Today is 'Maybe Night'

The second annual celebration of Maybe Night organized by Bobby Campbell is today. 

If you are just tuning in, Maybe Night is the winter solstice celebration  of  James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, particularly as it influenced the work of Robert Anton Wilson. Maybe Day is the July 23 celebration of the work of Robert Anton Wilson, which has gone on for several years now.

Finnegans Wake scholars will be participating in a live broadcast on YouTube at 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Here is the link for the panel discussion livestream. 

For more Maybe Night material, from Bobby and others, please see the Maybe Night website

Joseph Matheny news for 2025

 Joseph Matheny's latest newsletter update reports that plans are shaping up for the release of Ong's Hat Compleat. :

"As it stands today, there will be three versions of this work.

"1. An audio work with accompanying digital notes to be experienced separately. This is to be considered the primary work.

"2. An audio-only version.

"3. A print/eBook version.

"The notes are not a transcription of the conversation. If I can suggest, the best way to experience this work is to listen to the conversations and then read the notes, which include links, so you may follow up with the ideas I’m trying to highlight. Think of it as a hybrid, extended storytelling session and accompanying research manual. The audio clocks in at over 14 hours, and the linked notes are over 28,000 words, so you will get your money’s worth."

More at the link, and he's also leaving social media next  year, but other ways to stay in touch are listed. More here.  Of course, I will try to report on any major news, God willing and the creek don't rise, as they says in parts of the country. 

'Tales of Illuminatus' first issue complete online, will go away soon

 

In the new Tales of Illuminatus email newsletter, Bobby Campbell reports that the online serialization of the first issue of Tales of Illuminatus has been completed. 

"The full issue will remain available for FREE on www.talesofilluminatus.com until the end of the year, and then we’ll clear it all away to make room for issue #2!" Bobby reports. 

Digital and print copies of the first issue remain available, and Bobby provides handy links. 

There's also a reminder that Maybe Night is in two days:

Joyce's 'Ulysses' and other public domain books

During 2024, James Joyce's Ulysses was the 1,000 book released by Standard Ebooks, which puts out carefully edited versions of the classics; it's my go-to source for public domain books. (I'm currently reading the Standard Ebooks version of Moby Dick; I can use my Kindle to make the type large enough for my old eyes to read easily. The type in my paperback copy turned out to be rather small).

Standard Ebooks has just published an essay discussing how Ulysses references another famous book, the Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (e.g., "A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou"). Molly Bloom's famous "yes" at the beginning and end of the final section may have come from the poem, and the loaf and the jug are referenced in the section in which Stephen Dedalus goes to visit a brothel.

Books published in 1929 will go  into  the public domain on Jan. 1 in the U.S., and the Standard Ebooks folks already have announced some of the books they are working to publish soon. They include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, Cup of Gold by John Steinbeck, Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge and Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis. (I'm a huge Sinclair Lewis fan, and Robert Anton Wilson apparently read a lot of Lewis when he was a teenager.)

At present, Standard Ebooks offers two books by Ernest Hemingway (including The Sun Also Rises), five books by James Joyce, four books by Sinclair Lewis and one by William Faulkner. 

My Beethoven synchronicity

Beethoven in 1813. (Source)

Monday was Beethoven's birthday and Eric Wagner wished me a "happy Beethoven's birthday." I didn't blog about him Monday as I try to follow the schedule for online reading groups, but I can write about him today. 

I have been a Beethoven fan for much of my life, and as I've written before, Robert Anton Wilson had a particular love of Beethoven. The essay about Beethoven in The Illuminati Papers, "Beethoven As Information," is my favorite short piece about Beethoven written by anyone, anywhere. 

Sunday I went to see a local community orchestra, the CityMusic Cleveland Chamber Orchestra, give a concert at a local Catholic church. The orchestra played Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 3 and Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, along with a piece by composer Leó Weiner that I wasn't familiar with,  the Serenade for Small Orchestra. 

The Beethoven and the Mozart made the concert an ideal bill for me. Although I've listened to a lot of Mozart, I am not particularly familiar with that work. Here is an article about the soloist, Sibbi Bernhardssohn, talking about  how "it’s probably the most perfect out of all the perfect violin concertos that Mozart wrote."

It certainly won me over. Later Sunday after I got home, I listened to a recording of it. My wife thought I was crazy to listen to a recording of something I had just heard. I thought it was crazy she would not want to hear it again.

The Seventh is perhaps the Beethoven symphony I have listened to the most. The second movement is particularly famous; when the symphony was first performed in 1813, it caused such a sensation that it was played twice. The movement is used to good effect in Zardoz, a 1974 science fiction movie that starred Sean Connery.  I saw it in high school, and it was an early example of a Beethoven piece making an impression on me. 

Late at night before I go to sleep, I often listen to the late night classical music program hosted by Peter Van de Graaff (it's very good). When I tuned in, the radio was playing a solo piano piece. To my amazement, I realized that the piece used the melody from the second movement of the Seventh. It turned out to be an obscure but interesting piece by Robert Schumann, WoO 31, "Studies in the Form of Free Variations on a Theme by Beethoven (1831–32)," played by Peter Frankl. Van de Graaff of course plays many famous pieces, but he's also good at discovering obscure but interesting ones. 

Moby Dick online reading group, Chapters 43-48

Public domain image, information. 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

This week: Chapters 43-48, "Hark" through "The First Lowering."

I had forgotten that Ahab’s father died before Ahab’s birth and his mother died around his first birthday. 

This novel seems ahead of its time with its truly multi-cultural cast of characters, although the power resides with white men from New England. Of course, the book contains few women. 

The film Jaws comes to mind reading about this sea hunt. I also think about a scene from Citizen Kane. When preparing his declaration of principles, Kane says he wants his newspaper to become as important to the city as the oil in the lamp that lights the room. I suspect at that time in history this meant whale oil.  

I wonder how long after the end of the novel Ishmael began to write the story of this voyage. I think he took other whaling voyages after the one recounted in the novel. 

The novel gives a snapshot of the nature of early nineteenth century capitalism in the contrast between Starbuck’s sense of the economic purpose of the voyage and Ahab’s quest for revenge. I find it interesting how Ishmael reflects on how he joined in the enthusiasm for the reward Ahab offered for the sighting of Moby Dick. 

Once again I ask, is Moby Dick a yacht rock novel? 

Next week: Please read Chapters 49-54, "The Hyena" through "The Town-Ho's Story."

Maybe NIght reminder and classical Christmas music

 

A reminder from Brian Dean of the RAW Semantics blog that Maybe Night is coming on Dec. 21 for all you Finnegans Wake/Robert Anton Wilson fans. Maybe Night information here, and also see my interview with Bobby Campbell.  Brian says, "Btw, if anyone wants a hi-res version (eg to print a greetings card for your grandma or local church): [see this link].  (Use your browser's controls to zoom & pan)."

Also, my latest Substack newsletter has a few music recommendations, for those of you who like the kind of old-fashioned Christmas music I like. (I listen every year to Handel's "Messiah," Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker," Renaissance Christmas music, Christmas carols from English cathedrals, etc.) My rationale for linking to it here is that Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea both loved classical music, so perhaps some of their fans might be  interested. 

Wayne Benner update

Former California prison inmate Wayne Benner is listed as a co-author of Timothy Leary's Terra II (which I will read soon) and was interviewed in the last Hilaritas Press podcast. 

Back in 2013, I reviewed his memoir Seven Shadows, and I expressed some skepticism about one of the incidents in the book. Here is part of what I wrote:

"The centerpiece of the book is an account of how he escaped from Folson Prison when he was being driven from the prison to a court date. In Benner's account, he overpowered the guard, took the guard's gun and drove the car away despite being in chains. He then evaded a police chase despite having to drive the car while still in chains and took a family hostage. The next day, he forced the family to drive him to an airport, where he planned to hijack an airplane but was surrounded and captured by police. He doesn't give a date for any of this, but the book says he was sentenced to an isolation cell as punishment in spring 1971, so it would have to be early 1971 or sometime in 1970.

"I could not find any articles about this when I searched Google News. The Wikipedia article on Folsom prison mentions several escapes, but not Benner's. Did it really happen? Maybe."

Via an anonymous comment posted this week at that original blog post, I now have a link to a newspaper article that confirms Benner's account.  I have updated the original blog post, but I thought a follow-up here would be a good idea, too. 

John Wisniewski interviews Nick Herbert

Nick Herbert 

Many Robert Anton Wilson fans will know about Nick Herbert, the physicist and author who is mentioned in the first Cosmic Trigger book and who wrote a popular introduction to quantum mechanics, Quantum Reality.  I have mentioned him many times at this blog. Herbert's own blog is called Quantum Tantra. 

John Wisniewski has done a number of interviews that have been published here. You can read interviews with David Halperin, Tea Krulos, Adam Gorightly and John Higgs. 

Mr. Wisniewski is a freelance writer who has written for L.A. Review of Books, AMFM magazine and Cultured Focus, among other publications. 

John Wisniewski: Nick, what did Robert Anton Wilson "steal" from you?

Nick Herbert: Writers like Bob are always searching for new ideas. And they will take them wherever they can get them. Hang out with a writer long enough and he/she will get them from you. When I heard that RAW had worked for Playboy in Chicago I asked him this question. Every month Playboy conducts an unprecedented massive experiment in sexual telepathy. For a whole month the centerfold gal has a million men masturbating to her image. As far as you know, does she experience anything different during Masturbation Month? Bob answered not that he was aware of.

A while later I was reading RAW's Schrǒdinger's Cat hot off the presses and ran across his character Carol Christmas who was a centerfold for Pussycat, a men's magazine like Playboy. During her month, she became sexually voracious and irresistible to men, a veritable sex goddess with all the complications that entailed. Ha, I thought, Bob stole my idea. And invented the Carol Christmas Effect.

JW: When and how did you meet Robert?

NH: I've already described how I met Bob thru an introduction in Berkeley from mathematician Saul-Paul Sirag from the Center for Study of Consciousness on Benvenue St. Saul-Paul had contributed a chapter to RAW's Cosmic Trigger and knew him pretty well.

JW: When you were searching for what quantum physics really was, were there those who suggested that you don't look into this?

NH: When Einstein came up with Special Relativity, it was said that only six people understood it. Certainly an underestimate. When the Irishman John Stewart Bell came up with his now famous quantum nonlocality theory in 1964, only SIX PEOPLE CARED. I was one of them. Most physicists who had heard of Bell's Theorem because it was a theorem about “reality” not about Theory and Experiment which are the meat and potatoes of “real physics”. Bell's Theorem was generally dismissed by everyone as “mere philosophy”. When my friend, physicist Heinz Pagels, showed me BT, published in an obscure new journal, I was fascinated and decided that Bell must be wrong. In my efforts to disprove him I managed to come up with the world's shortest proof of Bell's Theorem. My efforts in this direction also put me in touch with the other 5 people who cared about BT including physicist John Clauser whose efforts in doing and encouraging others to experiments inspired by BT led eventually to his receiving the 2002 Nobel Physics Prize along with Zeilinger and Aspect. By that time the number of people who cared about Bell's Theorem had immensely increased. Much of this story is related in David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics.

JW: Did you begin to experiment with mind altering substances during the 1960s? Did you see anything in this?

NH:  I first took acid in 1962 while a physics graduate student at Stanford. I was impressed with the sheer number of different states of consciousness I could intensely access without dying. Also that experience convinced me that consciousness was a much more fundamental mystery than physics and that conviction shaped the rest of my life. LSD was for me a gateway drug to several other mind-altering substances such as marijuana.

JW: How can we determine what Quantum Reality is?

NH: Quantum Reality is the ability to tell a plausible story about what is really happening in the world consistent with the highly accurate quantum mathematical formalism.

Quantum theory seems to describe the world in two different ways: a wave of possibility until it's measured and a particle when it's measured. The biggest problem in quantum physics is what is a measurement? What does it take to “collapse the wave function”?

Not all interactions achieve a collapse. A beam of light can bounce off mirrors, be divided in two by beam splitters, pass through a lens consisting of zillions of atoms and still remain a wave of possibility. But when it hits the back of your eye, it acts like a particle (photon). Lots of people have tried to investigate what it takes to make a measurement but so far no one has quite succeeded. Anyone who can solve “the measurement problem” will take a big step towards describing quantum reality.

JW: How did you feel about experimentation during the 1960's as far as opening the doors of consciousness?

NH: Ever eloquent Terence McKenna said it best: “Now even bad people can see God.”

For me these substances inspired a search for what I call quantum tantra, an intimate new connection with Nature accomplished not by chemistry but by (quantum) physics. 

This search inspired 50 years of poetry about what that connection might feel like but (so far) no hint of how to accomplish such a marvelous new union. Many of these poems have been published on my quantum tantra blog (under the “quantum tantra” tag). The two closest approximations to this vision might be “Opening Night” and “Elements of Tantra”  Much of my blog is focused on this search for a new way to connect with Nature.

JW: Are there any prominent figures that you met during the 60s and maybe 70s that you felt you learned something from?

NH:  I will stretch out that time span a bit to fit in a few people who were especially important in my life. Meeting and working with physicist John Clauser, who was certainly the most important moving force in exploring Bell's Theorem. Then meeting Greek-American physicist Demetrios Kalamadis who proposed a very clever faster-than-light signaling scheme that took a team of us months to refute was a very exciting time in my life.

I first met Sasha and Ann Shulgin at one of Bob Wilson's salons in Santa Cruz and subsequently attended many of their parties in Lafayette with my partner August O'Connor. Pihkal and Tihkal are certainly landmark books in any psychedelic library.

But as far as those who are exploring a really exciting edge, I would cite my friendship with Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of religious studies at Rice University in Houston, who has made a career of studying the Impossible: events both in the past and present that violate our sense of what can physically happen. Kripal (“Mutants and Mystics”) is interested in SuperNature, what we might call miracles. The best example of such impossibilities is the behavior of Saint Joseph of Copertino whose life is chronicled in detail by Michael Grosso in The Man Who Could Fly and other works. How impossible is this? A man who could consistently levitate over a period of 35 years.

Coincidentally, near the end of his life Joseph the gravity defier lived in a monastery not more than 100 miles from Galileo who was busy formulating the physics of gravity. Both men had been examined by the Inquisition, Galileo sentenced to house arrest and Joseph sent to obscure monasteries where his impossible antics would not attract public attention.

JW: Has your book  Quantum Reality become outdated?

NH: I think QR is still an accessible introduction to quantum theory and to the big problem of fashioning a quantum reality which gives us some story we can tell our kids about “what is really happening in the quantum world “, some sort of picture about what is really going on behind the mathematics.

Forty years since the publication of QR the quantum reality question remains conspicuously unsolved but there has been some progress.

First of all John Clauser and two of his colleagues received the Physics Nobel Prize in 2022 for their experimental work on Bell's Theorem.

Then there were a few more attempts (besides the eight I listed in QR) to solve the measurement problem (how quantum possibility turns into actuality) most notably the works of  Wojciech Zurek at Los Alamos and Oxford's Roger Penrose.

Zurek has carried out a long and ambitious study of realistic models of wave functions losing their coherence when interacting with complex environments. However, even though these scrambled waves can no longer interfere, they still remain mere possibilities and never collapse into actualities.

Penrose has speculated that Gravity collapses the wavefunction, that when a quantum system gets big enough it essentially collapses “under its own weight” but so far there exists no experimental evidence for this conjecture.

On a lighter tone, on the last page of Quantum Reality, I append a song “Bell's Theorem Blues”. Not so long ago I persuaded a local jazz group to perform BTB and it became part of a celebration in Belfast, Ireland (Bell's birthplace) to honor the fiftieth anniversary of his creation of this now famous theorem. Since Belfast has a law against naming streets after people they named a street after his theorem, probably the only street in the world so named. 

Yes, I believe that Quantum Reality is still a valuable introduction to quantum theory and to the difficulties we still face in trying to describe exactly what is going on in even the simplest of quantum measurements.

Maybe Night will be here soon!

In the latest Tales of Illuminatus newsletter, Bobby Campbell reminds Finnegans Wake fans  that Maybe Night is coming on Dec. 21, includng the live broadcast, above. 

More on Maybe Night here, and you can also see my recent  interview with Bobby. 

Other news and great art at the first link. 

A Google announcement mentions parallel universes

Many of you will be familiar with the concept of parallel worlds, from science fiction or perhaps from Robert Anton Wilson's  Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy.

Google put out an announcement this week on its new quantum computing chip,  Willow. I've  linked to it, including the discussion of Google's plans for a large scale quantum computer,  but here is the bit catching everyone's attention, particularly the last sentence:

"Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch."

More from Scott Sumner

Illustration for Scott Sumner's first Substack newsletter. "The Cezanne painting on top is the visual representation of how I think about happiness. It hangs in the National Gallery in DC, and also on the wall of my living room."

Yesterday's update to the Moby Dick online reading group quoted Scott Sumner's comments on Chapter 42 of the book, "The Whiteness of the Whale." If that made you curious about Sumner, here are a couple of pointers to more of his writings.

Another blogger, Dan Frank, has put together a directory of some of Scott Sumnen's best blog posts.  Note that there are many movie reviews. 

Here is Robert Anton Wilson on the importance of reading different points of view: "I also read at least one periodical every month by a political group I dislike -- to keep some sense of balance. The overwhelming stupidity of political movements is caused by the fact that political types never read anything but their own gang's agit-prop."

Here is Scott Sumner making a similar point, in a piece I found using Dan Frank's directory: "Read material on both sides of the ideological spectrum, indeed on many different sides.  I subscribe to three magazines, which represent three different ideological perspectives.  (NYR of Books, The Economist, Reason.)  I also spend a lot of time reading the NYT, WSJ, FT, WaPo, National Review, Bloomberg, South China Morning Post, Yahoo and lots of other outlets—mostly online.  Don’t let your ideological bias affect how you view a news outlet."

Scott launched his Pursuit of Happiness Substack in September and there are already a number of posts. He isn't charging subscriptions so far, so everything is free. 

'Moby Dick' online reading group, chapters 35-42

A monument to John Cleves Symmes Jr. and his crackpot hollow Earth theory, in Hamilton,  Ohio, released into the public domain by the photographer, Christopher Roehl, details here.  For how Symmes' crazy theory helped lead to Moby Dick, see below. I live in Ohio, but I haven't seen the monument yet;  Hamilton is kind of on the other side of the state from Cleveland. 

These chapters are a pretty impressive section of the novel. The chapter describing Captain Ahab's vendetta against the great white whale,  "The Quarterdeck," Chapter 36, is pretty dramatic stuff ("Drink, ye harponeers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow -- Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!").

But I have only so much time to do this blog post, so you'll have to forgive me if I write mostly about the "Whiteness of the Whale" chapter. It's mind blowing, and I'm going to quote a couple of writers I really like, Robert Anton Wilson and Scott Sumner. 

When I re-read Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger 2, one of my favorites of his books, some weeks ago, I was struck by how much he wrote about Moby Dick in the book. This next series of chapters is the appropriate place to bring that up, as  you will see. 

RAW gives one of the origin stories for the novel. 

In the CT2 chapter Cosmic Economics "A Great Saving of Stuff," Wilson writes about John Cleves Symmes Jr., who advocated a hollow Earth theory. He relates that Jeremiah Reynolds, influenced by Symmes' theories, led a sea expedition to Antarctica that "had to turn back before they were south of Chile" because of a mutiny. Wikipedia says this is not quite true, that  "Encountering much danger, the expedition reached the Antarctic shore and returned north, but at Valparaíso, Chile, the crew mutinied."

In any event, Wilson relates, "Reynolds consoled himself by writing a melodramatic and popular book about the cruise, including all the good sea-yarns he had heard along the way. Herman Melville read it and one chapter -- about a great white whale that had almost incredible cunning and good luck in escaping whalers again and again -- inspired Moby Dick."

In Wikipedia's telling, this was actually a magazine article: "The Knickerbocker of May 1839 published 'Mocha Dick: Or the White Whale of the Pacific', Reynolds' account of Mocha Dick, a white sperm whale off Chile who bedeviled a generation of whalers for thirty years before succumbing to one." And here is Wikipedia's article on Mocha Dick and Reynolds' piece about the whale. Wikipedia does indicate the piece influenced Melville.

Also in the same chapter of Cosmic Trigger 2, Wilson writes about Chapter 42 of Moby Dick, "The Whiteness of the Whale," in which Melville attempts to explain why whiteness is uniquely terrifying. 

Writes Wilson, "The whale, of course, symbolized all sorts of ghastly and mysterious aspects of the world, but mostly, I think, he symbolized the "colorless allcolor" of the materialist reality-tunnel which Melville hated, because it made art meaningless, and feared, because it might be true."

Here is the relevant passage at the very end of  Chapter 42: 

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

In another chapter of Cosmic Trigger 2, "The Square Root of Minus One & Other Mysteries," Wilson writes about his discovery of "the concept that we are living in a colorless world." Wilson explained that while colors seem real to him, "All of this is hallucination, according to physics. What is actually out there consists of clusters of colorless atoms and photons, and all the 'colors' are my brain's way of reacting to various wave-lengths of light carried by the photons bouncing off the atoms.

"Melville understood, and felt profoundly disturbed by this aspect of modern science. The phrase from Moby Dick that I mentioned earlier, 'the colorless allcolor of atheism,'  summarizes the horror that most artists feel at this bleached-out, emotionally empty view of a monochromatic world -- which also terrorized Blake and Dostoevsky and absolutely nauseated Whitman. (See his 'When I Heard The Learn'd Astronomer.') This colorless, seemingly 'abstract' world reappears in the pale dead white decor of some of the gloomier films of Bergman and Woody Allen." 

One of my favorite bloggers, Scott Sumner, quite recently wrote about Chapter 42 of Moby Dick. In a postscript to an unrelated article about monetary theory (Sumner is an economist who also has a wide range of interests) Sumner writes:

"Postscript: Off topic, but have you ever noticed how common it is to be thinking about something, and then a day or two later find the exact same idea being discussed in a novel you are reading? This occurred to me a few days after my clumsy attempt to express the depressing thought of a colorless universe devoid of life. BTW, stories with this sort of existential dread are much scarier than tales of ghosts or vampires, which I suspect explains the popularity of Lovecraft among intellectuals.

"This morning I read chapter 42 of Moby Dick, entitled The Whiteness of the Whale. In the chapter’s final paragraph, Melville evokes a colorless inhuman universe much more effectively than I ever could:

[Sumner quotes the last paragraph I just quoted in italics, then adds:]

“ 'all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot' I’d cut off my right leg and replace it with a whalebone if I could write like that.

"I certainly won’t claim this is the best paragraph ever written, but:

"Which novel is better than Moby Dick?

"Which chapter in Moby Dick is better than The Whiteness of the Whale?

"Which paragraph in Chapter 42 is better than this one?

"None of those are easy questions to answer."

See also Scott Sumner's piece "The tambourine men" which compares Herman Melville and Bob Dylan. ["Even though I am generally more receptive to the visual arts, Melville and Dylan are my two favorite American artists. The next eight on my top ten list would all be architects or film directors."]  It includes this observation about Melville: "He surely understood that in Moby Dick he had written a masterpiece.  I have trouble even imagining how disappointing it would be to see this sort of novel flop with both readers and critics."

Here are the lyrics for the song "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," which includes mentions of a "Captain Arab." 

Off topic, but in "The tambourine men," Sumner also tosses off this observation:

"PS. Someone with more knowledge of music than I have should do a post on how pop music blew up in 1965. Major albums that came out in 1966 (Revolver, Pet Sounds, Blonde on Blonde, Aftermath, etc.) would have been inconceivable just two years earlier. In 1965, you have musicians starting to adopt the attitude that would eventually lead to punk (in songs like "My Generation," "Satisfaction", "Get Off of My Cloud," "Maggie’s Farm," "Highway 61"). You have the beginnings of the sort of clever wordplay (and intentional misspellings) that would later be associated with rap ("Subterranean Homesick Blues"), and a lot of other interesting experiments. Has pop ever evolved so much in such a short time, either before or since 1965?"

Revolver is my favorite Beatles album and is arguably the best rock music album of all time.  As much as I love RAW, it's hard to keep up with everything, and he was arguably a bit oblivious to what was going on in popular music in the mid-1960s. Robert Shea was really more of a Beatles fan. Dylan said of Elvis Presley, “Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.” People following rock music in the 1960s must have had a similar feeling of revelation. 

Next week: Please read Chapters 43-48, "Hark" through "The First Lowering."

Steve Fly (Pratt) releases Shakespeare album

 The latest album released on Bandcamp by Steve "Fly" Pratt is As You Like It, inspired by the Shakespeare play of the same name. 

At Bandcamp, Steve explains:

"This suite of bespoke music for Shakespeare's pastoral comedy play: As You Like It, is made for soundtracking the performance LIVE. Together with The Shakespeare Performance Workshop, directed by William Sutton, this DJ feels fortunate to be invited to contribute and get stuck into the theatrical treat.

"The play is scheduled for 2 performances at the Mullholland Academy 16/17th. And 2 at Mikes Badhuis Theatre: 18/19th December. Tickets are available. [Both locations in Amsterdam]

"released December 7, 2024."

Saturday links

 

Via X.com, caption, "An example of an official OHO card handed-out by Robert Anton Wilson during the 1970s. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives." From the account of Grouchogandhi, K.S.P.

"Noam Chomsky Has Been Proved Right."

Harvard just had a G.I. Gurdjieff conference. You can see what the program was. 

New Neal Stephenson interview. 

TV adaptation for Alan Moore's new novel. 

Science breakthroughs of 2024. 

Fortune tellers living in a Massachusetts city or town must obtain a license.  A one-year residency is required. 

My Bryan Caplan podcast

When Bryan Caplan, the economist and blogger, came out with a book on self-help, Self-Help Is Like a Vacccine, I wrote to him in connection with my side project, Bryan Caplan's Life Advice, and he suggested we do a podcast. So we did. It took two tries to overcome technical difficulties, but the result has been released.

This was my first attempt at a podcast on YouTube, and I will upgrade my presentation if I get the opportunity to try again, but I did work hard to prepare my questions and overall I was happy with the result. Somehow the podcast has a couple of inside jokes for people who read this blog. One of the important parts of the podcast for me was to ask Bryan about Epicureanism, and without any intention on my part, I start the discussion 23 minutes into the podcast. There's also a part where I ask about Bryan's habit of making public bets on the outcome of public-policy issues, and Bryan mentions he's won 23 our of 23 so far.

Bryan has a Substack.  Here is a post on other podcasts about the book and an audiobook version. 

Postscript: If the discussion on Epicureanism makes anyone curious about the subject, Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life by  Emily Austin is considered the best modern treatment of the subject by many people, including me. Austin is a philosophy professor at Wake Forest University who focuses on ancient Greek philosophy, but her book is aimed at general readers. 

'Tales of Illuminatus' online serial ends soon

While I always enjoy getting the Tales of Illuminatus Substack newsletter from Bobby Campbell, I have not mentioned the last couple of weekly issues because I had trouble finding news in them which I hadn't already mentioned here.

But that's not true of today's issue, which says that the ongoing online serialization of the first issue will end soon, and that Bobby is undecided whether to continue online serialization next year's upcoming second issue. Here's the scoop from the newsletter issued today, don't forget you can subscribe and get this in your own email inbox:

"Only 2 more weeks of thrilling TOI updates remain in our web serialization of Tales of Illuminatus! #1, at which point we’ll be hunkering down into a much needed production hiatus, so we can focus on delivering issue #2 ASAP.

"I don’t think we’ll run completely radio silent, but rather will update as things occur, rather than on our strict weekly schedule.

"I’m going to keep the web version of issue #1 up until the end of the year, and then clear it all away to begin fresh with issue #2.

"I’m a little bit up in the air about doing the weekly serialization for issue #2. Most of the feedback I’ve received suggests readers prefer just reading the whole issue at once. Which makes sense! If there are people that enjoy reading week to week maybe make some noise so I know you’re there, otherwise I may try something new moving forward."

Copies of the first issue remain available for order, in paper (I'd hurry) and digital editions; please see the link to the newsletter for more information. 

What I read last month

November's reading, some of it in connection with being a judge for the Prometheus Award and the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award:

Singularity Sky, Charles Stross. Far future space opera from 2004, a lot of cool artificial intelligence stuff. I really enjoyed it. 

The Norman Conquest, Marc Morris. I often buy cheap history books when they go on sale for Kindle, and occasionally I find time to read them; this was good, well written and well-researched. Did you know that 10% of the population in Anglo Saxon England were slaves? The Normans get bad press, largely deservedly so, but one of the things the Normans did after conquering England was to abolish the slave trade. 

Gangster Hunters: How Hoover's G-men Vanquished America's Deadliest Public Enemies, John Oller. All about John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, etc., but also the FBI agents who tracked them down. A new book, hard to put down, suitable for people on your holiday shopping list who like true crime. The real Dillinger bears little resemblance to the character in Illuminatus! I interviewed the author and wrote a newspaper article. 

A Talent for Murder, Peter Swanson. A few years ago, I read The Kind Worth Killing by Swanson, and it was one of the best crime fiction novels I'd ever read. This is the third book featuring the characters Henry Kimball and Lily Kintner. 

Machine Vendetta, Alastair Reynolds. I've been hearing for years about Reynolds, supposedly a master of the new British space opera, and this new novel did turn out to be a good read. I will try to read more of his. 

Earth to Moon, Moon Unit Zappa. A memoir, mostly about growing up in Frank Zappa's household. Candid and fascinating. Here is a sentence about books in Frank Zappa's personal library that might interest some of you: "The books belonging to my father have strange words like 'Sufism' and 'Kabbalah' or long titles like Scotch Rite Masonry Illustrated or Science: The Wealth of Nations or Science: Novum Organum."

Jechidah reviews 'The Bumper Book of Magic'

At the Jechidah blog, Apuleius Charlton reviews The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan and Steve Moore, and recommends it to everyone.

When I am trying to do a summary of a fairly long blog post, I sometimes struggle to find an excerpt that accurately conveys the whole. But I think this sentence gets the point across: "It may be the best single expression of magic in theory and practice extant."

The review goes into detail about the different sections of the book, such as "Things to Do on a Rainy Day" and “Old Moore’s Lives of the Great Enchanters.” Read the whole thing. 

'Moby Dick' online reading group chapters 21 – 34

 

AI illustration by Paula Galindo. 

By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger 

This week: Chapters 21 “– 34, Going Aboard” through “The Cabin-Table”

Chapter 21 puts us right at the borderline of land and sea. Ishmael and Queequeg arrive just before 6 a.m. in the misty dawn to board the ship for departure. They meet resistance at this membrane from Elijah, a Prophet in Moby Dick as well as in the Bible. Two chapters earlier, Elijah had given them a vague and sinister warning about signing up to ship out with Captain Ahab. The Pequod receives onboard her final supplies before casting off on a three year excursion to hunt whales. “It was now clear sunrise.” The voyage begins on Christmas day.

Melville had an excellent education growing up in New York City in privileged circumstances. He was well-read and well-traveled. Moby Dick seems an early attempt to write the Great American novel while simultaneously expanding out to encompass the entire world. On another level, it reads as a profound treatise on the inner life – magic, spirituality and mysticism; framed as the classic model of a journey into Unknown territory encountering monsters, Leviathans and who knows what other challenges to their sanity sailing the seas of the Unconscious.

The Bible appears a transparent major influence in Moby Dick. We’ve already been through a sermon on Jonah and the Whale in a church modelled off a whaling vessel. The Biblical Ishmael is considered the ancestor of Arabs and a Muslim Prophet. His name means “God has hearkened.” Ishmael reputedly lived to the age of 137. 137 = “a receiving; the Qabalah.” Ishmael adds to 151. 151 = “TETRAGRAMMATON OF THE GODS is one TETRAGRAMMATON”, which seems another way of saying “God has hearkened.”

151 also = “The Fountain of Living Waters (Jeremiah xvii 13).” Of course, our adventure takes place in the watery world. The “Fountain of Living Waters” will turn up literally, in the eponymous chapter 41, “Moby Dick,” when Ishmael mentions the story of the Arethusa fountain in Syracuse, Sicily “whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land.” Arethusa is a nymph in Greek mythology who symbolizes “the untamable essence of the feminine nature.”

My understanding holds that Kabballah came into existence through esoteric Hebrew scholars and mystics searching to unlock or decode secrets found in the Bible. Melville seems to have known as much about the Bible as Aleister Crowley. It follows that Kabballah turns up in Moby Dick as part of the Biblical influence. The very first thing we read in the novel suggests this:

“Etymology

(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.)

[The pale Usher – threadbare in coat, heart, body and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.]

Usher is derived from Ush meaning “to enter into.” In the Bible, ushers were doorkeepers serving the temple. Right from the get-go we’re told we’re in School. His coat, heart, body and brain suggest the four common neurocircuits. Reminded of his own mortality can suggest working on higher consciousness (via lexicons and grammars) to survive that mortality. However, he’s already dead. The initial communication in Moby Dick comes from a dead guy. 

The “queer handkerchief” with all the flags perhaps foretells the international composition of the crew of the Pequod which gets delineated in chapter 40.

The first alternate language spelling of WHALE is given in Hebrew as the letters Tau and Nun final to give “Tan” from Job 7:12 “Am I a sea, or a whale, that thou settest watch over me?”

Tau = The Universe and Nun = Death in the Tarot.

In the next section, “Extracts” which consists of various quotes and accounts of whales throughout history, literature and mythology, the 11th quote is from Rabelais, a noted Cabalist and major influence on Aleister Crowley and James Joyce among others (the influence of The Whale in Finnegans Wake will be examined later). The 13th quote comes from Spenser’s The Fairie Queen, a classic of magick literature.

In this week’s chapters, after the Pequod sets sails, we encounter several new characters and learn more about others. Also, we have discussion about metaphysical aspects of life on the ocean and the endeavor of whale hunting. Chapter 23 briefly tells of Bulkington and his spiritual relationship to the sea where we are told the highest truth resides. Chapter 24 gives a vigorous defence of whaling by Ishmael who invokes various historical characters to support his argument. This continues into chapter 25 where we find some discussion of the magical act of anointing in relation to the coronation of kings and queens. Ishmael wonders if the act of anointing might apply to the inner as well as the outer.

Chapters 26 and 27, both titled “Knights and Squires” introduces us to the Pequod’s senior crew, Starbuck, Stubb and Flask in that order. The chapter title suggests the story of Don Quixote who imagined he was a knight errant. Cervantes, the author of said story, has his “stumped and paupered arm” clothed with “leaves of finest gold” by God at the end of chapter 26, Starbuck’s chapter. John Bunyan, author of the spiritual classic The Pilgrim’s Progress gets mentioned in the same breath. The Pilgrim’s Progress tells of journey into the Unknown in search of communion with God. I read it for the first time recently based on a favorable mention by Crowley combined with finding a copy for a buck at a thrift store. I highly recommend it if one is able to get past the overtly Christian trappings. It seems relevant to understanding one metaphor behind Moby Dick. Andrew Jackson, the 7th President of the United States gets mentioned heroically in the same breath as the other two, but I have no idea why?

Stubb appears next in the chain of command at the beginning of chapter 27. His many confrontations with death by getting close up to the monsters he hunts “converted the jaws of death into an easy chair.” Coincidentally, this also occurs with bardo training which confronts death in less dangerous situations. Just as Starbuck is an inveterate coffee drinker, Stubb likes to constantly smoke. Last, but not least, we meet Flask. These three, Starbuck, Stubb and Flask command the smaller boats that go after whales when spotted. They comprise the “Knights” in Melvilles medieval metaphor. Next come the “Squires,” the men who steer the smaller boats and help with the harpooning. They work in close conjunction with the Knights. Queequeg is Starbuck’s squire. Tashtego, a Native American, squires for Stubb. He’s compared to “the Prince of the Powers of Air” which seems an analogy straight out of the Cabala. Daggoo, a gigantic African native “was the Squire of little Flask who looked like a chess-man beside him.” Daggoo gets compared to Ahasuerus, an ancient Persian king who appears in the Bible. 

Chapter 28 brings us to the book’s central human character, the enigmatic, mysterious, mythopoeic, strangely marked and scarred Captain Ahab. He tends to be regarded as the personification of obsession and evil like his Biblical counterpart, Ahab the King of Israel who “did evil in the sight of the Lord above all that were before him” (1 Kings 16:30), but he’s a much more complex character. A couple or so chapters later we’re told he has a conscience. In this chapter we find out that a certain whale chomped off his left leg. He didn’t replace it with a wooden peg leg, but with ivory carved from the jawbone of a sperm whale. In one sense, Ahab is part whale. Counter to his dour disposition, he’s observed, more than once, almost smiling. 

Shakespeare seems up there with the Bible as a profound influence on The Whale. Chapter 31, “Queen Mab” gives a little tour of Stubb’s subconscious life when he describes a dream he had to Flask of Ahab kicking him with his ivory leg. No mention of Queen Mab in this short chapter but those familiar with Shakespeare and people who know how to google know that she is a fairy in Romeo and Juliet, a miniature creature who rides her chariot over sleeping humans helping them “give birth” to dreams.  

Chapter 32 “Cetology” provides a literary taxonomy of whales. Ironically, the Sperm Whale was once known by the English as the Trumpa. Sperm whales, like Moby Dick are the largest whales. Their name is a misnomer having nothing to do with male reproductive cells, but rather named for a waxy substance called spermaceti used in ointments, textiles, cosmetics and industrial lubricants. At the chapter’s end, Melville declares that he’s leaving his cetological system unfinished. He justifies this then reveals the scope of what he’s trying to accomplish: 

“For small erections may be finished by their architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from completing anything. This whole book is but a draught – nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience.”

Next week: please read Chapters 35-42, "The Mast-Head" through "The Whiteness of the Whale."

A particularly dire 23

The band Chicago, back in the day. Public domain photo, more information). 

Many RAW fans have picked up on his fascination with 23 and use the number for screen names on the Internet. I've used the number sometimes, too, but one thing I've noticed that is the 23 often crops up in rather dire ways.

I recently read an interesting new book called Gangster Hunters by John Oller about famous 1930s gangsters such as John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd (here is an article I wrote about the book) and I noticed some 23s in that book, connected with serious events (for example, Bonnie and Clyde were shot to death on May 23, 1934). 

I recently ran across a pretty bad 23 I hadn't noticed before.

One of the first rock concerts I ever attended, back in the 1970s, was when I went with friends to see the band Chicago in Oklahoma City. (I still like early Chicago, but not the later version). When I saw the band, it had a guitar player named Terry Kath, and I remember reading about a couple of years later that ha had died of a gunshot wound.

I looked up Kath on Wikipedia the other day, and here are the events of May 23, 1978: 

"Kath enjoyed target shooting and by 1978 was regularly carrying guns. On Monday, January 23, after a party at the home of roadie and band technician Don Johnson, in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, Kath began to play with his guns. He spun his unloaded .38 revolver on his finger, put it to his temple, and pulled the trigger. Johnson warned Kath several times to be careful. Kath picked up a semi-automatic 9 mm pistol and, leaning back in a chair, said to Johnson, 'Don't worry about it ... Look, the clip is not even in it'. His last words were, 'What do you think I'm gonna do? Blow my brains out?' To calm Johnson's concerns, Kath showed him the empty magazine. Kath then replaced the magazine in the gun, put the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. Apparently unbeknownst to Kath, the gun had a round in the chamber. He died instantly from the gunshot, eight days before his 32nd birthday."

The event was so traumatic the band considered disbanding. According to Wikipedia, Doc Severinsen, leader of the old "Tonight Show" band, (older people like me will remember him) helped persuade the band to keep going.