From the RAW Semantics X account.
The quote is taken from one of the better RAW interviews, at least in my opinion, not withstanding the unfortunate bit where he criticizes Bob Dylan. It's the 1976 "New Libertarian Notes" interview, which I made available on the Internet, thanks to Mike Gathers, who made it available to me, and Jesse Walker, who made it available to Mike.
John Higgs has released the latest edition of his newletter.
Lots of news and you should read the whole newsletter for yourself, but here is some of the news relevant to this blog: The new edition of the KLF book remains available for mail order -- you can have an autographed copy shipped to the states, for example. Higgs has recorded an audiobook of his Timothy Leary biography, and that will be out very soon.
And there's this news, too: "Both The KLF and I Have America Surrounded will be getting proper US releases next year, including audiobooks - more news on that soon."
The current issue of Harper's Magazine has a long, interesting article, "The Golden Fleece," by Joe Kloc, about pulp collector Gary Lovisi and his wife, and Kloc's search for an old pulp magazine with a romantic story behind it. It's worth reading.
Kurt Smith tipped me off about the piece because of this passage:
"Gary and his wife, Lucille Cali, live in Gerritsen Beach, a working-class neighborhood in the southeast corner of Brooklyn, just three miles from the open waters of the Atlantic. Their brick row house sits at sea level, not far from the local Knights of Columbus lodge and the childhood home of the neighborhood’s only canonized son: Robert Anton Wilson, a science-fiction author elevated to sainthood by Discordians, or worshippers of Eris, the Greek goddess who sparked the Trojan War."
Kloc's first book is coming out next year, it sounds like it will be a good read.
The Hilaritas Press podcast is out today, and it's an interview of magician and author Lon Milo DuQuette, who contributed a piece to the new Robert Anton Wilson book, Lion of Light.
"In this episode, Mike Gathers chats with Lon Milo DuQuette. As Mike says, 'it’s my great pleasure to chat with man who wrote the introduction to the new Hilaritas publication of Lion of Light; musician, teacher, and author of over 20 books on Aleister Crowley, Magick, Kabbala, Thoth Tarot, and things that bump in the night, Lon Milo DuQuette'.”
Mike has said on social media that this may be his favorite podcast so far. It's number 25, so there's been a bunch.
Announcement via X from Ben Graham: "Discordian hi-jinx in a Brighton pub on Sept 29! Featuring Richard Norris (DJ set and Q&A), Kermit (DJ set from Black Grape / Ruthless Rap Assassins legend), Daisy Eris Campbell, God's Teeth & The Interstellar Tropics and loads more! Tix at tiny.cc/herosandwich23 "
This was posted on Facebook by Eddy Nix. I don't have a cover artist or any other information, but the caption said, "Prometheus Rising. Russia 2008."
At the post, Mike Gathers commented, "Excellent. Once upon a time, I collected these. The foreign covers were so much more interesting than New Falcon."
I asked Mike if he posts those foreign covers, and he sent this link to his covers collection at the Robert Anton Wilson Fans site that Mike founded. (Note the links to "cover art galleries" at the top of the page.) Unfortunately, the link to the international gallery is not currently working, but other galleries may be viewed.
Scott Apel will write a new introduction of Chaos and Beyond, Rasa has announced. Hilaritas Press is putting out a new edition soon of the book Chaos and Beyond, an anthology, originally issued in 1994, of material from the Trajectories newsletter put out by RAW and Apel. It's mostly pieces written by RAW, but there are also contributions from folks such as Arlen Wilson and Timothy Leary.
I asked Scott about this and he said he doesn't know yet what he's going to write about.
"All I have so far is an epigram, an introductory quote, from Blazing Saddles:
Mayor Johnson: “Goddamn it, I said ‘Order”!”
Howard Johnson: “Y’know, Nietzche says, out of chaos comes order.”
Olson Johnson: “Ah, blow it out your ass, Howard.”
So an auspicious start, anyway. 😁"
Beyond Chaos and Beyond, the 2019 book Apel edited, is kind of a companion book to Chaos and Beyond. Here is the review I wrote when it came out.
Author and pundit Jesse Walker (at the Laurie Anderson exhibition at the Hirshhorn museum in Washington, D.C. )(Facebook photo).
After Monday's post, in which I reproduced a Facebook post by Rasa on the upcoming Hilaritas Press book on Robert Anton Wilson's politics, Jesse Walker revealed some news on X:
"I guess the cat's out of the bag that this book is in the works and that I'm writing a foreword to it. My comments quoted in the linked post are the short version of what I'll be saying, or of part of what I'll be saying."
[This is a post by Rasa, on Facebook on August 8 in the "Robert Anton Wilson Group," on RAW's politics, that I thought would be worth sharing. The Management.]
Hilaritas Press is working on compiling a book of essays RAW wrote on politics. The working title is, "RAW Politics." We've been having a lot of discussions about the topic, and I'm making this post because today someone again tried to say RAW was a "Right-Winger."
That person posted a link to the 1969 article RAW wrote (or at least we think he wrote it. He used the pseudonym "Ronald Weston"), and the person asked, "Are you sure you are in the right group?" – implying that RAW was an anti-socialist (the guy's words) right winger. Not only did RAW change his opinions on a lot of things over time, but that article in particular was interesting for a number of reasons having to do largely with changing definitions and changing political realities.
https://www.unionofegoists.com/.../why-i-am-a-right-wing.../
It is useful to note that when interviewed years later, RAW had this to say...
• • •
DARE
Are there any existing political systems you admire?
WILSON
Scandinavian socialism. I found the Scandinavians to be about the most admirable people in Europe. clean streets, a low crime rate, a general air of high civilization - luxuries for all and a total absence of slums, poverty, and ugliness. They seem very happy and productive, with one of the most way out futurist movements in the world. They're the California of Europe.
I hate to sound like a Marxist, which I'm not, but the reason you haven't heard about Scandinavian Socialism is because the media of this country is controlled by rich people who are scared shitless of socialism. They want Americans to think there's only one type of socialism, Soviet Communism, which is the kind of place where dissident scientists get thrown in lunatic asylums, all of which is true. Americans are paranoid about Russians but Scandinavians regard them with amusement; they're those backwards people who think that you can only have socialism by putting all the poets and painters in jail. The Scandinavian
http://www.rawillumination.net/.../raw-on-scandinavian...
• • •
In a discussion I had with RAW fan and Libertarian book editor for Reason Magazine, Jesse Walker, I asked him specifically about that "I am a Right-Wing Anarchist" article. Here's what he said:
• • •
So: Before Bob had a writing career, he went through Trotskyist and Randian phases. In the early '60s he mixed Tucker/Proudhon-style individualist/mutualist anarchism with ideas from Wilhelm Reich and other sources; he was a pretty doctrinaire anarchist at first, in ways that I suspect made him wince when he looked back later, and then he moved toward the more agnostic approach that became a big part of his general worldview. He mixed in other influences as well, from Fuller to Pound to Brooks Adams.
He stopped calling himself an anarchist for a while, then embraced the word again. He went through a period of supporting gun control, but eventually formed the Guns and Dope Party. In the '90s he presented anarcho-mutualism as his social ideal while suggesting that Scandinavian social democracy was the best real-world system available. (Around the same time, of course, the Scandinavian countries started adopting a bunch of market reforms. They're arguably more deregulatory than the U.S. now, but they also have a more generous safety net, which is a combination he'd probably appreciate.)
In one of his early Realist articles he called himself a "socialist." (A libertarian socialist, but he used the s-word.) In Prometheus Rising, he commented that "as indust-reality has spread, socialism has followed in its wake" and then noted in parentheses that "the author, being up-front about his prejudices, admits that he does not like it." By the end of the '80s, on the other hand, he was writing like a labor militant. (I can't help suspecting that the excesses of the New Left provoked a bit of an anti-left backlash from him, and then the excesses of the Reagan era pushed him in the opposite direction -- if not in his underlying philosophy than at least in who was annoying him the most at the moment.)
Through many of those shifts, from the '70s through the '90s (and maybe later), he spoke at libertarian gatherings. I ran into him at a Libertarian Party convention in 1993, where he was giving a talk and I was present on behalf of a now-defunct magazine. I asked him how close he felt to the party these days, and he replied that it depended on which segment of the party we were talking about. This particular convention, he added, was basically being run by the local chapter of NORML, so he was cool with them.
All in all, he wasn't that far from what people would call a left-libertarian these days. But that's an easy phrase to misunderstand, and it papers over the different ways he used "left" and "right" over a long career. If you want a single word to describe his politics, I think "mutualist" would be incomplete but accurate.
• • •
Here's a link to the full Dare interview:
https://emulsionalproblems.blogspot.com/.../man-bites...• • •
When I asked Jesse specifically about that article, "Why I am a Right-Wing Anarchist," he said,
As far as "Why I Am a Right-Wing Anarchist" goes, I agree that the title can mislead people -- the fact that it upholds pre-Columbian Native American societies as an ideal should indicate that this wasn't some sort of Randian argument. But I don't think he was making a joke when he used the word "right-wing"; this was, after all, just a few years before he wrote in SEX AND DRUGS that he was "a spokesman for an extreme right-wing libertarianism that prides itself on being more radical than left-wing anarchism.”… Better to figure that he had a quirky definition of "right-wing" in mind at the time and that he later discarded it.
I was a Kinks fan in the sense that I bought this album, Misfits, when it came out in the late 1970s, and a few others, but Jesse Walker is a much more serious fan that I; see his article.
Jesse Walker has a really interesting article in the October issue of Reason magazine, "The Pirate Preservationists," now available online, about collectors who go beyond what is commercially available when collect TV shows, music from a favorite artists, etc. Jesse argues that while "piracy" has a bad name, such collectors often preserve work that otherwise might be lost.
I'm guessing that Robert Anton Wilson fans can relate. Even in RAW's lifetime, Email to the Universe drew on articles posted on the Robert Anton Wilson Fans website founded by Mike Gathers, and recent posthumous RAW books have used materials gathered by the likes of Mike and Martin Wagner.
People who follow classical history, i.e. ancient Greece and Rome, know that only a tiny percentage of work written by classical authors has survived to modern times. But those kinds of losses have happened much more recently; here is an interesting bit from Jesse's piece:
"Preservation is a constant war against decay, a war where the losses outnumber the victories and the victories are only temporary. According to the Library of Congress, roughly 70 percent of silent-era movies are now gone completely and another 5 percent survive only in part. The library's list of lost sound recordings includes commercial releases by musicians as popular as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Ethel Waters. The vast majority of NBC's pre-TV newscasts have disappeared; they're rumored to be rotting in a landfill in New Jersey."
It seems to me that "pirate" is a term that takes in widely differing activities; collecting an article that otherwise might be lost seems wildly different, to me, than distributing a bootleg copy of a book available from Hilaritas Press.
Jesse's article is illustrated with a photo of Jesse's music collection. I can figure out a lot of it, but what is the "Illuminatus Hi-Fi Companion" from DJ Sun Woo Kong?
I have just finished Brian Dean's book, Lazy Person's Guide to Framing: Decoding the News Media, issued this year in a newly-revised edition.
I enjoyed the book and it's an easy, quick read. I am of course somewhat familiar with Brian's thought via the RAW Semantics blog and his X account, but it's nice to have much of it in one place. The book seeks to popularize George Lakoff's work on framing, i.e. the metaphors and points of view that people use to understand the world, and to attempt to impose their ideology on others. The book also can be read as being about reality tunnels, and Robert Anton Wilson is quoted in several places. (Here is Brian's own explanation of the book). Much of the discussion comes from the point of view of Brian's left politics (which I understood better after reading the book) but you can use the techniques Brian talks about to analyze anyone's opinions, including Brian's.
Here are a couple of my favorite passages from the book:
"It seems obvious, but needs repeating: We don't all think the same -- only a part of our conceptual systems can be considered universal. So-called 'conservatives' and 'progressives' don't see the world in the same way; they have different forms of reason on moral issues. But they both see themselves as right, in a moral sense (with perhaps a few 'amoral' exceptions.)" [Emphases in original.]
[On how a small element of truth can lead to distortion:]
"With repetition and reinforcement, the irrefutable small 'truth' becomes the main focus -- the primary frame through which we perceive the larger issue. But it's not an accurate or honest representation of the issue. It's like a small stain on the corner of a large carpet -- you don't even notice the stain unless somebody points it out. But if you repeatedly focus on the stain, it may become an obsession -- your primary mental category for the overall appearance of the room is 'stained carpet.' The stain becomes the overriding frame, the tiny truth that's out of proportion."
Adam Gorightly's package from Illuminated Brew Works.
Alan Moore redirects some of his royalties. "I asked for DC Comics to send all of the money from any future TV series or films to Black Lives Matter.” Seems a bit like Dorothy Parker directing the royalties from her estate to the NAACP.
John Sinclair birthday party in Detroit.
Book blurbs in the publishing industry.
Tyler Cowen on the "alien bodies" in Mexico.
I've long thought that an interview of Robert Anton Wilson by Scott Apel and one of Apel's friends, Kevin Briggs, was one of the best interviews of RAW. It's not posted on the Internet, but it available in two of Apel's books: Beyond Chaos and Beyond, and Science Fiction: An Oral History.
So when I loaned a copy of Beyond Chaos and Beyond to a friend of mine, Tracy Harms, I was curious what Tracy would think of the interview. On X, Tracy posted, "Yesterday I read an interview with Robert Anton Wilson and it reminded me how delightful he was. So many fun, optimistic, enlivening ideas. We miss him." And to me, Tracy wrote, "The opening interview was a lovely reminder of his contributions."
Both books remain available; Beyond Chaos and Beyond has a lot of RAW material and biography of RAW that Apel wrote; for Kindle, it's about $5. Science Fiction: An Oral History is only 99 cents for Kindle, and you also get interviews with C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny and Norman Spinrad.
Rob Pugh writes to tell me he is reading the new Scott Adams book, Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success and reports that much of it reminds him of what Robert Anton Wilson wrote about reality tunnels. (I am often not a fan of Scott Adams' politics, but Rob knows I liked a previous book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.)
Rob writes, "I'm in the middle of the new Scott Adams' book 'Reframe Your Brain' and (sadly) it took me about half of the book to realize 'Oh, he's changing reality tunnels using language.' I'd long categorized 'framing' in the political/spin category and didn't give it much thought. But he's basically using Sapir-Whorf linguistic to change channels on reality tunnels. IMO/YMMV at least. The next chapter that I'm about to start is literally called 'Reality Reframes.' It's an interesting and possibly useful book, I think, so far.
"I've never run across any direct Adams/RAW links, but given he goes on about his hypnotist bonafides, there's probably at least some NLP/Bandler'esque overlaps."
I got a followup email from Rob the next day. In a passage of the book, Adams writes, "I can see a valid argument for either optimist or pessimism about the current state of the world. I don't know which filter is more accurate, but I do know one makes me feel better than the other. So I choose the happy-making one."
Rob posits, "This is a just another way RAW said 'I prefer to create for each hour the happiest, funniest, and most romantic reality-tunnel...' "
Rob does not mention it, but it sounds like the Adams book could be a companion for Lazy Person's Guide to Framing: Decoding the News Media by Brian Dean, which is sitting in my Kindle reader, waiting for me to get to it. Here is Brian's pinned post on the book at the RAW Semantics blog. I am not suggesting that Brian is interested in Scott Adams' book, only that they (apparently) tackle a common subject.
Aleister Crowley in 1925 (public domain photo).
When I read the Illuminatus! trilogy back in the 1970s, when I was in college in Oklahoma, I didn't know anyone who was seriously into magick or Aleister Crowley. I did know quite a few libertarians; in fact, all of the people I knew who read the book were libertarians, and so I was under the impression that libertarians were the core audience for the book. Of course, there are plenty of libertarians who have read the trilogy, and read other work by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, but I did not realize how many RAW fans really were more into magick than political philosophy. When I began this blog in 2010, I assumed that most of the people who bothered to read it would be libertarians, and I was surprised at the number of people I encountered who identified with the left instead, or who were into magick.
While my views about RAW's audience have shifted, I am still capable of surprise. I am reading Lion of Light because I am taking part in the ongoing online reading group at Jechidah, so I duly read the pieces by Lon Milo DuQuette and Richard Kaczysnki, and a couple of passages caught my eye.
DuQuette: "Ordo Templi Orientis is now arguably the largest and most influential magical order in the world. In the first 15 years since our local lodge in Newport Beach officiated scores of Degree initiations. Of the new initiates I interviewed in those years at least 75% told me they had been initially drawn to magick and Aleister Crowley because they had read The Illuminatus! Trilogy and the works of Robert Anton Wilson."
Kaczynski: "In the late 1970s, when I dove into the sci-fi con and pagan festival circuits, one or both of Wilson and Leary were frequent guests of honor. To me it seemed like more of the attendees had come to Crowley's magick through The Illuminatus! Trilogy than all of the aforementioned 'establishment' authors combined." [Kaczynski says that in 1974, the occult "establishment" was Israel Regardie, Francis King, John Symonds and Kenneth Grant.)
So it sounds like the revival of Crowley's magick is another way Illuminatus! has influenced the culture.
Lon Milo Duquette (Creative Commons photo by Alan Corcoran, source.)
The second post in the online reading group for the new Robert Anton Wilson book, Lion of Light, has gone up. Oz Fritz covers the history of the phrase "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law," discusses the Lon Milo Duquette and Richard Kaczynski pieces in the book and even provides a nice anecdote about Brian Eno, so check it out. The information about Jimmy Page's interest in Aleister Crowley also interested me.
Today's blog post will be in honor of the fact that RAW loved classical music.
On his blog, Tyler Cowen makes the case that Johann Sebastian Bach was the greatest achiever of all time: "I’ve been reading and rereading biographies of Bach lately (for some podcast prep), and it strikes me he might count as the greatest achiever of all time. That is distinct from say regarding him as your favorite composer or artist of all time."
Tyler lists a variety of criteria in his argument, including quality of work, being better than contemporary rivals, staying power over the centuries, overcoming obstacles, and so on. (The whole post, not terribly long, is worth a read.) One of the criteria is "consistency of work and achievement," and that's certainly true. Like most people who are into Bach's music, I listen to a wide variety of music -- cantatas, keyboard pieces, concertos, pieces for solo organ, work for solo violin and on and on. It's all really good.
I certainly don't want to diminish Bach in any way. But it still seems to me that one can make a case for Mozart, who seems at least as amazing as an overachiever. Perhaps I am influenced by the fact that I have lately been obsessed with Mozart's piano concertos and listening to them every day for days, but I think a good case can be made for Mozart.
Brilliant Classics has issued a complete box set of all of Bach's music. It comes to 155 CDs. But the Brilliant Classics boxed set of Mozart adds up to 170 CDs!
Yes, Mozart's early music, written when he was a child, is not not as interesting as his later work, and the music that is played the most was written late in his life. For example, among the 27 piano concertos, the last eight are the ones that are most often played, and recorded over and over again.
But consider also, that Bach lived to be 65, and Mozart wrote more music despite living to be only 35!
And if you compare works written while an adult, the consistency of quality for Mozart is very good.
Bach got to live 30 more years than Mozart. During the time he was alive, Mozart wrote furiously. In 1788, Mozart completed the famous last three symphonies, 39, 40 and 41, and 1788 also included Piano Sonata Number 15, Piano Concerto No. 26, Piano Trio No. 4, Piano Sonata No. 16, Violin Sonata No. 36, Piano Trio No. 5, Divertimento in E-flat and Piano Trio No. 6. 1791, the year Mozart died in early December, obviously was not his best year, but it still included two operas, the last piano concerto, a clarinet concerto, much of the Requiem and many other works.
If you listen to classical music radio stations, you'll notice Mozart as the composer who is probably played the most, fulfilling the same role that Led Zeppelin plays for classic rock stations.
It is painful to think about what Mozart could have written if he had just five more years and lived to age 40. It is mind boggling to think about Mozart living into his 60s, like Bach, or even making it to age 56, like Beethoven.
Bobby Campbell has released his latest occasional newsletter, and it underscores how he's had a busy and productive summer: A new episode of "Buddhafart," his excellent "Living in a RAW World" essay for Maybe Day, and other bits.
There is also an intriguing announcement: "Additionally, a top secret new project has popped up on the horizon, prompting a frenzied explosion of pre-production activity, and a vague notion that everything has been building towards THIS :)))"
Production of AI opera "Valis."
The persecution of pain management doctors. I keep trying to draw attention to this, and in general no one cares. Here is an article on the doctor's conviction, and notice how the stupid, lazy reporter, Tracy Gladney, simply writes down the government press release.
New episode of Bobby Campbell's "Buddhafart."
What men really think about (maybe).
Saudi man sentenced to death for Tweets.
Cherokee tribe in North Carolina votes to legalize marijuana.
The KLF and Tammy Wynette, performing a KLF song inspired by the Illuminatus! trilogy.
Of all of John Higgs' excellent books, the one he wrote on the KLF, The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds, arguably is his weirdest and certainly is the one that discusses Robert Anton Wilson the most.
So when Nick Helseg-Larsen sent me a link to "Footnotes to a Discordian Fable," a review by Christopher James Stone of a new edition of the book, I was interested.
As you know if you regularly read my blog, Higgs has issued a new edition of the book, updated with thousands of words of footnotes. I had a better idea of what the new edition is like after reading Stone's review.
I'll let you read the review for yourself (you should read it), but a couple of things. Stone has a comment about John's career which seems insightful: "This is part of Higgs’ genius: his ability to identify neglected stories that need to be told."
There's also an anecdote about John, not really related to the review, which illustrates the determination and drive which also has been a part of John's success. John and Mr. Stone, who have become friends, travel to Stonehenge and are knighted by "King Arthur," a biker turned Druid who is the subject of a book by Stone and an unproduced screenplay by Stone. "He vowed to remain in the stones till dawn. It was an awful night, raining constantly, and I soon gave up and sat in the car. Higgs remained true to his word and stayed out all night. When he finally joined me after dawn he was shivering with the cold and dripping wet. We turned on the engine so that the fans blew out a stream of hot air."
In the review, Stone reveals that one the structures of the book is that it focuses on five topics, conforming to the Discordian Law of Fives, e.g. "Bill Drummond, Robert Anton Wilson, Ken Campbell and Doctor Who." but then lists only four topics. Is this a joke that I'm not getting, or did the reviewer make a mistake? Update: After I asked about this on the Social Media Platform Formerly Known As Twitter, Stone wrote: "Ah yes, how could I have missed that? The fifth element is Alan Moore, the comic book writer. He's mentioned earlier."
I thought I would offer a few notes on Perdurabo, the biography of Aleister Crowley written by Richard Kaczynski.
I wanted to get background of knowledge about Crowley before reading the new Hilaritas Press book by Robert Anton Wilson, Lion of Light: Robert Anton Wilson on Aleister Crowley. I think Perdurabo succeeds in providing good information about Crowley's activities and beliefs, his Book of the Law and his belief that he was a prophet for a new creed. I read the "revised and expanded" edition, which runs to 720 pages, including the notes. It took me awhile to finish it.
I should note that it's also a pretty good read; whatever you think of Crowley's character, or the way he treated other people, there was seldom a dull moment in his life as a magician, mountain climber, poet and a person who apparently had dozens of sexual relationships. If you like name-dropping, you also will like this book: Crowley had relationships with or at least ran across many different famous people. And so you read about Crowley's feud with William Butler Yeats. You read about how one of his lovers had a teenage son, Preston, and that Preston and Crowley loathed each other, and eventually Kaczysnki reveals that "Preston" is Preston Sturges, the famous Hollywood film director and screenwriter. And so on and so on.
But while I generally enjoyed the celebrity portraits, one of them displeased me. At one point, Crowley had dealings with Walter Duranty, the infamous New York Times reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his articles about the Soviet Union; Duranty is known now as the perhaps the most famous liar in journalism. He is best remembered for suppressing the truth about how Stalin starved to death many residents of Ukraine. The Wikipedia article gives a useful summary and how the current situation with Russia and Ukraine has not lessened awareness of the matter, or criticism of the New York Times. Kaczynski covers all this by writing that when Crowley met Duranty just before World War I, "Years would pass before he [Duranty] would be acclaimed for his coverage of World War I and the rise of Joseph Stalin." This seems a little bit like writing, about the young Adolf Hitler, "Years would pass before he would be acclaimed for his pioneering work in dealing with anti-Semitism."
Speaking of politics, as I read the book I kept in mind the comments of D.M.S. on my blog post announced the new Lion of Light reading group; D.M.S. wrote, "I would like to know more about RAWs views on the more ugly sides of AC, his sexism and racism (as well as misusing other people, losing his own will to a heavy addiction and sometimes being just a plain asshole) as it has been documented in many ways.
"I am having a hard time just to focus on his spiritual work and 'Ignore his morals, ignore his political views, ignore his very clear lack of understanding for most people' as an admittedly well written post an reddit says."
Most of D.M.S.' accusations seem true about Crowley's ugly sides, although the book does document that he became a heroin addict because he was given heroin by doctors to treat his bronchitis and asthma, which troubled him much of his life (bronchitis is part of what killed Crowley at age 72 in 1947.) And to give Crowley his due, he sacrificed his wealth and much of his time and energy to a single-minded dedication to learn what he believed he had discovered. Apparently he really was sincere.
The only comment from D.M.S. which puzzled me was the reference to Crowley's "political views." Insofar as he had political views (I could not make out after reading a book hundreds of pages long if he ever voted or had a favorite political party) it seemed to me he had little use for fascism, Nazis or Communists. Perdurabo documents that Crowley was booted out of Italy by the Fascist regime (a big setback, he had established an Abbey of Thelema in Sicily) and that Crowley responded by writing anti-Mussolini poems; that Crowley denounced the "peace in our time" pact that sold out Czechoslovakia and temporarily delayed World War II, and that Crowley wrote a scathing letter to a pro-Nazi Thelema follower in Germany, denouncing anti-Semitism, and that Crowley referenced "Murder and terror in Soviet Russia, Concentration Camps and persecution in Germany (Page 498). Crowley's political views were one of the few items of his personal life that did NOT bother me, as opposed to, for example, his cruel treatment of women and the often callous way he treated other people. But I am not an EXPERT on Crowley (as RAW sometimes spelled the word) and Crowley may well have had repugnant political opinions I am just not aware of.
Much of Crowley's misbehavior can be explained (but not excused) by his single-minded dedication to his mission. I read a biography of Prokofiev, the Russian composer, a couple of years ago, by Harlow Robinson, and the biographer remarked that Prokofiev treated other people as if he assumed the most useful thing they could do in their lives would be to support him in writing as much music as possible; Prokofiev was likely correct, but that does not excuse how he treated everyone, Robinson wrote. Crowley had a similar belief about his own importance.
Kaczynski recently announced on Facebook that an audiobook of Perdurabo is on the way; no details yet, but he has promised to post updates.
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The Lion of Light online reading group has begun at the Jechidah blog. Lion of Light is the new Hilaritas Press book of Robert Anton Wilson's writings about Aleister Crowley
As per usual for online reading groups here or at Jechidah, everyone else is invited to join in by posting comments. There are two blog posts so far at Jechidah, one to announce the reading group and the first actual entry, posted last night to further discuss the group and to cover Mike Gathers' "Editor's Note" in the new book, which provodes the story of how the book came together. Future postings will go up each Sunday, with Gregory Arnott and Oz Fritz alternating.
Gregory and Oz both contributed to the new book. Both have spent many years reading RAW and also studying Aleister Crowley. The new reading group is an excellent opportunity for RAW fans, people interested in Crowley and people who like magick.
The "read inside the book feature" at Amazon's page for the book will let you read Mike's piece, so if you don't have the book yet, you can order it and get started in the meantime. You don't have to buy the book from Amazon, of course; see the other options at the bottom of this web page.
I like to buy cheap ebooks, and I sometimes note ebook sales here; recently I posted about sales for an historical novel about James Joyce and Richard Kaczynski's Perdurabo, which I'm currently reading.
A couple of new sales that caught my eye: In the U.S., Enochian Vision Magick: A Practical Guide to the Magick of Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley by Lon Milo DuQuette is available for $3.99 at the U.S. Amazon, (I checked, and it's not on sale at Barnes and Noble.)
British readers may want to know that John Higgs' William Blake Vs. the World is just 99 pence at the Amazon UK. Unfortunately, there's no corresponding sale in the U.S.; on Amazon, the ebook is a pricey $18.99.
I heard from a couple of different folks that Hilaritas Press is working on a book about Robert Anton Wilson's political writings. I also heard reports that a RAW book on magick might be in the works. I wrote to Rasa and asked for an update on Hilaritas' immediate plans. and he kindly took time to respond, as is his wont.
About the reports on planned new titles, Rasa wrote, "Yes, we are working on a few ideas. The 'RAW Politics' book (working title) has been picking up speed with Mike Gathers, Chad Nelson and Jesse Walker all working to get a collection of RAW articles together."
About other possible books that haven't been announced yet, Rasa wrote, "Two books that we’ve been thinking about for a while are also on my mind recently: Playboy’s Book of Forbidden Words, and The Sex Magicians. I just last week scanned Forbidden Words. RAW obtained the copyright for that book when he left Playboy.
"Mike Gathers had a couple ideas for compilations of RAW essays for a few other books: RAW on Magick and RAW Interviews are in that list. We’re still thinking about those."
Meanwhile, if you look at the Hilaritas list on the publisher's home page of the 21 publicly-announced RAW books officially announced by Hilaritas, 19 have been published and only two remain: Reality Is What You Can Get Away With and Chaos and Beyond.
Rasa gave me an update on those, too, explaining that they have been last because of technical difficulties:
"We are still trying to figure out how to get permission to use the Hollywood stills that RAW put into Reality Is What You Can Get Away With – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences no longer has ownership of the original photos, so that’s been a hassle to track down current owners. Christina is working on that copyright usage.
"The other book, Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories, was a bit of a hassle because, like all the old New Falcon titles, we didn’t have the original files, so we had to use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) versions. Chaos and Beyond was one book where RAW used a lot of the goofy fonts that came with early Mac computers. That drove the OCR software nuts, and so I have not been eager to tackle that reformatting, but just last week I had the thought to ask Scott Apel, the book’s editor and publisher, if he had the original files, and Praise Eris, he did! So this week I’ve been slowly going through that book, working on a newly formatted version. I’m guessing that will be our next book to release."
"The citation in case anyone wants to find it on JSTOR is Spring 2007 Fifth Estate, Volume 42, Issue 1(375), 56 pages."
The "Transmigratory Adventures of Philip K. Dick" Kickstarter.
1961 panel discussion, features RAW (via Prop Anon on X).
The KLF Share Unreleased Music Via British Library
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Ishmael Reed in 2019 (Creative Commons photo, source).
Jesse Walker sends me a bit from an interview with Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo and other books:
Q. Have you ever received an honorary degree or grant or award for your writing?
A. I haven't received an honorary degree or grant, but I was recently made an honorary pope by the Bavarian Illuminati (for the writing of Mumbo Jumbo) which, according to the sealed papers I received in the mail, was founded in 1090 A.D. by Hassan i Sabbah. They read the book and don't think it was "muddled," as one of the "Sister" critics thought. (I get my strongest criticism from some of the "Sisters." I guess this is because they want me to improve and do better, god bless them.)
I asked Jesse for a citation, and he replied,
It originally appeared in the June 1974 issue of BLACK WORLD, and it was reprinted in the books SHROVETIDE IN OLD NEW ORLEANS and CONVERSATIONS WITH ISHMAEL REED. I should probably add that he is interviewing himself.
Your query prompted me to look up whether that issue of BLACK WORLD is online, and sure enough it is:
https://books.google.com/books?id=rjkDAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
I have posted on the connection between Illuminatus and Mumbo Jumbo, see this post, and also see this post.
Jesse also asked me to post the query he made on X, looking for a Reed essay, here is is:
1. In my memory, I first learned of Zora Neale Hurston in an essay about her by Ishmael Reed, then dug up TELL MY HORSE at the library. But the only Reed essay about Hurston that I can find is...his intro to a reprint of TELL MY HORSE, which couldn't have led me *to* the book.
2. That intro was reprinted in Reed's book AIRING DIRTY LAUNDRY, which I've read, but it didn't come out until 1994, years after I encountered TELL MY HORSE. She is mentioned in some of his essays—and in MUMBO JUMBO—so it's possible I went digging after reading one of those.
3. But it's possible that he really did write an extended essay about her that was not the TELL MY HORSE intro & that I'm just doing a bad job of finding it. So I put the question to Twitter: Do any of you know of this article that I think I'm remembering but might be imagining?
"Finally got around to digitising several hours of old RAW cassette tapes. Please check out the resulting MP3 files below. I’ve looked everywhere online to see if these talks/interviews have previously been uploaded (eg at RAWilsonFans.org or RAWilsonFans.de or Youtube. I also checked commercially available RAW recordings). As far as I can see, the digitised tapes below seem 'new' to the Internet (please let me know if I’ve overlooked anything)."
There are more details at the blog post and the comments are interesting. Note that you can stream the audio at the blog post, but you also can download the files for offline listening.
UPDATE: Some of the audio has been removed -- see the comments -- but there's still a lot that most people likely have not heard.
George Mason University professors (and bloggers) Alex Tabarrok, left, and Tyler Cowen, in 2020. (George Mason University marketing photo).
While it's not directly related to this blog, I thought I would note that the Marginal Revolution blog has now celebrated 20 years in operation. Here is an interview (including a transcript) of the site's two bloggers, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok.
When I launched this blog, back in 2010, Marginal Revolution served as a model. For example, Tyler remarked somewhere that for a blog to be successful it must post frequently, at least once a day, and I've always tried to have one post a day, in spite of the fact that this blog has a rather narrow focus. There isn't always breaking news n the world of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea fandom!
And while there isn't a huge overlap what's covered in Marginal Revolution and what I write about here, there is some. For example, here is a recent post by Alex on why the recent UFO craze in the news media is silly. Tyler often writes about classical music. And while these guys focus on economics, you never know what they will write about. Here is Alex's tribute to the greatness of Sinead O'Connor. And if you missed my earlier post, here is Tyler on John Higgs' Love and Let Die.
In the interview referenced above, Tyler mentions that the search box at his blog is an underrated feature because of the huge number of topics that blog has covered. I think that might be true of RAWIllumination, too. This blog has been around since June 2010, and I've covered a lot of RAW-related topics. Sometimes I have searched for information on Google, only to find that the answer to my question is an old blog post from this blog that I've forgotten!
I am still plugging away on Richard Kaczynski's biography of Aleister Crowley, Perdurabo, and there's a passage where Crowley seems to anticipate the idea of reality tunnels and of switching from one reality to another.
Chapter Eight, "Singer of Strange and Obscene Gods," relates that Crowley wrote a book that was a "collection of devotional poems to the Virgin Mary" (although it had decidedly unpious hidden messages). But it says that it's just as well the hidden messages were not noticed, because "Crowley's intent was not to blaspheme" and that he was attempting to write from the mindset of a good Catholic.
The book quotes Crowley as saying, "I do not see why I should be confined to one life. How can one hope to understand the world if one persists in regarding it from the conning tower of one's own personality?"
RAW relates that radio dramas were still being produced in England and the New York station rebroadcasted them. One of them was an Orson Welles series, The Lives of Harry Lime. "The Great Round One also occasionally wrote some of the scripts, but a stable of writers did most of the stories and, after a while, I began to notice that some of the yarns I liked best were attributed to one Arlen Riley."
The Wikipedia article on the show has useful background information (RAW gets some details wrong, and the series was a prequel to the 1949 movie The Third Man) and you can listen to all 52 episodes at the Internet Archive. (You can download all of them too; the Archive says they are in the public domain.)
Jesse Walker has been digging into this and has identified "Blue Bride," one of the episodes you can listen to at the Internet Archive, as having been written by Arlen Riley. "She is identified as the author on this German-language site (with a different date and title, because Germany, but if you run it through Google Translate you'll see it is clearly the same story)," Jesse wrote to me.
Richard Kaczynski
The latest Hilaritas Press podcast, released August 23, fits well with yesterday's announcement of a new book discussion group for Lion of Light.
"In this episode, Mike Gathers chats with Crowley biographer Richard Kaczynski, author of the recently updated Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley and The Weiser Concise Guide to Aleister Crowley. Richard has also recently written the Foreword for the New Hilaritas Press edition of Lion of Light: Robert Anton Wilson on Aleister Crowley."
The podcast website has the usual helpful links to obtain more information and you can access the podcast from there, although you should be able to also find it on your favorite podcasting app. Kaczynski's official site is worth a look.
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A new online reading project for a Robert Anton Wilson can now be announced. Following a suggestion from Spookah, Gregory Arnott and Oz Fritz have agreed to lead a reading group on the new Robert Anton Wiilson book published by Hilaritas Press, Lion of Light.
The discussion will be hosted at the Jechidah blog, and the weekly postings will begin after Labor Day. Labor Day is Sept. 4, so it's probably a good idea to hurry and get a copy of the book, if you don't have one already. Gregory and Oz plan to alternate on doing the posts, and everyone else is invited to contribute to the discussion in the comments.
It's hard to imagine a more promising reading group, or a better opportunity for people who are interested in Robert Anton Wilson to learn about a key influence on Wilson. Aleister Crowley obviously was a major influence on RAW. Oz wrote a foreword for the new book, "Five Footprints of a Camel." Gregory wrote an afterword in the book, "Enduring Magical Biography."
In addition, Oz has read every available biography of Crowley, and I know Gregory has read more than one. I have been reading Perdurabo, the biography of Crowley written by Richard Kaczynski (who also contributed a foreword to the new book), and it has an endorsement from Oz at the front. (The version of Perdurabo I am reading is the revised and expanded edition; Oz wrote a review.)
Please consider taking part in the new reading group.
UPDATE: There's now a post at Jechidah discussing the reading group.
Caption for this from Visio Smaragdina on X: "23 Skidoo, from Aleister Crowley’s gnomic Book of Lies (falsely so called), 1912"
On X, Visio Smaragdina writes, "I’ve always thoughts the ‘23 enigma’ - as proposed by authors William Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson- was complete nonsense. However after reading about 23 in RAWs Cosmic Trigger, my wife and I went out to lunch and were then shown to table no. 23…"
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A suggestion from Spookah in a comment to Sunday's post: "Just a suggestion, but what about a Lion of Light reading group? Many around here could weigh in and bring some much appreciated depth of clarification."
What say the rest of you? This does seem like a good idea, but I would prefer such a reading group to be led by somebody other than me, any volunteers? I will write to a couple of the usual suspects.
UPDATED: I'm getting a good response to this idea. Announcement coming soon.
Brian Dean, aka RAW Semantics, spots something interesting: Two different versions of "The Horror on Howth Hill," a piece reprinted in Email to the Universe. Here are his comments, taken from his X (i.e. Twitter) account:
"I recall hearing that RAW stopped using Flann O'Brien's character 'de Selby' at some point, due to legal caution. 'Professor Timothy Finnegan' then filled that role. What I hadn't heard before (and noticed only yesterday): there exist two very different versions of two very different versions of RAW's 'The Horror on Howth Hill'. The 1990 version (from 'Three-fisted Tales of "Bob"' - a Subgenius anthology edited by Ivan Stang) has de Selby as a main character. The later version contained in New Falcon's 2005 edition of New Falcon's 2005 edition of 'Email to the Universe' (presumably also the Hilaritas edition) has Finnegan replacing de Selby throughout, including in the copious/hilarious footnotes - 'DeSelbyismus und Dummheit (6 vols.)' becomes 'Finneganismus und Dummheit (6 vols.)'etc. And Von Hanfkopf is replaced by Professor Sheissenhosen (except in a few instances where he isn't. There are a few missed replacements of 'de Selby' too, which makes the main story dialogue confusing in a couple of places, in the New Falcon version). Additionally, the 'Three-fisted Tales' version has some fairly substantial footnotes which are missing from the New Falcon version. And there are quite a few other intriguing little differences I noticed, without even getting anywhere near full anorak!"
I just looked, and the Hilaritas version has Finnegan, too.
As Brian also notes, in a couple of places in the New Falcon/Hilaritas versions, "de Selby" was not replaced by "Finnegan" and the mistakes went through. In the Hilaritas version, "de Selby" is on pages 198 and 204.
I have started reading Perdurabo, Richard Kaczynski's biography of Aleister Crowley, as preparation for reading Lion of Light. A passage describes how Crowley, while attending Cambridge, suddenly was introduced to the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. "For Crowley, the budding poet, Shelley's lyrical style and unique expressive language represented the perfect marriage of poetry and music .... Shelley ... remained Crowley's lifelong favorite."
This may be the only thing I have in common with Aleister Crowley, but I discovered Shelley in college, too, and while I liked all of the English Romantic poets, Shelley was my favorite and I read a great deal of him.
Here is a famous Shelley poem:
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
By Tom Jackson
Many important new fantasy and science fiction authors have emerged as the 21st century advances. I like many of them, but my personal favorite among all of the new writers is Ada Palmer, 42, who published her first novel, Too Like the Lightning, in 2016. It was nominated for the Hugo Award but lost, but Palmer did win the John Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Three more novels in her Terra Ignota series followed, concluding with Perhaps the Stars in 2021.
Palmer also is an associate professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Chicago, where she teaches classes on the Renaissance and other subjects. To give you an idea of her range of interests, she is listed as a faculty member at the university's Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies, and at the Department of Classics, and in Medieval Studies, and Renaissance Studies and the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. Previously, she taught history at Texas A&M as an assistant professor. She has a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, knows eight languages, and authored two books aimed primarily at scholars, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance and (with James Hankins) The Recovery of Classical Philosophy in the Renaissance, a Brief Guide.
Although I did my best in this interview to find out about all of Palmer's upcoming books that might be expected in the next few years, I did not ask about one upcoming novel because I did not know it existed until I came home from Pittsburgh and read the Palmer bibliography printed in the Confluence program book; The Wrath of Abaia (or something with a similar title) is co-written with Palmer's close friend Jo Walton, and will come out in 2025 or so. Here is a description from Palmer's Patreon: "It's a very hopepunk project, dealing with future politics, Climate Crisis aftermath, biological and planetary custodianship, and the connection between the dream of space colonization and Earth's destructive colonial past, and ways we can address and rehabilitate the dream of space in anticolonial ways. The world build was a ton of fun to work on, especially the future politics plus stuff with disability & future medicine and A.I. civil rights, and it's really fun working with Jo on it, who is so much faster that me at getting words down on the page, and great at such vivid characters."
And in addition to Abaia and the upcoming books discussed below, Palmer somehow also, according to her curriculum vitae, is working on a book called Why We Censor: the Unexpected Motives of Censorship from Antiquity to the Internet, and also on a "Critical edition of 17th-Century English Banned Droll Plays."
She also has an official website and blog and is working on the next recording project for the Renaissance music group she founded, Sassafrass.
I interviewed Dr. Palmer for 51 minutes on July 23, 2023, at the Confluence science fiction convention in Pittsburgh. (See my convention report). I have never seen a guest of honor at a science fiction convention work as hard as Ada Palmer to give her all for the fans. She did appearances morning, afternoon and night, including lectures on topics such as Viking mythology and the history of censorship, a reading, panel discussions, a Kaffeeklatsch with fans, and a full concert on Saturday night with her Renaissance music group, Sassafrass. When I mentioned this, she said it wasn't the convention working her to death, she kept asking if she could add another event. This attitude carries over into the interview; Dr. Palmer was very intense, but there was also plenty of laughter and joking.
I had a small audience at my interview that included Gregory and Adie Arnott, and I want to thank them for helping me decipher a couple of moments as I worked on my transcript. Dr. Palmer is a high bandwidth speaker who talks quite rapidly and often tosses out references to Renaissance figures, not a period of history I know much about, and it took me hours to compile a written version of the interview, even with help of a speech to written word software program. If you like, you may download the recording and hear what the interview was like, complete with interruptions from jet planes passing overhead.
July 23 of course was Maybe Day, and I brought that up as I began my interview. I was wearing my black Boing Boing Robert Anton Wilson t-shirt, and at Palmer's suggestion, we sat outside the convention hotel, on a bench near the lobby.
RAWILLUMINATION: Thanks a lot for talking to me. I have a kind of a housekeeping question I need to ask. Today is Maybe Day July 23rd, when fans of Robert Anton Wilson all over the world, celebrate him. So since I do a blog devoted to his writing, I wanted to ask you if by chance you have ever read the Illuminatus! trilogy or anything by Wilson or Robert Shea.
ADA PALMER: I've read a few bits of it but I haven't read it all the way through. And it's extremely influential on conspiracy theory, narratives and lots of other forms. So, I've looked at a lot of its derivatives ranging from -- I mean, there's the Illuminati this subsection in the Gargoyles TV series, there's Illuminati stuff in The X-Files, and it's interesting to watch the way his transformation of the Illuminati then morphed into broader ideas of conspiracy theory that have in turn morphed more broadly into shaping the way we think about conspiracy theory.
I have a colleague historian called Kathleen Belew who is an historian of the history of, it's not a happy subject, white supremacy, and the U.S. And her new project is actually on the influence of conspiracy theory and post-apocalyptic fiction on alt right and extremist recruitment. And the ways that post-apocalyptic narratives and disillusionment with sort of the power fantasies of the ends of the world turn into tools for alt right recruitment. So it's a very interesting sort of, you know, three steps removed descendant of that to look at. I think one of the interesting things when we write about power and we write about shapes of powers and we give people models for thinking about what shapes power really takes. And the Illuminatus! trilogy is at the core of the fact that it's much more satisfying to believe somebody is in charge than to believe that it's actually as chaotic and out of control as it is.
RAW ILLUMINATION: There's a few things in Terra Ignota which could be read as a reference to the llluminatus! trilogy or which is simply a coincidence. Such as the fact, there's important events that take place on the 23rd. There's a scene set in Ingolstadt where the Bavarian Illuminati were created. There's a few other things but I guess that is just coincidence. It's not a nod.
ADA PALMER: The dates in Terra Ignota are all based on the Ides of March and how many days after the Ides of March it takes to accomplish the things that Mycroft needed to accomplish within his days, so that the dates could line up for us to hear about his history at the correct points. That and the timing of the latest possible [date] the Olympics can be are the two things that set the dates for when things occur in it. Ingolstadt I know is important in Illuminatus! As I also play the INWO card game. [I believe she is referring to the Illuminati: New World Order (INWO) game of Steve Jackson games -- Tom.] But Ingolstadt also makes a lot of sense as a historic capital and I wanted something that has an old city and the new city. So there are a lot of very interesting connections with Ingolstadt, and I was aware of that one, but it was only one of several that I was thinking about what I made the choice.
RAWILLUMINATION: I want to focus on what Ada Palmer fans will be interested in. So is the collection of essays with you and Jo Walton the next title that is likely to come out?
ADA PALMER: Yeah that's going to be out I think in May of 2024. So quite soon. We're still deciding on a final title. I think right now, we were leaning toward Time's Promethean Shore, which I think is a great title. Sorry, Time's Protean Shore. But we are still working with our editor to get the title just right. It's actually a funny feeling to have three books on the way, none of which I know what the title is going to be. [Laughs].
RAWILLUMINATION: Is Patrick Nielsen Hayden the editor?
ADA PALMER: Yeah, Patrick is the editor.
RAWILLUMINATION: And can you give me an idea of what the topics are going to be? Is there a particular focus or is it pretty wide ranging?
ADA PALMER: It's somewhat wide ranging but it focuses on reading and writing and the subtitle is definitely Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction. So it contains histories of science fiction publishing, histories of fandom, histories of the cross-pollination between Anglophone and Japanese science fiction fandoms, and by history of science fiction publishing, it goes from Lucian of Samosata to Amazon. It's a very comprehensive one, but focusing on the transformation and codification of the genre in the 1920s with pulp publishing. It has a lot of details about the differences between U.S. and UK publishing history. Trying to focus on how that shapes art, and how things like the lengths of works or whether we get series or whether we get more SF or fantasy or more fantasy or SF at different points were shaped by specific things such as changes in warehouse pricing and other factors that no one would ever think of as factors, factors that no one would ever think of as related to these questions but that nonetheless are big shapers of it. And then has a number of essays about reading. Some of them are about, you know, the process and act of reading. It has a great essay on what is genre that focuses on pacing and how one of the defining characteristics within a publishing genre is often not the furniture of the genre -- does it have a vampire? But the pacing, pacing is what makes something be a vampire romance versus vampire fantasy versus vampire magical realism, for example.
We also have essays on individual authors. There's a long essay on Delany, there's an essay on LeGuin. There's several of my essays about Shakespeare. Looking at Shakespeare as a historical fiction writer and how we can take things from the way Shakespeare combines and cuts and the pacing that he applies to the condensing and transformation of time when he's turning a multi-decade war into a two-hour event. So there are sections on that. There's also a couple of essays about disability and pain, both Jo and I are chronic pain sufferers and we've written some essays about that and how it intertwines with our careers as historians and so on. So, that's in there. Several of the essays I recently published in Uncanny Magazine about important, projects of the genre, such as my essay on Hopepunk, that was actually not in Uncanny. My essay on Hopepunk and my essay on the protagonist problem and which Jo worked with me on. And the essay on censorship and science fiction and their histories together.
So it's a lot about what has science fiction been doing, what is science fiction achieving, what is it like to read science fiction? How does the reading process for science fiction work? And then how does this affect thought? How does this affect thought patterns, how does this genre have the power to shape our future building as well as our ways of thinking about the future. It's going to be a fat collection. There's a lot in it. And some of the essays are versions of essays that Jo started as Tor.com posts, but that we've expanded together. So, they're now three times as long and have examples from Japan that I've been able to pull in. Oh, and there's a really neat one on the ethics that shapes Japanese versus Western horror and how Western horror is providentialist, and Japanese horror is ecosystemic and these affect who gets killed in a horror story. And whether you're interested in horror or not, the point of it is to think about how the logics of purity and guilt and innocence affect our leader expectations of who will prosper and who will be punished in a narrative. But that there are other ways to think about who should through some ethical logic get punished or prosper in a narrative that we can learn from borrowing, in order to be able to notice how much purity logic and providentialist thinking affect our instincts when we're designing a story and our first impulse as to who should get killed in this scene or who should prosper or not.
We've also written two essays which are calling a Vorfreude. Sorry, Mitfreude. Mitfreude is a German word. We're all familiar with Schadenfreude. So, Mitfreude is the joy of enjoying a friend's joy by being with them. And if you've ever had a delightful conversation where a friend is telling you about their hobby and you just enjoy learning about this. So you have a friend who's an enthusiast of something and they're just going on about, you know, this particular subcategory of weird opera that they love and you enjoy it. You enjoy it because you're with them, that's Mitfreude, "with joy," the joy of enjoying somebody else's joy. And so, as an essay, it's sort of an essay that's trying to be that. It's trying to be the equivalent of a geeky conversation where you say, to your friend, "So tell me about romance novels." Part of the idea being that it's not trying to persuade you to take up this hobby. You know, when your friend who keeps lizards tells you about lizards, they're not proselytizing for you to start keeping lizards, they're just enjoying geeking out on lizards. And similarly, it's neat to learn about what romance as a genre is, how it works. And the many things that people who don't read romance, don't quite understand about them. So, Jo has written an essay about romance. It's nifty. Here's what it's like so that you can understand it. And I've written one that's about Japanese SF and manga and anime, not with the "You should read manga and watch anime," but with "here is what this is." And it's nifty to learn about because it's connected with World War Two and it's connected with intercontinental cultural exchange and it's connected with histories of feminism and gender, gender play and musical theater and all these other fun subjects so one can hear about. So lots of essays. Sorry, that was too long an answer.
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Jo Walton (Creative Commons photo, source)
RAWILLUMINATION: That's fine. We're all drinking it in. Now, so I'm guessing the second book that's on the way is a history book because I understand you turned in the manuscript.
ADA PALMER: I have turned in the manuscript. So this is a nonfiction pop history, fun book written in the fun, casual style of my blogging about the Renaissance and specifically why we think of it as a golden age. The title is probably going to be Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age. And it's about why this particular period in history comes to be one that is celebrated as opposed to Middle Ages, which get a bad rap, or the 17th century, which doesn't even have an era name despite being very important. So, it looks not only at the Renaissance, what happened in it, how complicated and messy and bloody it was but it also looks looks at post-Renaissance ideas of the Renaissance when 18th century and 19th century historians decide to celebrate this era, why they decide to celebrate this era. So it has a lot of fun storytelling. A big chunk in the middle of it is a bunch of micro-biographies of different Renaissance people whose lives cross and, you know, there's Josquin des Prez who's a composer, there's Montesecco, who's a professional assassin, there's Lucrezia Borgia. There's people you've never heard of, like, Camilla Rucellai, those people you definitely heard of like Michelangelo and it goes through the same events from different points of view. Most history books go chronologically. This doesn't, it goes in the loop as if you're a time traveler and you're living it from the point of view of one faction. And then you're living it from the point of view of their enemy. And then you're living it from the point of view of the scared composer who was just trying to compose music in the middle of all these terrible things. And so it gives you the intersection, one of the goals of the book being to make clear that the Renaissance is very plural. And when you go into a bookstore or a library or a museum gift shop, and it has five different books on the Renaissance, they're going to give you five different Renaissances and they're all correct because so much is going on. So it's a very fun book.
So it's an odd book because the formality varies enormously and sometimes it will be very elegant for a while or it will be very meticulously researched for a while. Quotations and then it'll switch into jokes and you know internet OMG in the way that my blogging does. All the beta readers for it and also the editor have been like, "Wow this is so fun and so not like anything, and I don't know how to market it." So we have no idea whether this book is going to succeed in finding very many readers, but I hope that it will.
RAWILLUMINATION: Who is the publisher?
ADA PALMER: So it's being done by Head of Zeus. Head of Zeus does the UK editions of my novels and they're a mostly UK press, but they do do world stuff. And for this one, they're doing here in the U.S. as well.
RAWILLUMINATION: So it's a commercial publisher. We're not talking about Princeton University Press like Lucretius was. [I am referring to Palmer's 2014 academic book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, although I misspoke -- it actually as put out by Harvard University Press.]
ADA PALMER: Exactly. This is not in any way the stiff and formal academic book. This is a popular reading book, although it has some patches of not yet published new research in it, especially on which Renaissance women we choose to celebrate and which Renaissance women we are uncomfortable with, particularly when Renaissance woman exercise power. We're very comfortable with Renaissance. women who exercise power in a modern feeling way or by stepping into male spaces. But there were a lot of Renaissance women who exercise power in ways that we don't find comfortable, like as visionary mystics and exercised more actual power than the famous women like Caterina Sforza who, you know, move into traditionally masculine spaces. But we're uncomfortable with celebrating those women because they aren't exercising the correct kind of power. And it's important and interesting to look at, you know, why are these ones famous? And these ones only ever negative when they appear in stories even if their influence was greater. So it has some fun new stuff on there.
RAWILLUMINATION: All right. And then the next book that everybody's excited about is, and I want to make sure I have the title right, is it Hearthfire or Heartfire?
ADA PALMER: It's Hearthfire.
RAWILLUMINATION: Okay. And give me the elevator pitch to excite us all about the Viking fiction work that you're --
ADA PALMER: Viking mythology. See, so much easier to describe than Terra Ignota, which didn't ever have an elevator pitch. You needed to take a really tall long elevator at the Sears Tower for that.
Viking mythology, historical fiction. It's looking at the question of if the Aesir are real and only the Aesir are real and the world is really the Viking metaphysics. But history is real history. Why did they let belief in them die out? Why did the world and its history take the shape that it did if it's being governed by the metaphysics and the entities that are described in Norse myth. So it sticks very close to the primary sources. Every chapter begins with quotations showing, which bits of Eddas or sagas I'm drawing on in that particular chapter and it brings a lot of the new hard-to-get-at research on this stuff. Because so much of Viking studies has changed so quickly in the past couple of decades that most of the stories we are familiar with are now 50 years out of date. And there are newer versions where we understand context better or we realize we weren't interpreting a word correctly, or the two bits of story should have been connected that weren't or shouldn't have been connected that were. And so it's trying to bring in some of the most recent readings of a lot of these myths but also looking very seriously at the question, if we want to make this compatible with the real course of history, what makes sense? So it's a lot of fun. It's coming slow, it's past the one-third mark on it, after working on it for a little over a year and a half. So my hope is that I'll be able to finish it, it would be awesome if I finished it within a calendar year but probably it'll be two, which would mean it comes out in three because it's a year between when I turn it in and when Tor puts it out.
RAWILLUMINATION: Is it projected as a two novel series?
ADA PALMER: Yeah, two books.
RAWILLUMINATION: And you're pretty sure it's not going to grow into four?
ADA PALMER: I've outlined it completely. And now that I've gotten through the one-third mark of the first book and it is indeed, as I hoped, going to end up to be the right length to be one volume, I'm pretty confident in it as one volume, especially because I looked carefully at it and if you divided it up into three, the stopping point would be horrible. You can't split it anywhere but there, it would just be torture for the reader. So I'm working very hard to keep it to the length that will fit in the volume.
Flags from the world of Terra Ignota which Ada Palmer gave away to some of her most devoted fans at Confluence. Left, the flag of Utopia; right, the flag of the Universal Free Alliance.
RAWILLUMINATION: I have one Terra Ignota question. I really love Too Like the Lightning as as an introductory novel by a writer I had not heard of before, it's kind of my favorite novel, the last 10 or 15 years, and one of the things I liked about it is it's obviously the first book in a series so you obviously, there's a lot of stuff you still, you know, you're going to find out about, but I thought that for a first book in a series it also succeeded in having a pretty dramatic ending when Martin and Papadelius are uncovering the murder plot for the reader. And I wondered if you put a lot of effort into not just doing a first book of a series, but in rewarding the reader for reading that first book, and thereby incentivizing them to keep going.
ADA PALMER: So I still feel tense about where that cutoff had to be. And, I wrote books one and two as one book. Book three, I wrote by itself, book four I wrote by itself, but book one and two I wrote as one longer book. And if I hadn't been in new debut writer they might have been able to do it as one fat book. But for a new writer where it's more of an experiment, they were less willing to do that because the longer a page count is in a book, the less money they make because it's more expensive to produce the book, which makes perfect sense. So I had to cut it in half and we knew that I would have to cut it in half and I was promised suggestions on how to cut it in half and I proposed an idea of cutting it a half in a very different way by unweaving the two plot threads, which began at the beginning, one of which follows Carlisle Foster and one of which follows Martin, to effectively make the Carlisle Foster narrative be the first book and the Martin narrative be the second book so that they would have each had more sense of volume completion. Because those narratives would come to an end in each. And I never received any kind of reply to any of these suggestions and then I got an email that said, "Hey just cut it in half in this point randomly selected and also we need it in two weeks," and also it's the first day of finals period. And I was like, no, this is not happening. I have to grade finals and also I cannot edit all of this book in two weeks. And so I had to very suddenly on very short notice, figure out a way to give it a degree of volume completion that would be satisfying. And I juggled a couple of chapters. Originally the chapter Sniper's Chapter, which would have been one chapter earlier, and that would have been one chapter later. But Sniper's Chapter is a better tone shift for the beginning of a new volume. And I did what I could. And I rewrote very intensely those last two chapters to give a greater sense of volume completion. I still wonder what I would have done if I had had more than no time to make that ending.
RAWILLUMINATION: Well, obviously you do well under pressure so we'll just have to pressure you into finishing Hearthfire quickly.
ADA PALMER. No! It's not going to happen. If you're willing to translate the Old Norse, go for it. There's a reason this is slow.
RAWILLUMINATION: Speaking of translating Old Norse. This will probably give you a chance to show off a little bit. But Dr. Palmer, how many languages do you read?
ADA PALMER: So, there are some languages that I work in but that I wouldn't say I have proficiency with. But I've worked in eight languages. But I mainly work with Latin, French, Italian and ancient Greek. But I've worked with Gothic and I've worked with Old Norse and I've worked with Japanese.
RAWILLUMINATION: When you say worked with Old Norse, are you doing your own translations as part of this fiction project?
ADA PALMER: Yes. Mainly because the process of clearing the copyright to use somebody else's translation in your novel takes longer than translating the Old Norse yourself [laughing]
RAWILLUMINATION: What a great excuse for taking your time, it takes time to translate from the Old Norse!
ADA PALMER: It does, but it takes so long to clear copyright on things. So I'd much rather translate it myself. It means that I really burrow down to understanding these words. And then every so often I translated a few, and I have a wonderful Old Norse expert, whose name is Maya Blackwell, who lives north of Stockholm. And we get on video chat every couple of weeks and say, okay, you know, I've got this word, she's like, "Oh my God, that word," and then we'll spend you know an hour. We did this a few days ago going through every instance, all five instances of this word, and we're like. This is useful as all five instances of this word describe Loki. That doesn't tell us anything. It just means Loki like. What does the word actually mean, it doesn't mean anything. It's like in Homer. There's this adverb, that is the manner in which Athena leaves a room and it only ever appears as the manner in which Athena leaves a room and we don't know what it means. It's just means, Athena leaves the room with this adverb. And you're like, that doesn't help. We have no context of what this adverb could possibly mean.
But yeah, so I'm not translated the Old Norse myself. I think that would not be responsible in a scholarly way. I am translating it and then sitting down with an expert who really knows this language to double-check that my interpretation in everything has worked well.
RAWILLUMINATION: All right now I have a music question. When I was listening to Sassafrass last night, and I'm not an expert on a Renaissance music, but it sure sounded like a Renaissance vocal music ...
ADA PALMER: Yeah, it draws on Renaissance and late Medieval vocal methods. Renaissance in terms of having multiple polyphonic voices that are moving separately, but in ways that intertwine. And medieval in that it uses modal music. So it's not major or minor. It will be in something in between, like a Dorian mode.
RAWILLUMINATION: So you really are drawing on those old forms and using them as a composer.
ADA PALMER: And they make it feel old because one of the interesting challenges when trying to present Viking material or similar other material like that is, it needs to feel archaic, it needs to feel different from modern needs to feel premodern. But it also needs to be satisfying and people sometimes ask me, how do we have real surviving Viking music? Do you use the real surviving Viking melodies? And like, yes, we do have real surviving Viking music. It's for a flute that can only produce four notes. And it sounds like somebody playing "Chopsticks" as a beginning piano player. And you're not going to want to listen to that. It just doesn't have the musical layering because music has advanced. Music and its production is a technology and nobody is going to sit through long, accurate early Medieval music. It doesn't have the power. Or even if you sit through it, it doesn't have the emotional cathartic draw. So what I want to do is something that's going to feel period by drawing on tools that the Middle Ages use such as having music in modes, other than what we now call major and minor, but to give it the thickness and complexity of modern music so that it is has the emotional power to draw out of us grief and joy and catharsis and all of the other powerful emotions that strong music can do. [You can buy Sassafrass on Bandcamp, including the Sundown album, the Viking mythology cycle Palmer performed at Confluence.]
RAWILLUMINATION: So you don't think of Sassafrass as an early music group. You draw from early music but there's also modern elements, you're not trying to reproduce ...
ADA PALMER: I mean, we are in early music group in that we also sing Renaissance music and we're working on a CD right now of Renaissance pastorals of shepherds and nymphs dating each other and getting dumped.
RAWILLUMINATION: So who are your favorite Renaissance composers?
ADA PALMER: I really like Josquin des Prez. I really love Thomas Weelkes, who does very playful and whimsical pieces, where he really rolls with what the lyrics are about. He has a piece called "Thule, the Period of Cosmography," which is about geography and reaching the geographic limits of the world and it lists exotic objects in order to try to communicate, so there's a verse in it that goes, "The Andalusian merchant who returns laden with cochineal and China dishes reports in Spain, how strangely Mount Fugu burns, amid an ocean full of flying fishes." And for each half line in there, he's describing some other different wild exotic thing. Yeah, no one would ever actually return somewhere with both cochineal, which comes from the Americas, and China dishes, which come from the Far East, right? He's being jokey. And so, he's joking with the music and each half line of that sounds really weird in a totally different way from the way that the next half line of it sounds really weird. And you get to the [singing] "In an ocean full of flying, full of life, full of flying fish is full of magic and flying fishes are flying all over," and he's doing what we call your musical music painting, you know, word painting of exoticism. So he's really delightful.
There's another piece that I love called "A Sparrow Hawk Proud," which has a sparrow hawk [which] has caught a nightingale. Let's see what is it. "A sparrow hawk proud did hold in wicked jail, music's sweet chorister, the nightingale. To whom she said, Oh, set me free and in my song I'll praise no bird but thee. The hawk replied, I will not lose my diet to let a thousand such enjoy their quiet." So it has the the tyrant refusing to release the musician and it's an ironic piece where the patron had been being kind of a jerk to the musician, so it's partly about that, but it's also largely about the beauty, contrasting the beauty of the music's chorister against a haughty tyrant, and it's just a really lovely playful kind of melody. But we've got a bunch of different composers that we're doing, some Orlando di Lasso and other stuff.
RAWILLUMINATION: My next question is from one Gene Wolfe fan to another.
ADA PALMER: Yes!
RAWILLUMINATION: I'm a big Book of the New Sun fan. I've read it over and over again. And when I met you at Penguicon years ago, we had a conversation about Gene Wolfe -- you were playing with the the Rube Goldberg machine and you were sitting on the floor, and I was pestering you with questions. I really like The Book of the New Sun, but I've been reading Gene Wolfe for decades and I've really never found any other novels that I like as well as The Book of the New Sun. Is there anything he's done at novel length that you particularly like and that you think rivals The Book of the New Sun?
ADA PALMER: I don't think anything rivals Book of the New Sun. I really enjoy Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete, which I don't think are aiming as big and grand an epic as Book of The New Sun is. But they hit the target they aim at, which this wonderfully fascinating and challenging immersion into a world of Greco-Roman myth, in which we're having to learn how to recognize things that should be familiar to us. But he's translated the word roots in ways that are tricky so that it's a puzzle and that puzzle gives us an interesting immersive taste of what it would be like to live in that world view as your native world view, instead of as a distant one, right? The way he translates the names of cities. So it's not a war between Athens and Sparta, it's a war between Thought and Rope. And that's how it feels when you're there. I think an important thing we often forget is that place names that are nouns in our native language usually, in our mind, make a thing feel either like fantasy or maybe like Native American. And I have a great map which you can, if you go online and search for the Atlas of True Names, or the Map of True Names. It's a world map where they've translated all of the place names into English from what their word roots are. And so everything is labeled, you know, The Great Alpine Sea and it suddenly feels like the whole world is a fantasy map because that's the way we name fantasy places, and it's not the way we name the places we're used to. We're used to our place names being in languages that are not the onesand lake is the we're speaking most of the time. The Rocky Mountains are still the Rocky Mountains but everything else suddenly matches the Rocky Mountains. And oh yes, the Rocky Mountains and the River of Silver and the River of Gold and, you know, all these all these names that we forget. And so it's it's really lovely to dive into the Greco-Roman world, understanding it from the inside, as we would if we were native to it. Which I think is really delightful project. I've been thinking a lot recently about Soldier of the Mist actually because if Terra Ignota is my Book of the New Sun, than Hearthfire is my Soldier of the Mist. In (A), it's a shorter series, it's not aiming to be as grand, but also (B), it's diving deep into being within the world view of a mythology, and trying to bring that out in a new way. And in an interior point of view way.
RAWILLUMINATION: We were talking last night and, you know, lots and lots of people love Vikings, maybe this will be the fiction work that gives Ada Palmer a wider audience.
ADA PALMER: I would like that and I, you know, probably could have done that if I had made it less incredibly difficult to read.
[I laugh at this description of the upcoming novel.]
By, for example, having the events be in chronological order or having a bit less complicated technical detail. It is not an easy read. People talk about Terra Ignota not being a beach read and Hearthfire is not a beach read. And I could have set the same events as a beach read, but that's not what it's about. It's about diving into the feel of this and trying to be authentic to primary sources that are themselves partial, fragmentary, inconsistent and difficult to understand, even for a native speaker, right? So that Snorri feels he has to write a whole book expounding on how to understand the hidden meanings within the text that one is looking at. So you know, I do hope that it's going to have a nice broad audience among people who like Vikings, and they'll pick it up and they go "Hard, hmm, worth it" and read it. But you know, I used to imagine this would be the one that would get a TV adaptation or something. And then I actually finished the outline and looked at it and was like, "Nope, not it." [Laughs].
RAWILLUMINATION: I don't want to push the Gene Wolfe analogy too hard, but everything he wrote was written for an audience who reads carefully.
ADA PALMER: Yeah. And I mean, that audience is big, right? There are lots of people who want a hard read. Not all the time. Like, we want a hard read, and then we want our Agatha Christie in between which is an easy read. You want to take turns. There are lots of people especially within F and SF who love and want a challenging, interesting read. That's one of the things that Tor was delighted to reconfirm when Terra Ignota did so much better than they thought it would.
RAWILLUMINATION: Well, you know, another writer who's from Illinois, is Richard Powers, who is not an easy read either but he's been able to find a big audience and he's won, you know, Pulitzers and MacArthur grants and National Book Awards. So it seems to me that part of the equation is to get non genre readers to read Hearthfire.
ADA PALMER: And one thing that might help with that is actually having the nonfiction book come out in between.
RAWILLUMINATION: Yeah.
ADA PALMER: Because that's going to find non genre readers in addition to hopefully finding many of my genre readers who will enjoy the nonfiction book too, because it has really just as much storytelling in it as the novels do. It is very much a story teller's introduction to the Renaissance. But it also means that I hope that that will mean that there are a bunch of history readers who are then interested in giving the Viking book a try. So we will see, knock knock, carbon fiber [referring to what the bench we were sitting on was made of.}
RAWILLUMINATION: Has Tyler Cowen interviewed you yet?
ADA PALMER: Here's where I confess that I'm bad at names, that I don't remember.
RAWILLUMINATION: Okay, well, we'll just find out. Because he announced on his blog, he was going to interview you. The George Mason University professor.
ADA PALMER: Oh yes, yes, we did do that. That was fun. I wish we'd had more time.
RAWILLUMINATION: He usually does deep research on his guests.
ADA PALMER: Yeah, he did. And he had a very intense series of questions.
I expected a question about the LARPing that I do in class. I know a lot of people had replied to his post of "What questions should I ask Ada Palmer?" with things like, Should you ask her why she's watering down the educational system, by having her students do gaming instead of real class? And I was like, "I so want that question!"
[As Wikipedia explains about the courses Dr. Palmer teaches about the Renaissance, "She teaches a class on the Italian Renaissance wherein students enact the 1492 papal election, complete with secret meetings, betrayals, and a final vote conducted in full costume."]
I have molecular engineering majors who are five or ten years out of graduating, and I can still be like "What ruling family controlled Ferrara in 1492?" [The former student answers correctly and says] "Those jerks! I'll never forgive them!"
Boy, do they memorize it and know it inside out. And, you know, they travel. I have a folder on my desktop of self tomb selfies where people have visited the tomb of their character from the papal election simulation and checked out to the weird village where the person is buried or the odd part of France or Italy and then send me a picture of themselves happily with their tomb or in some cases with the ditch their corpse was thrown in.
RAWILLUMINATION: Well I like the anecdote about how you worked 20-hour days when you're doing these. Although I have to confess I'm not as conscientious as you and my phone is turned off at 3:00 a.m. I wouldn't take text messages about the pope. [At her Kaffeeklatsch the day before, Dr. Palmer had described how she was available day and night to her students during the tense papal election.]
ADA PALMER: Yeah, it helps having some of our team is usually working remote from Europe and so they handle the early morning shifts but on the nights right before there's going to be either a major papal audience or right before the war, you know, everyone's up all night. I mean this year there was a last-minute -- a cardinal who shall remain nameless ratted out the betrayal that one faction in the war was going to do to their former allies who had gotten them on the papal throne. And so then, there was a staying up until 5:00 in the morning rewriting their war plans in order to preempt the betrayal by the other people. So that then when the war happened, there was a lovely, "Wait a minute, why are the people we're going to betray betraying us first?" And it was, it was fantastic and it was worth it. But it's also very intense and it means they really do need to have 24-hour access to somebody who understands the details enough to be like, "No, you cannot move your army through Switzerland. The mountains are impossible. You must go around Milan or bust".
RAWILLUMINATION: Did I hear you say this weekend that you live in a bash'? [In the world of Terra Ignota, most people live in a globe-spanning organization called a hive, and live in a group home owned by one of the hives, called a bash'.]
ADA PALMER: Yes, I live in a bash', or as I call it sometimes, academic commune, and some of the bash' mates have been very long term. Lauren, who's one of my singing partners in Sassafrass and I, it's been more than 20 years now, but we have other people. We have a person who's just been with us for a year. We have another person who recently finished a PhD and therefore are moved out to where the job was. So I would say it's half a stable bash', and half of people coming in and out. But boy, is it great! Especially during Covid. Everyone was like, "I'm so lonely," and I'm like, "Well, I live with a bunch of my friends and we're fine. We're gonna go play Spirit Island now. Sorry, wish you were here." But it sure is amazingly psychologically useful. And one thing we did which is based on actually an experiment they did at the Globe Theater in London, the one that produced Shakespeare, they did a experiment a few seasons ago where they said, "So what happens if for this season we put away all of our modern electric sewing machines and we reconstruct a period tailor shop? Only make all of the costumes with period machines and do everything with hand sewing." And they looked at diagrams of how a Tudor era costume shop was set up, which in that meant, that they got rid of all of their individual desks facing the walls, where the plugs are, or the machines would be, and instead have one large table in the center of the room, where everyone sat facing and working on their stuff together. And what they found was that the work went as fast if not faster than it had with sewing machines, because of the morale boost of seeing somebody's face and being able to chat with each other while working. And being able to say, "Oh, can you hold that for a second while I lean across and do this?" And that the savings of time made by those things were actually greater than the time savings of having a sewing machine. So based on that model, when Covid started I set up a big group desk in the middle of our main library room, which has a bunch of computer kiosks on it that you can bring your laptop and plug it in, so that everybody in the household and indeed guests, when we have guests, can sit there and be doing our work at a table together. And there will be, you know, 20 minutes of silence and then someone will giggle and then someone else will say, "What is it that's funny?"And we'll have those moments of conversation. Or someone will get up and say, "Hey are you getting a glass of water? Could you bring me one too?" And I would say that the productivity is just gone up from that inverse of a cubicle.
RAWILLUMINATION: This sounds like an Ada Palmer essay on how to be a workaholic.
Gene Wolfe once did a self interview where he posed questions to himself that he wished people would ask him and we have only nine minutes left so we're not going to be able to do an Ada Palmer self interview. But do you have a question that you wish people would ask you? And now you're going to ask yourself and you're going to answer.
ADA PALMER: You should have asked me that at the beginning so I would have had time to think about it for awhile.
RAWILLUMINATION: We've already established you work well under pressure.
ADA PALMER: I think an interesting one is the question of, do I feel like I am accomplishing a lot? The workaholic question. Yeah, because I think that's an interesting one. Because everyone I know who is regarded by others as very productive feel themselves as they are not very productive. Including me. And I often sit here feeling like I haven't accomplished very much in the past couple of years and then I'm like, "But I have several books coming out." How did these two things square with each other? And I think there's two halves to that. One was very well put by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a good friend, and my editor's wife, when I think it was her who pointed out that most people greatly overestimate what you can accomplish in a year but greatly underestimate what you can accomplish in five years. And when we think about things as what did I get done in the past year, it won't be as much as we'd hoped. But when we think about what did I do in the past five years, you'll actually look at it and realize, oh, wait, that was a lot. And I think that we do so much self evaluation on the one-year front, in a way that can be harmful to our ability to perceive what we've actually finished, since so many major things take more than a year but do get done. I think another is that we always observe the visible produce of what people are doing, which means we don't see how much of their own time has been sucked up by things that didn't have produce, but we know that about ourselves, right? I know how much time has been wasted with me being sick on the couch. I know how much time has been wasted with me filling out forms for the university. I'm of know how much time has been wasted by having to recover from trips to places and that kind of thing. Or just days that for some reason I can't concentrate and there's no good reason for me to be unable to concentrate. But boy did those days leave you feeling at the end like a piece of you just rotted. And we're all aware of that. And then we see our friend published a blog post and our other friend did a video and I think we're always aware of the things we chose not to do. Yeah, I'm constantly feeling oh, I should do more podcasting, I should do some recordings of some of my lectures and release them in some manner. I see Cory doing -- Cory Doctorow -- doing a lot of interviews in places and I'm thinking, oh, I really need to be doing that. Why am I not doing that? And the real answers, I'm doing other stuff and it's becoming the essay collection or it's becoming other things. But we often judge ourselves by the things we thought we might do and then didn't. When we see other people doing things and they feel more productive than us. I've often noticed colleagues and I will feel like, well of course my colleague is doing really hard research because I'm just looking at marginalia in Renaissance manuscript. I'm not interviewing live subjects. That sounds very hard whereas the people who interview live subjects are like, "Well I'm not translating Renaissance manuscripts, that sounds like ..." We each think of our branch in history as the sort of easy version and what our colleagues are doing as the hard version, because we see the things we thought we might do, and then didn't that our friends are doing. And that often I think eclipses our ability to perceive what we are [doing].
So like I don't feel like I'm very productive. I spend a lot of time fretting about things I haven't done and could I be getting my voice and messages out better in other formats? I have all of this important work on censorship. It's probably not going to be able to be published for at least another four years. That isn't good. It feels it should be out now. What should I be doing? Should I be trying to figure out how you go about doing a TED talk? Like what should I be doing? And I spend a lot of time worrying about that and then trying to do exercises for myself, well, think about the things that you did do. And the fact that this was a choice, not a negligence. You chose to write this essay collection instead of doing that talk. You chose to teach this course at this intensive and effective level instead of recording a podcast and teaching an easier course. This is the set of choices that you made and if you had done that thing, I wouldn't have done the other thing.
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