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? 

Maybe Day is drawing near

Just a reminder that Maybe Day, e.g. July 23, is drawing near, and Bobby Campbell is inviting everyone to post something cool and perhaps host or attend a public event. Bobby will be holding an exhibition of his own artwork in Wilmington, Delaware. Bobby also is planning a 24-hour broadcast. 

Here is my previous post, and here is Bobby's Maybe Day website.

I am planning a couple of special articles, I hope some of you will like them. I am planning on posting them that day. 

Scott Sumner on cannabis legalization

Photo from Unsplash 

While cannabis legalization has been an ongoing trend in the United States, there has also been a backlash -- voters in Massachusetts apparently will be asked this fall whether to roll back legalization. 

So it caught my eye when Scott Sumner, one of my favorite Substack bloggers, argued in favor of legalization (some of this may be behind a paywall): 

"The partial legalization of pot has been a big success. We should embrace that success by doing further pot legalization in other states and at the federal level."

His piece (second item) begins, 

"I cannot prove this, but I strongly suspect that drug addiction in America is on the way down. Here are my claims; you tell me if I’m mistaken:

1. There is less alcoholism than in the past

2. Smoking is declining fairly dramatically

3. Opioid drug abuse is declining

4. Marijuana abuse is increasing

'Now I’d like you to consider two different social science hypotheses and tell me which one better fits the data:

1. Pot is a “gateway drug”, which leads to even more harmful forms of drug abuse.

2. Pot is a substitute for other types of drugs, and legalizing pot would tend to reduce other (more serious) forms of drug abuse."

He also writes, "Before pot was legalized, we were told that two things would happen. It was claimed that pot use among teenagers would increase. It was claimed that legalizing pot would lead to increased crime. Neither of those things happened."

There's more, but I don't want to quote too much behind the paywall.

Sumner's piece brings up something that's been bothering me. I keep reading scare stories about cannabis in outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, feeding the backlash.

Obviously, cannabis has its drawbacks from a health standpoint. But still (1) there is a difference between moderate use and being stoned 24-7, every day,  and (2) the anti-weed pieces never put the issue in perspective by discussing other substances, such as alcohol, which by itself kills about 178,000 people in the U.S. every year. 

'The Classical Style' reading group, week six

Joseph Haydn in England in 1791 (John Hoppner painting)

The Classical Style: Part II – THE CLASSICAL STYLE 

1.The Coherence of the Musical Language 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

This chapter title makes think of how Aristotle and Aquinas’s ideas of coherence influenced Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 

Foreshadowing: In the last chapter of this book Rosen discusses a piece by Schumann that alludes to the final song in Beethoven’s “An Die Ferne Geliebte”, “Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder”. I plan to listen to his song a few times a week for the next hundred days so that I can hopefully recognize the allusion when we reach the final chapter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsgS3I1NORY&list=RDRsgS3I1NORY&start_radio=1 

For anyone struggling a bit with this text, I suspect it will get easier when we get to the Haydn chapters. In these early chapters, Rosen deals with a wide variety of music from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries discussing topics like ”The Coherence of the Style”. When he focuses on one set of pieces by one composer, I think things will make more sense. I think books like this reward rereading because they cover such large topics, and I think Rosen covers them very well.  

Pg. 68: Rosen says of the classical style that “a single movement longer than twenty minutes is beyond its reach,” but the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony tends to run over 24 minutes. 

July 4, 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Pg. 94 mentions “the ferment that followed the American Revolution.” I feel this book suits the troubled times of 2026, I feel grateful for the people reading along with us. 

An Australian historian on conspiracy theory -- and Carl Oglesby

 Perhaps this might be of interest to Illuminatus! fans? Jesse Walker, an expert on the subject himself, pens a review of The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory by Andrew McKenzie-McHarg. declaring the book " the most original study of the subject to come along in years."

McKenzie-McHarg, an Austalian historian, researches the history of the term "conspiracy theory" and related terms. But Jesse adds, "But this book is also about what we mean by such terms, and how those different meanings have intersected with one another."

As Jesse writes, McKenzie-McHarg finds an actual Illuminati double agent. "Convinced that the secret society was still active in the 1790s—or, at the very least, convinced that it was useful to have people believe the Illuminati were still active—Grolman decided to form a secret 'counter-association' against that 'devilish union.' "

The book also has a chapter  on Carl Oglesby, the historian discussed by Robert Anton Wilson who discussed recent American history as a battle between competing conspiracies, the Yankees and the Cowboys. 

More here. 

And I have a bonus link:  LitHub has just published McKenzie-McHarg's chapter on Carl Oglesby from the book! Or at least an article adapted from the book. So if  you've read what RAW wrote about Oglesby, you can read an interesting article. Carl Oglesby's son pops  up in the comments. 

Jesse's own book, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, remains available. 

Mr. McKenzie-McHarg's internet biographies are (perhaps appropriately)  confusing, but the just-published Lit Hub article says he is at the "Bibliotheca Hertziana–Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome." 

Footnote: Jesse Walker says the LitHub piece is "was based on the chapter but is far from the whole thing."

Alan Moore and Steve Moore on 'Illuminatus!'

I recently finished reading The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore and Steve Moore. It's a kind of compendium on magic, with chapters on Kabbalah, the tarot, "Lives of the Great Enchanters," and so on. It is so  copiously illustrated it seems almost like an art book. The list price is $50, but it's currently half that at Amazon.  

I might do 1-2 other blog posts on the book, but for now, I wanted to note what the book says about Illuminatus!

An essay toward the back of the book, "The Soul," describes how in 1994  or 1995 (page 302), Steve Moore introduced Alan Moore to Illuminatus!, "offering the younger Moore a toehold on a field about which he had previously entertained strong doubts."

On page 300, the book says, "The significance of Shea and Wilson's book to the development of magic thought lies in its presentation of a new way of regarding occult ideas, an approach which embraced contemporary knowledge and which did without the humourless and ritual-bound mental encumbrances of the traditional occult societies. Essentially, the trilogy afforded rational and reasonable people a way to engage with magical ideas that did not entail blind belief or the restricting dogmas of religion, nor subservience to the doctrines of a questionable living or dead guru. In Illuminatus! and in Wilson's subsequent essays and fictions, a window was opened onto magic through which a great number of sensibly sceptical, discriminating and creative people gained their entry to a conceptual landscape which stretched far beyond the necessarily dogmatic confines of religious or even scientific thinking. In this way was magic greatly enriched and extended."  

A 'new' Orson Welles movie?

Orson Welles working on "The Magnificent Ambersons" in 1942 (public domain photo). 

 Orson Welles died in 1985, but one more of his movies may be on the way. 

"The Spanish, French, and Italian film archives and the Filmmuseum Münchner are promoting the reconstruction of Don Quixote, the film adaptation of Cervantes' novel that Orson Welles began in 1957 and left unfinished upon his death in 1985."

More here. Via Tyler Cowen's often-interesting blog 

RAW ebook is cheap again

 

Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-ups by Robert Anton Wilson is on sale again as a $3 ebook on Amazon.  Note that you can use the Kindle app to read it on your smartphone -- you don't have to have a Kindle. 

A German radio documentary on RAW

Back in 2016, I mentioned that German public radio was working on a documentary piece on Robert Anton Wilson. I never found out about the final product. 

The documentary is available  on the Internet Archive.

I heard about it from Rasa, who writes, "It’s available to listen to at the Internet Archive, and what made me think of it was that Max created segments of a radio play version of Masks of the Illuminati. It’s all in German, but I found the production quite good. At about 1:50 into the broadcast, they cut to an audio play version of a scene from Masks of the Illuminati. During the doc they go back to the play a few times. I like the ambient sound and the voice actors."

New Hilaritas podcast: Flatley on 'The Occult Timothy Leary'

Mike Gathers, interviewed for the the new book The Occult Timothy Leary: The Tarot, Magickal States, and Post-Terrestrial Evolution, in turn interviews the author, Joseph L. Flatley, for the latest Hilaritas Press podcast. Links available at the official website, and you should be able to find the podcast at many of the usual places and apps.