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Monday, September 28, 2026

'The Classical Style' reading group, week 19



Portrait of Franz Schubert (source). 

Epilogue

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
            

Thank you for taking this voyage with me. I love this book dearly. This final Epilogue serves as a transition to Rosen’s 1995 masterpiece The Romantic Generation.

 I love Rosen’s discussion of Schubert in the Epilogue. When I first read The Romantic Generation it surprised me that he didn’t write more about Schubert. This Epilogue makes clear that Rosen sees Schubert as a transitional figure from the classical style to the Romantic generation. Yes, I had read The Classical Style before I read The Romantic Generation, but this distinction about Schubert’s unique transitional role did not become clear to me until about the fifth time I read The Classical Style. Like Thomas Pynchon, I seem a slow learner.

Ezra Pound tended to translate works he found important. In the same way, Rosen recorded works he found important, and I love his playing of the Schubert sonata he focused on in the Epilogue.


Sunday, September 27, 2026

New Adam Gorightly book, 'Agent of Disruption: The Many Lives of Fred Crisman'

 


Discordian Historian Adam Gorightly, mentioned many times at this blog because of his books and articles on Discordianism, UFOs, etc. has a new book out: Agent of Disruption: The Many Lives of Fred Crisman. It's on Bookshop, so you can support a local bookstore if you order it (also on Amazon and Walmart). 

Official blurb: "An international man of mystery with alleged intelligence agency connections, Fred Lee Crisman left behind a Walter Mitty-like legacy populated by flying saucers, assassination conspiracies, and alleged encounters with those nasty little inner-earth dwellers known as the Deros.

"Strap in yourself in for this long strange trip down memory lane to Maury Island, Dealey Plaza, and all points in between as we explore the many lives of Fred Lee Crisman, a true agent of disruption."

More about the book when I find out more, but here is an article by Adam about Mr. Crisman. 


Saturday, September 26, 2026

'Tales of Illuminatus' update



On Bluesky, Bobby Campbell announces that now that the Kickstarter campaign has concluded, single copies of Tales of Illuminatus! #3 "Opus Chao" are now available. You can also buy copies of the first two issues, all available here.  But note that Bobby adds: "This is the last call on single issues of TOI #1-3! Only have a small batch of these left and only going to keep the TPB [trade paperback of all 3 issues] in print after this :)))"

Bobby also reports: 

"The second and final phase of fulfillment has now begun :)))

"The digital versions of Tales of Illuminatus! - The Kether Trip and Illuminatus! Skeleton Key #1 are now available!

"The print versions are being produced as we speak, with shipping set to begin during the first week of October.

"At which point the only item left to be shipped will be the cassette tapes, which should be ready to go within the next few weeks."

Also, Bobby announces: 

"Refurbishing my old blog and archiving my various disparate nonsense :)))

"Here's a quarantine era curve ball re: the high weirdness of the 1970's."




Friday, September 25, 2026

Friday links


Illustration from RAW Semantics post. 

RAW Semantics on AI. He invites comments from RAW fans, and I have chipped in. 

Michael Johnson also recently wrote about AI. Michael writes that rich tech people "are trash," this seems to me to lack nuance (while I'm no Elon Musk fan and I feel let down by Big Tech politics in general), see my comments to the RAW Semantics post. 

Tyler Cowen posts a lot on AI. here is a recent post. "Snap out of it you sad sacks, hope you can recognize negative emotional contagion when you see it!"

"People are still saying that Dick’s novels are turning into reality. But it’s not a joke anymore. It’s feels more like a warning." Ted Gioia on Dick's seven best novels.   I do think he's found some of the best books, I read Flow My Tears the Policeman Said recently and enjoyed it. 

Natural Law Theory Is Obviously False. Bentham's Bulldog Newsletter. 

"I think that whether the right reforms in any meaningful way or continues its slide into stupidity and genocidal vibes will depend on election results. Parties are always responding to messages from voters, and this will continue to be true going forward." From "Why Non-White Voters Must Crush Republicans."





Thursday, September 24, 2026

'Modern Occultist' recommends 'Prometheus Rising'


 

The folks at Modern Occultist have put out a short video on the "Top Five Books for Chaos Magic Beginners" which includes Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. (For some reason, I could not find a way to share the code and post the video directly here, as I usually would do).

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

New Hilaritas podcast: Wingate and Turetzky

Dr. Douglas Wingate & Dr. Rachel Turetzky return to the Hilaritas podcast. Here is the blurb:

"Guest host Zach West chats with Dr. Douglas Wingate & Dr. Rachel Turetzky of Eight Circuit Ascension who have recently released a practical workbook and created an online metaprogramming certification course over at Psychedelics Today. Doug, based in Oregon, is a licensed psilocybin facilitator and Chinese-medicine practitioner. Rachel brings complementary depth in psycho-spiritual practice and education. They discuss the new course, the rapidly shifting legal landscape, early developmental imprinting, and the practical art of metaprogramming, and more."

More information here.  The two also appeared in a previous episode.

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Michael Johnson on Luna and Sen. Charles Piercy's daughter


Sen. Charles Percy 

Michael Johnson has a new Substack piece up: "When Tragedy Bridges Politics," about the death of Robert Anton Wilson's daughter Luna, as described in the first Cosmic Trigger book, and the murder of U.S. Sen. Charles Percy's daughter. 

I thought it was one of Michael's better pieces, but it's also good background for the upcoming online discussion group for Wilson's Schrödinger's Cat books. There is discussion about passages  in the first book of the trilogy, The Universe Next Door, describing the grief of the character Benny "Eggs" Benedick, who as Michael says is "a very Wilson-ish character." 

Michael posted about Luna's death on Saturday morning, the same morning I posted the sad news about the death of another one of Wilson's daughters, Alexandra Gardner. Kind of a sad synchronicity. 


Monday, September 21, 2026

'The Classical Style' reading group, Week 18

VII. BEETHOVEN 

Beethoven's Later Years and the Conventions of His Childhood 


By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

"More of Beethoven's intelligence is needed, desperately, to create a signal that the current Lenins cannot ignore, that will make them weep, and stop hitting heads." 

 - Prometheus Rising, pg. 271 

 Writing about the page around 29:41 - 29:58, Charles Rosen wrote, "This transitional page is one of the most astonishing in the history of music. No other work until then, to my knowledge, combined the effect of almost uncontrolled improvisatory movement with such a totally systemic structure" (The Classical Style, pg. 429). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5jBD_vxy8w 

 "Beethoven was conducting celestial astronomy in his own way. Before our eyes (this fugue cannot be completely realized in sound, so the printed music is important in its own right) he demonstrates the various rotations of the planets: retrograde, inversion, augmentation - at the same time reaching the frontier of atonality." 

- Wilhelm Kempff on the last movement of the Hammerklavier Sonata 

Sunday, September 20, 2026

New Jesse Walker paper discusses Wilson and Shea


A 1967 publicity photo of John Carradine. 

Jesse Walker has completed and published a new paper that I wrote about earlier, "Birchers, Discordians, and Sex Education: The Libertarians in the Anaheim Sex-Ed Wars." It's available here.

The abstract captures why the paper is of interest to readers of this blog: "Anaheim, California, was one of the first battlegrounds in the wars over sex education that started erupting in the 1960s. Radical libertarians found themselves playing notable parts on both sides of the conflict. This paper examines the roles of R.C. Hoiles on the anti-sex-education side of the debate and of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea on the pro-sex-education side; it also describes how another radical libertarian, Ralph Raico, essentially synthesized the Hoiles and Wilson/Shea positions. These rival approaches reflect conflicting ideas about liberty that can also be found outside the libertarian movement, sometimes in ways that confound conventional models of the political right and left."

Jesse's paper, published in the UC Berkeley Journal of Right-Wing Studies, has an amusing opening paragraph:

"Long before a certain sort of conservative took to casually calling his foes 'groomers,' the Malibu-based record label American United released The Child Seducers. On the disc, narrator John Carradine opined on everything from Rosemary’s Baby to 'the flaming pornography of the nudity cults,' but his chief target was sex education. 'The schools of America are sex saturated,' Carradine warned, just three years before the always-game-for-a-paycheck actor appeared in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex."

It's a fun paper; expect references to Illuminatus!, discussion of Wilson and Shea, etc.

Disclosure: I am named in the Acknowledgements and my Robert Shea book is cited. 



Saturday, September 19, 2026

RIP RAW daughter Alexander 'Alex' Gardner

 


Alexandra Gardner (Facebook photo)

Christina Pearson reports the sad news that her sister, Alexandra "Alex" Gardner, 71, Eugene, Oregon, died on August 29. All condolences to Christina and to her other family members and friends. 

No formal obituary has been posted, at least yet. Christina flew to Oregon to deal with the necessary details. Ms. Gardner has been cremated. Christina told me  the news when she wrote to me about another matter and then gave me permission to post about it here. 

Without an obituary, there are few details of her life I can report. According to her Facebook page, she was born on February 23, 1955, and listed Huntington, New York, as her hometown. She owned Junior Properties, LLC, a real estate company, and also worked for Flying Lasagna Enterprises. She also was a hypnotherapist.  According to written testimony she submitted in 2017 to the Oregon legislature, her main source of retirement income was a few rental properties she owned. 

Chapel Perilous, the RAW biography by Gabriel Kennedy, provides a few passing biographical glimpses, and the notes show that Ms. Gardner helped with the biography, granting the author many interviews. 

Robert Anton Wilson of course mentioned all four of his children in his books; in the first Cosmic Trigger book, Alex is mentioned a few times under the name Karuna. 



Friday, September 18, 2026

Arrived in the mail [UPDATED]

 



My copy of Tales of Illuminatus #3 "Opus Chao" arrived in the mail yesterday. If you participated in the Kickstarter campaign, look for your copy to arrive soon, too. I'm still waiting for some of my stuff, but it looks like fulfillment is moving forward. The Kickstarter site has updates. It looks like much of the digital rewards are available for download, with the Skeleton Key zine and the trade paperback on the way. 

UPDATE: Please see Bobby Campbell  in the comments!



Thursday, September 17, 2026

Titles can't be copyrighted, or even clever comma use

 



I have a couple of covers for novels, above. Hollywood, Ending is the title of Scott Apel's series about the detective Alec Smart. It was published in December 2023. The second is the new novel by the famous author of young  adult fiction, John Green (The Fault in Our Stars, etc.). His  new novel for adults, Hollywood, Ending, comes out  on Sept. 22. 

I thought the coincidence  (or whatever it is) was kind of amusing, so  I  wrote  to Scott to point it out, noting that titles apparently can't be copyrighted. 

Scott wrote back, "As for John Green and me sharing a title, you're right, titles can't be copyrighted. Robert Benchley once wrote a book entitled 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or David Copperfield. There are also several romance novels titled Hollywood Ending. I attempted to distinguish mine from all the others by adding the comma: Hollywood, Ending, which I hope gives the interpretation a different spin."

John Green sells  lots  of books. It would be a shame if people bought Scott's book by mistake! 

I'll ask Scott how he's coming with his new  novel, The Fault  in Our Stars. 

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

Ru Marshall on their new Carlos Castenada biography


John Wisniewski, who has done other interviews for this blog, returns with an interview with the author of an important new book. Ru Marshall is the author of American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda.

Marshall's  publisher, O/R Books, says the new book, released June 25 this year, "unravels the story of the secretive faux-anthropologist who pulled off one of the greatest literary hoaxes in modern history." Reviewers seem to agree. Publisher's Weekly, for example, said it is "an entrancing biography." The New York Times review, by Kurt Andersen, called the book "illuminating and relevant." 

When I was a college student in the 1970s, a friend of mine persuaded me to read Castaneda's breakthrough book, The Teachings of Don Juan. I remember finding the book's revelations of insight gained from indigenous psychedelic practices hard going, but others were more impressed. The publisher's blurb notes, "Admirers ranged from John Lennon and Joni Mitchell to Federico Fellini, George Lucas, and Octavio Paz. His books became international bestsellers and remain the most popular titles ever published on Native American spirituality—despite having little to no connection to actual Indigenous practices." It seems hilarious to me that Castaneda actually apparently didn't use drugs, as Marshall reveals. 

Michael Johnson, writing about Castaneda for this  blog in 2022, surmised, "At present, my main model of Castaneda is that he never went to the Sonora Desert and probably wrote all the Don Juan books from sources in the library at UCLA. When he submitted his thesis, he was asked to show his field notes, and basically: the dog ate 'em, and they signed off on his degree anyway."

Ru Marshall is an American artist, writer and critic. They labored for 20 years on the Castaneda biography. See also the official website. 

You can also read Mr. Wisniewski's interview with Nick Herbert, his interview with Adam Gorightly,  the Tea Krulos interview,  the David Halperin interview,  and two interviews of John Higgs, here and here. 

JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Are there many who believed in Carlos Casteneda, as far as his writing is concerned?

RU MARSHALL: There were millions. Although exact figures are impossible to ascertain, he was among the four or five bestselling nonfiction authors of the 70s, and his books continued to sell handsomely well into the 80s. For the first five years following the publication of The Teachings of Don Juan, almost no one publicly questioned the authenticity of his work. That rare exception being Gordon Wasson.

Did Don Juan Matus exist? No. He was a fictional creation.

JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Did Casteneda have a coven of witches who were his companions?

RU MARSHALL: I wouldn’t use the word “coven.” Castaneda never called it that. But there were three women, Taisha Abelar, Florinde Donner Grau, and Carol Tiggs whom he referred to as his witches, and who claimed (falsely) to have met Don Juan. Florinda and Taisha both disappeared immediately following his death in 1998, and all evidence points to they’re having committed suicide to follow him into the next dimension. 

JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Would you consider Casteneda to be a cult leader?

RU MARSHALL: You bet. Definitions of a cult vary, but the one I employ in American Trickster is as follows: a tightly bounded social group the underlying purpose of which is the aggrandizement of the leader or leaders at the expense, psychological but also financial, emotional, so forth, of the followers. Castaneda’s followers were told to cut off their families, leave behind partners, pets, and jobs to become part of his magical, alternative family. It rarely ended well.

JOHN WISNIEWSKI: What was Casteneda's early life like?

RU MARSHALL:  This is sort of too massive a question to answer. He was born in Cajamarca Peru, his birth name was César Arana. He came from the not quite so wealthy branch of an extremely wealthy family. Although his parents were revolutionaries, he was, on his father’s side, descended from one of the most infamous genocidiares in Peruvian history. Carlos attended art school in Lima, where, shortly before fleeing to the U.S., he impregnated a thirteen year old girl.

JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Why were Casteneda's documents and paper work burned by his followers, at the time of his death?

RU MARSHALL: One of the central principles of his work and in his cult was the mandate to “erase personal history.” He did not want his real story told. This didn’t make my life easy.

JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Does the  Casteneda cult continue to this day?

RU MARSHALL: I no longer pay close attention to this, but it appears to still exist, although it is likely less cultlike than when Carlos was alive. But you can still take classes in Tensegrity, the faux Toltec movement practice which Carlos and the witches suggested could provide the opportunity for eternal life.

JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Did Casteneda use drugs to alter his consciousness?

RU MARSHALL: Shockingly, there is almost no evidence that he did. He gave them to others, and artfully plagiarized accounts by others. In interview after interview, I was told, “he only did them with Don Juan.” But there is definitive evidence that don Juan was a fictional creation. I came across only one eye witness account of Carlos ever using any psychoactive plant or drug—Datura. And, in this account, by Jack Leoffler, he did it wrong. No one got high. He clearly never used mushrooms, since his account in his books has him getting high by smoking them. This doesn’t work.

JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Have his works proven to be an influence on the New Age movement?

RU MARSHALL: Absolutely. He is quoted often, and still regarded with reverence by many.

JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Why was Casteneda's life so often shrouded in mystery?

RU MARSHALL: Because he went to great lengths that it be so. He had far too much to hide.