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Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Blog, Internet resources, online reading groups, articles and interviews, Illuminatus! info.

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Nick Herbert's new 'Metaphase Typewriter' idea


Nick Herbert 

Nick Herbert -- hippie physicist, friend of RAW, Quantum Reality author, fringe science editor for Mondo 2000 -- has a wild new blog post up, "Metaphase Typewriter 2.0: a Preposterous Proposition." It's about his efforts to build a device to communicate with "a few recently deceased friends" and other entities in the beyond. 

You should read the whole thing -- it will probably be the most interesting article you read all day -- but let me offer a taste. Here are the opening sentences:

"In the early 1970s I designed and built the Metaphase Typewriter, a machine intended to communicate with spirits, based on the assumption that somehow consciousness, human or otherwise, arises at the quantum level and that an open quantum channel producing human speech or text might be able to be “possessed by some discarnate entity" in a manner similar to the way trance mediums can be taken over by alternate personalities. The Metaphase Typewriter was inspired.by Jane Roberts's Seth books. "

Herbert recounts his efforts to get the machine to work, discusses his efforts to improve the idea and his new inspiration for  how to get one that might work, concluding:

"Nick's preposterous proposition is the conjecture that today's quantum computers are not really computers at all (sure, they can--noisily--compute) but these systems may actually be better suited to operate as easy gateways to new kinds of quantum soul to soul connections, connections that are difficult today for us to even imagine, so deeply hypnotized are all of us by the materialism-is-everything trance. The interfacing will certainly be a bitch, but your children will appreciate the essential part you played in transforming their humdrum lives into complex experiences beyond present human recognition."

Monday, October 14, 2024

Review: Richard Powers' 'Playground'

 


As this is a blog for people who like to read, I'd like to write a bit about a new novel that impressed me a lot, Playground by Richard Powers. 

Powers has been one of my favorite writers for years. He had a career as a well-regarded literary novelist who didn't sell a lot of books until The Overstory (2018) which was a surprise big hit that sold many copies. 

If you don't know Powers (no relation to the "Richard Powers" who did covers for SF books), he has won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and a MacArthur "genius" grant (in the early days of the award). As far as literary merit goes, Playground seems to me an excellent novel, on a par with The Gold Bug Variations, The Echo Maker and The Overstory, which are generally considered the best of Powers' 14 novels. Playground currently is longlisted for the Booker Award. (I also am especially fond of Orfeo, which is largely about classical music.)

The novel is largely set in  Makatea, an island in French Polynesia, in Chicago and various seashore locations; whereas The Overstory focuses on trees, Playground focuses on the ocean and the sea creatures who live in it. The main characters are a woman who becomes a famous Canadian diver, a programmer from the Chicago area who becomes a wealthy tech company founder, his best friend, a Black young man from a tough background who has a literary bent, and a woman with a Polynesian background who is the love interest for the two young men. There is a plot that brings all of them together but I don't want to give away any spoilers. Powers has often shown interest in saving the environment, and that's one of the themes of this book, too. 

Aside from the ocean stuff, there's a lot about AI and computers (Powers was a computer programmer when he quit his job to try his hand at writing a novel, and computer technology comes up a lot in his work. Wikipedia: "One Saturday in 1980, Powers saw the 1914 photograph 'Young Farmers' by August Sander at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and was so inspired that he quit his job two days later to write a novel about the people in the photograph.")

While Powers is a different writer than Robert Anton Wilson, I will mention a couple of things they have in common. 

As I mentioned in a previous  post, each of the two writers have a favorite composer, and references to the composer recut in their work. For RAW of course, it's Beethoven; for Powers, it's Johann Sebastian Bach. In that earlier post, I wrote, "I have been reading the new Richard Powers novel, Playground, and I'm on page 141. Johann Sebastian Bach hasn't put in an appearance yet." Bach does turn up late in the novel.

Perhaps more significantly, like Wilson, Powers doesn't limit himself on the number of topics he will cram into a  novel. Wilson's fiction encompasses political theory, magick, the innovations of James Joyce, history and on and on. The new Powers novel takes deep dives into oceanography, racism, history, computer science, the game of Go, the fauna of offshore reefs, and I'm surely forgetting a few things. 

Sunday, October 13, 2024

Discordian 'Illuminatus' postings


First volume of British paperback of Illuminatus! Source. 

On X.com, Grouchogandhi, KRP (@Grouchogandhi) continues to post a great many Discoridian documents. Here are some Illuminatus! related documents that recently caught my eye. They are part of the Discordian Archives.


"Prunella Gee as Eris in the 1977 the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool's stage adaptation of ILLUMINATUS!" Source. 


"Poster for the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool's 1976 stage production of ILLUMINATUS!" Source.


"Discordian Robert Shea as Josh the Dill... Guerrilla Ontology advert for the release of The Illuminatus! Trilogy." Source.





Saturday, October 12, 2024

Podcasting news



This will be a bit bare bones, as I am sick waiting for the doctor, trying to do this on my phone. Sorry it's late.


And here is Joseph Matheny on "Bending Reality With Art." 

Friday, October 11, 2024

Free ebooks from Iain Spence


Iain Spence, mentioned in this recent blog post, has announced that all three of his currently available ebooks are being made available free Saturday and Sunday. 

"All three titles will be free over the weekend, worldwide. No restrictions. I'm not sure if they'll appear by way of east coast or west coast time in the USA. I do know that they (Amazon) go by US time and not UK when it comes to Kindle Direct, but I don't know which zone," he reports.

Links (for the U.S. Amazon, listed in order of publication): 

The Hare Hypothesis: The Quest for Wholeness Within Atavistic Pop Culture; blurb: "The Hare Hypothesis invites us to view pop cultural trends in relation to the four Life Positions of Optimistic Weakness, Pessimistic Weakness, Optimistic Strength and Pessimistic Strength. The study views pop cultural trends as atavistic symbols.

"An exploration of Timothy Leary's Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality with special emphasis on pop cultural trends of a symbolic nature. The book also includes essays on the origins of the four Life Positions in folklore, children's stories and in the four classical humours. It ends with an analysis of quaternities which crop up in modern literature." 

Dreams of the Hare. Blurb: "Essays on The Hare Hypothesis, the current fuss over gender fluidity, the cult of celebrity, quaternary symbolism in mythology and the works of Robert Anton Wilson."

The Breath of the Hare. Blurb: "A series of essays by Iain Spence."




Thursday, October 10, 2024

'Tales' update: The hurricanes are slowing things down a bit


 

In the latest Tales of Illuminatus newsletter update, Bobby Campbell reports that hurricanes are delaying the delivery the paper version of the first issue:

"Just a quick update on a slight delay for our grand plans of world illumination...

"Ka-Blam Printing, the company handling both the printing and shipping for Tales of Illuminatus! #1, just so happens to be located in Orlando, Florida, which has been hit with back to back massive hurricanes over the past couple weeks.

"They seem confident that they'll be back in the office by the end of the week, and it's possible there won't even be a noticeable delay, but it seemed worth mentioning!

"I'll let you know when, in true jumpin' jack flash fashion, our humble little periodical is birthed from the hurricane crossfire and successfully on its way to your doorsteps :)))"

Bobby also provides a review of the new RAW biography, Chapel Perilous by Gabriel Kennedy, that is out on Oct. 22:

"It now appears safe to say the book I was gushing about last week is indeed Gabriel Kennedy’s RAW biography CHAPEL PERILOUS: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. An absolutely spellbinding trip through the lives and ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, a book about RAW that is just as fun as reading a book by RAW, and an instant classic of Discordian lore. Highest possible recommendation!"


Wednesday, October 9, 2024

'The Sex Magicians' reading group has begun

 


Michelle Olley illustration by Bobby Campbell. 

The online book discussion of The Sex Magicians has begun, so head on over to the first posting at the Jechidah blog. 

This is a good description of what Michelle Olley does in her introduction to the Hilaritas Press edition of the book:

"Michelle Olley contextualizes and absolves The Sex Magicians. Olley is in a unique position of being a pioneer in sexual expression and one who has come out on top of the game. As far as I know, Olley hasn't declared any extraordinarily ugly sentiments about any groups, peccadillos or ways of being. Instead, she applies her myriad and extraordinary experiences to a multi-fold (multi-folderol?) interpretation, framed in empathy and understanding. Having Olley as our barker and initial interloper with the raw material of Wilson's first published novel is a very good thing, and very apropos, for our clarity-by-convolution century."

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Iain Spence on Grant Morrison


 Illuminatus!
led to The Invisibles, and that led to The Matrix, right? It is a sequence of events that has been suggested to me, and perhaps you have read it, too.

Iain Spence has his doubts, at least about the Invisibles to Matrix connection. He has a new piece up, "Invisible Influences in The Matrix: Debunking Grant Morrison‘s claim that The Matrix wouldn’t exist without his fiction."  It's on Medium, but Iain has removed the firewall so that everyone can read it.

Iain also contends that Morrison has misunderstood Iain's own work:

"Grant Morrison has stated in the past that The Matrix was part of a late 1990s emergence of Hostile Strength celebration within pop culture. He said this in relation to The Sekhmet Hypothesis.¹ As the author of the book, I disagree. The Matrix was a movie, not a raw celebration involving atavistic behaviour within pop culture."

Iain's books are available as Kindles on Amazon at quite reasonable prices. 

Sunday, October 6, 2024

Saturday, October 5, 2024

RAW 'politics book' has taken shape

 


An illustration for the Guns and Dope Party website. 

Rasa, the gentleman who runs day to day operations for Hilaritas Press, is careful not to make promises for when a Robert Anton Wilson book will come out; there can always be a last-minute hitch, and a book isn't released until it's done. But I'm pleased to be able to report that the upcoming Wilson anthology of writing about political subjects appears to be quite far along. Rasa has penned an essay on the Guns and Dope Party for the book, and other details are available. Here's the official update from Rasa:

"It’s still a ways off. We seem to have decided on the some 25 essays that span RAW’s career that will be included in the book, and Jesse Walker has written a great introduction,  but since many of the essays are scans of articles, there is still a lot of OCR and editing work to be done."

And here is an update on a recent blog post, where I mentioned that Rasa was looking for the source of an alleged RAW quote, for his Guns and Dope essay: “The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct.”  Rasa asked his "council of advisors" by email for the source, and at the link, I posted the puzzle.

I have possibly solved the mystery, while doing research on another matter. I flipped through the pages of my copy of Rasa's RAW Memes book, and I found this quote from RAW: "Conservatives say it is dangerous to give any group too much political power. Liberals say it is dangerous to give any group too much economic power. Both are right." It's attributed to The Illuminati Papers. There's still no source for the alleged exact quote, but the one I found seems pretty close.

Of course, it's amusing that I cited Rasa's book to solve Rasa's problem. There are many RAW experts out there -- Michael Johnson seems to carry the complete works in his head and Eric Wagner wrote the book -- but Rasa can truly claim he's forgotten more about RAW than most people know! 

See the Hilaritas Press website to see which new and reprinted titles have been released so far. It's an impressive list, and there might be a good one you've missed. 


Friday, October 4, 2024

New RAW biography to be published on Oct. 22

 


The new, long-awaited Robert Anton Wilson biography by Gabriel Kennedy will be published on Oct. 22, according to a listing for the book on Amazon.  The publication information says it is 473 pages long and has forewords by Grant Morrison and Douglas Rushkoff. Mr. Kennedy also performs and writes as Prop Anon. It is listed as a $9.99 Kindle; I will provide information about a paper edition as it comes to my attention. There is every reason to expect that a great deal of research went into the book.

Here is the blurb for the book provided by Joseph Matheny: "Writing a comprehensive, human, inclusive, biography for someone as complex as Robert Anton Wilson is a big bite for a writer to attempt. Thankfully, Gabriel Kennedy did not bite off more than he could chew. This biography made me laugh, cry, and sit silently in contemplation while I experienced the feelings, memories, and nostalgia it evoked. Chapel Perilous showed me points of view about RAW that I had not considered and informed me about aspects of my late friend’s life that I was unaware of. This book is an invaluable source of information about one of the greatest artists and thinkers of our time. It keeps the lasagna flying!”

Blurbs from Jeffrey Mishlove, Richard Metzger and David J. Brown also are available at the Amazon page. 


Thursday, October 3, 2024

Latest 'Tales' news: New RAW book on the way

 


The latest Tales of Illuminatus newsletter came out today, and Bobby Campbell reports that a new RAW book apparently will be out soon, although he doesn't provide details:

"I will hastily end things here, because I am desperate to get back to reading my advance copy of that very most anticipated RAW book, which I’d say the name, but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to yet! Suffice to say it is EXCELLENT!"

I've known for awhile that a new RAW anthology or two is on the way from Hilaritas Press. When more details become available, I will share. 

Also, Bobby had to change publishers for the European edition of the first issue, although apparently it is not a big deal:

"A small change in plans for our European readers, though ultimately of negligible importance, but Mixam UK, after nearly 2 weeks of hemming and hawing, decided that the job of illuminating the old continent was just too darn tough, and bailed on our order, which was immediately picked up by Ka-Blam, so the wheels remain in motion, albeit different wheels than originally reported."