Oz Fritz on Steve Pratt's 'Tale of the Tribe' book

At his blog, The Oz Mix, Oz Fritz has posted an entry on the new edition of Steve Pratt's book,
Fly On The Tale Of The Tribe: A Rollercoaster Ride With Robert Anton Wilson. The book is available on Amazon and to Pratt's Patreon supporters.

Oz is an alum of Robert Anton Wilson's "Tale of the Tribe" online course and he strongly recommends Pratt's book:

This book is also one of the rare (so far), and invaluable primer books for the writings, philosophies and methods of Robert Anton Wilson.  For that alone, I highly recommend it, but there is much else too.  We get a cast of philosophical and scientific heavyweights and a synopsis of some their prime ideas and practical contributions to human development - the Tale of the Tribe.  Among others, we hear from Nietzsche, Alan Moore, Claude Shannon, Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico, Buckminster Fuller, Wilhelm Reich, Korzybski, John Lilly, Tim Leary, Ernest Fenellosa, Jung, Yeats, Aleister Crowley, Marshall McLuhan, Orson Welles, Paul Krassner, John Sinclair, and of course, the Tale of the Tribe's first two stars, James Joyce and Ezra Pound.

Sombunall of the subjects include:

What is the Tale of the Tribe? and its corollary, what do we do with it?
Augmented Reality(AR)
What is art? We are all artists.
Eprime and certainty; the effects of language on consciousness.
King Kong, his sister Hong, and Guerilla Ontology.
Finnegans Wake
James Joyce/RAW inspired geo-mapping APPS - I suspect this one brilliant idea alone would revolutionize the consciousness of whomever used them.
Hologrammic writing.
The contribution of Chinese ideograms to the Tribe.
Magick.
Holometic Retribalism,  a Fly neologism which seems a portmanteau of hologram and hermetic.
The influence of psychedelic drugs on the Tribe.
Quantum entanglement and spooky action at a distance.

FOTTOTT is full of amazing quotes, the large percentage from Wilson, but many from other conspirators that serve to fill out and substantiate this vision of the Tribe.  Perhaps my favorite parts are the email and interview transcripts between Fly and RAW and any personal exchanges they had as it presents new light on the venerable sage.

Read the whole thing.

Thursday links

Arthur C. Clarke in 1965 (Creative Commons photo by ITU pictures) 

Trump AG nominee won't go after legal marijuana businesses.

Sometimes drug prohibitionists listen.

Digitized anarchist publications available on the Internet. No Governor is missing. 

Was Nietzsche a Discordian?

Cat Vincent announces event. 

Another piece on the solar sail theory of Oumuamua. The astronomer being interviewed says he never read Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. 

Slate Star Codex on conspiracy theories

One of my favorite bloggers, Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex, takes on conspiracy theories. He argues that a little thought can help people figure out which ones are plausible.

Excerpt:

The Basic Argument Against Conspiracy Theories goes: “You can’t run a big organization in secret without any outsiders noticing or any insiders blowing the whistle.” If we keep this in mind, I think we can resolve some of the awkward tensions above.

For example, the CIA definitely has fixed elections in foreign countries. Is this a conspiracy theory? No. The CIA is not secret. Everyone knows the CIA exists and does nefarious things, even if we don’t know exactly which nefarious things it does. There is no need to keep the CIA secret. It can advertise in public “Wanted: people who are good at doing nefarious things”. And if somebody whistleblows, they will not receive the thanks of a grateful country. They’ll probably just be arrested for leaking classified information, while everybody snoozes. “CIA discovered to have fixed Gabonese elections” is probably a page 5 story at best.

I think “The CIA is plotting to fix the 2020 US elections” is a conspiracy theory, with all the unlikeliness that implies. Although the CIA exists openly, fixing US elections would take a powerful conspiracy within the CIA. You would have to hide it from the idealistic young recruits who come in hoping to make the world safe for democracy. You would have to convince all the other CIA agents to hide it from Congress, from the other intelligence services, and from any CIA agent who wasn’t on board. And a whistleblower really would receive the thanks of a grateful country. Although the CIA gets the advantage of existing publicly, the intra-CIA conspiracy to fix elections doesn’t, and so the Basic Argument strikes it down.

If you are really interested in conspiracy theories, read Jesse Walker's book. 

Did RAW read van Vogt? Should I read him?

A.E. van Vogt circa 1963 (via Wikipedia) 

As I've mentioned recently, I've been reading Astounding, the interesting book by Alec Nevala-Lee that's about John W. Campbell Jr., and also Campbell's three most influential writers: Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and L. Ron Hubbard.

Various other interesting science fiction figures crop up in the text. There's an interesting "naming names" chapter which talks about which SF writers embraced Scientology (A.E. van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon, particularly) and which ones thought it was nonsense from the word go (Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp, for example). A depressingly large number of people bought into Hubbard's ravings.

I've read very little van Vogt (just whatever's in the SF Hall of Fame volumes put out years ago at the instigation of the Science Fiction Writers of America, to cover the time period before the Nebulas began) but I got curious from reading Astounding, so I looked up van Vogt on Wikipedia. 

I learned that he made a big impression on Philip K. Dick, that van Vogt was interested in Korzybski and General Semantics, and that van Vogt's famous novel, The World of Null-A, refers to non-Aristotelian logic. I also learned that van Vogt drew much of his work from dreams.

All of this seems suggestive to a Robert Anton Wilson fan. Did RAW read van Vogt, have RAW's fans read van Vogt, and should I read him?

The Earth Will Shake online reading group announced

A few weeks ago, I floated the idea of doing an online reading group for the Historical Illuminatus! books, and reaction was good.

So let's do it. Let's have a reading group for The Earth Will Shake, and go on from there.

I suggest starting on Feb. 25; as with other online reading groups, there will be a posting every Monday, giving everyone the rest of the week to post comments.

I've had some guest bloggers leading many recent online reading groups. I'm inclined to take this one myself, although if there were a volunteer eager to lead the discussion, I certainly would listen.

If you are new to the blog, you can sample other online reading groups on the right side of this page, but the basic idea is this: A weekly blog posting is put up, and then everyone else is invited to weigh in using the comments. I have had to institute comment moderation to block all of the hire-a-prostitute-in-India spam posts, but I try to check for comments regularly and try to approve anything legitimate.  If you choose to participate by putting up a post at your own blog, I will link to you.

I figure Feb. 25 gives everyone time to hunt up a copy (preferably the canonical Hilaritas Press edition, but do what you can afford) and to wrap up whatever other current reading project is on your plate.

What pace makes sense? The Masks of the Illuminati reading group did about 35 pages a week, and covered the book in 10 weeks. The Hilaritas Press edition of The Earth Will Shake lists it at 398 pages. Would about 40 pages a week to cover it in 10 weeks make sense? I don't want to dawdle but I don't want to overwhelm people with an unreasonably fast pace, either.

Guns and dope links [UPDATED]

Violent crime has fallen in Colorado and Washington, even as marijuana use has risen. For context, see first link.

In the spirit of Robert Anton Wilson's Guns and Dope Party, some links:

Good Twitter threat on the new Alex Berenson 'Reefer Madness' book.

UPDATE: German Lopez at Vox -- hardly a libertarian -- weighs in. I'm going to read the book he recommends.

Marijuana legalization is more effective in reducing drug smuggling than a border wall. (Cato Institute).

Canada is dealing with a marijuana shortage. In a rational world -- not the one we live in obviously -- Oregon could deal with its surplus by exporting to Canada.

Expanding background checks for guns will do little to aid public safety. (Jacob Sullum).

A couple of links with no guns or dope:

John Higgs fan shirts are a thing.

Review of the new Adam Gorightly UFO book.

'New' RAW interview

Martin Wagner does it again, with a posting of an interview of Robert Anton Wilson that appeared in 1991.  The interview is by James Wallis.

I particularly liked this bit about authorial intent:

So if your writings do have an intention, what is it? Obviously with books like Quantum Psychology, their intention is quite clear but is there a subtext? Do you want to alter the mind of the late twentieth century?

Robert Anton Wilson: And the twenty-first, yeah. At my most ambitious I want to make as big a revolution as Voltaire or Marx or Nietzsche, only I hope mine will be totally wholesome. Of course, that’s hoping for a lot. On a more modest level, I just hope I give some people some good laughs, cheer them up and make them a little more optimistic because the world is suffering from terrible depression. It’s a global illness.

Bob Wilson, 'amiable crank' [UPDATED]

A new book, Questioning Minds, reproduces the edited correspondence of two important modernist critics, Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport. Hugh Kenner was a prominent James Joyce scholar (there are references to him at PQ's "Finnegans, Wake"  blog), and it turns out that Kenner knew Robert Anton Wilson. Here is a bit from the book, apparently from a letter by Kenner:

Have hooked onto an amiable crank named Bob Wilson, formerly of the School of Living in Ohio, now at Antioch Bookplate Company in Yellow Springs, O, who is loading me with Pound-Fuller-Wright-China-Korzybski-Gesell tieups. These Utopian absolutists make me nervous.

Hat tip: Jeet Heer, via Jesse Walker.

UPDATE: Here is my previous blog post, which I'd forgotten, on RAW writing to Kenner, and see also the comments.

Brenton Clutterbuck launches Patreon account

I can't quite bring myself to post his butt logo on this blog, so you'll just have to follow the link, but globetrotting Australian Discordian and Chasing Eris author Brenton Clutterbuck has announced he has launched a Patreon account. If you join and support him, you get a copy of his book and other productions. (He is using "Cluttered Butts" as the account name, rather than his name, so that's what you should search for at Patreon.com if you mislay the link. Australian marketing is interesting). Details here. 

When Stravinksky came to hear the Bird

Charlie Parker in 1947. (Public domain photo) 

Posted because I think Robert Anton Wilson would have enjoyed this story about Charlie Parker, too:

The house was almost full, even before the opening set — Billy Taylor’s piano trio — except for the conspicuous empty table to my right, which bore a RESERVED sign, unusual for Birdland. After the pianist finished his forty-five-minute set, a party of four men and a woman settled in at the table, rather clamorously, three waiters swooping in quickly to take their orders as a ripple of whispers and exclamations ran through Birdland at the sight of one of the men, Igor Stravinsky. He was a celebrity, and an icon to jazz fans because he sanctified modern jazz by composing Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman and his Orchestra (1946) — a Covarrubias “Impossible Interview” come true.

As Parker’s quintet walked onto the bandstand, trumpeter Red Rodney recognized Stravinsky, front and almost center. Rodney leaned over and told Parker, who did not look at Stravinsky. Parker immediately called the first number for his band, and, forgoing the customary greeting to the crowd, was off like a shot. At the sound of the opening notes, played in unison by trumpet and alto, a chill went up and down the back of my neck.

They were playing “KoKo,” which, because of its epochal breakneck tempo — over three hundred beats per minute on the metronome — Parker never assayed before his second set, when he was sufficiently warmed up. Parker’s phrases were flying as fluently as ever on this particular daunting “Koko.” At the beginning of his second chorus he interpolated the opening of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite as though it had always been there, a perfect fit, and then sailed on with the rest of the number. Stravinsky roared with delight, pounding his glass on the table, the upward arc of the glass sending its liquor and ice cubes onto the people behind him, who threw up their hands or ducked.

From the book Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce by Alfred Appel, which sounds like a book RAW would have enjoyed.

Via this posting at Open Culture by Colin Marshall.

Tuesday links

Tribute to "Saint Robert Anton" from Trans Van Santos. 

December Eris of the Month at Historia Discordia.

Reason's Jacob Sullum dissects the latest "reefer madness" piece, this time in the New York Times.

Independent bookstores are growing in the UK.

Podcast featuring Adam Gorightly.

Cat Vincent on optimism.

More JIm Garrison probe weirdness

In "The Raymond Broshears Files Part 00002: Odd Sects and Wandering Bishops," Adam Gorightly explores some of the con men who were somehow fingered as "CIA assassins" and the like by DA Jim Garrison.

Here is Adam, writing about one of the criminal masterminds Garrison targeted, a guy named Thomas Edward Beckham:

Beckham followed his mentor’s lead by getting into a number of scrapes himself. In February of 1961—during Army basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in the Missouri Ozarks—Beckham went AWOL, and in short order found himself in the stockade. As is typical in such cases, the Army figured it best just to let him go. Beckham resurfaced later that year in New Orleans where he was arrested for vagrancy.

In 1962, Beckham was running a scam called the “United Cuban Relief Missionary Force” that was subsequently dismantled by the FBI. As part of this con, Beckham sported a clerical collar, pretending to be a Catholic priest, while soliciting donations that he apparently pocketed. That same year he was charged with the rape of a minor, and a second vagrancy charge. Some priest.

Adam thinks that a literary hoax -- a purported translation of the Necronomicon, apparently by a guy named Peter Levenda -- was influenced by Illuminatus!

New Buckminster Fuller biography announced

Buckminster Fuller (Creative Commons photo)

Alec Nevala-Lee, a Robert Anton Wilson fan and the author of a new book on John Campbell Jr. and his major authors, Astounding, announced on Dec. 31 that he will end daily blogging, but not before making an announcement that will interest RAW fans:

 I’ve confirmed I’ll be spending the next three years writing the book of my dreams, a big biography of Buckminster Fuller, which is something that I couldn’t have imagined a decade ago. 

Fuller of course was a big influence on Robert Anton Wilson.

Here is a blog post from Nevala-Lee discussing his plans for the book.