Given that Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea were Blake fans and many RAW fans also love William Blake fans, I thought I would pass on this article recommending the five best books about William Blake, as chosen by Mark Vernon, author of the new book, Awake!: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination.
Don't forget that John Higgs also has written two books about Blake.
I don't see the book on Amazon, so U.S. readers apparently will want to order the book from Britain and have it shipped over here.
Malcolm Cowley. Public domain photo by Carl Van Vechten.
Dwight Garner reviews a new book about Malcolm Cowley for the New York Times, and the review (and apparently the book) highlights the role Cowley, a writer, editor and critic, played in reviving the career of writer William Faulkner:
"It’s hard to believe now, but in 1944 every one of William Faulkner’s 17 books was out of print except for 'Sanctuary,' a thriller he’d written to pay the mortgage. He was only in his late 40s but his career was in eclipse. Maxwell Perkins, the venerated Scribner’s editor, had declared: 'Faulkner is finished.' Faulkner’s publisher nudged him further into oblivion when it donated some of his novels’ printing plates — who’ll need these again? — to be melted down for the war effort.
"Among the books out of print were several interrelated novels written between 1929 and 1942, 'The Sound and the Fury,' 'As I Lay Dying,' 'Light in August,' 'Absalom, Absalom!' and 'Go Down, Moses.' Each was set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Miss. Each is now recognized as among the most vital and important novels of the 20th century, but that was hardly the case at the time. Faulkner’s work had never sold well, and it had long ago been pounded into dust by popular critics such as Clifton Fadiman of The New Yorker, who found Faulkner a puzzling bore."
The review relates how Faulkner's fortunes were reversed when Cowley succeeded in getting Viking to let him edit and publish The Portable Faulkner, despite the fact that "Almost no one at Viking thought the book worth doing."
The book Garner reviews is The Insider by Gerald Howard; Faulkner is not the only writer Cowley helped. See the link, above, and the Wikipedia bio.
I mention this not just because RAW was a Faulkner fan (Faulkner gets a mention in Illuminatus!) but because the new book raises an important point: Who or what will help bring more attention to the works of Robert Anton Wilson (and Robert Shea)? Is there a Malcolm Cowley out there somewhere?
At least, thanks to Hilaritas Press, we don't have to worry about RAW going out of print. There's a lot currently available for any reader who discovers RAW and wants to get more.
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Harlan Ellison (Creative Commons photo by Pip R. Lagenta, more information)
Jesse Walker spots a "letter to the editor" from Robert Anton Wilson in the October 1981 issue of Heavy Metal magazine.
The text:
"Dear All,
"Loved the Burroughs article on immortality. That man is the greatest prose artist since Joyce. I was less impressed with the Ellison piece. His rhetoric always reminds me of the kind of speech that traditionally ends up, 'And let's get a rope and string the bastards up right now.' Doesn't he ever stop hating everybody and anybody in sight? Oh, well, that's his shtick I guess: different maps for different chaps, different scenes for different genes, different lanes for different brains ....
Live long and prosper,
Robert Anton Wilson Berkeley, Calif."
The Harlan Ellison piece, "Fear Not Your Enemies," is here. It's an essay arguing for gun control that appeared after John Lennon's murder. It's reprinted in the Ellison collection Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed: Essays.
The William Burroughs piece is here. The AI summary when I searched for it says, "William Burroughs' piece 'Immortality' was featured in Heavy Metal Magazine in May 1981. This work is a heavily edited version of an essay that later appeared in his book The Adding Machine. In "Immortality," Burroughs explores themes related to the human desire for eternal life and the implications of advanced medical technologies, such as transplant techniques, on society."
Dr. Gül Dölen
Robert Anton Wilson, defending Timothy Leary, campaigned for research into the benefits of psychedelic drugs, and I often wished he could have lived to see the research efforts that have been going on in recent years. Michael Johnson's latest Substack newsletter, "Recent Psychedelic Drug Research and German Ethology," is an interesting primer on some of the work that's going on. At the end of the piece, Michael loops back to Leary: "The Leary scholar James Penner thought Leary’s ideas around 'de-conditioning' and 'reimprinting' using psychedelic drugs were his biggest breakthroughs."
As this is a blog aimed at people who like to read, I thought I would pass on a suggestion from Mark Frauenfelder, from the latest issue of the newsletter Recomendo:
"book.sv, is a free book recommendation engine built by scraping 43 million Goodreads users. I entered about ten favorite books, and the results impressed me. It surfaced other books I’ve read and loved, validating its taste-matching algorithm. More exciting were the new titles it suggested: intriguing picks I hadn’t encountered before (like Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze). Unlike Goodreads’ algorithm, this feels like getting suggestions from someone who actually understands my reading taste. — MF"
So I decided to try it. I entered 14 favorite books, ones that I had read more than once, and it gave me 30 book recommendations. Most were titles I knew about, all were authors I had heard of. Nineteen were books I had already read, which I guess shows that the recommendations work; I liked almost all of the books I had read, although a couple did not impress me much. There were only a couple of books I don't know much about, Light by M. John Harrison and The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies. But the recommended book I am likeliest to read next is The Magus by John Fowles; Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea were both Fowles fans. I probably should also try The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth. (I read The Floating Opera in college and liked it, but I've never read any other Barth. RAW liked him.)
Photo from Unsplash
Here is some news that combines several of Robert Anton Wilson's interests: Ireland is moving ahead with a program to provide basic income payments to artists. The program was an experiment and is now being made permament.
While I got frustrated trying to find one really good news story that answered all of my questions (what kinds of artists? How many people are likely to qualify in the future?) here are some articles: From Smithsonian, also an article from Ocula, and also an article from Business Insider.
Just wanted to draw a little attention to it. Posted on Bluesky to draw attention to the recent RAW Semantics posting about A Non-Euclidean Perspective: Robert Anton Wilson’s Political Commentaries 1960-2005.
My sister's copy
I recently flew to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to visit my mother. While chatting with my sister in my mother's living room a few days ago, my sister mentioned that the local branch of the public library has a table where people can put books they own they have finished reading, and other library patrons are invited to take them and bring them home. Kind of like the "Little Free Libraries" that are common in the U.S. Susi mentioned there was a book that offered a different history of the 20th century.
The next day, Susi, knowing my interest in history, brought the book over to show to me, and to my surprise it was John Higgs' Stranger Than We Can Imagine. It's one of my favorite John Higgs books. I have my own copy, autographed by the author, and I also had bought a copy and given it to my father. It was one of the last books my Dad read before he passed away.
"I know that guy!" I exclaimed. I explained that Dad had read it. Then I picked up my mother's copy of Every Day is a GOOD DAY, the Robert Shea book published by Hilaritas Press that I edited that came out in September. I showed them the quote on the back cover, from John, endorsing the book.
At this point, you probably are curious what John said about the Shea book, here it is: "“Entertaining, thought provoking and richly varied, Every Day is a GOOD Day is a perfect introduction to the anarchistic principles and humane thinking of Robert Shea - a man more interested in finding flaws in his own beliefs than he is in forcing those beliefs on others.”
The October 2025 issue of The Mycelium has been released, and there's lots of Discordian news, including several events in Britain.
Some of Michelle Olley's newsletter covers news we have mentioned here: The new Non-Euclidian RAW book, the new Robert Shea book, Tales of Illuminatus No. 2 and John Higgs' new David Lynch book. And we appreciate the shoutout for this blog.
Also: A Day of the Dead bricklaying ceremony in Birkenhead Park in Liverpool ("The JAMs return to Merseyside for the annual laying of the bricks in The People’s Pyramid, presided over by Callendar, Callendar, Cauty and Drummond funeral services and our own Bricklayer, Daisy Eris Campbell and Krew"); a screening of David Bramwell's movie, The Haunted Mustache ("The story of a mysterious inheritance, seances, psychedelics and Brighton’s 1990s alt-cabaret scene is woven together with inimitable charm by writer, broadcaster and performer David Bramwell"), Melinda Gebbie's new art book and a new version of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies.
I haven't gotten very far in Non-Euclidian yet, but I have gotten far enough to notice that the editors chose many pieces written early in RAW's writing career. RAW himself, with some exceptions, did not use much of his early work when he was alive and was selecting the pieces for his own anthologies. He sometimes disparaged his early work, although I also wonder if he did not have easy access to much of it.
In any event, the use of early pieces in A Non-Euclidian Perspective means that the reader gets a look at how RAW's writing style and political thought evolved during his career. Some of those early pieces are not really my favorite bits of RAW writing, but I did very much like "Ezra Pound and his Admirers," where RAW confronts his admiration of Pound and his loathing for his politics:
"Two statements which I am arrogant enough to call 'facts' must be placed on record in any intelligent discussion of Pound: (1) He is a great poet and a great thinker; (2) He has deliberately and consistently support fascism, anti-Semitism and other vicious systems and attitudes for 30 years now, and continues to do so ... Placed together, those facts make a paradox which is both tragic and highly alarming. Most of us prefer not to face that paradox, and we reduce Pound to one part of it and ignore the other part."
Later:
"To see Pound as he is -- a man of genius and goodwill, of folly and rage, of love and integrity and hatred and dishonesty -- is to admit that such contradictions can exist in the human personality. That is not a comfortable thought -- it is especially uncomfortable to those of us who are, like Pound, idealists intent on changing the world -- so we prefer to brush it aside and go on playing our life-myth that the universe is one big Western Movie where the 'good guys' (us) are fighting the 'bad guys' (our enemies.)"
I am grateful to the editors for getting this book assembled, so I could read this piece and the other pieces.
Related: Substack from Michael Johnson: "Ezra Pound, RAW and The 'Two Cultures'."
The new Robert Anton Wilson book, above, won't be the last from Hilaritas.
Hilaritas Press already has an impressive catalog of Robert Anton Wilson books, along with books by other authors, but the flow of new RAW titles looks like it is going to keep going for awhile.
Mike Gathers -- Hilaritas Press podcast host, one of the editors who helps Rasa, Substack newsletter author, and so on -- reports that work has begun on a new book that collects Robert Anton Wilson's writings on magick. Mike has assembled 16 essays so far. Possible titles include RAW Magick in Theory and Practice or Maybe Magick.
Don't expect the book to come out right away. "We've got a long way to go to get this into print," Mike said.
Various other ideas for RAW anthologies are being kicked around, but I need to emphasize that at this point there are mostly just ideas and may not result in an actual book:
• Mike has worked to assemble some of RAW's more utopian pieces, possible title, A Vision of the Future.
• Mike has compiled a list of 29 pieces RAW wrote for other books, including forewords, prefaces, etc.
• Mike has a list of 27 book reviews which could form the kernel of a book.
• "And then there's RAW Letters, which could be an endless research project although some are already assembled by Mike Johnson, Martin Wagner and myself, and I'm aware that Gabriel Kennedy has the real inside scoop there," he says.
• "And another idea we've tossed around is RAW Interviews, which would take some transcription work on a lot of the audio stuff running around out there, and, at least the part that intimidates me the most, would be securing the publishing rights to that long and varied list of interviews (I've mentioned this to Rasa several times and he's always seemed unconcerned). Burroughs Live by Semiotext(E) would be the model for that RAW Interview book."
In case you missed my caution above, Mike says, "I want to emphasize that these are all just ideas I've tossed around with Rasa and Chad."
Not a bad book, honest. Cover by Rasa.
Feel free to email me what you read last month to be included in these chronicles, or just post your own list in the comments.
What Mark K. Brown read last month:
The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche 10/18
Brave New Word by Aldous Huxley 10/19
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut 10/21
Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein 10/25
A Non-Euclidean Perspective by Robert Anton Wilson 10/26
What I read last month:
Every Day is a GOOD Day: Robert Shea on Illuminatus! Writing and Anarchism, Robert Shea. Yes, I read the book I edited when I got my paper copies from the publisher, Hilaritas Press. I thought it was pretty good. Michael Johnson wrote a review for his Substack newsletter, he obviously gave the book a careful read.
Vineland, Thomas Pynchon. I kept up with the reading group.
The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told, Bill Janovitz. New book about one of my favorite rock groups. I obtained a review copy, read it, interviewed the author, and wrote an article about it.
All the Humans Are Sleeping, John C.A. Manley, Prometheus Award nominee.
Don't Try This at Home: Convention Reports, David Langford. I mentioned this in a previous blog post, and I may write a review and publish it here.
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