New 'High Weirdness' available soon

While I was researching an article  for Maybe Day, I noticed that High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies by Erik Davis (focusing on Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick) appeared to be out of print. On Amazon, the hardcover and the paperback are both listed for about $125.

Well, don't buy it! A new edition is coming soon.

From Erik Davis, after I wrote to him about the matter: "It is currently out of print BUT a new edition (with new afterword and appendixes) will be out this fall from Strange Attractor Press."

I'll try to pay attention when it comes out. 

'The Classical Style' reading group, week eight

 

Joseph Haydn around 1770 (source). 

Part III 

HAYDN FROM 1770 TO THE DEATH OF MOZART 

1  String Quartet 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

Mozart died December 5, 1791, age 35. 

On pg. 118, Rosen says of Haydn’s Op. 33 string quartets, “Transitional figures and phrases are almost completely eliminated.” I find this interesting because when Ezra Pound edited T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, he mostly eliminated transitional material, seeing it as unnecessary. Before Pound and Eliot, the notion of the three unities of time, place, and action played a big role in Western literature even though writers like Shakespeare rarely followed the unities. Shakespeare’s The Tempest provides a rare exception: the play takes place in one location on one afternoon. Robert Anton Wilson noticed that films prepared audiences for radical jumps in space and time. D. W. Griffith influenced both Pound and Joyce. Later films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Fifth Element would jump thousands of years from one scene to the next. James Bond films would jump all over the world from scene to scene.  

Literature before Pound and Eliot tended to have transitional material. Pound used radical jump cuts across space and time in The Cantos, and he encouraged Eliot to abandon transitional material in The Waste Land. Rosen illustrates a similar process in Haydn.  

I love Rosen’s writing, but one sentence on page 140 bothers me: “Op. 64 no. 3 in B flat major is one of the great comic masterpieces: the listener who can hear the last movement without laughing aloud knows nothing of Haydn.” I don’t like how he puts the reader on the spot here. The first time I listened to this movement in response to this passage, I did laugh aloud, but I wondered if I found myself nervously laughing because of my fear Rosen would think I knew “nothing of Haydn.” I just listened to it again, and I had a similar experience, laughing insecurely but enjoying the music nonetheless. Cannabis users might experiment with this movement and the quartet as a whole.

Late pledges still taken for 'Tales of Illuminatus No. 3'

Although the Kickstarter for issue number three of Tales of Illuminatus is over and the initial pledges have been paid,  late pledges are still being taken at the Kickstarter site.  It will still help with the project and Bobby Campbell would still appreciate your support. A wide variety of rewards remain available. The planned first trade paperback will have bonus material if the Kickstarter can hit $5,000. 

Update: See Bobby's comment,  below. 

Saturday links

 George Washington crossing the Delaware (to attack the British army's German soldiers). 

Bobby Campbell and Gabriel Kennedy on the Wetwired podcast.   The podcast also has a collection of RAW episodes. 

Arden Leigh in podcast discussing AI. Bobby recommends this. 

The ebook of John Higgs' bio of Timothy Leary is currently $3 on Amazon.  Also, Jesse Walker's The United States of Paranoia also is on sale again. 

Dementia is declining. 

Solar power is gaining. 

Neal Stephenson on "The Sting in the National Anthem's Tail." 

Was the American Revolution good or bad? Ilya Somin thinks it was good but he provides arguments for both sides. 

2026 Prometheus Awards announced

[Again, the relevance to this blog is that Illuminatus! won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, Robert Shea was involved with the Prometheus Award and I am currently one of the judges -- The Management.]

J. Kenton Pierce wins Best Novel for A Kiss for Damocles

Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World to be inducted into Hall of Fame

The Libertarian Futurist Society (www.lfs.org), a nonprofit all-volunteer international organization of freedom-loving science fiction fans, has announced Prometheus Award Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction winners.

The 46th annual Prometheus Awards ceremony

The 46th annual Prometheus Awards will be presented online Sunday afternoon Aug. 16, 2026, in a zoom awards ceremony open to the public.

This year’s hourlong ceremony, tentatively scheduled for 2-3 p.m. Eastern time and emceed by LFS President William H. Stoddard, will feature a guest speaker: Lifelong science-fiction fan Ilya Somin (George Mason University law professor, Cato Institute scholar and author), who will present the Hall of Fame award.

Updates will be posted on the Prometheus Blog over the next several weeks about additional speakers and the ceremony line-up.

The Prometheus Award for Best Novel

A Kiss for Damocles, by J. Kenton Pierce, won the 2026 Prometheus award for best novel for novels published in 2025.

The science fiction novel, published by Raconteur Press and launching Pierce’s Tales From the Long Night series, illuminates the ethics and efficacy of free trade and self-defense as a proper foundation for civilization.

Pierce’s novel is set on a remote planet where humans in towns and homesteading communities are struggling to recover centuries after a catastrophic attack and volcanic cataclysm that set back and severely limits their use of advanced technology. At the story’s heart is Shai, a young homesteader facing harsh frontier conditions, corrupt Townie politicians, dangerous native species, and sinister forces amid still-functional A.I.-powered orbiting war machines.

Pierce celebrates the self-reliance and resilience of self-regulating frontier communities that survive and evolve based on the hard-won realities of voluntarism, mutual respect and cooperation. But this is also a cautionary tale about the deceptive ideals of a command-and-control politics and the perennial tendency toward abuse of power, reflected in the Townies’ push for higher taxation, fiat money and state takeover of education to indoctrinate new generations.

Narrating from her wry but hopeful perspective, Shai becomes a leader in her community’s struggles to defend their freedom, preserve their heritage and restore their world.

Visit the Prometheus blog for a full review of A Kiss for Damocles that illuminates how it fits the distinctive dual focus of the Prometheus Award on quality and liberty.

The other 2025 Best Novel finalists were Storm-Dragon, by Dave Freer (Raconteur Press); War by Other Means, by Karl K. Gallagher (Kelt Haven Press); No Man’s Land, by Sarah Hoyt (Goldport Press); and Powerless, by Harry Turtledove (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy.)

The Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction

Brave New World, a 1932 novel (Chatto & Windus) by Aldous Huxley, won the 2026 Best Classic Fiction award and will be inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.

This dystopian classic offers a still-timely cautionary tale of collectivist soft tyranny under seemingly benevolent world government and technocratic central planning.

Critiquing his era’s rise of collectivism and scientism, Huxley warned about behavioral/biochemical conditioning, propaganda, censorship and manipulation of artificial wombs limiting intelligence and initiative to create and control different castes.

At a time when the intellectual and artistic elite saw most forms of authoritarian collectivism as the inevitable and positive wave of the future, Huxley foresaw the dark side of utopia. The novel explicitly dramatizes how such trends deny individuality, liberty, reason, romantic love, the family, history, and literature (including Shakespeare, which inspired the novel’s title).

Visit the Prometheus blog for a full review of Brave New World that illuminates how it fits the distinctive dual focus of the Prometheus Award on quality and liberty.

The other Hall of Fame finalists were The Star Dwellers, a 1961 novel (Faber and Faber; Avon Books) by James Blish; That Hideous Strength, a 1945 novel (Scribner) by C.S. Lewis; Salt, a 2000 novel (Gollancz) by Adam Roberts; and Singularity Sky, a 2003 novel (Ace) by Charles Stross.

Prometheus Awards History

The Prometheus Awards, sponsored by the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), were first presented in 1979, making it one of the most enduring awards after the Nebula and Hugo awards, and one of the oldest fan-based awards currently in sf.

For more than four decades, the Prometheus Awards have recognized outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy that dramatize the perennial conflict between liberty and power, favor cooperation over coercion, expose the abuses and excesses of coercive government, and/or critique or satirize authoritarian systems, ideologies and assumptions.

Above all, the Prometheus Awards strive to recognize speculative fiction that champions individual rights, based on the moral/legal principle of non-aggression as the ethical and practical foundation for peace, prosperity, progress, justice, tolerance, mutual respect, civility and civilization itself.

All LFS members have the right to nominate eligible works for all categories of the Prometheus Awards, while publishers and authors are welcome to submit potentially eligible works for consideration using the form linked from the LFS website’s main page at www.lfs.org

While the Best Novel category is limited to novels published in English for the first time during the previous calendar year, Hall of Fame nominees — which must have been published, performed, broadcast or released at least 20 years ago — may be in any narrative or dramatic form, including novels, novellas, stories, films, television series or episodes, plays, musicals, graphic novels, song lyrics, or narrative or dramatic verse.

The Best Novel winner receives a plaque with a gold coin, and the Hall of Fame winner, a plaque with a smaller gold coin.

Michael Johnson on RAW's memorable trips

A belladonna plant (Creative Commons photo, source). 

Michael Johnson has a new Substack issue out, "Robert Anton Wilson: Two Formative Drug Trips," with the usual careful research you expect when Michael writes about RAW. Here is a good observation:

"There seems something paradoxical about drug writing: reading about Bad Trips often seems more interesting than reading about Good Trips. Hey, I want all of your trips to be good ones: emotional breakthroughs, sudden realizations that change your life for the better, the feeling of being connected with everyone, every living thing, the biosphere, and the universe, all that really Good Stuff. But it’s at times not gripping reading. Bad trips very often, I find, make for a cracking good read. I read and I think of a line from DFW: well…here’s a supposedly fun thing I’ll never have to do. (He said “never do again” but ya know?)"

As I remark in the comments, the link Michael provides to an R.U. Sirius bad trip has some pretty memorable lines, e.g. when the hospital authorities look at his fake IDs: "Since the admission authorities knew I wasn't Ho Chi Minh, they figured the other ID must be the correct one. I was admitted as Frank Zappa." Also: "The arrival of the ambulance got the attention of my parents."

Lost Leary-Wilson book now available

 

Using the Timothy Leary archives at the New York Public Library, Bobby Campbell has made available a lost book, The Periodic Table of Energy, by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. 

A download of the PDF and Bobby's explanation of how he recovered the document and made it available can be found at Bobby's post at the Only Maybe blog. Note that it's a hefty file, 158 MB. The cover, which I show above, was created by Bobby.

Discussing the manuscript, Bobby writes, "I haven't done a detailed comparison yet, but from a decent skimming of these pages and my memory of The Game of Life and Info-Psychology, I would say The Periodic Table of Energy represents a distinct formulation of Leary's ideas, though clearly early drafts of concepts that he would revisit, and further develop, in later works."

In the first comment, quackenbush writes, "This is definitely a proto version of the Game of Life, an occult transmission, and not a proto-Exo-psychology, which is more of 'scientific' presentation. Curiously, he lists other books, and it appears that 'Interstellar Neurogenetics' is the proto-Exo-Psychology."

More information here. 

A Grateful Dead history

 

The Grateful Dead in 1970. Public domain publicity photo, source. 

Despite getting a strong recommendation from Tracey Harms to check it out, it took me awhile to get to the "Dark Star" by the Grateful Dead episode in Andrew Hickey's  A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs podcast. In podcast form, it's four hours and 39 minutes long. I saved myself considerable time by reading the transcript, available at the link.

Tracey mentioned that it would give me background on the California  milieu of Robert Anton Wilson, and in fact Wilson is mentioned in the podcast. While the song "Dark Star" is duly covered, the podcast in fact is a long history of the band.

I am not particularly a Grateful Dead fan -- I did the bulk of my listening to the Dead when I was in high school and college, before 1980, because I had friends who listened to the records -- but I thought the podcast was very interesting, and I read the whole thing. Some fine research. I had no idea, for example, that two members of the band, Phil Lesh and Tom Constanten, had ties to modern classical music and knew Steve Reich. Even as a transcript it took quite a bit of time to get through the podcast, but I read it eagerly. 

Before offering another theory on why Silicon Valley became such a technology powerhouse -- because so much defense spending was focused there -- host Andrew Hickey offers this:

"Many people who were influential on the Californian ideology, like the postmodernist science fiction writer Robert Anton Wilson, would argue that if you plotted a timeline of the most innovative people in human history, that timeline would slowly move west and slightly north, accelerating over the centuries, as the most radical thinkers followed the Sun, so in the last few centuries the greatest innovations had come from Greece, then Italy, then France, then England, then New York, and then finally the West Coast of the USA. According to Wilson and his friends like Timothy Leary, now that wave had finally reached the Pacific there was only one place left to go, and so humanity would fulfill its manifest destiny and head up into the stars."

Jerry Garcia was only 53 when he died after years of neglecting his health. The story is very sad. The band should have let him stop touring and get his life together. I plan to check out more episodes of the ongoing podcast and if you get interested in it, you can get bonus episodes by supporting Andrew Hickey on his Patreon. 

'The Classical Style' reading group, week seven

 

II  THE CLASSICAL STYLE 

2.  Structure and Ornament 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

The references to Rossini on page 101 makes me think of the popularity of his “The Barber of Seville” in the mid-twentieth century from Bugs Bunny in “The Rabbit of Seville” to Alfalfa of the Little Rascals singing “Figaro, Figaro, Figaro”. Joseph Kerman has written about how people have complained about the “death” of classical music for over a hundred years. Kerman notes that classical music survives, but often not in the way some people wish it would. In his wonderful (non-technical) book  Opera and the Morbidity of Music Kerman notes the surprising revival of the popularity of opera in the 1990’s and the popularity of the Three Tenors and the CD Chant. 

The discussion of ornamentation in this chapter makes me think about popular music in the last forty years, especially post-Mariah Carey, post-Whitney Houston singing, where singers typically add more ornamentation than in the music of the seventies and eighties. Watching American Idol in the 2000’s I noticed how young singers tended to add way more ornamentation than I tended to like. I think about changing performance styles of “The Star-Spangled Banner”.  

I love the Heisenbergian tone of pg. 104, with Rosen’s uncertainty about how to find an accurate interpretation of music especially when it comes to knowing what kind of ornamentation Mozart would have liked in the slow movements of his piano concerti. 

The first 108 pages of this book have laid the groundwork for appreciating the classical style. We have  reached the top of the roller coaster. Enjoy the ride!  

Erik Satie, surrealist composer?

A portrait of Erik Satie by the artist Santiago Rusiñol.

When I recently read The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore and Steve Moore, I was pleased but a bit surprised to see Erik Satie as practically the only composer who gets much attention in the book. Satie is described as a Surrealist composer and his music is recommended for one of the magical workings the authors describe.

Erik Satie (1866-1922), is a kind of ambiguous figure in the history of classical music. On the one hand, he isn't terribly famous. He doesn't get a huge amount of airplay on classical music radio. He is not an international superstar composer in the way that French contemporaries such as Debussy and Ravel were.

On the other hand, it is hard to exaggerate how influential he is on modern classical music. The Wikipedia bio gives some sense of this, but there is a good explanation in Virtual Music, a book that the modern American composer William Duckworth (1943-2012) gave to me years ago. Duckworth explains that Satie was a big influence on John Cage, who in turn influenced many other composers (such as Duckworth). 

Satie, for example, invented "furniture  music," music to be played in the background, rather like Brian Eno's ambient music. It was written for the two intermission of a play, and when members of the audience stopped talking and began to listen, Satie ran around saying, "Talk, keep on talking. And move around. Whatever you do, don't listen!"

Satie's titles for his music included "Desiccated Embryos," "Veritable Flabby Preludes (for a Dog)" and "Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear," the latter written after  his buddy Debussy told him his music lacked shape. Duckworth doesn't mention this, but doesn't that sound like the kinds of titles Frank Zappa has for much of his music?

Duckworth also relates that Satie wrote a short piano piece called "Vexations"  and directed it be played 840 times. John Cage organized the first concert to carry that out, in 1963; it took more than 18 hours. There have been other such concerts  since then, see this Alex Ross piece. 

Satie is mostly known for his piano music,  but he also also wrote a ballet called "Parade," which featured sets and costumes designed by Picasso. I saw a video clip when I attended a Picasso exhibition a few months ago at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the absurd costumes did give the performance a Surrealist air.

Bonus link: My new Substack piece on "Five modern composers you should know."  I mention Duckworth, and if you don't know what the "angel music" is that was used to comfort dying AIDS patients, you might want to read my article. 

A Picasso costume from "Parade"

Schism in the Catholic Church

Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, Paris, occupied by the SSPX since 1977, Wikipedia says (public domain photo).

If you follow the news, you have have noticed that the Catholic Church has excommunicated six bishops in the ultra-conservative Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), e.g. the "Latin mass folks." 

Eric Wagner, the author of An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson and Straight Outta Dublin: James Joyce and Robert Anton Wilson (the latter with Michael Johnson) wrote to me and suggested I mention the news:

"Bob wrote a ton about challenges within the Catholic Church in the 1970's surrounding the P2 conspiracy and the death of Pope John Paul I. The SSPX schixm, which goes back to the 1960's and Vatican II, makes me think about the whole history of the Catholic Church during our lifetimes. Also, the conservative group Opus Dei got some press when the Da Vinci Code movie came out, and it seems like Dan Brown read Bob Wilson. I don't know how all these puzzle pieces fit together." 

What we read last month

A Hilaritas Press book, information here. 

Mark K. Brown's reads and re-reads in June:

Elevated: Cannabis as a Tool for Mind Enhancement by Sebastian Marincolo  6/6 
The Neutronium Alchemist, Part 2: Conflict  by Peter F. Hamilton  6/13   
Mount Analogue by Rene Daumal  6/16   
Writing on Drugs by Sadie Plant  6/17   
Out of the Dead City by Samuel R. Delany  6/21   
The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster   6/24

What I read (or re-read) last month:

The Amazing Editorials, Ted White
Roman Conquests: Britain, Simon  Elliott
The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, Alan Moore and Steve  Moore
New Hampshire, Robert Frost

Feel free to share in the comments what you read  in June. 

An obituary mentions RAW

Annabelle "Joanne" Bates

An obituary for a lady named Annabelle “Joanne” Bates, 98, a resident of Norfolk News in Virginia, captures my attention with this line:

"In 1987, Joanne hosted author Robert Anton Wilson during his visit to the area, who loved her crab cakes."

Perhaps that is another sign that Wilson has not been forgotten since his death in 2007?