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Monday, March 18, 2024

Archived issues of Mondo 2000


Cover of issue 14 of Mondo 2000.

 Mondo 2000, the cyberculture magazine co-founded and edited by R.U. Sirius, featured contributions from the likes of Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary and Rudy Rucker. It came out in the 1980s and 1990s.

Every issue of the magazine is now available for download. Find all of the issues here. 

I downloaded the first issue, and it includes a piece by Robert Anton Wilson, "Cyber Evolution: Montage." 


Sunday, March 17, 2024

James Burt Nirvana story, and Kickstarter

 


Copyrighted free use photo, credit Paul Fritz Surachit, details here. 

"Hidden Tracks," a short story by James Burt about Nirvana fans, is both touching and funny. Two of the characters save up to visit Aberdeen in the state of Washington in the U.S.

"(Our friend Emily thought that Nirvana came from Aberdeen in Scotland, and couldn’t figure out why it was taking Henry so long to save up. When we realised, we took the piss. But Emily got a first in her degree and I was a long way from that)." 

"Taking the piss" means to mock somebody; my wife and I watch a lot of British mysteries, so we had heard the expression.

James sends out emails of short stories, none of them longer than about 700 words. Sign up here. 

James also has announced a Kickstarter for a new book:

"I’ve been chatting with Dan from Peakrill Press, and we’ve set a date for launching the True Clown Stories kickstarter: March 21st. We’ve uploaded a preview page where you can sign up to be notified on launch.

"The clowns in this book are not the creepy ones from horror stories. Rather, these are talented people who’ve found themselves in a world that doesn’t value their skills. These are stories about how they fight back against that disappointment.

"This book has been far too long in the works and I’m excited about launching the kickstarter. Nervous too - it’s so much harder to promote things online these days. But we’ll see what happens."

As I mentioned in an earlier post, James Burt worked on the Mycelium Parish News 2023. 



Saturday, March 16, 2024

Jesse Walker reviews 'Tripping on Utopia'



Jesse Walker's comments on Benjamin Breen's book, Tripping on Utopia, attracted some discussion in the comments for my recent blog post.  Jesse's review of the book has now become available at the Reason magazine website. 

I don't think the sole focus should be on Jesse's review, particularly as he is kinder about Tim Leary than other reviewers. Charlotte Shane's review for the New York Times is available here.   The book also was reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books. (The headline for that review is "Timothy Leary Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.") Publisher's Weekly also reviewed it. 

Friday, March 15, 2024

Was the RAW gorilla story 'too good to check'?


 At the Boing Boing website, RAW fan Mark Frauenfelder mentions that he has been reading RAW's Cosmic Trigger 3 and decided to track down an anecdote in the book about a prankster in Uganda who tranquilized gorillas and then dressed them up in clown suits. Mark tries to track down the story and can't find any confirmation and finally decides that it might have been "too good to check." 

In the comments section, this remark from the current Fortean Times news editor might be relevant: "I can confirm that it is indeed from us, via the Coventry Telegraph. It is definitely one of the more unlikely stories we’ve run, but we are as much about the strangeness of the media as the strangeness of the world, so do run tales like this without going deeply into verification, but provide the source for those who feel motivated to follow up."

"Without going deeply into verification" is a good description for a great deal of Fortean material, apparently; see this discussion of The New Inquisition. 


Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Interesting new article on James Joyce


A 1922 photograph of James Joyce by Man Ray. (Public domain photo). 

 "James Joyce Was a Complicated Man" by Henry Oliver, an article posted at The Fitzwilliam, starts out by zeroing in on the date James Joyce chose for Ulysses

"After Nora Barnacle masturbated James Joyce under a bridge, she became his muse. It was their first date, and Nora thought it a way of keeping her ardent admirer at bay. The glove that Nora had removed, Joyce kept by him in bed as a young man. But this was more than infatuation. That day became the centre of Joyce’s imaginative work, the day on which Ulysses was set. 

"A few years earlier, Joyce had been seduced by a prostitute, down by the River Liffey, an encounter which began his retreat from religion and religious authority. Now Nora was bringing him towards his central idea: the role of love in human affairs, and the notion that, as Richard Ellmann put it, the ordinary is the extraordinary; Joyce’s novel is the 'justification of the commonplace.' What happened between him and Nora that day wasn’t crude or immoral or disgusting: it was life. And it became the foundation of Ulysses."

Lots of other interesting observations in the article, too. This passage, for example, could be read as a restatement of how Ulysses influenced Illuminatus!: "Consciousness is fragmentary and so, to depict consciousness, novels must become fragmentary too. As T.S. Eliot said, 'the number of aspects' in Ulysses 'is indefinite'.” This seems like a restatement of RAW's comment that Ulysses does not have one objective point of view. 

The author, Henry Oliver, has his own Substack. 



Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Bobby Campbell's big comics collection


Omnibus 777 is a digital comics bundle that has been put together by Bobby Campbell. $5 for hundreds of pages of comics that can be downloaded individually, or as one big bundle. Available here. 

"OMNIBUS 777 - Your Passport to the Weirdoverse! A digital comix bundle collecting together 12 comix and 4 zines from Bobby Campbell and his amazing friends :)))

"Featuring: Weird Comix #0, Weird Comix #1, Weird Comix #2, Agnosis! #1, Agnosis! #2, BUDDHAFART #1, BUDDHAFART #2, Daze of Future Pastime, REJECTED, Psychonaut Comix #1, Psychonaut Comix #2, EITHER/OR, New Trajectories #1, New Trajectories #2, Maybe..., and Meet the Others.

"Bundle comes with access to PDF versions of all 16 releases, with CBR, Mobi (Kindle), and Web versions of all 12 comix. Download them individually or as a .zip file collection from the OMNIBUS 777 PDF guidebook."

"The idea is to make Omnibus 777 both the cheapest & best way to access my work," Bobby told me. 




Monday, March 11, 2024

Michael Johnson recommends three books on cannabis



[If you look at this blog, I hope you have noticed that the comments have been really interesting lately. Most of them should not really be taken out of context, but Michael's three book recommendations, as part of other comments for the March 7 blog post, seems to stand alone, and I decided to turn them into a blog post to make them easy to access, not least to remind me to read them. The Management.]

Three good books about cannabis

By R. Michael Johnson 

Peter Grinspoon's book from 2023, Seeing Through The Smoke: A Cannabis Specialist Untangles The Truth About Marijuana is to be recommended.

On the neurobiology of cannabis and the endocannabinoid system that is probably the master regulatory system in the body: see Cheryl Pellerin's Healing With Cannabis: The Evolution of the Endocannabinoid System and How Cannabinoids Help Relieve PTSD, Pain, MS, Anxiety, and More: it's quite readable for the intelligent layperson.

For cannabis and philosophy, I have a heavy bias toward Sebastian Marincolo's Elevated: Cannabis As A Tool For Mind Enhancement, put out by Hilaritas, with an Intro by some jackass*, but Marincolo's book is da bomb.

Read all three, digest what they have to say, then settle back with a few hits of a hybrid and try not to ponder the amount of BS that the government and industries that felt threatened by weed got far too many people to believe. The data/info/knowledge in those books couldda been common by the 1960s if there was no concerted disinformation program against this plant. (AKA Stanford professor Robert Proctor's term: agnotology: the business of creating un-knowledge) This is no small point: tens of thousands of people have done heavy time in prison for small amounts of what grandma is now scoring from her local dispensary, 'cuz it helps with her arthritis and the side effects are negligible.

Do that for a few minutes, then drop it - cannabis helps you easily to drop this kinda of anger - and just enjoy music, poetry, or movies. Or art, food and sex. Just a thought.

* [Foreword by R. Michael Johnson]

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Do psychedelics make everyone better? Maybe the answer is obvious ....


Douglas Rushkoff

 Article spotted on Twitter by R.U. Sirius: "Ego tripping: Why do psychedelics "enlighten" some people — and make others giant narcissists?" 

"Crossing paths w. everyone from Leary and McKenna to  RAWilson & R.U. Sirius Rushkoff was an early proponent of  the crossover between technology & psychedelics." Rushkoff is is quoted a lot, so your mileage may vary depending on what you think of how his thinking has evolved. 

More here. 

Saturday, March 9, 2024

My Robert Shea FOIA



Robert Shea. Photo from Bobshea.net. 

Via Jesse Walker on X, I read an article in the Intercept which says that the FBI "the FBI maintains a program specifically for combating anarchists, called the Anarchist Extremism Program."

"An internal FBI threat advisory obtained by The Intercept defines Anarchist Violent Extremists as individuals 'who consider capitalism and centralized government to be unnecessary and oppressive,' and 'oppose economic globalization; political, economic, and social hierarchies based on class, religion, race, gender, or private ownership of capital; and external forms of authority represented by centralized government, the military, and law enforcement'.”

Robert Anton Wilson's interest in anarchism waned somewhat over the years, but Illuminatus! co-author Robert Shea called himself an anarchist, put out the anarchist zine No Governor (see the Robert Shea Resources at the right side of this page) and was otherwise active on the anarchist zine. He was rather strictly opposed to violence (he equated violence with statism), but I wondered if he showed up in the FBI files, anyway.

So I've filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see if there is anything. Naturally, if I get something, I will post about it here. 

As I wrote in 2013, there have been attempts to get information on what the FBI files had about Robert Anton Wilson. Apparently, there's not much there. 


Friday, March 8, 2024

Robert Anton Wilson on Daniel Defoe


[A literary observation posted on Facebook by Jamey-Heather Davis. I thought it would share it with you. Jamey-Heather Davis is a teacher in Eugene, Oregon, and a member of Robert Anton Wilson Fans group. The Management.]

As an undergrad, I got an A+ on a paper where I demonstrated Wilson's use of other author's voices (in my paper, Joyce and Burroughs) to communicate certain states of mind. But my all time favorite passage of his doing so is this: "Maria had been reading a chryselephantinely over written book called Moll Flanders in the coach, and very definetely thought the somber, passionate, tragicomic and picaresque story was most absorbing, and certainly presented the dark, sinister, underground side of English life in a vivacious and veridical manner that carried conviction, but she wished Mr. Defoe were not so in love with ornamentally excessive adjectives and long, stentorian, and somewhat inchoate sentences that, even by the standards of the time, seemed to twist and turn through curlicues and arabesques and wind on and on through ever-increasing clauses and sub-clauses, including abrubt changes of subject and total NON SEQUITURS (italics in original), even if he did seem to be making a unique effort to understand a woman's perspective on the world, which was all to the good, and it was less monochromatically monotonous (she had to admit) than the other one he wrote with virtually nobody in it but that one ingenious mechanic on the island , living in total isolation unitil he found that one  ineluctable footprint; and yet it could all be told as well and be more pleasant to read if those sentences did not get so totally out of control and sprawl all over the page so often in positive apotheosis of the lugubrious style, and then she wondered if reading so much of such labyrinthe and arabesque prose for so long in the hot carriage had affected her own mind and she were starting to think like that herself....." ~ RAW, Nature's God, Hilaritus Press edition, p. 17 - 18

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Thursday links [Updated]


 Erik Davis in the Paris Review, an article adapted from his upcoming book,  Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium, about a museum of LSD blotter paper. 

Republican nominee for governor in North Carolina. 

"Marijuana use is associated with lower odds of subjective cognitive decline." News for older people, but I don't know what to make of this and it may not be the final word. UPDATE: Here is another encouraging study (clickable link for the study Michael mentions in the comments.) 

Conspiracy content at the film festival. 

There's a huge increase in young women taking antidepressants.


Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Powerful psychedelic may hold key to breaking opioid addictions

 

Iboga is described as "an evergreen rainforest shrub native to Central Africa." It produces ibogaine. (Creative Commons photo via Wikipedia, information here). 

While we all wait for SMI2LE to be fulfilled (we may not have the space colonies or life extension yet, but we're getting the intelligence increase, in the form of AI), it's worth noting again that Robert Anton Wilson apparently had a point when he condemned the long ban on psychedelic research.

Here's a New York Times story about ibogaine, a powerful psychedelic from Africa I had not heard about before:

"Ibogaine, a formidable psychedelic made from the root of a shrub native to Central Africa, is not for the timid. It unleashes a harrowing trip that can last more than 24 hours, and the drug can cause sudden cardiac arrest and death.

"But scientists who have studied ibogaine have reported startling findings. According to a number of small studies, between a third and two-thirds of the people who were addicted to opioids or crack cocaine and were treated with the compound in a therapeutic setting were effectively cured of their habits, many after just a single session."

Full story here.

The article is written by Andrew Jacobs, and the byline says he "writes about psychedelic medicine." Think about that -- the New York Times has a psychedelic medicine reporter.