [Note the full title of the book: "Natural Law, Or Don’t Put A Rubber On Your Willy And Other Writings From A Natural Outlaw."] Who were the six people in the debate, and who was the other "Natural Outlaw"? Have you read Rothbard? He and RAW were both antiwar, although obviously they had differences.

Thanks! The others in the debate were Wilson, Samuel Edward Konkin III, George Smith, Jeff Riggenbach, Robert LeFevre and L.A. Rollins. Rollins was the other "outlaw". It was amusing to see the natural law proponents refer to themselves unironically as "lawmen." What self respecting libertarian wants that moniker?! 

I do have a profound respect and appreciation for Rothbard. He's a personal favorite of mine -- I've learned so much from him. Even when he went in a right-wing, "paleolibertarian" direction later in his career, advocating for national borders and strict immigration controls (notions I despise), I enjoyed his writing. It was always full of flair and he was often very humorous. I appreciate those qualities in political talking heads, even if I don't like their underlying views. Most of today's political "thought leaders" seem utterly devoid of humor and incredibly boring. 

RAWIllumination.net: What's your opinion on the cover? As the editor, did you participate in discussions with @amoebadesign, or was that between Rasa/Christina and @amoebadesign?

Chad Nelson:  I was very surprised at how different it was from Amoeba's previous Hilaritas covers, and how well it fit the content. 

I'm sure Rasa had input, but I think we largely let Amoeba do his thing. I wasn't involved at all in the process. I know the green grass evokes some very specific material in the book that I'll leave as a surprise for readers, but it also seems to me to be a larger metaphor for the book's ideas. To me the simplicity Amoeba dialed up is a perfect visual reprentation of the vast openness, lightness, clarity, bliss -- all of those things that one experiences when they begin to play with model agnoscistism. [See this post for more on the cover.]

RAWIllumination.net: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you get involved in the "Natural Law" book project?

Chad Nelson: I was first turned on to Wilson ten or so years ago after watching some of his "stand up philosophy" performances on YouTube, and reading the Illuminatus! Trilogy. But it was really his non-fiction work that I dove into after Illuminatus! which turned my fascination with his ideas into what now seems like a full-time study. The two that really grabbed me were Quantum Psychology (1990) and The New Inquisition (1986). It's not a stretch to say that reading Wilson has transformed the way I think and operate in life. Thanks to RAWIllumination.net and the handful of other sites devoted to archiving and keeping his work alive and circulating, I've never felt like there is a shortage of new places to turn. 

In any event, Rasa recently pointed out to me that I first contacted him when Hilaritas Press was founded, offering my services. I think it was in 2015. I was willing to do basically anything to assist their work. I really just wanted to be involved in whatever he and Christina planned on doing with Hilaritas. I had previously been involved with Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and Antiwar.com as an editor, so I thought I had something to offer. Rasa and I maintained an ongoing dialogue after that (which mainly consisted of me trying to pry secrets out of him -- i.e., what they were working on and when their next title would be released). Then around this time last year he asked if I would edit the new Natural Law edition, which of course I jumped at. Natural Law is particularly important to me because I've always felt it's the most underappreciated book in the Wilson canon. I've never told Rasa this, but when I first saw it on the list of scheduled Hilaritas publications, I sort of mentally flagged it as the most exciting one they planned to put out -- that maybe this time it would get the attention it deserves.  So I guess the stars really aligned here. 

H.P. Lovecraft's grave (photo by Chad Nelson)

RAWIllumination.net: You live in Providence, which of course is where H.P. Lovecraft lived, and which as a result is one of the named settings in Illuminatus! Have you visited any of the places associated with Lovecraft? 

Chad Nelson: I have visited all of the ones I know about. A few of them I have unintentionally stumbled upon. That's always amusing when it happens: "Oh look, a Lovecraft monument on this random street light." His gravestone is probably the coolest site. It's in this beautiful private cemetery called Swan Point  where a lot of Rhode Island's prestigious families are buried. It's always adorned with the most random stuff, and I understand there are "weird" ceremonies around it at different points of the year. I wish somebody would invite me to one of those! 

RAWIllumination.net: Don't you actually own a sculpture of Robert Anton Wilson? Where do you display it? Weren't there actually negotiations with your wife on where to display this priceless piece of art?

Chad Nelson: I do, but it fell and part of RAW's nose broke off so it lives in a drawer now. All of that negotiating for it to be displayed on the bookshelf was for naught, I guess. I do have a RAW coffee mug that I use most days, at least!

RAWIllumination.net: You mentioned reading "Illuminatus!" I have read it over and over again. Have you read RAW's other fiction, or do you prefer the nonfiction?

Chad Nelson: Me too, though I haven't re-read Illuminatus! in a while. Sometimes I pick it up off the shelf looking for a specific Hagbard Celine quote though. The one I've wound up reading over and over again is the Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy. The new Natural Law collection actually includes a 1972 short story from the inaugural issue of Gallery that wound up being adapted into one of the characters in Schrodinger's Cat. That Gallery piece may be my favorite single individual writing from Wilson, and I was so glad it found a permanent home in this book. Gallery described it as a story about "the life and death of a Reichian rebel." I look at it as the story of a fictional hero who takes many of Wilson's ideas (including model agnocistism) to the extreme.

All that said, I do have a strong preference for Wilson's non-fiction.

New Hilaritas podcast on Kerry Thornley

Kerry Thornley (Creative Commons photo by Sondra London)

Episode 5 of the Hilaritas podcast has dropped, and it looks like a good one. Adam Gorightly is interviewed on the life and ideas of Kerry Thornley. 

Available at the link, and also Podbean, Apple, Google, Spotify and TuneIn. 

Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, episode 66, Chapter 11

Photo by Maria Lupan on Unsplash

In Chapter 11, Robert Anton Wilson talks about various ways to activate the fifth of the eight circuits, the neurosomatic circuit, including tantric sex, cannabis, yoga and pranayama. Apuleius Charlton in his recent post seemed to have a good understanding of the subject matter, and I won't attempt to top him here. 

But I did want to offer a few notes on one of Wilson's observations. He seems to think that music can help activate the circuit. More specifically, he is interested in talking about the music of Beethoven.

Beethoven comes up quite a bit in this chapter. Beethoven is said by RAW to be "genetically inclined to right brain activities, that is, to sending coherent wholes, to plunging into neurosomatic bliss almost 'at will,' and to sensory-sensual raptness and rapture. Everybody 'knows' that the Sixth Symphony is 'pantheistic,' but whether Beethoven was an ideological pantheist or not, that way of responding to nature is normal and natural right-brain Circuit V functioning."

Wilson also writes that Beethoven could communicate his Circuit Five experiences, "which is precisely what the ordinary 'mystic' cannot do."

Wilson also writes about obtaining control of the neurosomatic circuit, a progression "from primate emotion to post-hominid tranquility," and says of this "Next Step" that "you can hear it in most of Beethoven's later, major compositions."

You will see that there is more about this in Chapter 12, including this paragraph:

" 'I am He that was, and is, and shall be,' a sentence from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in hieroglyph and in his own handwriting, was found on the desk where Beethoven composed the Ninth Symphony and all his later, aeon-spanning 'evolutionary' music. One judges from this, and from the music itself, that Beethoven had opened the neurogenetic circuit."

However you judge such passages, certainly it is true that there are RAW fans such as Eric Wagner and myself who have a major Beethoven habit. 

Anyone interested in this way of looking at Beethoven's music should read the short piece "Beethoven As Information" in The Illuminati Papers.  I almost hate to excerpt it -- RAW is on fire from beginning to end in this three-page piece -- but here is one bit:

" 'Anyone who understands my music will never be unhappy again'," Ludwig is alleged to have said. Some biographers doubt the source from which we get this; but it doesn't matter. If he didn't say it, he might as well have; the music certainly says it for him. It is the music of a stubborn individual who is willing to suffer anything, pay any price asked, to achieve greater organic vision than has existed in the world before him.

"To be blunt about it, what went on inside Beethoven's head was more important, in the long run, than everything going on outside that head in those years."

RAW, in the new book, on Ulysses

First edition of Ulysses from 1922

Feb. 2 this year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. 

The new Robert Anton Wilson book, Natural Law  Or Don’t Put A Rubber On Your Willy And Other Writings From A Natural Outlaw, edited by Chad Nelson, has two interviews with RAW, both of them good,. 

In one of them, a KBOO-FM interview by Cliff Walker, he's asked about Joyce. Here are a couple of sentences from the answer:

"What I love about Joyce (besides introducing me to Jameson's and Guinness Extra Stout, -- the two greatest products that ever came out of Dublin) is he wrote the first relativistic novel, Ulysses. Ulysses seems to me the only realistic novel of the twentieth century, because it's the only novel that contains at least one hundred different interpretations of itself, within itself. Therefore it's contemporary with quantum mechanics and Gödel's proof in mathematics and Cubist painting and movies like Citizen Kane, where you get five versions of the same story; Joyce anticipated all of modern science, modern philosophy, and modern art. And he was very funny, too, like most Irish writers."

Natural Law's cover art

On Twitter, the RAW Semantics Twitter account says, "Excellent cover for the new Hilaritas Press edition of RAW's 'Natural Law'  (by  @amoebadesign I believe)."

Yes, it was done by @amoebadesign, Scott McPherson, and as Rasa remarks, it references a RAW quote, "Every perception is a gamble, in which we see part, not all, (to see all requires omniscience) and 'fill in' or project a convincing hologram out of minimal clues. We all intuitively know the obvious and correct answer to the Zen koan, 'Who is the Master who makes the grass green?' "

I remarked to Scott on Twitter that Chad Nelson and I both admire the cover and thought it seemed like a departure from his previous covers, and he remarked, "Aye, this one is aimed at the general public and wellness mob ;)  it's meant to look like an appealing  book you would see in the Sunday papers.... it's a trojan horse design ;)  meant to suck you in.....

"Going for the non RAW fans with this one  .... the gateway drug I call it."

I remarked, "Yes, it kind of reaches out to the unconverted, doesn't it? I thought it was a really good collection. I suspect many RAW fans will like it, but I also hope it reaches other people, and you've contributed to that cause."

Scott replied, "The content is king ;) doing that type design style cover helps get it through to unsuspecting types I'm hoping ;)"

Hilaritas releases two books

Hilaritas Press has announced the publication of two new titles, Natural Law, Or Don’t Put A Rubber On Your Willy And Other Writings From A Natural Outlaw by Robert Anton Wilson and From Now to Now, the autobiography of German abstract artist Marlis Jermutus.

The new edition of Natural Law is essentially a new book; although it reprints a long essay RAW wrote which had been published as a short book earlier and has now gone out of print, the new edition also adds a dozen pieces of additional material, both essays and interviews, making it essentially a new book. The editor, Chad Nelson, did a fine job of selecting the additional reprints, and when I served as a volunteer copyeditor for Hilaritas, I discovered Chad had put together an excellent book, one I'm really excited about. I'm interviewing Chad now, and that interview about the book should appear soon. See the link to the Hilaritas announcement for links to buy the book. As of now, Hilaritas is still struggling with Amazon to get the Kindle available, but it should be there soon. 

The Hilartitas Press announcement has quite a bit about From Now to Now, including a review of the book by Christina Pearson, RAW's daughter. "I love this book. As a mature woman of these times, as a childhood abuse survivor, as a hard worker, as a trailblazer, as someone who never wants to be boxed in, and has always wanted to do and be the best me I can, she spoke directly to my weary heart in so very many ways," Pearson writes. 

You can read my 2018 review of an earlier edition  and there is also my interview with Jermutus, which includes discussion of her friendships with Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson (Leary influenced her decision to move to California.) 

New RAW reading group: Sex, Drugs and Magick

Apueleius Charlton, who lead a reading group recently at his Jechidah blog on Robert Anton Wilson's Ishtar Rising, has announced a new online reading group on Wilson's Sex, Drugs and Magick, also reissued recently in a new edition by Hilaritas Press. Apuleius mentioned that in his last Prometheus Rising post, and there is also an announcement at Jechidah.

The reading group starts Feb. 28,  giving everybody time to get a copy, and I believe it will follow the same format we've followed here, i.e. Apuleius will post, and everyone contribute via the comments. 

Hilaritas published the new Sex, Drugs and Magick in April 2021 with an unusually large number of guest pieces, with essays from Grant Morrision, Damien Echols, Phil Farber, Cat Vincent, Rodney Orpheus, Andrew O'Neill, Alexis Mincolla and Arden Leigh. 

Wednesday links

Arden Leigh

F23 podcast released, featuring Arden Leigh. 

New Prop Anon music track. Meditative hip hop. Buy it here. 

Canada allows psychedelic drugs for therapy. 

"Drug-laced beer may have forged ancient Peruvian empire."

Democrat angles for libertarian vote.  I'm probably underselling it; check it out. 

Happy RAW birthday, new interview

Today is Robert Anton Wilson's birthday, and Martin Wagner at Robert Anton Wilson Fans Germania celebrates by posting an interview from late in RAW's life, "Throwing Shoes Down The Rabbit Hole With Robert Anton Wilson, An Interview by Rev. Dr. Shé D’Monford," giving answers that mostly are not terribly serious. A couple of Q and A's: 

I wouldn’t put it past you to do that or at least create a rumour that you have. However, we can lay one rumour to bed here and that is: ‘Robert Anton Wilson is dead’… In fact he is still ‘really living!’ Apart from living, what are you doing now?

Wilson: Teaching courses online through the Maybe Logic Academy. That’s at www.maybelogic.org

What is your aim with the online school?

Wilson: To use Internet to accelerate evolution and of course to annoy people who already think evolution has reached its peak.

Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, Episode 65, Chapter 11

By Apuleius Charlton
Special guest blogger 

I’ve been looking forward to writing about Chapter 11 since the nascent planning stages of our Prometheus Rising group. I vividly remember this chapter and how it “opened a door” for me to understand some of the experiences I had had since beginning practicing magic. After rereading the chapter, I realize that Wilson (and many, many other writers) is correct…the ineffable doesn’t lend itself to translation…also, most of my experiences with neurosomatic consciousness are intensely private. Talking too much about one’s personal experience with the fifth circuit is akin to telling someone else about your dreams…unless you’re Coleridge or Steve Moore, you’re probably not going to come up with anything of interest. 

Some notes on the chapter: the drawing at the beginning of the chapter is not by Aleister Crowley but rather Lady Frieda Harris, though it was executed according to Crowley’s specifications. Crowley’s remarks on pranayama come from The Book of Lies and Book 4, Part 1 respectively. To disagree with Uncle Bob, I think that Crowley’s Liber E provides clear enough, if overly ambitious, instructions for pranayama. The years when I regularly practiced pranayama were some of the most productive in my life- and while I never achieved a regular regimen of an hour each day, for some time I practiced it for around forty minutes morning and evening. After fifteen minutes I would almost always feel a “shift” inside myself and would spend the remainder of practice blissfully snorting and blowing away. I think resuming pranayama will be the main exercize I follow from this chapter, and hopefully my sinuses will cooperate. 

When I read this chapter the first time I wasn’t particularly struck by the material on Christian Science and faith healing. While Mary Baker Eddy was a fascinating woman, and I always think of her when I stumble on ice, my exposure to people who really, really believe in “laying on of hands” and possess, in my opinion, an unhealthy reliance on homeopathy did not set me up to have much sympathy for such ideas. Today’s pandemic of anti-scientific thinking in the face of a global crisis has alienated me further from such beliefs. What would have appealed to me was Wilson’s sober-minded exploration of the Dark Night of the Soul and the unpleasant side of the fifth circuit and his whizz-drunk recounting of Hassan-i-Sabbah’s pleasure gardens. While I had read about the Old Man of the Mountain in other places and in Wilson before, I love his luridly detailed recreation of history. (And, I must say that I am incredibly skeptical of the level of detail added by Wilson or whatever historian Wilson was using as a source. While I’d like to believe that Sabbah had some time-released-fun-pills, I doubt it.)  

Wilson’s remarks about Hassan-i-Sabbah and whatever philosophies he liked to group under “tantra” appealed to me enough to soon try the third exercize from this chapter and explore Sex, Drugs, and Magick which would lead to some experiences that would greatly affect my own comprehension of reality and pleasure. Again, this is mostly highly personal experimentation that isn’t comfortable to write about nor would it be interesting to read. That said, I think it is time to begin thinking about beginning the Sex, Drugs, and Magick reading group on Jechidah- I’m thinking the new group will most likely begin February 28th, which should give me time to finish up some other projects before moving on to something else. Let me know what everyone thinks! 

YouTube course on Prometheus Rising

 Eric Wagner's excellent post last week for the Prometheus Rising online discussion group drew a bunch of comments, including one from Spookah that shared some news I had never run across before: An online course on Prometheus Rising hosted by YouTube, presented by the Virtual Reality Mystery School. 

"The Virtual Reality Mystery School (re)connects people with the world’s heritage of spiritual, esoteric and mystical philosophy and practice, through a sharable VR experience. From ancient wisdom to modern science’s cutting edge, to make the most of now," the About section explains.  

There's a playlist of 18 different videos. 

"This series started out as a group-reading and discussion but quickly turned into a fully fledged course on RAW's classic work 'Prometheus Rising'.

"This series was created by and recorded at VR Mystery School (https://vrmystery.school) and contains:

"- The full text of Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson

"- Dissection of the subject matter by Alley Wurds (https://linktr.ee/elephantwords), Bachelor of Philosophy & expert on RAW's eight-circuit model

"- Questions from & discussion with the audience"

Illuminatus! the musical?

Ben Graham (Twitter photo)

An amusing followup to yesterday's David Bowie discussion: My post generated some chatter on Twitter, and writer Ben Graham remarked, "As a personal OM project a couple of years back I was trying to push a story that in the late 70s Bowie had bought the film rights to Illuminatus! and was determined to make a musical version in which he played Hagbard Celine."

David Bowie remains a big rock star and fascinating person

 

David Bowie (Creative Commons photo by Adam Bielawski)

People have wondered for awhile whether David Bowie, the talented and fascinating British rock star, might have been interested in Robert Anton Wilson.  Here are a few sentences from Oz Fritz, who wrote about Bowie in 2016 after the sudden news arrived of Bowie's death from cancer. (In spite of his stardom, Bowie has managed to keep the news of his illness private, so the news was a terrible shock. But despite having no warning, Oz wrote a very substantial article, as you can see.)

I recall someone in the online Crowley course RAW gave posting a rumor or anecdote that David Bowie had been seen at a RAW talk in the LA area in the early to mid '70's. I never did discover the actuality of that, but it seems plausible. Bowie lived in LA at that time and traversed similar experimental territory with RAW. They both practiced qabala and magick and both used it in their artistic expression.

Bowie also appeared completely dialed in to the space migration, extra-terrestrial intelligence, Starseed Transmissions gestalt that RAW and Leary were promoting in the '70s ..... [Much more at the link.]

I have thought about Bowie again this week, after running across "Hunky Dory Turns 50," about the album sometimes seen as one where Bowie found his stride. 

Hunky Dory is the album that includes "Changes." When I looked up the album on Wikipedia, I discovered that it has a song, "Oh! You Pretty Things" that "reference the teachings of the occultist Aleister Crowley and his Golden Dawn and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly with the lines 'the homo superior', 'the golden ones' and 'homo sapiens have outgrown their use'."

The Hunky Dory article also mentioned something else that's interesting: 1971 apparently is considered a year that provided the peak of classic rock:

"The classic rock era arguably launched in 1971, seeing the release of a multitude of iconic LPs. Specifically, these foundational and ground-breaking albums ranged from the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers to Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain; and from Joni Mitchell’s Blue to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On; and from Carole King’s Tapestry to Led Zeppelin IV. As the year ended—on 17 December—a 24-year-old British singer-songwriter David Bowie released Hunky Dory, a record whose musical versatility and genius rivals any of the Beatles’ late ’60s catalog."

There's a book about this, Never A Dull Moment: 1971 The Year That Rock Exploded by David Hepworth.

I am not a David Bowie expert but I have an old friend, Gary Shindler, who actually is, and so I asked Gary if he could help me by giving me his list of the top five Bowie albums. Gary kindly obliged, so exclusively for this blog, here is Gary's list:

1. Scary Monsters
2. Man Who Sold the World
3. Station to Station
4. Low
5. Aladdin Sane

"His catalog is vast and simplifying it to five albums isn't easy," notes Gary, a fan of the Hunky Dory album. 

Thursday links

 

New musical work, "Prometheus Rising." 

Is RAW the Dada Diogenes? 

Do cannibinoids inhibit the spread of COVID-19?   I don't know enough to know what to make of this. 

Eris speaking through fortune cookies.

The Buckfast Illuminated Principia Discordia.

Blog update

After doing some research on who "Tommy Robinson" is, I have unpublished today's blog post on the Psychedelic Future Party.

I support allowing a wide variety of political views on this blog -- I cannot recall censoring a blog comment for political reasons and I've allowed comments from right wingers, left wingers, libertarians and so on -- but I'm really not comfortable with racism or ethnic hatred. I did not detect it in the party manifesto I posted this morning, but I'm just not comfortable with Tommy Robinson's views, or at least some of them, now that I've had a chance to understand who he is. (He's not a household name over here, i.e. in the U.S.)

And just to be clear, I don't like racism whether it comes from the right or the left or anyone else. So whatever one thinks of opinions I express here or anywhere else, I am attempting to be consistent. I apologize if I gave offense. 

Help sought as Kirsty Hall battles cancer

Many of you will know Ian "Cat" Vincent from his prominent role in the RAW fandom community in the UK, and as an author and magician; he's often mentioned in this blog. Cat's wife, Kirsty Hall. is battling cancer, and although the cost of medical treatment is covered by the NHS, there are incidental expenses with getting treatment a considerable distance away from where the couple live. So a GoFundMe has been set up; it very quickly met its goal, but no doubt additional help would be welcome. (The account was created only three days ago -- I'm a bit slow to note this, but I only spotted it yesterday.)

Here is some of the announcement:

"Because this is a rare kind of cancer, treatment will take place in the specialist cancer centre at St James' Hospital in Leeds. This is an hour away from her home in Hebden Bridge, which is a trial for a disabled couple with no personal transport. Fortunately the hospital has a small hotel floor where Kirsty and Cat are able to stay for free during the week. The treatment itself is also free but there are a lot of incidental expenses, mostly weekly travel (a taxi one-way costs around £50, so they will potentially be spending around £600 on that alone) and daily meals (there are no cooking facilities in the accommodation). There have also been a lot of expenses involved in preparing to stay away from home for so long. It's all mounting up, so any help would be very gratefully received.

"Please only give if you can genuinely afford to, Kirsty and Cat know it's been a tough time for many folk and don't want people to put themselves into any financial hardship."

More here.  Cat has a Twitter account. And Kirsty does, too. 

Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, Episode 64, Chapter 10

Cover of the first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses

By Eric Wagner
Special guest blogger 

Exercise 5: “James Joyce said he never met a boring human being. Try to explain this. Try to get into the Joycean head space where everybody is a separate reality-island full of mystery and surprise. In other words, learn to observe.” 

 I have spent a lot of time trying to get into the Joycean head space. I wrote my master’s thesis on the influence of Finnegans Wake on Masks of the Illuminati. When I interned with him, the poet B. H. Fairchild recommended the audiobook of Dubliners where a different Irish actor or writer read each story. I got that audiobook and listened to it over and over again in the car as I finished my master’s degree and at the same time finished writing An Insider’s Guide to Robert Anton Wilson. I also listened to a cassette of Joyce reading from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake which also included other voices reading Joyce’s two books of poetry, and a cassette of Irish songs that included a short version of “Finnegan’s Wake”. I continued listening to this set of Joycean metaprogramming tapes after I got my master’s degree as I continued working on my still unfinished book on Joyce and Wilson. (I plan to finish a rough draft in 2022.) I would mix in some Wilson tapes as well.  

During my periods of Joyce obsession I have read Joyce’s books over and over again along with many books about Joyce. I had Finnegans Wake study groups from 1985 to 2021, and I watched a bunch of films about Joyce. I used to have a party on January 6 each year where we would watch the 1987 film The Dead. Joyce’s story “The Dead” takes place at a party for the Feast of the Epiphany around January 6, 1904. I took Bob Wilson to see that film in 1988. My last real period of Joyce obsession came in 2011 as I prepared to give a talk at the 22nd North American James Joyce Conference in 2011 on the question of whether Joyce included references to the Oz books in Finnegans Wake. I finished reading the Wake four times and Ulysses once that year. Of course, I think of Joyce a lot and read a bit of Joyce even when not in one of these obsessive Joyce periods. I did finish rereading Dubliners and two books on Joyce as I did this exercise over Christmas break 2021-2022. I also read a bit in Brenda Maddox’s Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce. I have tried to read that biography since it came out in the 80's. I still have about 230 pages to go. At one point she refers to some of Joyce's letters to Nora as "even worse than Ulysses". Now, she meant their sexual explicitness, but I kept hearing the voices of many of my professors calling Ulysses the greatest novel ever written, so "even worse than Ulysses" could refer to every novel every written. Perhaps I should have "even worse than Ulysses" printed on the back of all of my books. On page 296 Maddox writes of Harriet Weaver’s generosity towards Joyce, “Miss Weaver’s largesse, some have argued, also impoverished world literature by allowing James Joyce to waste his lyrical gift on the bad joke of Finnegans Wake.” She does not provide any citation with the identity of these “some”. I know that Finnegans Wake frustrates many readers, including many of Joyce’s admirers such as Vladimir Nabokov.  

I guess this Joyce obsession has helped me to observe. It seems like looking for quarters [meaning] everywhere, in every person and every situation. Bob Wilson told me he loved Edna O’Brien’s description of Ulysses as a day where nothing, and everything, happens. Certainly, everybody seems “a separate reality-island full of mystery and surprise”. February 2, 2022, marks the centennial of the first publication of Ulysses as well as Joyce’s 120th birthday. Small pockets of our culture will “Try to get into the Joycean head space” this year. Hopefully this will bear some positive fruit for our troubled world. 

An initiation with Betty Boop

 At the end of every year, Jesse Walker does postings on his blog on the best 10 movies of 10  years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, etc. They are always fun to browse.

For 1931, Jesse listed "Bimbo's Initiation" as the year's best movie, with the comment, "Betty Boop: Final Secret of the Illuminati."

So naturally, I watched it (above, just under six and a half minutes) and I was surprised to see this short film, released about a year before Robert Anton Wilson was born, depict many of the themes in his works about secret societies, initiation and individual initiative. Some of the scenes are reminiscent of incidents in RAWs works, such as the upside down room Sigismundo finds himself in The Widow's Son. And see how the plot matches this RAW quote: 'The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences." And Bimbo undergoes an underground journey, which as RAW wrote in Ishtar Rising is one of the recurring themes of his books. 

Check out the cartoon and see what you think! And I wish I knew if RAW ever saw it. 

Tips on listening to Bach

I plan to spend a lot of time this year listening to Bach. I'll listen a lot to some of my other favorites, too, such as Beethoven, Mozart, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. But for them, and for some composers I like, such as the Russian Futurists, I feel relatively up to speed. I've heard all of the Beethoven symphonies, for example, all of the string quartets, all of the piano sonatas. I've missed many of the most important Bach works, and I plan to fix that.

To that end, the updated Gramophone list of the 50 best Bach recordings seems useful, not just for suggestions on specific recordings, but to get a sense of what the major works are, so that you can explore other recordings. (I already have some favorite artists Gramophone's list doesn't seem to mention.) Gramophone has similar lists for Mozart and for Beethoven. 

RAW Semantics on that ubiquitous RAW quote

 

A particular quote from Robert Anton Wilson (from Email to the Universe) has been getting a lot of use on the Internet during the pandemic, and in a new post, RAW Semantics takes on what Brian considers a misuse and misunderstanding of the quote. (I'm not sure if Brian has any particular meme in mind, but I hope the above will serve as a representative example.)

Brian offers a meme of his own:

in his post, Brian cites a RAW quote which would seem to favor vaccination as a tool for dealing with potentially deadly diseases.

For more on how RAW  apparently felt about vaccinations, see this earlier post. 

Note that Brian does not address mandates in general, noting, "Like laws in general, some mandates make sense to me; but others don’t...." 

I think I've read that in Britain, masks are not required for children when they are at school. 

Peter Quadrino goes to Dublin

The view from Vico Road

"This past summer, in the midst of a breakup from a long-term relationship and needing to go far away, I embarked on my first ever trip to Ireland. I ended up spending much of the past few months in and around Dublin."

So writes Peter Quadrino, aka PQ, who many RAW fans will recognize as a blogger who has been immersed in the works of James Joyce for many years. You'll want to read his latest blog entry, "So This Is Dyoublong?" Living inside the World of the Wake, Part 1"

"I grew up in New York City where famous sights like the Manhattan skyline, Verrazano Bridge, and Statue of Liberty were familiar aspects of home. An out-of-towner visiting a place like New York City for the first time would instantly recognize many of the landmarks and sights from the background or setting of the worlds of NYC-based films and tv shows. With Joyce's Dublin though, the city is not merely the setting for Finnegans Wake---so much of the book is about the landscape itself, the ecology, the littoral life of the coastal zone, the street grid and its voices, the layers of historical events that shaped the place. Dublin in the Wake becomes the universal city, a city rendered into text with so much mythical depth and detailed density it makes you contemplate all cities."

"On days when I wandered around in what seemed like a James Joyce theme park (a phrase I'm borrowing from former Dublin resident Robert Anton Wilson), casually walking down Westland Row, past Finn's Hotel, down to St. Stephen's Green, past the Shelbourne Hotel, over to King Street past the Gaiety Theater, back towards Grafton Street, up past Trinity College (all places that appear throughout Finnegans Wake) and then along the River Liffey, the river of life, the universal river Joyce anthropomorphized as Anna Livia Plurabelle in the Wake, I'd stop to stare at the varying ripples along the surface of the waters ... "

More here. 

Forthcoming book on Terence McKenna, top psychedelic books

Terence McKenna

Writer Graham St John is working on a forthcoming book about Terence McKenna, Terence McKenna: The Strange Attractor (MIT Press, 2023). On Twitter, Erik Davis writes that St John is "currently writing what I have no doubt will be the definitive book on Terence McKenna."

Mr. St John also has written an article on "The best books on psychedelics and culture,"  which lists Davis' excellent High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies as one of the best books. Davis says St John's book Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT also belongs on the list. 

RAW on Ubuweb

 

I have long been a fan of Ubuweb, the Internet archive for avant garde films, music, writing and art, although it hasn't much material relating to Robert Anton Wilson. Now, however, the site is hosting a two-hour film of RAW being interviewed by Richard Metzger and Genesis P-Orridge for a show called The Infinity Factory. Lots of trippy special effects. The interview dates from 1997, when RAW came to New York City to deliver the Korzybski lecture at the Harvard Club. 

There are other new items on Ubuweb that might be of interest to RAW fans: 

Infinity Factory interview with Genesis P-Orridge.

"Surreal news footage of Pound strolling around Paris, narration in French."

"A private performance by John Cage realizing his 'Writing For The Fifth Time Through Finnegans Wake' in three ways: reading, singing, and whispering using I-Ching chance-operation: Chinese fortune-telling."

"Maya Deren, 'Witch's Cradle' (1943). Sketches for an unfinished silent film about witchcraft, filmed at Peggy Guggenheim's NYC gallery, with Duchamp cameo."

Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, Chapter 10, episode 63

Photo by Juri Gianfrancesco on Unsplash

The  exercise I find the most interesting in Chapter 10 is this one:

5. James Joyce said he never met a boring human being. Try to explain this. Try to get into the Joycean head space, where everybody is a separate reality-island full of mystery and surprise. In other words, learn to observe.

This seems closely related to the previous exercise:

4. Accept this book, if not in whole at least in general outlines. Assume you have been brainwashed. Try to learn as much from every human you meet about their separate reality-tunnel and see how much of it you can use to make your reality-tunnel bigger and more inclusive. In other words, learn to listen. 

I did some searching, trying to find the source of the claim that "James Joyce said he never met a boring human being." 

Sylvia Beach, born in America, was a bookseller and publisher in Paris; she was the first publisher of Ulysses and also gave Ernest Hemingway early support. She is apparently the source for the statement:

“As for Joyce, he treated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses, or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him; he told me that he had never met a bore.” — Sylvia Beach

For the next week, I am going to try to get into other people's reality tunnels, by listening to them and observing them, with an attempt to learn from them rather than instantly judging their opinions. 

The good news of 2021

I'm sure you've been hearing a lot of complaints about how bad 2021 was, so, via John Higgs on Twitter, here is "99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn’t Hear About in 2021." Written by Angus Hervey and featuring these sentences about energy and climate change: "Doom and gloom however, is never the full story. Underneath all of that, the tectonic shifts of the energy transition continued, driven by a simple piece of economic logic: it is now cheaper to save the world than it is to ruin it."

Books Read, 2021

As I do every year, I'm going to list the books I finished during the year. 

It does lean heavily toward libertarian-themed science fiction, as I am a judge for the Prometheus Award, but I would claim that I read pretty widely. Some of these are re-reads. 

Pretty much all of the nonfiction I read in 2021 was at least pretty good.  I liked the Znore so well, I bought another copy and gave it to a friend. 

I strongly recommend four novels, some old, some new: Situation Normal, Leonard Richardson, a new science fiction novel by an author I really like. I think at least some RAW fans might like it, please see my review. Customs Violation, Janice Weber, literary fiction by another favorite writer, she is always funny and she always writes well about sex and classical music; Citizen of the Galaxy, Robert A. Heinlein, which I somehow missed until now, could this be Heinlein's greatest juvenile? Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro, my first by the Nobel-winning writer, but it won't be my last. 

A lot of the fiction I had to read for the Prometheus Award was mediocre, although I liked some of it. Most of the nominees really worth reading are covered in the link to my Situation Normal review. 

1. Death Sweat of the Cluster: Selected Essays from Groupname for Grapejuice, Znore.
2. Braintrust: Requiem, Marc Stiegler.
3. The Pursuit of the Pankera, Robert A. Heinlein.
4. Situation Normal, Leonard Richardson.
5. Storm Between the Stars, Karl Gallagher.
6. Ready Player Two, Ernest Cline.
7. The War Whisperer: Book Five: The Hook, Barry Longyear.
8. The Age of the Infovore, Tyler Cowen.
9. Cosmic Trigger 2: Down to Earth, Robert Anton Wilson.
10. Who Can Own the Stars?, Mackey Chandler.
11. Heaven's River, Dennis E. Taylor.
12. S.S.O.T.B.M.E. Revised: An Essay on Magic, Ramsey Dukes.
13. The Byzantine World War, N.J. Holmes.
14. Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, Scott Horton.
15. Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade,  Anthony Kaldellis. 
16. Eight Perfect Murders, Peter Swanson.
17. Cosmic Trigger the Play, Daisy Eris Campbell.
18. Customs Violation, Janice Weber.
19. Roger Zelazny (Modern Masters of Science Fiction), F. Brett Cox.
20. Memory Layne, Bob Adamov.
21. Sex, Drugs and Magick, Robert Anton Wilson.
22. Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, Avi Loeb.
23. The Probability Broach, L. Neil Smith.
24. Mozart: The Reign of Love, Jan Swafford.
25. Drug Use for Grown-Ups, Carl Hart.
26. A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine.
27. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, John Dower.
28. The Little Book of Cannabis: How Marijuana Can Improve Your Life, Amanda Siebert.
29. The Hilaritas Press 'Natural Law' book, mostly never collected "new" material,  the manuscript of which I helped proofread. Edited by Chad Nelson. I'll let Hilaritas announce the final title, but it's a great book.
30. Scratch One Flattop: The First Carrier Air Campaign and the Battle of the Coral Sea, Robert Stern.
31. Revolver: How the Beatles Reimagined Rock and Roll, Robert Rodriguez.
32. 2050: Psycho Island, Phil M. Williams.
33. Citizen of the Galaxy, Robert A. Heinlein.
34. Bewilderment, Richard Powers.
35. Epicurus and the Pleasant Life, Haris Dimitriadis.
36. The Book of Dreams, Nina George.
37. Epicurus and His Philosophy, Norman Wentworth DeWitt.
38. Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro.
39. A Night in the Lonesome October, Roger Zelazny.
40. The Age of Caesar: Five Roman Lives, Plutarch.
41. Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction, Catherine Wilson.
42. The Ruins of Ambrai, Melanie Rawn.
43. The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar, Peter Stothard.
44. 1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls, Winston Groom.
45. The Carols of Christmas, Andrew Gant.
46. Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, Bryan Caplan.
47. Triple Cross, Marc Stiegler.