Mary Butts, a modernist writer

Mary Butts in 1919 (public domain photo). 

Every once in awhile, I run into a writer and wind up being surprised that I did not know the name. The modernist writer Mary Butts (1890-1937) would be the latest example.

I am on the email list for Standard Ebooks, an outfit I've written about before that makes available excellent free editions of public domain books. The latest newsletter announced the publication of  the "influential but obscure modernist novel" Armed With Madness by Mary Butts: 

"Six friends are staying in a cottage in the English countryside when they discover a mysterious ancient cup buried deep in a local well. The cup seems to have a long history—could it be the legendary Holy Grail? Long-held tensions start simmering as the friends begin investigating the cup’s story, threatening the formerly peaceful retreat.

"Butts adapts the grail myth to early 20th century England in a highly modernist prose style that invites comparison to Virginia Woolf or Ford Madox Ford. The narrative resembles a kaleidoscope in its shifting perspectives, abrupt dialogue, and dreamlike feel, and close reading reveals densely packed allusions ranging from Greek mythology to English legend.

"The first edition of Armed with Madness was illustrated by none other than Jean Cocteau and won praise from her modernist contemporaries. Butts went on to write a companion novel in 1932 following some of the same characters, The Death of Felicity Taverner."

Who knows what I'll think of Armed With Madness when I get around to reading it, but I saw other indications that, at the very least, Butts was an interesting person who hung out with other interesting people. The Wikipedia bio records that she was a student of Aleister Crowley and spent time with him at the Abbey of Thelema in Sicily. She knew modernist writers such as Ezra Pound. A biography is available, by Nathalie Blondel.

A university professor in Canada provides the Mary Butts Letters Project online.  And here is an interesting piece from The New Yorker, "Modernism's Forgotten Mystic." That 2021 piece by Merve Emre describes Butts as pretty much forgotten, so maybe I get a pass for not knowing the name until a few days ago. Read the piece for the William Blake connection! 

Based on what they read, I  think both Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea would have been interested in her. But if either of them ever mentioned her, I  don't know  about it. 

What we read last month

Another reading log from Mark Brown and myself.

What Mark Brown read last month: 

Trouble is My Business by Raymond Chandler 2/6 
The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson  2/11
Two Hawks from Earth by Philip Jose Farmer  2/18   
Domnei by James Branch Cabell  2/22   
Land of Terror by Edgar Rice Burroughs   2/25   
Turn on Your Mind: Four Decades of Psychedelic Rock by Jim de Rogatis  2/27

What I read:

The Uncertainty Principle?, D. Scott Apel
War By Other Means (Fall of the Censor Book 7), Karl Gallagher
The Workshop of Democracy, 1863–1932 (The American Experiment Book 2), James MacGregor Burns
Colors of Asia: A Visual Journey, Kevin Kelly
Forged for Prophecy (Forged for Destiny, #2), Andrew Knighton

As usual, everyone else is invited to share what they have read. 

A bit more on 'All Things Are Lights'

 

I've updated my Feb. 20 post on Robert Shea's All Things Are Lights. 

Here (in part) how Shea described the novel in an interview (reproduced in my new Shea book, Every Day Is a GOOD Day.) 

"The title comes from a medieval  philosopher, Scotus Erigena, who said, 'All that are, are lights.' The main characters have an outlook that is as mystical as that statement, only their mysticism is not of the orthodox variety. The main character is a troubadour who achieves illumination in an adulterous affair with a countess through the rites of courtly love, which I portray as a westernized version of tantric yoga. The troubadour is also in love with a woman minister of the heretical Cathar sect. Nowadays they tell women they can't be priests; in those days they burned them at the stake for trying." 

Oz Fritz continues 'Shadow Ticket' analysis

Oz Fritz has continued his discussion of Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon, with a Part Two post now up at his The Oz Mix blog. 

This one focuses quite a bit on Dante. Oz observes:

"The Divine Comedy by Dante provides a foundational pillar in the canon of Western and Near Eastern literature. It poetically describes a journey through death and the underworld. The influence of this opus on modern and postmodern writers has been profound. You'll find it in James Joyce (Finnegans Wake), Ezra Pound (The Cantos), Robert Anton Wilson (Illuminatus! and others), Malcolm Lowery (Under the Volcano) to name a few."

Here is Oz' first post.   Also, please see my earlier post for links to what Eric Wagner and Peter Quadrino wrote about Pynchon's latest novel. 

A Part Three post is planned with "a Deleuzean perspective."

Dan Simmons has died

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea both loved science fiction, and I do, too, but science fiction writers  still don't get as much respect as other fiction writers; Dan Simmons, who wrote the Hyperion Cantos novels, did not get an obituary in the New York Times after he died on Feb. 21. So I am telling you about it here.

The Hyperion books are really good; the Ilium/Olympos books also are well known, but I was less impressed with them. Simmons also  wrote horror and other work. Here is an obituary from Newsweek. 

Joseph Matheny announces free audio versions of his work

In his latest newsletter, available here, Joseph Matheny announces audio versions of several of his works are now available for free. 

The titles include the audiobook of This is Not a Game, Ong's Hat: The Beginning, Ong’s Hat: COMPLEAT, and Xen: The Zen of the Other. They are torrents, but Joseph includes a video explaining how to use the technology.

Joseph also explains what you can do -- and not do -- with the free versions of his work, and it's worth quoting:

As many of you know, I always make a free digital version of my work available for free after a year of selling it through commercial channels. Some unscrupulous players have taken that to mean that those works are available to be taken, resold, and reused without permission. I shouldn’t have to explain this, but one more time for the folks in the back:

You’re free to download the free versions for your personal use. You are not allowed to resell, remix, or include in any collections without my express, written permission. There are legitinmate, legal copyrights on all my works, for that very reason. The free versions are distributed under the following Creative Commons agreements (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International) and are also legally copyrighted, registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. Look it up. I'm happy to offer my work for free; I’m much less than happy for people or corporations to profit from it.

There are other interesting items in the newsletter. 

Mike Gathers' interesting podcast

As I mentioned I would, I listened to Mike Gathers' in the latest Hilaritas podcast, above, as I was intrigued. It is interesting, personal and candid. Mike talks about his two trips to Costa Rica for Iboga psychedelic therapy, what is was like, how it affected her personal habits and his health. He's planning a follow-up session. Mike is careful to explain that Iboga is dangerous, and not something to experiment with by yourself. 

'Saucers, Spooks and Kooks' news roundup

Saucers, Spooks and Kooks is a new movie based on the Adam Gorightly book of the same name, which I enjoyed. 

Here is an official podcast.  You can also read a roundup of other podcasts.  And there's a post on how the movie got made.  And here's the Substack home page.

Watch here.

Have a nice day!

Atomic bomb test at Bikini Island in 1946 (Wikimedia Commons photo).

One of the reasons I miss Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, besides the obvious ones, is that I wonder what they would make of advances in computers in general, and AI in particular. (They were both fascinated by personal computers; there's a little bit about this in my Robert Shea book.) At age 69, I love my smartphone and marvel at the computer I can carry in my pocket. Technology is wasted on the young. I was a teenager in the 1970s, when our second TV was a black and white with antenna ears, and mobile music meant eight track tapes.

Anyway, here are a couple of things that caught my eye, alarming or black humor, depending on your temperament:

1. "AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations." The lead sentence: "Advanced AI models appear willing to deploy nuclear weapons without the same reservations humans have when put into simulated geopolitical crises."

Via Jesse Walker, who writes, "I was rooting for the resolution of WAR GAMES and instead they kept giving us the setup for THE TERMINATOR."

2. Scott Alexander mentions one of the winners of the ACX forecasting contest and then writes, "Seems potentially bad that so many of the people who win forecasting contests are professionally involved in some form of worrying about AI killing us. Hopefully that’s just a coincidence."

PQ on Joyce and the state violence of evil days

Joyce and Militarism, a book cited by PQ. 

Peter Quadrino has a new piece up at his "Finnegans, Wake!" blog. The new posting is "Evil Days": Joyce and State Violence and it refers to recent events in the U.S. but mostly discusses the brutal repression by Britain when the Irish were trying to achieve independence.

As Peter explains, Joyce had quite a few friends who  were killed by the British, including in the wake of the Easter uprising. (Peter calls these killings "executions," but I think that implies more of a due process than many of the Irish rebels got). Here is Peter on one of the killings:

"One of Joyce's school friends was named George Clancy, he appears in Portrait as Davin, later he became the mayor of Limerick. He was the mayor when one night, the Black and Tans dragged him out of bed and summarily executed him in front of his family. This was in 1921. Joyce was remembering the shock of this almost 15 years later, in a letter to his son Giorgio 4 Feb 1935 he mentions "my poor friend George Clancy (Davin in Portrait). ... He was afterward Mayor of Limerick and was dragged out of bed by the Black and Tans in the night and shot in the presence of his wife." (Letters 1, Gilbert, p. 357)

Mike Gathers' guest? Mike Gathers!

The Hilaritas Press podcast released Monday has a format that's a little different this time. Instead of the usual interview of a guest by Mike Gathers, it stars Mike himself, doing a monologue.

It also sounds really interesting, and I will be listening to it soon. Here is the blurb:

"Hilaritas host Mike Gathers does all the talking this episode as he describes his illuminating experiences with iboga psychedelic therapy."

That's an iboga rainforest shrub behind Mike. 

RAW's circle of friends

RAWnet, the "Friends of the Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson," has moved to a new location on the RAW Trust website.  It's a "people who RAW knew personally who influenced him, or the other way around, and folks who were in some respect experts on RAW," Rasa says.

It can be fun to look at the biographies. For example, I followed the links for Mark Frauenfelder, pictured above,  and discovered he has made several TV appearances, including the Colbert Report. 

'Illuminatus' on list of 'weird books'

 

An article at the Microsoft Network, "32 weird but brilliant books if you are seeking to read something different, as shared online," includes Illuminatus! as one of the books. 

The article is attributed to Asli Akalin, although I wondered if AI was used for the compilation.

Aside from Illuminatus!, I have read a number of books on the list: If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino, A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole, Babel-17, Samuel Delany, and 334, Thomas M. Disch. It's not a bad list.

Hat tip, Nick Helweg-Larsen.