nick black on Illuminatus!, James Joyce and his novel, midnight's simulacra

nick black 

nick black is an Atlanta based software writer, engineer and writer who in early 2024 published his first novel, midnight's simulacra, influenced by James Joyce's Ulysses and also Wilson and Shea's Illuminatus! I thought the book was good, also interesting and original, see my earlier review.  As I mentioned in the review, readers familiar with Ulysses and Illuminatus! will notice many references in black's novel, and there are many other references and sources; I caught a reference to Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, for example. 

As you can see from the interview, the protagonist of midnight's simulacra, Sherman Spartacus Katz, is largely based on black, just as Stephen Dedalus was a version of James Joyce. 

I originally read midnight's simulacra as an ebook and then sent off for a paper copy; nick published it himself, although the publisher is listed as Gold & Appel Publishing. The book can be purchased directly from the official website in all of the usual formats (buying a paper copy from there gets you an autographed inscription) but you can also get it from Amazon. The paper copies are the preferred edition (they have illustrations, for example) but the ebook works fine and costs a manageable $9.  

As you can see from his Goodreads postings, nick is a busy book consumer who reads widely, although his main interests appear to be heavy-duty modern fiction and technical works. At some point, I would like to catch up with him -- I haven't gotten around yet to reading Pynchon or David Foster Wallace or Cormac McCarthy. (Although nick reads quite a bit of science fiction, he generally does not hand out rave reviews for SF; hilariously, Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, gets just two stars and this review: "some good lines, an interesting idea or two, but most of this was just abjectly silly, and heinlein's crotchety old manism is hard to take."  I find nick's reviews more useful than the ones from people who routinely pass out four and five stars).  Aside from being busy with various software and engineering projects, Mr. black also is a book collector and information about his literary interests can be gleaned from his book collection documents; see this posting on Reddit and also this section of his official website.

By the way, "nick black" is the official spelling, and nick considers getting that name officially recognized as canon by the Microsoft Corporation as one of his best achievements, see below. He also has succeeded in getting another corporate behemoth, Amazon, to accept his spelling. 

Hoping to learn more about nick and his book, I asked for an interview. I think this is one of the most interesting interviews I have ever published here. 

RAWIllumination: Could you begin by telling us a little bit "about the author" and introduce yourself?

nick black: Katz is quite autobiographical. Born in Atlanta, GA 1980, the child of evangelical Pennsylvania transplants. My parents were more religious than most of our neighbors, but despised the whole Southern thing. We started Catholic, but ended up in a non-denominational evangelical parish with services eating five hours every Sunday. I was prohibited secular music, movies, or television, but books were open season, thank goodness. When it came time to pick colleges, it was either the Ivy League for competitive literature, or Georgia Tech for computer science. I looked at the debt I'd go into studying lit at Harvard, decided I could read books on my own, and headed down to Atlanta.

I dropped out at 19 due to fucking things up, and was hired by a local startup to lead their development efforts. Spent five years there honing skills and developing discipline. Came back to GT at the age of 23, still working eighty hours a week, and secured undergraduates in CS and Math. Developed a nasty methamphetamine addiction which would persist for a decade, but which allowed for tremendous study and effort. Ducked back in and got masters in CS and Nuclear Engineering while doing my second startup. Went to Texas and worked for a young NVIDIA on their compilers team. Built up a fairly serious drug distribution enterprise over this time, and funded my third startup with the proceeds. Was raided by the DEA 2013-05-13 after an ex dropped a dime. Not much was found in my condo--thankfully--but it forced a reevaluation of my life to that point.

Since then, I've worked for Google in NYC and Microsoft in ATL, and done a shitton of open source work (I'm a Debian Developer, if you're familiar with Linux). I still code for at least eight to ten hours a day. Married an incredible woman in 2015, but got divorced in 2020. No children. My code and my writing are my legacy.

I'm quite loud, enjoy making outlandish statements and agitprop, haven't driven in twenty-plus years, and am financially independent thanks to the good life of software engineering.

RAWIllumination: What sort of readers are you hoping to reach with midnight's simulacra?

nick black: My goal was to write a Serious Novel about engineering and engineers. I wanted to reach people like me, ones who lived in the world of science but drew their culture and insights from the world of literature. I wanted to tell a story of someone like myself, an extroverted, loud, slightly oblivious and easily agitated but fundamentally kind engineer; I don't like the stereotypes of engineers and scientists one typically sees. I wanted to write a book that serious scientists could read and be satisfied by, where everything could be backed up by real research.

I furthermore had spent some significant time reverse engineering the (still) classified SILEX process of uranium enrichment via laser, and wanted to put that information out there.

More than anything, I had always told myself that I would one day write novels, and wanted to see whether I had it in me. I left a 650k/year job to finish it: I knew I was one of the best in the world at low-level, high-performance UNIX programming, but had no idea whether I could write a good book. I never expected the book to sell many copies, and it's actually done better than I had hoped.

An illustration by Justin Barker for midnight's simulacra that did not wind up in the book after the scene it illustrates was cut from the book's final version. 

RAWIllumination: I found the website for  the artist that you used to illustrate your book, Justin Barker. Why did you decide to include illustrations, and how did you select Barker?

nick black: i had access to a phenomenal artist in Mr.  Barker, and i asked him to do a drawing or two for the website.  i thought the results so good that i asked for a full set of  illustrations. i thought he did a fantastic job. i know  illustrations have passed out of common use, and the  "illustrated by" might draw some sideeye when people are looking  at the book, but call it a throwback to a more elegant era.

Illuminatus comics from Nick Black's book collection

RAWIllumination: Can you describe how you discovered Illuminatus! and what the effect of the work was on you? 

nick black: Oh, man. I was working at Media Play (a music/book/movies/software retailer), and someone came in looking for it in 1997. I special-ordered it for them, as we didn't have it on hand, and asked "is it good? I've never heard of it." The customer with no small mystery looked me in the eye and said, "hold on to your pineal gland." I found this sufficiently weird and foreboding to justify ordering myself a copy. The summer after I graduated high school, I was doing software development in a downtown Atlanta tower, riding MARTA a half hour each way and smoking cigarettes in their pleasant garden. I brought it with me for a week, devouring it on the train and outside.

I thought it absolutely mesmerizing. It presented a completely different philosophy than anything I'd come across until then. It fused mysticism with engineering in a way that seemed, if not plausible, at least interesting. It was esoteric but not obstructed--you could look up all the references, especially using a burgeoning internet (this was the summer of 1998).

I had two years prior found a Libertarian newspaper accidentally, with a lengthy opinion piece on legalizing drugs. Until that time, the idea of legalizing drugs had literally never occurred to me (much as I had assumed, younger and dumber, that it was against the law to be an atheist, and was surprised and shaken to find otherwise). Illuminatus! was like that, in that I was suddenly presented with ideas and systems of ethics that diverged so completely from the norm that one had to take serious time to absorb them. Yet this was clearly no crackpot author; the book was rich with reference to serious literature and respect for science. Joe Malik being a fallen Catholic-turned-engineer appealed to me, though not so much as the magnificent Hagbard Celine, who has remained a role model all my life. More than anything else, the idea of taking a slightly bitchy minor Greek goddess as one's deity and inspiration was marvelously out there.

I have called myself (and voted as) a Libertarian since finding that newpaper in 1996, and have called myself (and prayed as) a Discordian since finding that book in 1998. I've pressed it on at least twenty people, and gone through at least five personal copies (I reread it at least once a year, and have long stretches memorized). It cemented my beliefs in personal liberty, personal responsibility, the lifelong quest for learning, and doing all of this in an absurd and hostile universe. It gave me Eris, the goddess who dwells inside me and serves as a focus and justification for my efforts, my toil, my failures and successes. I consider the most important paragraph in that book to be:

 “Hagbard,” George protested disgustedly. “Are you telling me Eris is real? Really real and not just an allegory or symbol? I can’t buy that any more than I can believe Jehovah or Osiris is really real.”

 But Hagbard answered very solemnly, “When you’re dealing with these forces or powers in a philosophic and scientific way, contemplating them from an armchair, that rationalistic approach is useful. It is quite profitable then to regard the gods and goddesses and demons as projections of the human mind or as unconscious aspects of ourselves. But every truth is a truth only for one place and one time, and that’s a truth, as I said, for the armchair. When you’re actually dealing with these figures, the only safe, pragmatic, and operational approach is to treat them as having a being, a will, and a purpose entirely apart from the humans who evoke them. If the Sorcerer’s Apprentice had understood that, he wouldn’t have gotten into so much trouble.”

Everything is true in some way, false in some way, and true and false in some way. This becomes clearer to me with each day.

Plus it was FUNNY.

I stopped smoking cigarettes 136 days ago, but sure wish I could light one up in honor of old Robert Anton Wilson right now. What a guy.

RAWIllumination: Why did you decide to model your novel after Ulysses? Were you trying to do for Atlanta what Joyce did for Dublin?

nick black: Because Ulysses was long my favorite book (as it clearly was one of RAW's), but mostly because it gave me a framework from which I could hang my story. In short, cowardice.

I hoped to tell a story of Atlanta, but knew I wouldn't have the depth of Joyce's Dublin. With that said, I did very much have in my mind the low opinion held by most of the nation for the Deep South, and wanted to make it plain that, just like California, or New York, or Ohio, we have our dullards and mehums and neophobes, but are also contributing that rare one percent of human talent. As Smokey the Bear says, don't shit in the woods -- I live here!

RAWIllumination: Ulysses is a famously difficult book. Your book "can be a nontrivial read," as you yourself say. You made a decision to have hardcore engineering and science passages, with lots of formulas. (At one point when I was frustrated, I went back and re-read the passage in the "Invocation" allowing readers to skip a few paragraphs if necessary, so I decided I could skim the bits I didn't get and just see what I COULD get from the book). There are other writers who have lots of technical stuff in their works -- Neal Stephenson and Richard Powers come to mind -- but they also try to make it more approachable for people without a technical background. Why did you decide to take the approach you did?

nick black: Four reasons: one, as you say, other people try to make it more approachable. if you want that, there are plenty of authors providing it. the science fiction i enjoy the most is "hard" scifi, particularly Greg Egan, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Fred Hoyle.

Fiction pitched at the expert is rare: it sells fewer books, and if you know expert level things, you can generally make more money practicing them than writing =]. i wanted my fiction book to still be an engaging bit of nonfiction, even for the expert.

Secondly, once again: cowardice. when i was stuck, or when i felt something was weak, i could spergily fall back to spewing hard technical data. i won't do it again in any further writing.

Third: it is a book about engineers, who by definition went to engineering school. engineering school is kinda fundamentally different from other majors. i talk to people from other schools, and they're like, "yeah we had a great discussion in class about [whatever]." We had very few discussions in engineering school, because it's understood that you are a worthless, brainless, skillfree piece of shit, and have nothing to add. The majority of people are chronically behind things. There's a constant sense of fear and loathing. even if you're feeling confident going into, say, an electromagnetics test, the prof can choose a problem that requires some weird type of diffeq solution, perhaps not even with intentional malice, and, whoops, that's a C for the semester. I've gone into a classroom and come out understanding nothing more than when I went in more times than i can count. You put on a brave face, and submit, and when you draw the occasional say 8 on an exam you exclaim "Allah, the All-Powerful, has fucked me again!" and drink. i wanted people to feel a little bit of that =].

I tried to ensure you could skip most of that and still follow the plot and characters without trouble. at the same time, there are lots of secrets and details in those sections for the people who closely read. the correlated concurrent development of a thermonuclear explosion, a cancer, and a human child is something i'm particularly proud of, and i really like the playful alliteration on p.361.

Four: i was often writing about forbidden knowledge. You've gotta give the details for such to establish street cred.

I'm glad i typed all that out. i might put it on my site.

RAWIllumination: As I understand it, you got permission to take six months off from work at Microsoft so you could write the book. Can you give us a taste of what that conversation was like?

nick black: I can give you the exact mail I sent. I would prefer that this not be reproduced, though i guess it's no big deal. It's kinda bombastic but that's how shit went down at the MSFT. I was pleased with getting this, though i thought getting my name officially lowercased in the company directory was a greater achievement. that involved fifty+ emails and three years.

[Editor's note: I did read the email, and in fact Nick carefully listed many arguments in favor of his request, not the least that he pledged to still work about ten hours a week during the six months of leave, and made other promises to avoid leaving Microsoft in the lurch. -- Tom]

RAWIllumination: Do you have other works of fiction in the works, or did  you have to set that aside to concentrate on your "day job" for a bit? 

Nick Black: i am unemployed at the moment! i do some consulting now and again, but am kinda living a post-dayjob life. I wrote about 200 pages of another novel and then put it aside. I might pick it back up. iIve got another planned which I've not yet started.

I'm working on a textbook, High-Performance Systems Programming. I designed a high-temperature filament dryer for 3dprinting that got picked up by CrowdSupply (https://dankdryer.com/). I spent most of the past four months studying electronics. i hope to start on the next novel, hesitantly titled Infernal Columns, RSN. If that one goes out and doesn't see some more pickup, i'll probably call it a day, fictionwise. The money isn't an issue, but i don't want to write stuff that nobody's reading.

Page from nick's copy of Finnegans Wake

RAWIllumination: As my readership has many Joyce fans, tells us about your "signed kinda beaten up first edition of Finnegans Wake."

Nick Black: hahahaha, it's got some fairly serious water damage in the back, serious enough that no real collector/library would want it anyway. i keep it in an airtight box in an attempt to keep it from developing mold or spreading said mold in a great bibliocide.

it's cool to own, but you can only look at a signature or even rub it on your testicles so many times, you know? but i got it at an excellent price, a gift to myself after finishing my masters.

RAWIllumination.net: Robert Anton Wilson told his friend Eric Wagner that Eric should read Ulysses 40 times, how many times have you read  it? Do you have advice to people on how to read it when you are recommending it?

nick black: So a reread in my experience usually jumps around a good bit. i have read the lengthy Shakespeare argument of Stephen Daedalus  in its entirety exactly once and don't expect to do so again. i  likewise tend to skip the early elements of Nausicaa. the beginning and end of Oxen of the Sun are not really meaningfully read IMHO. With that said, i'd read the book at least five times through by the end of high school, by which time i'd memorized most of "Proteus", having read it at least a hundred times. Remember, compile times were generally much longer then =].

My advice is: do not bother with annotations the first time, but *do* read a quick summary of each chapter before and after you read it. Let things flow. Joyce does not expect you (the educated but not expert reader) to understand everything. at times he doesn't expect you to understand much of anything. If you were plopped into somebody's brain, able to sense their thoughts as they rose to the surface, how much would you understand? Not too much, for any interesting brain. Sometimes he is drilling this fact into you. There's a reason why you get two unexceptional (language-wise) chapters, then slapped in the face with "ineluctable modality of the visible". You're *supposed* to ask "what the fuck?" and angrily claim that you're an educated reader and ought be able to understand everything you come across. No! he is taking that away from you, and it's a critical part of the form.

i do not claim to understand a single page of Finnegans Wake, which i like much less than Ulysses.

Portrait of the Artist is like any number of books that came before it. Ulysses is an experiment and a revolution because it is not, and you have to accept that it is not, or you're gonna have a bad time. if you go in expecting to treat it like a standard novel, reading it for a ten-question fill-in-the-blank quiz to be administered at the beginning of class, you failed before you started. 

There's shit in my book that no one without serious research in the subject is going to "understand". that's intentional. you ought feel at times buffeted by waves of uncertainty. hence the "invocation", which it pleased me to hear you cite regarding skipping some paragraphs.

RELATED LINKS

Official midnight's simulacra page 

nick black's website, dankwiki

Read part one of the novel

Danktech videos

Dankblog

self-publishing and nuclear secrets (Interesting background on the novel). 

TECHNICAL NOTE

Some of you may care, maybe some of you like computers, too. An interesting feature of the book is that it has sentences in many different languages, using fonts for the characters used by the original language.  The book's credits note that it was "Created on a Debian Linux workstation using exclusively Free Software (git, Vim, LuaTEX, Memoir, GNU Make, polyglossia, CircuiTikZ, PyMOL, and GIMP) and free fonts (Gentium Book Plus,Kanit, Noto, Hack, and Symbola)."

nick comments: i put a lot of effort into formatting and the way i  did footnotes. my girlfriend was yelling at me all the while, saying "if LaTeX is causing you such problems, why don't you use Word like everyone else?" and "no one is going to care whether you have the Belarusian!" to which i replied, "because LaTeX is how serious work is done, and i can fix it if i need to, and it'll look unbelievable when it's done" and "i will care."

Some of nick black's library. The cabinet with the blue light on the right has autographed books and rarities, "a signed Illuminatus!, a signed Schrodinger's Cat, and the original three paperbacks of Illuminatus (as opposed to the omnibus edition) lurk within."

Note: In the interview, sometimes nick capitalized "I" sometimes he used a lower case letter, I decided to go with both. 

What I read last month

Waffle Irons vs. the Horde, Dr. Insensitive Jerk. Oddball science fiction novel submitted for consideration for the Prometheus Award. Quite funny in places, original, also with an edge of cruelty.

midnight's simulacra, nick black. My review is here. My interview with nick will run shortly on this blog. 

The McCartney Legacy, Volume 1: 1969-73, Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair. Very detailed chronicle of the first part of Paul McCartney's solo career, covering the first five albums, e.g McCartney, Ram, Wild Life, Red Rose Speedway and Band on the Run. A second volume is also out, apparently more are on the way. I wrote about the book here. Paul also has announced he is coming out with his own history of Wings. 

Straight Outta Dublin, Eric Wagner. I was one of the volunteer copyeditors for the book, so I read it all the way through. It's about James Joyce's influence on Robert Anton Wilson and also includes a substantial essay from Michael Johnson. You'll learn a lot when the book is published by Hilaritas Press. Rasa never announces a publication date and puts books out when they are ready, but I am guessing sooner rather than later. 

Invasion! Rome Against the Cimbri, 113–101 BC, Philip Matyszak. I read a lot of Roman and classical history, and although I focus on the later Roman Empire, I read a lot about other periods, too. One thing that surprised me was evidence that the Cimbri were Celts, i.e. more likely to be Gauls than German. 

Moby Dick online reading group, chapters 110 to 116

 

Scene from the opera Moby-Dick, see below. (Via The Metropolitan Opera's website). 

Chapters 110, Queequeg in his Coffin”  to 116, "The Dying Whale." 

Some pretty good passages in this week's section of the novel, as the Pequod sails toward the final confrontation with the Great White Whale.

Chapter 110

It's kind of a trope  in science fiction to compare voyages in space with voyages on the ocean. I loved this passage: "For not only do they believe that the stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so form the white breakers of the milky way. "

Chapter 111

The contrast with the beauty of the Pacific Ocean with the violence and suffering also associated with it reminded me of all of the histories I've read about World War II in the Pacific theatre. 

I thought this section of the novel has passages that sounded pagan, e.g. "Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan," and also the blood sacrifice to christen Ahab's new harpoon, and the reference in Chapter 113 to "the Three Fates."

"Bashee isles," they are in the Phillippines. 

Moby Dick, the opera 

As I don't follow opera news closely, I did not realize until now that there is a well-reviewed, contemporary opera based on Moby Dick. The opera Moby-Dick features music by  Jake Heggie with a libretto by Gene Scheer. It seems to have gotten good reviews; here is a review in the New York Times after it premiered in 2010 in Dallas. I have not been able to find an audio recording. There's a DVD that's hard to buy,  Moby-Dick apparently may be the most-staged recent contemporary opera. 

While most of us won't be able to see it, unless you can get to New York for this month's production at the Metropolitan Opera, it will be broadcast on the radio on March 29, on all of the radio stations that carry the Saturday afternoon matinee broadcasts from the Met. Here is the radio station finder, with a link for the live webstream. 

The Met has an on-demand streaming option, so I would guess Moby-Dick should become available at some point. Bits of the opera are available on YouTube.

Next week: Please read Chapter 117, "The Whale Watch," to Chapter 124, "The Needle."

Did the Guardian miss the lead?

Catherine Shoard

The Guardian runs an article on "Inside this year’s Oscar goody bags," the various stuff that's given away to people attending the Academy Awards ceremony in California. Buried deep in Catherine Shoard's article is this:

"A three-month Ancestry World Explorer membership comes with a DNA testing kit. A-listers can also choose between membership in the Hollywood chapter of the Illuminati or a private live show from mentalist Carl Christman."

No link is supplied for "Hollywood chapter of the Illuminati." Perhaps THEY didn't want Ms. Shoard to supply too much information? 

Hat tip: Nick Helseg-Larsen. 

UbuWeb has returned

From the "Conceptual Comics" section of Ubu.com

My wife once remarked I have friends who are "out there." I suspect this may be true. Well, here's some news for them. 

UbuWeb, a site that collects avant-garde work, including music, art, experimental film and poetry, ceased adding new material last year and became an archive. But now it has been revived and is adding new material again.

A statement at the website, dated Feb. 1 says, "A year ago, we decided to shutter UbuWeb. Not really shutter it, per se, but instead to consider it complete. After nearly 30 years, it felt right. But now, with the political changes in America and elsewhere around the world, we have decided to restart our archiving and regrow Ubu. In a moment when our collective memory is being systematically eradicated, archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression. We encourage you to do the same. All rivers lead to the same ocean: find your form of resistance, no matter how small, and go hard. It's now or never. Together we can prevent the annihilation of the memory of the world."

The home page also has a huge list of what has been recently added to the site. Some of the names RAW fans will likely recognize include William S. Burroughs, Ezra Pound, Aleister Crowley, John Cage, Gilles  Deleuze, Orson Welles and Allen Ginsberg. I spotted a couple of films by a Surrealist poet I am interested in, Charles Henri Ford. Happy exploring!

Oh, and here is the site's 1997 interview with Robert Anton Wilson, with  Richard Metzger and Genesis P-Orridge. 

Bold opinions on jazz and literature

Cecil Taylor (Creative Commons photo by Michael Hoefner, source). 

Tyler Cowen, in a blog post from Thursday on what he's been reading lately: "Philip Freeman, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor.  Call me crazy, but I think Sun Ra and Taylor are better and more important musically than say Duke Ellington.  Freeman’s book is the first full-length biography of Taylor, and it is well-informed and properly appreciative.  It induced me to buy another book by him.  The evening I saw Taylor was one of the greatest of my life, I thank my mother for coming with me."

In the comments, "It Ain't Necessarily So" replied, "With respect, this is a bad take. Duke Ellington wrote a host of standards that are widely remembered today and arguably is the single most influential figure in the history of jazz. He wrote dozens of standards including 'Mood Indigo,' 'Satin Doll,' 'Caravan,' 'I Got it Bad and That Ain't Good,' and the inescapable 'It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got that Swing.' Even today, it's pretty common to hear at least one Ellington tune during any set in a jazz club. As an illustration of Ellington's importance, Cecil Taylor continued to perform Ellington compositions for most of his career. Also, Ellington's band was one of the most important and influential during the era when jazz was the most popular music of the day."

"To say that Sun Ra and Taylor, who came along in an era when jazz had been marginalized and ceased to be popular music, were more musically important than a figure like Duke Ellington, is a poor revisionist take on musical history."

This is one of those instances where I wish I could ask Robert Anton Wilson his opinion, perhaps jazzbos in RAW fandom such as Eric Wagner and Steve Fly can weigh in? 

I am a huge fan of Duke Ellington. Although I consider myself reasonable conversant with jazz -- I've listened to Ellington, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Chick Corea, and other major figures -- I am not really familiar with music of Cecil Taylor or Sun Ra. I did some hasty Cecil Taylor research and borrowed Unit Structures from Hoopla, is there an obvious Sun Ra album to try, in the same vein that everyone who doesn't know Miles Davis is supposed to listen to Kind of Blue? 

When I thought about Tyler's post, I realized it reminded me of this statement from Wilson: "James Joyce is more important than Jesus, Buddha and Shakespeare put together. Pound is the greatest poet in English. Thorne Smith should be reprinted immediately, and would be enormously popular with the current generation, I wager. The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best (and only) literature of our times. All of these opinions are pompous and aggressive, of course, but questions like this bring out the worst in me."

Jim O'Shaughnessy on RAW's 'Cognitive Relativism—Ahead of His Time'

Jim O'Shaughnessy

In 1975's "The Illuminatus! Trilogy," Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea introduced cognitive relativism—the idea that our beliefs heavily filter our perception of reality. Wilson's concept of "fnords" (hidden messages in media that trigger unconscious fear) symbolizes societal propaganda that most people are conditioned to ignore. His core insight is relevant in today's AI era: absolute certainty in any belief system kills intelligence—rigid belief systems trap us, whereas a flexible mind yields insight.

(Posted at X.com)

John Higgs announces book tour dates

As you can see from the above, John Higgs has announced British tour dates for the imminent release of his new book, Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who, out April 10. If  you are British and nothing looks near you, keep an eye out for further dates to be announced later. 

More information from the latest issue of his newsletter. 

An Eight Circuit podcast

 

 

While Hilaritas Press released a new edition of Beyond Chaos and Beyond on Feb. 23, the podcast released the same day deserves some attention, too.

"In this episode, Hilaritas guest host Zach West chats with Rachel Turetzky, Doug Wingate, and David Jay Brown about their new book with Original Falcon Press, Eight Circuit Ascension: A Guide to Metaprogramming the Multidimensional Self."

Here is the official website for the book. You can buy the book on Amazon.   You can also look at the Original Falcon Press page for the book, where you can buy the book directly if you don't want to go through Amazon, or you want to buy an ePub rather than a Kindle ebook. 

As for the new book, here is my review of the original edition. 

Moby Dick online reading group, chapters 105-109

AI generated image of Melville, right, and Hawthorne in the former's study.

This week: Chapter 105, “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? – Will He Perish?”

to Chapter 109, “Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin”

By Oz Fritz
Special guest blogger

The question of creating an American Literature with a distinctly separate identity from its British counterpart appeared of great interest to Melville before, during and after he wrote Moby Dick. He expressed thoughts about this in a critical essay titled “Hawthorne and His Mosses” a review of a collection of stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne called Mosses from an Old Manse.  The review also addresses the subject of literature as a whole and Hawthorne’s place in it. Melville wrote the piece not long after meeting the elder writer for the first time. The two were part of a group of hikers along with other literary figures including Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. walking up Massachusetts’ Monument Mountain in August, 1850. Melville and Hawthorne were forced to take shelter from a storm under some rocks for two hours. The enforced intimacy formed and sealed a fast friendship between the two lasting the remainder of their lives. 

At the time of the hike Melville was in the middle of writing Moby Dick. Hawthorne’s publisher, a friend of Melville, encouraged him to review Mosses from an Old Manse which had come out a few years earlier. Melville took a break from writing his epic novel to do so. According to Wikipedia, the close encounter with Hawthorne led Melville to reexamine, reconsider and revise his monumental work in progress.  One scholar, Walter Bezanson declared the essay, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” to be "deeply related to Melville's imaginative and intellectual world while writing Moby-Dick" and should be "everybody's prime piece of contextual reading" for said novel. Indeed, Melville writes: “[b]ut already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germanous seeds into my soul.” In winter of that year, Melville unexpectedly paid Nathaniel a visit only to be turned away as he was busy writing and didn’t want visitors. Melville came back another time and was received. Later, Hawthorne surprised Herman by visiting his farm known as Arrowhead. The two spent the day “smoking and discussing metaphysics.” Historical accounts don’t clarify what they were smoking. Of course, we know that Moby Dick is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne. This essay can be found in The Portable Melville, inexpensive copies of which can be had online. Another Melville expert speculated that he wrote it in part to help prepare readers to receive Moby Dick. 

He sets the literary bar high in the second paragraph of the review with the egolessness of a Saint:

“Would that all excellent books were foundlings, without father or mother, that so it might be, we could glorify them, without including their ostensible authors! Nor would any true man take exception to this – least of all, he who writes. When the Artist rises high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which he makes it perceptible to mortal senses becomes of little value in his eyes, while the spirit possesses itself in the enjoyment of its reality.”

In attempting to substantiate the body of American literature, Melville compares and contrasts Hawthorne with Shakespeare saying that the distance between their greatness is not immeasurable. Writing about “The Old Apple Dealer,” a sad, melancholic story concerning a man who sells gingerbread and apples at a railway station, Melville says:

“Such touches as are in this piece cannot proceed from any common heart. They argue such a depth of tenderness, such a boundless sympathy with all forms of being, such an omnipresent love, that we must needs say that this Hawthorne is here almost alone – in his generation at least – in the artistic manifestation of these things.”

He continues, and this, I believe, applies to Moby Dick as well: 

“Such touches as these – and many, very many similar ones, all through his chapters – furnish clues, whereby we enter a little way into the intricate, profound heart where they originated. And we see that suffering, some time or other and in some shape or other – this only can enable any man to depict it in others. All over him, Hawthorne’s melancholy rests like an Indian Summer, which though bathing a whole country in one softness, still reveals the distinctive hue of every towering hill, and each far-winding vale.” 

It seems that Melville believes a great writer can transmit and engender a sense of compassion and empathy in the attentive reader. Related to the above, responding to other opinions about Hawthorne, he writes:

“He is immeasurably deeper than the plummet of the mere critic. For it is not the brain that can test such a man; it is only the heart. You cannot come to know greatness by inspecting it; there is no glimpse to be caught of it, except by intuition; you need not ring it, you but touch it, and you find it is gold.” 

I regard intuition as a form of Intelligence of the Higher Emotional centrum; Leary’s C6. Intuition grows and becomes stronger as one explores that territory. It seems that one of Melville’s points holds that great literature can help get one there. 

Melville prepares readers for Moby Dick by extolling the virtue and making a case for the dark side of Hawthorne’s writing so that they might be able to appreciate and more easily digest the shadow side of his own forthcoming (published slightly more than a year later) masterpiece. “For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side – like the dark half of the physical sphere – is shrouded in a blackness ten times. But this darkness but gives more effect to the ever-moving dawn, that forever advances through it, and circumnavigates his world. Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wonderous effects he makes it to produce in his lights and shades: …” 

Coincidentally, a few days before reading “Hawthorne and His Mosses” I commented on this technique of blending light and darkness in regard to chapter 12 in the Sex Magicians by RAW as part of the discussion group working with that book (https://dovestamemoria.blogspot.com/2025/02/is-god-sex-magicians-chapter-twelve.html scroll down for my comment). I also mentioned that Pynchon uses this technique multiple times in Gravity’s Rainbow. (The first time I typed it I mistakenly called it Gravity’s Whale.) Some people maintain that not only did Moby Dick influence Gravity’s Rainbow, but that the latter novel represents a re-imagining of the former. I haven’t researched this enough to have an opinion, yet. I call the blending of literary light and darkness “chiaroscuro” after the artistic technique that does this visually. 

Synchronistically, we find a taste of this literary chiaroscuro in this week’s assigned section, in chapter 106, “Ahab’s Leg.” “For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heart-woes, a mystical significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur;” It continues a bit further in this vein. I consider this a synchronicity because when I started this piece, I thought I would write more about the establishment of American literature, not the chiaroscuro technique. Reading RAW’s use of chiaroscuro in Sex Magicians prepared me to recognize it when Melville makes the argument in the Hawthorne piece, but I was surprised and astonished to find Melville continuing his point here in chapter 106.

The two phrases, “all heart-woes, a mystical significance” recalls the concept of betrayal in the poetry of the Sufi mystic, Rumi. Rumi held that emotionally painful experiences can lead to inner growth and transformation. I tell people going through a rough romantic patch that when the heart gets broken, it can grow back stronger if one doesn’t completely capitulate to the pain. The passages in and around what I quoted reminds me of Nietzsche’s valuation of tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy published slightly more than 20 years after The Whale. Previously I mentioned that Ralph Waldo Emerson influenced both Nietzsche and Melville. Some scholars say that Moby Dick influenced the maverick German philosopher.

The title of chapter 105 seems pretty self-explanatory – “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? – Will He Perish?”.  Some of the size measurements given appear quite exaggerated as is a typical whale’s life-span. Melville appears to believe literally in Adam as the first human. The second half of the chapter considers the question: will humans kill all the whales and render them extinct like they nearly did with the buffalo? Some weeks ago, Tom mentioned a book called The Manifesto of Herman Melville by Barry Sanders that considers Moby Dick a warning about humans destroying nature. This chapter aligns with that premise.

Chapter 107, “The Carpenter” starts by asking the reader to shift their perspective to way out in space, specifically to the moons of Saturn. This resonates with Arthur C. Clarke's’novel, 2001 A Space Odyssey where the ship Discovery travels to Lapetus, a moon of Saturn. Kubrick changed it to Jupiter in the film because he wasn’t satisfied with the attempt to represent the rings of Saturn. The description of the duties and abilities of the unnamed carpenter sounds quite extensive and remarkable. Melville sums him up thusly: “this omnitooled, open and shut carpenter, was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of harthorn, there is no telling.” Omnitooled recalls the language of Buckminster Fuller and his fondness for using “omni” as a prefix. Fuller was the nephew of Margaret Fuller, a friend and literary colleague of Emerson. The two possible “subtle somethings” seems metaphorical and suggest the concept I associate with the number 68. Quicksilver = Mercury (Hod 8). Harthorn is an archaic term for the chemical compound ammonium carbonate, a kind of ammonia used in baking, medicine and smelling salts. Looking at “harthorn” as a Joycean type of pun we can see “heart” (Tiphareth 6) plus “horn.” Also, recall the famous, mythical carpenter that corresponds with Tiphareth. We’re told, three times in this final paragraph, that the carpenter is a soliloquizer “talking all the time to keep himself awake.” I’m reminded of Sufis who use the metaphor of being “awake” to indicate consciousness that transcends the automatic (automaton), mechanical consciousness which they call “sleep.”

The term “soliloquy” gets frequently used in plays to indicate a character’s speech to the audience. The next chapter, 108, “Ahab and the Carpenter” gives what appears to be stage directions suggesting the form of a play without directly imitating one. This chapter has a nod to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Ahab calls the blacksmith Prometheus then orders from him a fifty-foot tall “complete man after a desirable pattern.” The full title of Shelley’s early 19th Century novel is: Frankenstein Or, The Modern Prometheus. In esoteric circles, Frankenstein often appears as a metaphor for the alchemical creation of higher bodies. Mel Brooks’ hilarious film, Young Frankenstein, gets highly recommended for this reason.  Bob Dylan uses this metaphor as the central theme in the song, “My Own Version of You” from his album Rough and Rowdy Ways. For example, in the lyrics we find:

“If I do it upright and put the head on straight

I'll be saved by the creature that I create”

Can you look at my face with your sightless eyes?

Can you cross your heart and hope to die?

Got the right spirit, you can feel it, you can hear it

You've got what they call "the immortal spirit"

You can feel it all night, you can feel it in the morn'

It creeps in your body the day you were born

One strike of lightning is all that I need

And a blast of electricity that runs at top speed

I wanna bring someone to life, turn back the years

Do it with laughter, and do it with tears”

It works better with the music, but you get the idea. I highly recommend listening to it multiple times over time. 

Chapter 109 presents a revealing confrontation between Ahab and Starbuck about the ship’s priorities. Ahab lets him know who is boss, then ends up following Starbuck’s suggestion after initially and forcefully resisting it. 

To bring it back to Melville, I’ll leave you with the comment Sophia Hawthorne said after reading Herman’s essay for her husband:

"the first person who has ever, in print apprehended Mr. Hawthorne." She called him "an invaluable person, full of daring & questions, & with all momentous considerations afloat in the crucible of his mind."

Sophia, of course, means “wisdom.”  Some branches of Gnostics considered her the feminine aspect of the Divine, and she was also known as the “Bride of Christ.”

Next week: please read Chapter 110, “Queequeg in his Coffin” to Chapter 116, “The Dying Whale.”

 

New from Hilaritas: 'Beyond Chaos and Beyond,' new podcast

One of my favorite posthumous Robert Anton Wilson works, Beyond Chaos and Beyond, has been issued in an enhanced new edition by Hilaritas Press. In the newsletter announcing the reissue, Rasa explains, "This new edition is essentially the same written material, but it features enhanced photographs and many upgraded design elements."

As Rasa explains, the book has an excellent biographical essay about RAW penned by Scott Apel and reprints a great deal of RAW material, including writings from the newsletter Trajectories that Apel and RAW put out. It also has a particularly good interview with RAW, maybe my all-time favorite, dating back to 1977.

Also announced today, a new podcast: "Hilaritas guest host Zach West chats with Rachel Turetzky, Doug Wingate, and David Jay Brown about their new book with Original Falcon Press, Eight Circuit Ascension: A Guide to Metaprogramming the Multidimensional Self." 

I will have more on the podcast and the new book. 

Mycelium Parish News is a nice Discordian catalog

I do my my best to cover Discordian doings and Robert Anton Wilson/Robert Shea news at this blog, but there's a lot out there and there is interesting news I miss. For much of that, see the 2024 edition of the Mycelium Parish News, which I ordered a few weeks ago. It's available on Etsy.

The publication covers much of the news I had up here, such as the release of Chapel Perilous, the RAW biography by Gabriel Kennedy, and last year's releases from Hilaritas Press. But there are many items new to me. 

For example, Forklore Rising was new to me. "Inspired by an encounter with druids in London, Ben Edge set out to record the folk rituals of Britain. Folklore Rising features Edge's paintings, along with accounts of these ceremonies, from Obby Oss events in the West Country, through to churches filled with clowns. This is a fantastic portrayal of Britain's strangeness."

I like surrealism, so I went to download Patastrophe No. 9. The link was bad, but I found it here.  And here is a link to their publications. 

I suspect that most of you who send off for the Mycelium Parish News will find something to like. 

Three new podcasts

Three new podcasts sombunall of you may be interested in:

The Team Human podcast, featuring Prop Anon, Grant Morrison and Douglas Rushkoff,  The focus is on Prop's Chapel Perilous biography of RAW. 

Jim O'Shaughnessy, the Reason Magazine interview. O'Shaughnessy is a major RAW fan who helped with the fundraising for the first issue of Tales of Illuminatus. And he does talk about RAW in the interview -- interviewer Nick Gillespie has posted a clip on X.com. 

Also, Jesse Walker appears on the Non Serviam podcast, and I am told RAW comes up in this conversation, too. 

I've supplied links but these should also be available on your favorite podcasting app. 

Paul McCartney's early British tour

Paul McCartney with his wife, Linda, in 1976 (public domain photo). 

I have been reading The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1, by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair, which covers McCartney's solo career from 1969 to 1973 in great detail (more than 700 pages.) Volume 2, which covers McCartney from 1974 to 1980, came out in December.

Paul's first tour as a solo artist was a low key affair in February 1972, in which he and an early version of Wings would show up unannounced on college campuses and book shows on the spot for audiences of usually only a few hundred people. (The Kozinn book says the Oxford show on Feb. 23 listed at the link did not take place.) 

As Liverpool has been important to the British Discordian movement, I thought I would share what happened when Paul tried to line up a show there. Of course, Liverpool was the hometown for him and the other three Beatles:

Visiting Merseyside without trying to set up a concert was unthinkable, but cruising the streets of Liverpool unnoticed was impossible for one of the city's best-loved sons. On Sunday afternoon Paul asked his roadies to drive around town and sniff out a venue. Their mission did not go well. Being a Sunday, the University of Liverpool campus was deserted. Quickly devising a backup plan, the brothers-in-law figured one of Liverpool's many playhouses would roll out the red carpet for Paul and his group. Strolling into the Everyman Theatre, Ian found a carpenter fine-tuning the set for a new production of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, due to open on February 23. He happily took a message to the theatre's boss, Alan Dosser. "There's a group here called Wings who want to play a gig here tonight," the carpenter ventured. Dosser, not a follower of popular music, and having a schedule to meet, snapped, "Fuck off! Can't they see we're in the middle of a tech! Fuck off!" Walking in late on the conversation, musician Terry Canning dashed out of the theater onto Hope Street to see the van disappearing around the corner.

McCartney's return to the Liverpool concert stage would have to wait. (Page 373.) (Canning composed incidental music for Ken Campbell's production of Illuminatus!). 

The book has very detailed accounts of Paul in the recording studio and his interactions with other musicians, record producers and recording engineers. I knew who some of these folks are (e.g. Alan Parsons), but some of my favorite bits in the book describe encounters with more obscure figures, who suddenly find themselves working with the most famous pop musician in the world. Here's a bit about a guy named Paul Beaver:

"On Thursday afternoon I was scheduled to do a session at Sound Recorders in Los Angeles, but they wouldn't tell me who it was for," Beaver remembered with a smile. "I got there, set up the synthesizer and I sat in the recording engineer chair behind the console. Then this guy walked into the control room and with an intimidating English accent said,  'Who are you and what the hell are you doing here?' It was Paul!" (Pages 244-245).

 

'Illuminatus!' tops list of 'weird but brilliant' books

We have a winner!

A new article at AOL Online, "35 Weird But Brilliant Books If You Are Seeking To Read Something Different, As Shared Online," supposedly based on "netizens in various online threads" (a methodology isn't spelled out) has 35 works of fiction ranked. The top-ranked book is Illuminatus! by Wilson and Shea. 

The author of the article, Denis Krotovas, ventures opinions on some of the 35 works bur is silent about Illuminatus! There is actually no information about Illuminatus! at all in the article, just a cover image. Still, it's good for the work to get some coverage, I guess.

Of the 35 rankings (confusingly, for some rankings more than one title is listed), I've read (besides Illuminatus!, of course) Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany, 334 by Thomas Disch and A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Draw your own conclusions as to whether I am a weirdo reader. I really do need to get around to reading Tristam Shandy. 

Hat tip, Nick Helseg-Larsen. 

Review: midnight's simulacra by Nick Black

 

"code stoned. debug sober. document drunk.and never trust the nuclear regulatory commission."

midnight's simulcra is a challenging but interesting novel from Nick Black, an engineer who attended Georgia Tech University; the novel is largely set on the campus of Georgia Tech or in Atlanta. It is consciously modeled on Ulysses by James Joyce and also draws much of its inspiration from Illuminatus! 

It was published last year. The official website bills it as "a hysterical, scientifically rigorous, slow burn of a thriller, a modern picaresque, a portrait of autists as young men, and unlike any other novel you've read" and as "An autofiction of rogue engineering."

I would describe it as an ambitious work of modern fiction. Anyone who is familiar with Ulysses will see many references to it in midnight's simulacra. There is for example an interior monologue by a a woman in the novel obviously modeled after the one by Molly Bloom. The plot is driven by the interactions of two males with intersecting lives: Sherman Spartacus Katz and Michael Luis Bolaño, although the action takes place over many  years, not in just one day.  They meet at an academic quiz bowl and decide to both attend Georgia Tech. They eventually get into large scale LSD manufacturing and distributing and then Katz gets interested in smuggling and enhancing yellowcake  uranium.

Just as Ulysses fans can visit actual places in Dublin that are mentioned  in the novel, midnight's simulacra takes place in numerous real Atlanta locations. For example, there's an important confrontation in an Atlanta bar, where Bolaño buys a drink for the "Molly Bloom" character. I looked it up, and it's an actual Atlanta bar; you can go there  and buy the same drink. 

Nick Black's Goodreads account shows that he has read many important modern novels (David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which I haven't gotten around to, is apparently another favorite). 

His novel's most daring innovation is the various nonfiction essays and explanations on various aspects of science, including how to manufacture LSD, the history of modern cosmology, the history of illicit LSD manufacturing in the U.S., and many other topics. Many of these lectures-within-the-novel are quite dense with mathematical  formulas and technical terms. In the introduction to the book, Black gives the reader "permission" to skim the portions of the book that are too difficult. I really learned a lot from this book, although sections were opaque to me. I use Linux for example, but I'm not a coder, and I could not follow everything that was happening when Katz fears his machine has been compromised and he reinstalls Debian Linux (a form of Linux considered more difficult to use than, say, Ubuntu or Linux Mint, distros that cater to nontechnical users. Among his numerous interests, Black is a Debian developer). 

So portions of the book can be difficult, although having said that, the main story is not difficult to follow. I would say that while Ulysses is largely driven by Bloom's interest in sex, midnight's simulacra tends to focus on drugs (some of the characters use a bong named after a Klein bottle, a good example of the intersection of interests). In addition, while Ulysses is generally life-affirming, midnight's simulcra can be read as kind of a tragedy. 

The five main sections of the novel are named after the five main sections of Illuminatus!, and references to Eris and to phrases such as "Hail Eris!" and "All Hail Discordia" figure prominently. As with Ulysses, there are more references to Illuminatus! that careful readers will catch. 

And here is a bit of synchronicity, one that I don't know if Nick Black knows about: As far as I know, the only literary award Illuminatus! ever received was the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, given at the Worldcon in Atlanta in 1986. (I attended the Worldcon, one of my favorites, but did not know about the ceremony and missed it). 

Portions of the book are quite funny in a dark, sardonic way, e.g. "You can always know the right way to interpret a situation by where Sartre, history's biggest piece of shit, stood on it." 

midnight's simulacra is available for purchase at the official website and also at Amazon, in hardcover, paperback and ebook. (The paper editions are the preferred editions and  include illustrations the ebooks don't have; I have ordered a copy of the paperback). 

The official website also has a hefty "try before you buy" excerpt of the first part and interesting background on the novel, including a partial bibliography of the references. 

Moby Dick online reading group, chapters 101-104

 

Pompey's Pillar, referenced in the text, Creative Commons photo. source. 

This week: Chapter 101, "The Decanter," to  Chapter 104, "The Fossil Whale."

I have written that, for my money, the best passages in Moby Dick are in the chapters in which action takes place. In this section, we get (1) A discussion of the food aboard well-stocked whaleships; (2) A discussion of the bones of the whale; (3) Measurements of a whale's skeleton; and (4) a discussion of fossil whales. Not a lot of drama!  Nonetheless, I have a few notes. (After I read this section, I went out to eat in a local Cambodian restaurant. I'm struck by how well people can eat in the modern United States, as compared to Melville's time). 

A couple of annotations:

"I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far beneath the skin of an adult whale." (Chapter 102, "A Bower in the Arsacids"). A kayaker recently was briefly swallowed by a whale. 

[After Melville imagines the spine of the whale being piled up vertically] "But now it's done it looks much like Pompey's Pillar." (Chapter 103, "Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton"). Pompey's Pillar is an ancient monument of the city of Alexandria in Egypt, it still stands, see this article (it was set up by Diocletian, not Pompey). 

"And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer’s uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me." (Chapter 104). This references Samuel Johnson. 

In the Dec. 30 episode of this chronicle, Oz wrote, "Encountering strange beings in literature inevitably brings comparisons with H. P. Lovecraft and his unique talent for otherworldly moods, atmospheres and gnarly life forms that can seem terrifying. I don’t know if Lovecraft read Moby Dick. He was encouraged to read classics of literature at an early age, but Moby Dick didn’t really start to get on anyone’s radar until the 1920s." (Note that in the comments I point out evidence that Lovecraft did read Moby Dick.) Anyway, I thought of Oz' comments when I read this passage  from Chapter 104, "The Fossil Whale,"

"When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebræ, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the whale’s; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh’s. Methuselah seems a school-boy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors."

This bit, from the same chapter, seems self-referential:

"One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it."

Next week: Please read Chapter 105, "Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish? == Will He Perish?" to Chapter 109, "Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin?"

Sunday links

 Erotic Secrets of Pompeii

I did not mean to do links two days in a row, but I have some things to get caught up on:

"Erotic Secrets of Pompeii play wild, weird apocalyptic lounge music - a twisted amalgamation of angular art rock and transgressive post-punk, transmitted directly from the heart of the forbidden zone.

"ESOP's music is populated by grotesque imagery and vivid symbolism, drawing from artists across different mediums, such as Terry Gilliam, Salvador Dali, Leonora Carrington, Francis Bacon, William Blake, Robert Anton Wilson and Leigh Bowery." Official website.  (Thanks, Nick Helweg-Larsen).

“If cannabis use ‘causes’ schizophrenia,it is absolutely impossible that the rate of schizophrenia would not be going up with the rates of cannabis use increasing 1,000-fold,”said Dr. Peter Grinspoon, a cannabis specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Occult Elvis. 

Jason Louv podcast, "The DARK TRUTH About Wilhelm Reich." I have not seen it. 

Philip K. Dick as a prose stylist.

Saturday links

Jesse Walker on Tom Robbins: "Tom Robbins was also secretly a bridge between my two books. He was a DJ at KRAB in the '60s (check out one of his shows here: https://krabarchive.com/playlist/1967-07-07-nftu.html) and he credited a Robert Anton Wilson article with converting him to anarchism." Also, see Bobby Campbell's comment on yesterday's post. 

Paul Giamatti to play Art Bell.

One ghost town for all 50 states (video link starts with Ong's Hat). 

A promising opioid alternative. 

Sitting Now podcast with a long interview of Prop Anon.

 Twin Peaks survival guide (if you don't want to watch or rewatch every single episode).

Robert Anton Wilson, Tom Robbins fan!

 The above is via RAW Semantics on Bluesky, Brian writes, "Letter from Tom Robbins printed on the feedback page of RAW's Trajectories #2 newsletter (Autumn 1988),"

There was a time, decades ago, when it seemed like everyone in the U.S. was reading Tom Robbins, I asked Brian if Robbins was popular in Britain, too, he wrote, "Not very well known, Tom, AFAIK. He's another that I first heard of from RAW."

Then again, I think Brian may be young, at least compared to me (I'm 67) and I  suspect the people who remember when Robbins  was popular in the U.S. tend to be pretty old. 

A quote from Tom Robbins, via Todd Purse

 

The above is from Todd Purse, Bobby Campbell's Tales of Illuminatus collaborator. Todd writes, "Hey y’all! Sorry it’s been a minute, had the worst flu in years that completely wiped out the whole house for over a week! I’ve been feeling better the last few days but today is the first time I feel 100% human again! So much going on and to get caught up on, but for now here’s a drawing of a beautiful Tom Robbins quote in honor of his passing, one of my favorites to ever do it and just love these words so much right now."

RIP Tom Robbins

 

Tom Robbins (public domain photo)

Novelist Tom Robbins, a Robert Anton Wilson fan, has died. His heyday was decades ago, but I enjoyed his work. Here is the New York Times obituary (gift link).  And you can also read the Seattle Times obituary. 

'Tales' website revamped, 'New Trajectories' webring fixed

 

As Bobby Campbell prepares to launch the second Kickstarter campaign for the second issue of his Tales of Illuminatus comic book series, he's done some renovations to his Internet presence, as announced in his latest newsletter. 

The Tales of Illuminatus website has been revamped. The site now has newsfeeds from Bluesky, you can sign up for the prelaunch for the second issue and Bobby has decided after getting feedback to restore the free web version of the first issue. 

As for the webring, Bobby explains, "Back in 2022 we established a Discordian webring as part of that year’s Maybe Day celebration, though due to the limitations of some of the walled garden platforms people use, or trouble with placing HTML code, many of the sites weren’t able to display functioning navigation links, so the webring didn’t quite work as a ring, and was rather more of a directory.

"Though as part of network updates leading into issue #2 I thought it would be interesting to create a fully functioning webring. So I’ve limited entrees to those sites with functioning navigation links.

"(If anyone’s site was removed that would like to rejoin, LMK and I’ll help with installing the code!)"

Eleven websites are currently listed in the webring, including this one, and Jechidah, which has just added  another entry in the ongoing Sex Magicians reading group.