Bobby Campbell has sent out a newsletter to announce Tales of Illuminatus #3, providing basically the same details I provided yesterday (Kickstarter begins April 23), but also has a bunch of other news.
One of Bobby's announcements is that he's released a free Illuminatus! game, CTHULHUS WAKE.
"An arcane arcade adventure! Nine levels of mini game eldritch action!"
More news if you read the whole thing. You want to know who is "the best cartoonist in the world," don't you?
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A new Kickstarter campaign is about to launch for Tales of Illuminatus #3, the sequel to Bobby Campbell's first two comic book adaptations of Illuminatus!
Bobby has put up a prelaunch page on Kickstarter. Bobby's message on the page says,
"The circus is back in town!
"More info coming soon with the official launch on April 23rd :)))
Until then stay tuned to the GLORIA DISCORDIA Newsletter
"<3<3<3"
More information soon.
Jesse Walker has a habit of posting movie lists on his website every year, going back ten years, 20 years, etc., but now he's created a new website for his movie recommendations.
Jesse has now launched a Letterboxd site, which features the following lists so far: "Acid Noirs," "Top 20 Movies of the 1920s," "Top 20 Movies of the 1930s," and "Stuff I Watched With My Then-10-Year-Old Daughter While My Wife Was Out of Town for a Week, According to a 2016 Facebook Post I Just Found."
I like old movies, so I suspect this will be a useful resource for me. Seems like a nice bonus that (or so I assume) just about any 1920s movie should be in the public domain and therefore easy to find for free. Above is Jesse's top pick for the 1920s.
UPDATE: I messed up the link to Jesse's new site, but that's fixed now. He's added more movie reviews since this post originally went up.
Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash
Michael Johnson has a new post up, "Model Agnoticism: Get Smarter and Happier (Maybe?)"
"Wilson said in an interview 13 years before his death that not believing anything and not disbelieving anything is 'one of the most important ideas in my books.' This Model Agnosticism runs like a source code through all of Wilson’s 40-odd books, both fiction and non-fiction. He even wondered about this separation of 'fiction' and non- as reified categories. If we just constantly invent or discover reality, how is this not an aspect of fiction? Why are the holy books shelved in the non-fiction section of the library? Are novels true statements about someone’s world? What is the relation between facts and 'reality'?"
Adam Vorobok, reading a ghost story (Facebook photo)
Parade publishes an article, "Librarians Say These 10 ‘Hidden Gem’ Books Are the Funniest Things You’ll Read All Year," and guess which is one of the books recommended?
Citing Adam Vorobok, a librarian at Cincinnati Public Library, the article says about Illuminatus!,
“Written during the counter-culture days, this trippy novel satirizes conspiracy theories as a way for you to question your own reality tunnel. No book has made me laugh harder than this one,” Vorobok says.
Per the book description, this trilogy addresses “all the coverups of our time,” ranging from “who really shot the Kennedys to why there’s a pyramid on a one-dollar bill.”
Mr. Vorobok also had a podcast as "Warlock Vorobok Reads." , reading classic horror stories. Seems like a cool dude.
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[Editor's note: This blog posting originated when I asked Scott what his favorite books are, and then asked a follow-up question asking him for his five favorite Philip K. Dick books. It was not originally written as a freestanding essay. -- The Management.]
By D. Scott ApelMy all-time favorite quote comes from Voltaire: “If you wish to converse with me, define your terms.” I mention this partially because I spent many, many hours in discussion and debate with other writers and editors at Apple’s iTunes, where we dissected specific words to determine how people understand them and whether we were being misleading when using these words in various promotions. “Best,” for instance, was a verboten term. Who decides what is “best,” and what qualifies a piece of content to be promoted as “best”? Anyone who disagreed with our choices could potentially be offended. But no one had an objection to labeling a movie “great,” since that word is so nebulous as to be meaningless—but it clearly indicates that “we like it.”
The point is that “favorite” is one of those vague words that could be interpreted in many ways. Does it mean pleasure reading? Great Literature? One’s list of Desert Island Books? Guilty pleasures? I published over 200 film-related articles, many of a “roundup” nature (“The Ten Best Film Noir Classics”) and I always began these pieces with “the ground rules” if only to avoid being accused of leaving out someone else’s choice of “best.” So, before I list my choices, here are my parameters: These are all works of fiction, in English (or translated into English). They are not necessarily Great Literature (although some absolutely qualify), but are the titles that had the most profound and longest-lasting influence on my approach to writing. Each in its way revealed how the boundaries of literature can be expanded and illustrated what language and literature are capable of.
In no particular order, the most influential works of fiction in my life include:
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Don Quixote by Cervantes
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Labyrinths by Jorges Luis Borges
The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles Finney
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Oedipus in Disneyland by Hercules Malloy
Any of Donald E. Westlake’s comic caper novels (The Hot Rock; Drowned Hopes; etc.)
I could also add any novel by Jules Verne and Philip K. Dick’s VALIS (since I’m in it).
And although they might seem out of place, I would be remiss if I did not include MAD magazine (from 1952-1970) and The National Lampoon (1970-’75) – although not novels, these humor magazines were print publications and were primarily responsible for my subversive attitude and approach to writing humor. Add to that the recordings of The Firesign Theater and Spike Jones, and you’ve got some insight into my sense of humor.
Non-fiction has informed my psychological development as much as those works of fiction have influenced my writing. The Top Ten Non-Fiction books in my personal pantheon include:
Collected Works by Carl Jung
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck
Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
Roget’s Thesaurus
The Path to Enlightenment by the Dalai Lama
Science of Survival by L. Ron Hubbard
Mirror of Venus by Wingate Paine
The Book of Thoth by Aleister Crowley
Sadly, these lists cover only print literature. There are so many more deep influences among movies (Forbidden Planet; Last Year at Marienbad; the Marx Brothers; Fellini), television (The Prisoner), and music (Bach, Beethoven’s symphonies, Dvorak’s 9th Symphony, and the Moody Blues are just the tip of that iceberg).
Favorite works by Philip K. Dick
My friend Will Jacobs (also a writer) is also a big PKD fan, and he said something that has stuck with me for like five decades now: "The first Phil Dick book a person reads is always their favorite." My interpretation is that the first PKD novel one reads is so impactful, unique, and different than anything else one has read before that it makes a huge and long-lasting first impression.
My Top 5 Favorite PKD novels would be:
Eye in the Sky (the first Phil Dick book I ever read -- perhaps proving Will's point!)
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
VALIS (and not just because I'm in it, but that don't hurt)
UBIK
We Can Build You
...but this is not to say that many others don't have many redeeming qualities. I still quote a paragraph from Clans of the Alphane Moon regularly, for instance.
You will notice that many of Phil's best-known works are not on my list, including The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Nothing against either of them, just not among my personal favorites.
Note: Scott was Philip K. Dick's friend and did a well-regarded book about Dick. This has been added to the "D. Scott Apel Resources" section on the right side of this page.
Brian Doherty (Cato Institute photo)
To my pleasant surprise, the New York Times runs a long obituary for Brian Doherty, libertarian chroniclers and RAW expert. And it mentions Illuminatus!
A couple of sentences from Trip Gabriel's piece:
"Mr. Doherty became a libertarian at the University of Florida in the late 1980s, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in journalism. But he traced his political tendencies even earlier, to his reading, as a 12-year-old, of a science fiction trilogy, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus!
“ 'One of the specific purposes of that work, according to Wilson,' Mr. Doherty later wrote, 'was to do to the state what Voltaire did to the church — that is, reduce it to an object of contempt for all thoughtful people'.”
Microdosing expert James Fadiman is the guest on the new Hilaritas podcast. Here is the blurb for the show:
"Hilaritas host Mike Gathers talks with researcher, author, teacher, and consultant, Dr. James Fadiman.
"Richard Alpert first turned Jim onto psilocybin in 1961. Jim soon moved to Perry Lane, the Stanford Bohemian Quadrant which was ground zero for Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. There in Menlo Park, Jim guided Stuart Brand on his first LSD experience. He went on to help found the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and continues to teach to this day. Jim wrote the Psychedelic Explorers Guide Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys in 2011, and has co-written with his friend Jordan Gruber, Microdosing for Health, Healing and Advanced Performance, and Your Symphony of Selves: Discover and Understand More of who we are.."
James Fadiman’s website: https://www.jamesfadiman.com/
Institute of Transpersonal Psychology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofia_University_(California)
Host Mike Gathers:https://linktr.ee/mgathers23
Producer/Engineer Richard Rasa: http://www.pelorian.com/rasa.html
D. Scott Apel's most popular book
D. Scott Apel collaborated with Robert Anton Wilson on RAW's newsletter Trajectories, resulting in two books, Chaos and Beyond and Beyond Chaos and Beyond, but Scott is an interesting writer in his own right.
So, on the right side of this page, just below the "Robert Anton Wilson Resources" and "Robert Shea Resources" sections, I've created a new "D. Scott Apel Resources" section. So far, those links include three interviews of Scott I conducted her, observations on some of his book titles, and the only complete and accurate bibliography of his books (that I know of) available on the internet. I just added the Hilaritas Press podcast interview with Scott.
I have other items in the works that I'll be adding in the coming weeks.
Scott is less organized in self promotion than many other creators -- there's no official author page -- so I decided to set this up.
John Higgs has released a new edition of his Octannual Update newsletter.
Lots of interesting events in Britain to go to, so if you live there you should read the whole thing, but I will highlight a couple of items of global interest.
The paperback of John's Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who is about to be released. It's only published in Britain, but John explains how you can order an autographed copy from a business that ships worldwide.
Also, the Mycelium Parish News has just been published, a bit late this time. As John explains, "This is a catalogue of that year’s books, podcasts, fanzines, mailing lists, events etc, that come from alternative or Discordian- adjacent creators. There’s a micro-essay from me in there also." I have just ordered my copy.
Martin Wagner's online collection of Robert Anton Wilson materials was offline for a bit, but he has now launched the revamped Robert Anton Wilson Archives website.
It looks great and it has a lot of interesting material to read. Martin's site and RAWilsonfans.org both deserve your attention as collections of RAW material (and I like to think there's a few things to read here, too).
The new link for "Robert Anton Wilson Archives" is now up under "Robert Anton Wilson Resources" at the right side of this page.
Sehr gut, Martin!
Over at RAW Semantics, Brian has posted new images of Robert Anton Wilson, both art images and enhanced photos. He's getting really good at this.
Brian says:
"A mix of some 'new' photos, repurposed (and quality-improved) old video stills and some of my attempts at artwork. The subject, of course, is Robert Anton Wilson, who I would argue – and despite the efforts of RAW fans – generally doesn’t seem well-served by images of his likeness (good quality source images being few – the web is populated instead with blurred low-res video grabs). I’ve added a boring technical note below the images, for people who like that kind of thing."
The Non Serviam podcast, episode 74, features Mike Gathers. He's interviewed by Lucy Steigerwald.
"For NSP 74, we spoke with Mike Gathers about the politics of Robert Anton Wilson!
In addition, we talked about libertarianism, techno-optimism, the limits of the left-right spectrum, and Mike's recently published book with Hilaritas Press titled, A Non Euclidian Perspective: Robert Anton Wilson’s Political Commentaries 1960-2005 containing many previously published political articles and interviews of RAW."
I've provided YouTube links, but both should be on most podcasting apps.
Bonus news: Afroman won.
