Maybe Night to return on Dec. 21

 

I am pressed for time so this has to be short, but Maybe Night is returning! Details here. 

Moby Dick online reading group: First chapters

The entrance of the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Creative Commons photo, source. 

This week: The Etymology, the Extracts, and Chapters 1-3 ("Loomings," "The Carpet Bag," "The Spouter-Inn.")

In the first chapter of Moby Dick, our narrator Ishmael imagines headlines that mention his decision to go to sea:

"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.

"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.

BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN."

Not bad as a synchronicity, no? And so, as we recover from the latest "grand contested election for the presidency," we embark on the Pequod, and on our Great American Novel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville. We'll be trying to cover about 35 printed pages each week, not a terribly difficult pace, so there's plenty of time to hunt up a copy and join us. There are many ways to do so, as I remarked in last week's blog post. No matter which edition you choose to read, I'll be making the "reading assignments" based on chapters, not page numbers, so it should be easy to follow along, and post any comments you would like to make.

Is there any 19th century novel with a better beginning? The start of Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities is justly famous, and I love it, too: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

But I also love the arresting beginning of Moby Dick: "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."

Ishmael of course is a Biblical reference; as the Wikipedia entry reminds us, the Ishmael in the Bible was the son of Abraham and Hagar, banished to the wilderness. See the entry for useful notes. 

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet ..." It's actually a damp, drizzly November as I write this; it is raining outside. But cheer up, fellow readers: We have an interesting novel to read!

I was struck by a couple of things as I read the first passages. The "sub-sub-librarian" credited with finding the various references in whales in world literature must have worked very hard in the era before the Internet to find so many passages.

There are lots of literary allusions in Moby Dick and much philosophical musing, but the book also can be read as an adventure story, and I found the descriptions very vivid: The icy streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts; the dark interior of the Spouter-Inn, with all of its decorations related to whaling; the meals Ishmael eats, including one in which the dining room is so cold the diners "hold to our lips cups of tea with our  half frozen fingers"; his bed, which features a mattress which feels like it is "stuffed with corncobs or broken crockery," his fright at first seeing Queequeg. 

New Bedford, by the way, has a nice whaling museum; I visited it sometime during the 1990s. 

Background posting from last week offering more details about the reading group. I'll be joined by Eric Wagner and Oz Fritz. The plan is to do this once a week, with a new posting every Monday. 

Next week: Please read chapters four through 14, "The Counterpane," "Breakfast," "The Street," "The Chapel," "The Pulpit," "The Sermon," "A Bosom Friend," "Nightgown," "Biographical," "Wheelbarrow" and "Nantucket." Sounds like a lot, but these are short chapters! 35 pages in my paperback copy of the novel. 

'Moby Dick' reading group to begin

Cover of the first edition of Moby Dick. 

Today I just want to remind everyone that the Moby Dick reading group begins tomorrow. Details in this previous post. We're doing about 35 written pages a week, so it won't be a killing pace by any means.

Brain preservation after death is now free

I like to read Scott Alexander's Astral Codex Ten Substack newsletter, and the November Links issue caught my eye with this item:

"20: Getting your brain cryogenically frozen after your death is now free."

The item links to "Cryonics is free," a blog posting by Mati Roy at the LessWrong blog. 

The article relates that brain preservation is available free from Oregon Brain Preservation on the west coast of the U.S. in northern California, Oregon and Washington and for people living in Germany. There is some discussion in the comments about whether the free Oregon Brain Preservation method is just as good as traditional cryonics. "I think both of those organizations can help coordinate remote cases with local thanatologists as well,"  Roy writes. 

Of course, I noticed all this because in the first Cosmic Trigger book, Robert Anton Wilson relates the brutal murder of his teenage daughter Luna, and how his friends  helped cover the cost of the cryogenic freezing of Luna's brain, in hopes that someday she might be brought back alive again. 

I tried back in 2015 to find out if Luna Wilson's brain is still frozen somewhere but didn't really get a definite answer. All I found out was that when RAW's wife Arlen Riley Wilson died in 1999,  RAW stopped paying many of his bills.

Chapel Perilous, the new RAW biography by Gabriel Kennedy, doesn't really answer the question, either.  Luna died in 1976 and the biography says,  "Wilson continued to pay Trans-Time to keep Luna's brain frozen for at least another twenty years." (Page 205). 

Apparently there was no attempt to do cryopreservation for either of Luna's parents. 

Also, here is Iain Spence's 2020 review at this blog of By the Forces of Gravity, a memoir about Luna Wilson by Rebecca Fish Ewan. 

Today in music news

Above is the new music video for song "Illuminatus" by the Canadian heavy metal band Mutank. It's a track off the band's Think Before You Think album, which will be released Nov. 29.

Here is a statement from the band: "This intro track sets the tone for the album with its strong riffs and songwriting to continue the Mutank tradition of elaborate riffs and ripping solos! Lyrically 'Illuminatus' (which gets its title from the 1975 novel) is about power and how it takes the souls of those that desire it the most.”

More here.  Also, here is a link to the Bandcamp page for  the album. 

Meanwhile, the latest Tales of Illuminatus newsletter from Bobby Campbell promotes my favorite song from Steve Pratt's related album, "Jump Into My Submarine":

Listen to the track.

See my full article about the album, The First Trip. 

Joseph Matheny's 'Ong's Hat' news

Joseph Matheny has released new details for his Ong's Hat: COMPLEAT, a new version of his best-known work that will be released in 2025:

"Ong's Hat: COMPLEAT will be a multi-chapter audiobook of conversations between Sequoyah and me about essential periods in my life during the lead-up to and development of Ong's Hat hypersigil and my interaction with various disembodied intelligences that aided in that work."

For much more, see his latest newsletter, which has links to recent podcasts. 

Not a good day for legalizing weed, and oh yeah, Trump won

 

Unsplash photo by Rick Proctor. 

I'm going to try to resume normal blogging tomorrow, but I don't see any point in ignoring the election. Some of you probably need to vent (or celebrate). So feel free to post your comments, I'll try to frequently check for them and approve them. 

You won't be able to avoid commentary on Trump's victory, so you don't need a lot here, but a couple of things: 

My pet issue (well, along with a few others) is what RAW called "The War on Some Drugs," so I have to report that marijuana legalization did badly Tuesday night. Reason magazine has things covered: Florida's legalization measure got a majority, but failed to pass, anyway, because Florida requires a 60 percent majority to change the constitution; legalization lost outright in North Dakota and South Dakota.  We'll see what happens next in marijuana legalization in the U.S., but the current trend is not great. 

Jesse Walker's commentary on the election, via Facebook: "It's not easy for a vice president to separate herself from an unpopular president, especially when she doesn't try.

"Other takeaways: turns out that inflation did in fact matter, that Muslims in Michigan do in fact care about the Gaza war, and that you can't count on the reasons Democrats are slipping among noncollege voters to magically go away when the voters aren't white.

"Finally: All those things would still be true even if 4% of the vote (not much!) had broken the other way and Harris had finished ahead. And all those dysfunctions on the Trump side that we'd be talking about if he'd lost? They're still real too."

Another take I spotted this morning: Tracing Woodgrains: "There is not a single moment this election that I felt heard or represented by Kamala Harris. Not one."

I noticed other takes, but that's enough. What do you think? 

Politics and religion post [UPDATED]

 

They say you aren't supposed to talk about politics or religion; let's see if I can violate both taboos. Above is a graphic that Joseph Matheny posted on X.com that I thought was funny.

As for politics, today is election day in the U.S., I did not expect the report that Adam Gorightly won. Adam says, "No time for celebrating right now. I need to get busy punishing my enemies!" Adam hasn't invited me yet to join his cabinet, but there's still time. 

My own views are closest to Michael Huemer's and to Scott Sumner's.  They are libertarians; if you are interested, you can read a left point of view from Freddie DeBoer, who says the U.S. is "a country with two right-wing parties." I assume that everyone else in the Solar System has heard from Harris or Trump fans by now. If anyone is curious, I voted for Harris while holding my nose and gave money to Chase Oliver, the Libertarian. My reasoning was pretty close to Huemer's and Sumner's. 

I put together a list on X.com to help me follow what's going on tonight during the election; it's an ideologically diverse group of accounts mainly meant to give me an idea how things are going. While I put it together for myself, it's public so everyone else can access it if they find it useful. 

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that marijuana legalization is on the ballot in three states; Jacob Sullum has the details at Reason.  Note that Florida requires a 60 percent majority to amend its constitution, so weed legalization could well get a majority of "Yes" votes and still fail. 

'Moby Dick' reading group begins

 

Cover of the Standard Ebooks version of Moby Dick. Get your free ebook here. 

Welcome to the Moby Dick online reading group! Eric Wagner assures us that Robert Anton Wilson loved Moby Dick, and indeed, when I recently re-read Cosmic Trigger 2, a book I've read again and again, I was surprised by how often RAW talked about the book. If you were going to pick a "Great American Novel," I think many people would go with Moby Dick. 

Moby Dick should be pretty widely available as a library book, as a cheap paperback, as an ebook and in pretty much any format you can think of. Here's a free audiobook, from Librivox. (There are actually two versions on the site, with another featuring different readers).

We're going to do this the way that online reading groups at this site have always worked: There will be a blog post, and then everyone else will get to weigh in using the comments. Unfortunately, I have to moderate the comments to avoid spam, but under normal circumstances, I check several times a day. Moby Dick has many chapters, and the reading assignments will be for chapters, not page numbers, so that everyone can easily follow along, no matter which edition you use. 

My co-hosts for the reading group are Eric Wagner, the author of An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson, and Oz Fritz, the Grammy-award winner recording engineer recently spotted penning the introduction for the just-published Hilaritas Press edition of Terra II by Timothy Leary, which I bought this weekend. The schedule will be Tom, Eric, Tom and Oz, unless somebody needs to switch out, or wants to change the schedule to cover a favorite passage. The three of us agreed to do about 35 written pages a week, a pace I think most people will be able to manage. We'll post every Monday.

Reading assignment for next Monday: Please read the Etymology, the Extracts, and Chapters 1-3 ("Loomings," "The Carpet Bag," "The Spouter-Inn.")

Sunday links

 

This is officially a "use any excuse you can to post Bobby's artwork" kind of blog. 

Latest 'Tales of Illuminatus' newsletter from Bobby Campbell. 

Scott Sumner on the election.  And Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex weighs in.  I will link to Mike Huemer one more time. 

The Winganon space capsule. 

Pre-order the Cryptid Tarot. 

Upcoming forum on the pain refugee crisis. 

Jesse Walker on "How the Political Spectrum Turned Inside Out."

'All That Jazz' is an interesting movie!

 

Thanks again to Bobby Campbell for the above graphic

As you may remember if your memory stretches back a few months, I have launched an effort to watch some of the various movies that Robert Anton Wilson included in his list of his 100 favorite movies.  So far, we've done The Maltese Falcon and Intolerance, and All That Jazz was next. (Click on the "RAW movie club" label on this post for previous installments.)

I apologize for taking so long to get to All That Jazz. I try to only schedule movies that can be watched for free, and after my wife agreed to watch the movie with me, I discovered that it had been temporarily removed by Tubi, the free movie website and app. They did bring it back, and I finally watched it (or rather rewatched it after several decades).

My ex wife loved the movie, as I discovered when I watched it with her decades ago (she liked the catch phrase, "Don't bullshit a bullshitter"), but my wife was more resistant to its charms, calling it "stupid,"  and declined to  finish watching it with me. But I liked the movie. It was directed by Bob Fosse and apparently is at least semi-autobiographical. The viewer realizes that the Fosse character, played by Roy Scheider, is seriously ill after suffering a heart attack and is looking back on his life. I won't go further into the plot. See this Wikipedia article for background.  Fosse himself died of a heart attack. 

Did any of y'all watch the movie? Did you like it?

Speaking of "blog projects," I will post a schedule Monday for the previously announced Moby Dick reading group. I will also soon announce the next RAW movie club movie. 

John Higgs on the effort to save William Blake's house

 William Blake's cottage in Felpham. Creative Commons photo, details here. 

John Higgs has an article up at Big Issue on efforts by volunteers to save William Blake's cottage on the Sussex coast in England. 

"In the village of Felpham on the Sussex coast, a 17th century cottage has come perilously close to falling into ruin. It was in this building, between 1800 and 1803, that the poet William Blake shaped England’s vision of itself," John explains. 

"It might be expected that such a nationally important building as this would automatically be preserved by the nation, and it seems symbolic of the current state of the country that it has fallen into such a state. Yet it is also fitting, in a way, for it to be saved by volunteers coming together, offering their skills, time and hard work, for no reward other than the confirmation that we can first imagine and then build a better way," he writes.

Indeed, it seems odd that for such a major writer, the work isn't being done by a local or national government, as I would expect in a similar situation in the U.S. 

Via John's latest email newsletter, which you can read here.