Joseph Matheny is working on a movie

Photo of Mr. Matheny by Marc Fennell, from the official website. 

Lots of interesting stuff in the latest Joseph Matheny Substack newsletter, and I would encourage you to read the whole thing. There's a lot that I won't try to summarize, but here's a particularly newsworthy bit: He's working on a movie!

[After some anecdotes about other attempts to adapt Ong's Hat that haven't worked out] "So, I’m going independent. I’ll develop my own feature-length movie, retaining full creative control. That’s the only way it’ll get made to my standards—and the only way it won’t be hijacked and diluted into mediocrity. I’m working on a treatment and script that weaves elements of Ong’s Hat: COMPLEAT and The Liminal Cycle into a new, third thing. I intend to create something that doesn’t fit the content factory molds, so I will necessarily have to create it outside that system. I don't want to release a movie. I want to make a movie that escapes. I’ll share more once the writing is done and funding is in place."

New Bobby Campbell podcast

 

In his latest newsletter, Bobby Campbell writes, "Very many thanks to the great AP Strange for having me on his show to talk all things Discordian and RAW :))) In what started as a typical podcast spot to hawk the book, but quickly turned into a real convo about these truly weird times!"

'Testament' reading group has begun

 

Over at the Jechidah blog, the Testament online reading group has begun. 

It's led by Bobby Campbell. Bobby has gotten permission from the creators of the comic book series, Douglas Rushkoff and Liam Sharp, to post each issue online for a month, and Bobby has written a thoughtful first blog post, so join in with your comments! 

'Straight Outta Dublin' released, new Hilaritas podcast out

 

Straight Outta Dublin, Eric Wagner's study of James Joyce's influence on Robert Anton Wilson (with a big contribution from R. Michael Johnson) was released today by Hilaritas Press. Here is the official announcement. A bit from that newsletter:

"RAW fans into Joyce will love this book. RAW fans who are curious about Joyce, but maybe not big Joyce fans will also love this book. RAW fans totally unfamiliar with Joyce have some enjoyable eye-opening to do! Eric Wagner and R. Michael Johnson make RAW's love for Joyce understandable… not an easy achievement!"

There's also a new podcast about the book, with Mike Gathers interviewing Eric:

Phil Baker's Austin Osman Spare biography

 

I have just finished Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist by the British writer Phil Baker, and I want to take a moment to  recommend it; while I know little of occultism and British art history, I admire good writing and careful biographical research and I found plenty of both here. Spare was a British artist and occultist; Baker remarks that Spare is "obscure and famous at the same time" (that would also be an apt description of Robert Anton Wilson, perhaps), and I confess I did not recognize Spare's name when Gregory Arnott sent me a copy of the book.

Spare had a habit of telling wonderful stories about himself that did not actually happen to be true, so Baker's task was not easy. Baker notes, "Biography can only follow its subject so far, especially a character like Spare, whose real life was internal. The life of an occultist is very different from the life of a tycoon or a general, and Spare was a hidden figure whose  life is lived largely on the inner planes ... "

I did feel I learned quite a bit about life in London over the decades, the British art scene, and some of Spare's contemporaries. There are many entertaining characters, such as Gerald Gardner and Kenneth Grant, and I read for example about George Moore, an Irish writer whose name was not before known to me: "His several volumes of autobiography are filled with tales of his sexual conquests, but it seems he may, in fact, have died a virgin."(

My copy of the book is the third edition, and Baker took the opportunity with each edition to make corrections and write updates at the back of the book. The publisher is Strange Attractor Press, and as with the other books by that British publisher, it is attractively put together and appears to be carefully edited. (Check out the publisher's website).

'Illuminatus!' cites 'The Crying of Lot 49' [UPDATED]

 

In a recent post I mentioned that I had recently read Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and that it seemed to be an obvious influence on Illuminatus!, and I also mentioned a connection between Robert Shea and Pynchon. 

In a comment, Jesse Walker notes that Illuminatus! actually has a passage that cites Lot 49: 

"We accept Bugs Bunny as an exemplar of Mummu here, too, but otherwise we have little in common with the SSS. That's the Satanist, Surrealists and Sadists— the crew who began your illuminization in Chicago. All we share with them actually is use of the Tristero anarchist postal system, to evade the government's postal inspectors, and a financial agreement whereby we accept their DMM script—Divine Marquis Memorial script— and they accept our hempscript and the flaxscript of the Legion of Dynamic Discord."

The "Tristero anarchist postal system" is from The Crying of Lot 49. Dr. Ignotum P. Ignotius is apparently talking (one of the Discordian names of Greg Hill), and the passage is found on page 275 of the original 1975 Dell mass market paperback -- I don't know the page number of the omnibus edition most people have. 

UPDATE: Please see the interesting comments! Thanks, Jesse, thanks Dr. Johnson! 

'Great Moments in Comic History'

 

Posted by Bobby Campbell. Bobby's own latest  episode in comics history is here. 

Is it really that bad?

A college student reads a Richard Powers novel (AI image via Bing). 

As this is a blog by definition for people who like to read, I thought I would share a recent piece that has been getting a lot of attention. "Hilarious Bookbinder" is a pseudonym for a philosophy professor at a state school who describes his students as average, not the elite students an Ivy League school would have; in a recent issue of his Substack newsletter, Scriptorium Philosophia he writes: 

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.

I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read,2 and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.

The whole thing is pretty depressing; it he exaggerating? 

There's a sequel, with responses to some of the comments. 

New lecture on YouTube recommends 'Prometheus Rising'

The video, above, by Apeiron, discusses "7 Books Philosophers Don’t Want You to Read," and one of the seven is Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. 

Here are the 7:

1. The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

2. Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson

3. The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz

4. Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse

5. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti

6. The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul

7. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes

Thanks to Tracy Harms for the tip; he has read and been influenced by most of these books. 

See here for other Apeiron videos. 

Robert Shea once published Thomas Pynchon

Cavalier magazine, March 1966

I have finally read some Thomas Pynchon. I finished The Crying of Lot 49 a few days ago. The book was published in 1966, and it is easy to see how it might have influenced Illuminatus! The plot concerns a woman stumbling upon the centuries-old machinations of a secret group. Is it real, or is she just paranoid and succumbing to conspiracy theories? There's even an element involving bodies at the bottom of a Euroopean lake, in this case a lake in Italy and the bodies of American soldiers.

As I have mentioned, I keep a copy of Eric Wagner's An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson on my phone for easy reference, and so I searched for "Pynchon" in the text and discovered that RAW has an entry for The Crying of Lot 49 in Everything Is Under Control. In that  entry, Wilson asserts that  the book's plot includes "a web spinning around  the Bavarian Illuminati (which is never mentioned by name)," but he doesn't offer any evidence, and when I asked Eric he didn't know what RAW was referring to. Can anyone help?

In any case, I have noticed something else which seems to strengthen the case that Lot 49 might have influenced Illuminatus! The front of the Harper Perennial  Deluxe Modern Classics edition I checked out from the library mentions that parts of the novel were published in Esquire and Cavalier magazines. 

The Cavalier bit stunned me, as Robert Shea was editor of the magazine from 1965 to 1967, before he went on to Playboy, where he met Wilson. A little rooting around on the Internet reveals that the Pynchon excerpt was published in the March 1966 issue, in about the middle of Shea's tenure. 

Retired English professor J. Kerry Grant, who wrote A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49, confirmed  in an email, " 'The Shrink Flips' appeared in the March, 1966 issue, so it seems likely that Shea oversaw the publication of the extract." I asked Professor Grant if his book would give me details about how "The Shrink  Flips" was placed in Cavalier, and he said, "I'm afraid not."

Shea was interviewed twice by Neal Wilgus, and in an interview published in 1985  in Science Fiction Review, there's the following exchange:

SFR: What contemporary authors do you get the most out of reading?

SHEA: The list is continually undergoing revision as my taste changes and my reasons for reading change, but John Fowles, Romain Gary, Norman Mailer, Yukio Mishima, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Thomas Pynchon, J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert Penn Warren seem to have taken up permanent residence in my literary pantheon.

Don't forget the Vineland online reading group, which starts in June. 

Prometheus Award finalists announced

[As I have explained before, the connection of the Prometheus Award to this blog is that Illuminatus! won a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, Robert Shea was a member of the Libertarian Futurist Society and I am a current member and a nominating judge. Of the five finalists, I nominated the Lionel Shriver novel, Mania, and I hope it wins. I do like all of the books that are finalists.  I wrote about Mania last year.  midnight's simulacra by nick black was submitted for consideration but not formally nominated; I am a fan of the book and I wrote a review and interviewed Nick.  --The Management]

The Libertarian Futurist Society, a nonprofit all-volunteer international organization of liberty-loving science fiction/fantasy fans, has announced five finalists for the Best Novel category of the Prometheus Awards.

Here are the Best Novel finalists in brief, in alphabetical order by author: Alliance Unbound, by C.J Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher (DAW); In the Belly of the Whale, by Michael Flynn (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy); Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, by Danny King (Annie Mosse Press); Beggar’s Sky, by Wil McCarthy (Baen Books); and Mania, by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins Publishers).

Full-length reviews of each Best Novel finalist, explaining how each fits the distinctive focus of the Prometheus Awards, have been (or in one case, soon will be) posted on the Prometheus Blog. Meanwhile, here are capsule descriptions of all five finalists:

* Alliance Unbound, by C.J Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher (DAW) — Set within Cherryh’s Alliance-Union future history series, Book 2 of The Hinder Stars projected trilogy and the direct sequel to Alliance Rising, the 2020 Prometheus Best Novel winner, this interstellar science fiction saga dramatizes how an evolving alliance of free traders strives to preserve its independence, freedom and survival amid machinations from an intrusive Earth. Starting out on the ship “Finity’s End,” en route to Pell Station, the ongoing drama is bolstered by shipboard challenges and relationships, military maneuvers and a mystery that unfolds as observant crew notice Earth-based goods that shouldn’t have been able to reach a distant station. Merchanters must strategize amid uncertainties in the human colonies about the game-changing possibility of new jump points opening up a faster-than-light route from Earth. Perhaps most notable with regard to Prometheus themes, Cherryh and Fancher continue to dramatize how the ethics and benefits of voluntary cooperation and free thought advance merchanter culture, even amid station tensions and competing interests. Focusing more on the personal than the political, the novel highlights both the daily challenges of freer societies and the authoritarian and dysfunctional tendencies within bureaucracies, military commands and other coercive systems.

* In the Belly of the Whale, by Michael Flynn (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy) — The posthumous work by two-time Prometheus winner Michael Flynn (In the Country of the Blind, Fallen Angels) explores the complex lives, work, challenges and conflicts of 40,000 human colonists aboard a large asteroid ship two centuries into a projected eight-century voyage to Tau Ceti. With its intricate world-building, believable characters in conflict and profound grasp of human nature, the epic social novel freshens the SF subgenre of the multi-generational colony ship while raising deeper questions about the enormous difficulties of our species expanding beyond our solar system. Beyond the usual technological and interpersonal issues of maintenance and survival that naturally arise, the colonists suffer from a dysfunctional bureaucracy, crew class divisions, and a traditional shipboard command structure that calcifies into an authoritarian hereditary aristocracy with enforced eugenics and a loss of focus on the mission goal. Without sustaining the culture of liberty, self-reliance and voluntary cooperation that helped lift Earth civilization to unprecedented levels of knowledge and prosperity, humanity may be doomed even if such ships reach their distant destination. The enduring theme of Flynn’s ambitious, multi-focused saga of power, decay and revolution: The price of freedom (and survival) is eternal vigilance.

* Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, by Danny King (Annie Mosse Press) — The gripping SF-enhanced cautionary fable is framed as a brave new utopia embracing love, inclusion and social justice, but reveals progressive politics warped into a totalitarian pseudo-religion in the name of women and minorities. Anyone can be cancelled for suspect behavior or old-fashioned attitudes in such personal areas as sex, food, manners and language. With its subtitle referencing H.G. Well’s 1933 novel foretelling a “history of the future,” King’s disturbing but satirical novel feels similarly prescient in extrapolating today’s illiberal sociopolitical trends. Cracks appear in the warped facade as hidden realities of New Britannia are revealed, with the omnipresent State echoing the oppressive attitudes of other dystopias in which “Everything not compulsory is forbidden.” King is especially good at exploring the fraught intersections of the political and the personal in his story focusing on the good intentions, growing doubts and eventual comeuppance of a true-believing woman secretly working as an auditor for a leading cancellation company. Overall, King offers an urgent warning about what might happen if government paternalism, radical egalitarianism, progressivist collectivism, identity politics and moral self-righteousness are taken to even more authoritarian extremes.

* Beggar’s Sky, by Wil McCarthy (Baen Books) — This inventive, far-flung first-contact story revolves around a wealthy entrepreneur using private enterprise to construct a star ship and take 100 humans, including himself, to meet non-corporeal aliens far from our sun. Each human, with the help of psychedelic drugs, interprets their contact in drastically different ways, sparking further mysteries and philosophical questions. Like Rich Man’s Sky, McCarthy’s 2022 Best Novel winner, this sequel shows how cooperation through free markets can be successful in carrying out various projects, such as a floating Venus station and perhaps the most expensive and important scientific exploration/discovery in history. The story takes place within the context of an ongoing space race sparked by four Earth billionaires pushing to expand humanity and space industry to new frontiers beyond our solar system. Perhaps most relevant to Prometheus themes are McCarthy’s insightful contrasts between two types of “power” - voluntary socioeconomic cooperation in business versus coercive State authority. Despite frequent disparagement by many on Earth of the “four Horsemen,” McCarthy depicts three as quite admirable, pursuing innovations not only to realize their dreams but humanity’s future.

* Mania, by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins Publishers) —  The cautionary fable takes place in an alternate-history recent America taken over by the Mental Parity movement, which denies any variability in intelligence or talent and condemns any recognition of IQ differences as bigoted discrimination. The psychological and social drama centers on how the movement affects a radically individualist and recalcitrant teacher, her three children, husband and lifelong friendship with a high-status media star. As the movement’s virtue-signaling foot soldiers impose the delusionary new orthodoxy, growing pressures to conform to the increasingly authoritarian movement warp language and culture. The progressive take-over of academia, media, education, medicine, and government destroys reputations, careers, families and friendships while ruining the economy and sabotaging the smooth functioning of everyday services. Darkly satirical but also chillingly poignant, Mania holds up a cracked mirror to today’s culture wars around race, gender and identity politics, where facts and objective reality are denied. A previous two-time Best Novel finalist for The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 and Should We Stay Or Should We Go, Shriver is no stranger to pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. Here she illuminates the perennial temptations of the morally self-righteous to impose their visions on others, no matter the devastating cost.

Eleven 2024 novels were nominated by LFS members for this year's award. Other Best Novel nominees, listed in alphabetical order by author: Time: A Novel, by Peter Grose (Merriam Publishing); Shadow of the Smoking Mountain, by Howard Andrew Jones (Baen Books); Machine Vendetta, by Alastair Reynolds (Orbit Books); The Glass Box, by J. Michael Straczynski (Blackstone Publishing); Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit Books); and The Last Murder At the End of the World, by Stuart Turton (Sourcebooks Landmark).

The Best Novel winner will receive an engraved plaque with a one-ounce gold coin. An online Prometheus awards ceremony, open to the public, is tentatively planned for mid-August. David Friedman, an SF/fantasy novelist and a leading economist and libertarian thinker, will be this year’s celebrity guest presenter. The date of the ceremony will be announced once the winners are known for both annual categories, including the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.

The Prometheus Award, sponsored by the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), was established and first presented in 1979, making it one of the most enduring awards after the Nebula and Hugo awards, and one of the oldest fan-based awards currently given in sf. The Prometheus Hall of Fame category for Best Classic Fiction, launched in 1983, is presented annually with the Best Novel category.

The Prometheus Awards recognize outstanding works of speculative or fantastical fiction (including science fiction and fantasy) that dramatize the perennial conflict between Liberty and Power, favor voluntarism and cooperation over institutionalized coercion, expose the abuses and excesses of coercive government, and/or critique or satirize authoritarian systems, ideologies and assumptions.

Above all, the Prometheus Awards strive to recognize speculative fiction that champions individual rights, based on the moral/legal principle of non-aggression, as the ethical and practical foundation for peace, prosperity, progress, justice, tolerance, mutual respect, civility and civilization itself.

All LFS members have the right to nominate eligible works for all categories of the Prometheus Awards, while publishers and authors are welcome to submit potentially eligible works for consideration using the guidelines linked from the LFS website’s main page.

A 12-person judging committee, drawn from the membership and chaired by LFS co-founder Michael Grossberg, selects the Prometheus Award finalists for Best Novel from members’ nominations. Following the selection of finalists, all LFS upper-level members (Benefactors, Sponsors and Full Members) have the right to vote on the Best Novel finalist slate to choose the annual winner.

Membership in the Libertarian Futurist Society is open to any freedom-loving science fiction/fantasy fan interested in how speculative or fantastical fiction can enhance an appreciation of the value of liberty and broaden public recognition of the dangers and evils of tyranny and the abuses more prevalent under the State’s centralized and coercive powers.

For a full list of past Prometheus Award winners in all categories, visit www.lfs.org. For reviews and commentary on these and other works of interest to the LFS, visit the Prometheus blog via our website link.

'Tales of Illuminatus' update: Fission Chips, why you should buy the second issue now

 

A couple of news items from the latest Tales of Illuminatus Substack newsletter from Bobby: Above is a first look at Fission Chips, one of the Illuminatus characters who will appear in this summer's upcoming second issue.

Also, while the Kickstarter goal has been met, Bobby explains why you should use the site to go ahead and order your copy of the second issue:

"I intentionally set our budget to a reasonable $777 because I knew we were going to make the book with or without financial backing, and I wanted to focus more on making a good comic, rather than worrying too much about selling it.

"Though that being said, financial backing would most certainly help us make our TALES bigger, better, and faster!"

There's also a kind mention of this blog, which I appreciate.

New online reading group: Pynchon's 'Vineland'

Hot on the heels of yesterday's announcement of a reading group for the Testament comic book series, I have one more reading group to announcement: Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. The book is a favorite of Eric Wagner, and he will lead the reading group, which will be hosted on this blog. Oz Fritz will also be turning in postings, and they may be joined by others.

An introductory post will run on June 23, and then there will be posts for each chapter, finishing shortly before the new Pynchon novel arrives in October. 

As with the other reading groups held here, there will be a blog posting, and then everyone else will be invited to weigh in with blog comments.