A useful movie reviewer

Scott Sumner (Creative Commons photo, information). 

Tyler Cowen says that Scott Sumner is "the greatest movie critic in the world," and I enjoy Sumner's movie reviews, too. Sumner's all time favorite TV shows is Twin Peaks and I agree with many of his other opinions, too.

A couple of links:

Peak cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

More film reviews. 

Overlooked films. 

More film reviews. 

The reviews are short; here are a couple of Sumner reviews of films by RAW favorite Orson Welles:

The Lady From Shanghai (US, 1947, CC) 3.9 Despite its leisurely pace, the first half of this film is near-perfect cinema. The second half is more fast paced and contains three famous set-pieces—including the hall of mirrors shootout—but it is actually the weaker half of the film. I enjoyed this more the second time around, as I no longer get frustrated when a film has an intricate and difficult to follow plot.

The Trial (US/Europe, 1962, CC) 3.7 Suppose you were a film buff who had never heard of Kafka, and you also knew nothing about Orson Welles. Also imagine that you were told that this film was produced by an obscure Eastern European filmmaker. How would you rate it? Clearly it would be viewed as an overlooked masterpiece. But you have heard of Kafka and Welles, and that undoubtedly explains why it received mixed reviews. For this sort of project, reviewers are naturally going to have extremely high standards. If someone felt that the film fell well short of expectations, I would not argue with them. The print has been beautifully restored.

Tom again: Sumner also blogs about other cultural topics, about economics (his actual academic specialty) and about politics. He is my favorite political blogger (libertarian, anti-Trump.) Here is an excellent essay on how pop music peaked in the mid-1960s.  And here are remarks on the U.S. becoming a banana republic (scroll to the end, the main post is about Trump's tariffs.)

Click the Scott Sumner tag on this post for more interesting stuff. 

Ben Graham on Julian Cope

 

Julian Cope in 2015 (Creative Commons photo, details here.)

As many Discordians, perhaps particularly in Britain, seem to be interested in musician Julian Cope, I thought I would share some of Ben Graham's latest Urban Spaceman newsletter:

I've got a piece in the next issue of Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychic Albion, published by Cormac Pentecost's Temporal Boundary Press. It's the first part of a long essay called 'The Transfiguration of Julian Cope, 1989-1991', and covers that period in Cope's career when he transformed himself from psychedelic pop star into visionary archdrude with his acclaimed Peggy Suicide album.

Those who know me will know of my long-standing enthusiasm for Julian Cope, and this is an attempt to explain it, to myself as much as anyone else, without just resorting to standard album reviews. It's about me as much as it is about Cope, and I think that if you like my autobiographical writing, or my writing on magic and culture generally, you'll probably enjoy this even if you're not particularly interested in Julian Cope’s music.

Part one is in Undefined Boundary Volume 4 issue 1, out in September. Part 2 follows in Volume 4 issue 2 later this year. More details and how to order can be found at https://temporalboundary.bigcartel.com/

If you are interested in Ben's music writing, see also another brand new newsletter, "C86 and all that."

Respecting another person's reality tunnel

New York Public Library image via Unsplash 

The latest Michael Johnson Substack, "OG: Where I'm Comin' From," has this passage:

It has always stuck with me: even if I personally think an area of human thought is dubious, silly, or just plain wrong or BS, there are fellow humans for which it is meaningful, and so I ought to take those ideas seriously while I study them.

I remember there was an immediate application: I went to party and some people were talking seriously about Astrology, which I normally would have debunked. You know: that kind of jerk at a party. Tryna show how smart he is but he’s just a big ol’ drag. But B&L were ricocheting around my brain-pan, and had already had a heavy influence on me and I asked questions and learned a lot about how this field lent meaning to their lives. I now see my debunking self in horror.

'Vineland' online reading group, Chapter 8

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

I love the martial arts material in this book. I first heard of ninjitsu in 1973 in the Manhunter stories in Detective Comics by Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson. I love the line on page 128 of Vineland, “DL reached the radical conclusion that her body belonged to herself.” Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea wrote about the question of people’s bodies belong to themselves or to the government or to their parents. 

Born in 1962, I did not experience the 1960’s as an adult or even as an adolescent. I love how Pynchon writes about the Sixties. It resonates with my understanding of that period. I feel grateful that my family moved from Silver Spring, Maryland, to San Jose, California in November, 1967. I got to walk around San Francisco a lot in the next few years, watching hippies with little understanding on my part. The movie Zodiac really captures the look of the Bay Area in the late Sixties and early Seventies.  

Here in 2025, I wonder about the role of marital arts and Pynchon in my life at the age of 63. I regret not learning more marital arts when I had the chance, but who knows what the future holds. 

Twin Peaks and Discordianism

As I recently reported, the next John Higgs book will be about David Lynch. In an email, John mentions a connection between the world of Twin Peaks and Discordianism:

"There's a few connections between Discordianism - if not RAW - and Lynch. The most prominent is Grace Zabriskie, who played Sarah Palmer in Twin Peaks and who is in a few more of Lynch's films. She was in a relationship with Kerry Thornley, and her sister, Lane Caplinger, photocopied the first five copies of the Principia on Jim Garrison's photocopier."

See Adam Gorightly's Historia Discordia website for more on Grace Zabriskie.  Also, see the Wikipedia bio, which cites her friendship with Kerry Thornley. 

'Loosely based' on 'Vineland'?

 

 

Above is the trailer for One Battle After Another, the Paul Thomas Anderson film that is supposed to be "loosely based" on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland.  It's out next month, on Sept. 26. The cast includes  Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and Chase Infiniti.

Classical music notes

1. Following a rabbit hole from the latest Michael Johnson Substack, I looked at the Fifth Path Magazine interview and found this bit:

What are your musical interests?

Robert Anton Wilson: My musical tastes are very conservative. I like the classics — Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi, … Helgar. He’s not on most peoples list of favorite composers, but I like him.

A search on a couple of search engines doesn't reveal a classical composer named Helgar. Is that maybe a corruption of Elgar? I've gotten interested in a couple of composers via RAW, such as Johann Christian Bach and Jan Dismas Zelenka (mentioned in Schroedinger's Cat) but I'm confused here.

2. As I may have mentioned before, I have a Substack about music, mostly focusing on Russian classical music of the 20th and 21st centuries, concentrating largely on composers you might not have heard of. I have a new post up on my favorite piano player, Yury Favorin. 

Perhaps I can explain the point of the Substack via analogy. Let's say the only two British Invasion bands anyone knew about were The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The Who, the Searchers, the Moody Blues, Yes, Cream, Led Zeppelin, etc. were obscure and most  people didn't know who they were. Not only that, but the British government tried to suppress them. My Substack certainly mentions the two biggest Russian composers, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, but I genuinely believe that Alexander Mosolov, Gavriil Popov, Boris Tishchenko and others also deserve a listen.

3. New Tyler Cowen podcast on classical music, with transcript. 

Lots of RAW letters apparently could be published

In past blog posts, I've remarked that both Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea both did a less-than-ideal job of preserving their literary papers. I haven't been able to find, for example, their lengthy correspondence. There's no collection of "Robert Anton Wilson papers" at an academic library.

In yesterday's blog post, I mentioned that Michael Johnson's latest Substack included an unpublished letter from RAW to Kurt Smith, and when I asked about it in a comment, Michael explained in a comment that there are more where that came from:

"Here’s the story:

"Kurt liked some writing I did about RAW online. I still lived in Berkeley. This must have been around 2008, I’m guessing. He told me he had a fantastic correspondence with RAW saved - actual letters you send through the mails - and would I like to read that? Of course I said yes. So he drove over to my house and we hung out for a couple hours. He left a shoebox crammed with his RAW correspondence, most of which was from Dublin to San Francisco. But some letters were from RAW in Los Angeles.

"I spent a couple hours at a Xerox place on Solano in Berkeley, makeing copies of the letters. RAW also sent a lot of fliers for talks he’d give, newspaper clipping, and other ephemera that had a Discordian tinge to it.

"My RAW book never materialized, but Gabriel [Kennedy] found out I had this trove and asked for it for his work-in-progress, and I had my wife scan most of the pertinent stuff - if anything seemed even moderately apropos to what I imagined his aims were, I had it scanned and sent. 

"I don’t remember giving the shoebox back to Kurt, but I must have. 

"The stuff is really great. Gabriel made excellent use of it for Chapel Perilous, I think. I have shared bits of the stuff when it was totally warranted, like in my long essay in Straight Outta Dublin. 

"There’s a letter that I think was in Beyond Chaos and Beyond in which RAW writes to Greg Hill and says he’s been writing letters all day, since early in the morning, and he was writing to Hill late at night. He was a FANTASTIC letter writer. I have a few short things RAW wrote to me via email, but I suspect typewriting mail and sending it out via snails was his metier. 

"I hope Hilaritas publishes as many letters as they can find in a book. I hope to get a chance to edit or write a Foreword or something for that dream-book.

"The unseen RAW/Shea correspondence - I fear it’s missing or it would have turned up by now. What a drag if it’s lost! I have found a number of other RAW letters that haven’t been published."

If you are a RAW fan, probably a good idea to subscribe to Michael's Overweening Generalist Substack. 

Michael Johnson on cut-ups in film and prose

William Burroughs in 1983. (Creative Commons photo, source.)

I don't actually think I'm going to link to all of Michael Johnson''s Substack newsletters if he keeps up his writing pace, but many of them are of interest to RAW fans! The newest one, for example, "Perception, Editing, Cut-Ups: A Glancing Take," looks at rapid shifts in film editing, to the cut-up prose technique popularized by William Burroughs, to RAW's use of the technique. Including in the post is a long, interesting letter from RAW to Kurt Smith that I don't remember seeing before. The comments also are interesting. 

Today's movie news

 From Nicholas Helweg-Larsen:

"For those films lovers of your blog, I see that a bunch of RAWs favourite films are now available on 4K Ultra HD.

"For instance I just saw that Harvey is having a 75th Anniversary edition for sale. Looks like it's released in America on August 19th."

Here is "Everything you need to know about 4K Ultra HD."

Here again is the list of RAW's 100 favorite  movies.  I don't see "Harvey," but  he certainly wrote about it. 

'Vineland' online reading group, Chapter 7

 

By OZ FRITZ

Special guest blogger

"'Most people are depressed, dumb, and agitated most of the time,' states Wilson, 'because they lack the tools to repair and correct damaged defective circuits in their nervous system.' The damaged circuits result in 'downer programs' that keep people stuck in stupid loops of behavior. These stupid downer programs are coping mechanisms to deal with their pain." - Chapel Perilous by Gabriel Kennedy, p. 149.

Fascism commonly describes a particular totalitarian kind of political behavior. It doesn't seem hyperbolic to say that the politics of the United States indicates a major resurgence of State fascism. I will briefly look at fascism on the individual and personal level - the internal fascism that keeps us hooked on downer programs that impede and keep us from living an authentic life true to our own nature. Deleuze and Guattari call this micro-fascism. In Anti-Oedipus they look at the question Wilhelm Reich asked: why do people desire their own repression and self-destruction?

Nietzsche maintained that most people go through life automatically reacting to whatever is currently stimulating them. We all have to do that to some extent, but many people seemingly never truly act from within, they react to the outside environment. He uses the French word ressentiment to describe the downer programs that afflict people. This translates as resentment in English but has further negative connotations in the French, I am told. These downer programs create a slave mentality in the general population.  Reich refers to this malaise as the emotional plague.

I bring up the subject of micro-fascism in relation to Vineland for two reasons. The first goes back to the Fascist Toejam cassette that the Vomitones play as they drive off into the future (p. 55). Earlier I brought up "toejam" as a reference to a lyric in "Come Together" by The Beatles. When researching how they wrote it, I discovered a lyric previously unknown to me. The song starts with an "sht" sound that becomes a rhythmic element. I though it simply a sound, but it seems a part of the lyric "shoot me". The "me" being mostly inaudible unless you know it's there. – I heard or imagined I heard it. A tragic irony played out only 11 or so years later when John Lennon, the song's singer and primary composer, was gunned down outside his home in New York. I can't think of anything more fascist than murdering someone. Describing the volume of the cassette, Pynchon calls it "300 watts of sonic apocalypse;" this obvious exaggeration allows him to use that number. 300 connects with the Death card in the tarot.

The second reason has to do with Deleuze and Guattari getting a shout-out in this chapter (p. 97):

"fortunately Ralph Wayvone's library happened to include a copy of the indispensable Italian Wedding Fake Book, by Deleuze and Guattari, which Gelsomina, the bride, to protect her wedding from such possibly unlucky omens as blood on the cake, had the presence of mind to slip indoors and bring back out to Billy Barf's attention." She did this to prevent Wayvone's goons from beating up the band for not knowing enough traditional Italian songs. The Deleuze & Guattari wedding fake book sidesteps the distinctly fascist tendency to inflict violence on someone who doesn't do what the authority wants them to do.

A Fake book in music is generally a large songbook filled with sheet music of various popular songs and standards. It's designed so that if a musician or a band doesn't know a requested song, they can "fake" it by reading the music. We encountered a ukelele fake book in an earlier chapter when Zoyd worked as a lounge musician in the sky. Both those fake books seem jokes as they don't make them with that kind of specificity. Wedding and love fake books exist, but not those specifically for Italian weddings. Making it a Deleuze and Guattari fake book compounds the humor since they're both French. An ukelele fake book sounds even more ridiculous.

Diverging along the ukelele tangent: that choice of instrument reminded me of George Harrison who had a reputation for being very fond of them. Paul McCartney recounts that story during the Concert for George memorial when he introduces "Something" which he starts playing with a uke. It also reminded me of a hilarious Pynchon anecdote. Laurie Anderson wrote a letter to Pynchon saying she wanted to write an opera based on Gravity's Rainbow. To her surprised delight Pynchon replied expressing admiration for her music and granting permission to write the opera. But with one stipulation: the whole opera had to be performed on a single instrument, the banjo. Anderson writes in her autobiography that she interpreted this as a polite and charming way of saying no. She did write one song inspired by the novel, "Gravity's Angel" (1984).

At the time of writing Vineland Deleuze and Guattari had published both volumes of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia series. Volume I is called Anti-Oedipus, Volume II is A Thousand Plateaus. In the preface to the former Michel Foucault calls it an "introduction to the non-fascist life." Desire is a primary focal point in Anti-Oedipus. They see it as a productive force that influences individual reality. This force, however, can go in the direction of repressive and self-destructive tendencies. A desire for fascism can manifest taking the form of a need for order, control, certainty and the suppression of diversity (no more DEI, dammit!). Or it can manifest in the opposite direction if one desires the freedom to be true to oneself. Foucault writes: "I think Anti-Oedipus can best be read as an 'art,' in the sense that is conveyed by the term 'erotic art,' for example. . . . "

"This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or pending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life." Foucault then gives his essential principles. He ends the preface bringing up the "games and snares scattered throughout the book." His final description also seems to apply to Vineland or even Gravity's Rainbow:

"The traps of Anti-Oedipus are those of humor: so many invitations to let oneself be put out, to take one's leave of the text and slam the door shut. The book often leads one to believe that it's all fun and games, when something essential is taking place, something of extreme seriousness: the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives."

The ending phrase of this quote is what Robert Anton Wilson calls "downer programs." His solution: increase intelligence. It seems to me impossible to read and comprehend Thomas Pynchon without increasing intelligence. Even if reading Vineland for the first time just taking in the story. Anyone know enough Italian to know the meaning of "ventunesmo?" The non-Italian speaking reader has the choice of increasing their intelligence slightly by looking the word up or skipping over it and remaining in ignorance about that passage. Another possibility: infer what the word means by the context it appears in. This also increases intelligence.

Some commentators are on record saying the wedding song book refers to Anti-Oedipus which makes sense given the anti-fascist theme. Jeeshan Gazi, disagrees. He contends that the D&G mention refers to their second main work, A Thousand Plateaus and has an article in Orbit: A Journal of American Literature called "On Delueze and Guattari's Italian Wedding Fake Book: Pynchon, Improvisation, Social Organization and Assemblage." His rationale holding that their book of music charts better suits A Thousand Plateaus which addresses music in various ways. He also claims that Pynchon has shared D&G's philosophy for a long time and gives an early short story, "Entropy" from Slow Learner as an example."  It's a very readable article that also delves into Mason & Dixon a little and also compares free jazz to their philosophy in connection with the fake songbook.  It can be perused online or downloaded for free here: https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/442/

This chapter introduces another main character who remains for the rest of the book, Darryl Louise (DL) Chastain. Her first two names affirms the male/female blending theme. Chastain is a French name meaning chestnut. She and Frenesi were close once. When DL discovers Prairie's heritage, Frenesi again becomes present in her absence. DL and Prairie connect through the Adjustments business card Zoyd gave Prairie given to him years ago by Takeshi. DL and Takeshi are partners. Language around that supports Spookah's previous comment connecting it with the Thoth Tarot Adjustment. He's also proven correct that the card has something to do with Frenesi.

The wedding takes place in the gated community of Lugares Altos which translates as High Places. The location's description puts it in the hills of Los Altos, California. I googled Lugares Altos attempting to find out if it's a real place and it came up with Pies de Ciervas en Lugares Altos which is the Spanish translation of a Christian classic written in 1955 by Hannah Hurnard, Hinds' Feet in High Places. We find enough overlaps with this in our story that I consider it a definite maybe that Pynchon intended the allusion. Hurnard's title, like Isaiah Two Four's name, comes from a Bible quote: "The Lord God is my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds' feet, and he will make me to walk upon mine high places." (Habakkuk 3:19) A hind is a female deer (a male deer is called a hart). Chastain sounds close to Christian. Hinds' Feet in High Places has been compared to The Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan, another allegorical Christian classic. I recommend reading the latter. I haven't read the former.

Lugares Altos  = LA = 31 = "The highest feminine trinity" (The Meaning of the Primes from 777). The feminine trinity in this chapter could be Prairie, DL, and Frenesi or Prairie, DL, and Gelsomina (the bride) if looking at those physically present. The Vomitones learned some Italian songs based on the theme of transcendence. One of them is "Al Di La" (p.96). Crowley makes a big deal of Al (= God) and La (= Not) when examining the word "Lashtal" (La+sht+al) in his notes for the ritual Liber V Vel Reguli. The Italian song has "Di" in the middle instead suggesting Daleth = Venus = love. Daleth also represents the path connecting Mom (Binah) and Dad (Chokmah) most apropos for a wedding. Veering back to the ukelele scene high in the sky, the song "Do You Believe in Magic" is brought up. I forgot to comment earlier that this became a hit song for The Lovin' Spoonful.

Chapter 7 ends with a form of transcendence I first got from listening to John Cage's 4'33" where every sound gets heard as music. Robert Anton Wilson sometimes played a version of this in his workshops or talks where he'd get the audience to close their eyes for about 5 minutes and listen without identifying the sounds.

Next week: please read chapter 8, pages 107 - 129

'Vineland' reading group page

I have now created a reading group page for the ongoing online reading group for Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. You can see a link to the page if you look at the right side of this page, and scroll down a bit. The posting for Chapter 7 will post Monday.

I have been hosting online reading groups on this blog for years, sometimes writing blog entries and sometimes enlisting other people. As I noted recently, it's never too late to participate in an online reading group, even if you are just reading the entries as you read or re-read a book. In each case, I've tried to put all of the links for the postings in one place, sometimes in a dedicated space on the right side of the page, sometimes on a separate page, as with Vineland.

Archived reading groups are available for Illuminatus! and for the following Robert Anton Wilson books: Prometheus Rising, Nature's God, The Widow's Son, The Earth  Will Shake, Email to the Universe, Cosmic Trigger, Coincidance, Masks of the Illuminati, Natural Law and Quantum Psychology. 

There are also archived links for Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Kerman's The Beethoven Quartets. It looks like I failed to create a links page for the Moby Dick discussion group, so I'll have to address that. 

The obvious remaining RAW book that deserves an online  discussion would be the Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy. (We would have to decide what edition, a vexing question). And I also wouldn't mind leading a Robert Shea discussion group for one of his novels. 

Meme from Rasa

 

Meme from Rasa.

You can get a book of these! 

Michael Johnson on history

Ezra Pound  in 1920 (source). 

Michael Johnson has a new, long Substack post up about history which I can't really summarize, as he jumps around with a lot of different musings, all of them tied however to the present moment. (I talk about some of the topics he brings up in the comments.) I liked this bit:

I had the idea that fascism was always near. All my voting since age 18 felt like I was voting for the least likely to contribute to fascism, and never “for” anyone. I was never enamored with the Democratic Party, but in my suburban, very white hometown I often overhead things like “Hitler had the right idea; he just went about it the wrong way.” And these people were always staunch Nixon and Reagan lovers. I picked up on quite a lot of coded language. How quaint that all seems now. After I discovered Robert Anton Wilson - a total accident - I knew I had to read Wilhelm Reich, whose name I’d only heard. Reich’s thesis was that fascist authoritarianism was the default mode in History. It was Capital, aye, but crucially: a fearsome, retributive Daddy, leader of the nuclear family.

A 'Prometheus Rising' video

 

Posted recently on YouTube, it has drawn a lot of comments. I haven't watched it yet. There also is a Part Two. 

The SF Encyclopedia

Logo of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction 

I got an email from Nicholas Helweg-Larsen the other day, asking about a reference work he had run across online, the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. He asked if I was familiar with it.

I replied, "Yes, it's very good, I use it all the  time for looking up SF authors. The brains behind it are British luminaries such as John Clute and Dave Langford. I should do a blog post and recommend it and put up a link. So you have given me a good idea."

There are in fact many entries which might interest readers of this blog. For example, there's one on Robert Anton Wilson,  and one on Robert Shea.  There's no separate entry on Illuminatus!, but in the RAW entry, critic John Clute opines the work is "clearly spoofing the intensively recomplicated plots of A E van Vogt and those influenced by him."

Pretty much any "name" SF author will have an entry, e.g. Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Harlan Ellison, Jack Vance, Philip Jose Farmer, and so on. It doesn't just explore authors; themes and ideas are also discussed, as in this piece on Libertarian SF.   The Prometheus Award has its own entry, although the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award (which went to Illuminatus!) is covered by a link to the award's official site. 

What we read last month

Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, Ada Palmer. I learned a lot about the Renaissance in Italy, and also a little bit about Vikings in Greenland. I thought she went a little too far in writing in a conversational style, a normal style would have been easier to read.

Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories, Frederik Pohl. A good collection of science fiction stories. 

Xen: The Zen of the Other, by "Ezra Buckley," e.g. Joseph Matheny. I liked it, see my comments here. 

Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties, Lucy Moore. I have long been fascinated by the 1920s, and this was vivid and interesting. 

Sell More Books! Book Marketing and Publishing for Low Profile and Debut Authors: Rethinking Book Publicity after the Digital Revolutions, J. Steve Miller. A lot of good ideas. 

As is his custom, Mark Brown posted  on Facebook what he read in July: 

When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger  7/1  

Tides of Light by Gregory Benford  7/14   

Quantum Psychology By Robert Anton Wilson  7/15   

Dawn by Octavia Butler  7/23  

The Book of Forbidden Words by Robert Anton Wilson  7/24  

Bonk: the Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach  7/26

Not a chronicle of last month, but Rob Pugh has published his midyear reading report. 

'Vineland' online reading group, Chapter 6

Count Basie. Public domain photo by James J. Kriegsmann 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger 

Early in this chapter I had a sense of the special quality of Pynchon’s writing. I can’t put my finger on what makes his writing so magical. I will see if I can articulate it over the next few months. 

When I first read this book in 1990, I found it utterly resonated with my politics. Born in 1962, I had lived through the Nixon and Reagan years, and I found myself saying “YES!” to how Pynchon characterized those eras in this novel. Reading this chapter again in 2025, I found that the politics still resonate for me. Perhaps his new novel Shadow Ticket, due out October 7 of this year, will help me make sense of our current political situation and of how we got here. I know Shadow Ticket deals with the 1930’s, Wisconsin, jazz, and Hungary, etc. I have listened to a bunch of Count Basie getting ready to read the new Pynchon. 

Since 1990 I have gotten every new Pynchon novel right when it came out, and the internet has provided prepublication glimpses of each of these novels. Of course, the novels themselves have always defied my expectations. 

Frenesi at the end of this chapter always makes me think of the Gang of Four song “I Love a Man in a Uniform.” 

I recommend checking out Michael Johnson blog post “Pynchon, Wilson, and TV: Irony, Etc.” at  https://substack.com/home/post/p-169809446

A 'Prometheus Rising' student

This is a comment to the blog I approved this morning (I have to moderate comments to avoid really bad spam on the blog entries). It's from tomlennon:

"Hi there,

"I'm joining the train a year later than Louis, and also plan to travel at the same pace. I've read PR multiple times over the last thirty years, most recently the Oliver Senton narrated audiobook (I was lucky enough to see Oliver play RAW at the Cosmic Trigger play in London some years back). I've often cherry-picked the exercises, and trying to devote enough time to each one was always a weird juggling act, where I'm reading chapter whatever, but still looking for 20p coins. I live in Mexico now (did Bob and Arlen influence that somehow?), so I guess I'll have to convert quarters to pesos. In any case, this allows me to take a more structured approach to a book and its exercises that continue to influence and inspire me."

Posted to Week One of the Prometheus Rising online study group, to a guest post written by Apuleius Charlton. 

Of course, this is why I have links the various study groups at the right side of my home page; it's never too late to re-read a RAW book and follow along with a study group. I need to start archiving links for the current Vineyard effort; Eric Wagner has already sent me tomorrow's entry. 

Information on the  Hilaritas Press version of Prometheus Rising is here. 

Michael Johnson on TV, Pynchon and Wilson

A new issue of his Substack newsletter finds Michael Johnson writing about "Pynchon, Wilson, and TV: Irony, etc." and the love-hate relationship the writers had with the tube. There's a lot of discussion about Vineland, so many of you will want to take a look at Michael's piece.

I posted a comment, but I forgot to suggest that Robert Anton Wilson might have enjoyed the current heyday of TV streaming services that allow viewers to watch really good shows and movies without being interrupted by commercials. And as I remarked again yesterday, I'm always surprised that RAW never mentions "Twin Peaks" when he discusses his TV viewing habits.

New John Higgs book about David Lynch

The new John Higgs newsletter dropped today with the announcement that his new book will be about one of my favorite artists, filmmaker David Lynch:

"It’s called LYNCHIAN: THE SPELL OF DAVID LYNCH and it will be out on November 13th. 

"This is a short book about why the work of David Lynch affects us in such a profound way. Writing it has been a joy, and it has been an absolute privilege to spend so much time immersed in his mind and his films. If you’ve ever watched Twin Peaks or one of his films and found them incredibly seductive in ways that you don’t quite understand, then I think you will get a lot out of this book.

"It will be out as a handsome hardback in time for Christmas, and as an audiobook and ebook as well. If you are minded to pre-order that would be wonderful - it’s available here and in all the usual places."

I own all of the Twin Peaks episodes. I've never seen evidence RAW was a Twin Peaks fan, but I know Robert Shea was. 

Bobby Campbell's comics convention, and 'Tales of Illuminatus' update

 

Bobby Campbell reports a good turnout for his Wilmington Comic Fest, an event he held to on Maybe Day, July 23 (I boldfaced some news):

"The Wilmington Comic Fest was an absolute blast! We actually had a ton of people come out, (on a Wednesday night no less!) all the artists had a great time, and it looks like we're going to do it again in the Fall :)))

"Here's a link to an IG post that has all of the featured artists linked.

"There's also livestream videos from WiseSpag who went around and talked to the artists:

https://kick.com/wisespag/videos/d4b1b5cb-cd0a-4068-8895-b60cdcf50222

https://kick.com/wisespag/videos/140b12cd-2484-45e4-9403-fd1336a99f86

As for Tales of Illuminatus, the second comic book of the series, Bobby reports, "TOI goes very well indeed! 28 pages down and 15 or so left to go."

While the Kickstarter funded, please note that you can still do a preorder to reserve your copy. 

Need a copy of the first issue? Please see Bobby's Weirdoverse Gift Shop on Etsy. 

Play based on 'Ulysses' trial

 Photo from Irish Arts Center website. 

“The United States vs Ulysses” a play by Colin Murphy,  was presented earlier this  year in New York City (sorry, I didn't do  a post when it was still available). I am pressed for time today, but here is the New York Times article, if you are curious.

Xen: The Zen of the Other

 

I was going to dive into the Ong's Hat saga, as I have all of it now, but then I realized I had started Joseph Matheny's  Liminal Cycle when I read Liminal. So I decided to finish the Liminal trilogy first. 

I enjoyed Liminal, but I liked the second book in the series, Xen: The Zen of the Other, even more. The protagonist, facing a crossroads in his life, decides to go into the woods for a vision quest, as many Native Americans are said to have done. Vivid, and the pages turned pretty easily.

I highlighted some of it, including this bit:

"This whole notion of having the same name from birth to death is a con job. It's an attempt to look you into stasis and identify you as an object when, in fact, you are not an object at all but rather a continuum."

And this related bit:

"Most people are not ready to accept that they are, on all levels, a continuum and not a 'this or that.' A verb, not a noun."

There's also a long passage I won't quote in full that I liked about being an artist, rather than a businessman: "You are not a milk cow, which is, unfortunately, the relationship an artist who sells their gifts to commerce has put themselves in." 

'Vineland' online reading group, Chapter 5

By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger

"The way out is via the door.
Why is it that no one will use this method?" – RAW quoting Confucius as told in Chapel Perilous by Gabriel Kennedy (p.46).

"For Wilson, when people digested language charged with 'meta-dimensional meaning, improbable structure, and even craziness, new circuits were produced within the human nervous system.'"  op. cit. (p. 49)

How does one communicate in the Higher Dimensions or the Higher Brain Circuits? Rational and linear language stays close to the C3 territory. It works well with the four primate circuits. Images, allegories, metaphors, puzzles, riddles and koans appear to occasionally tease cognition of higher consciousness. Images get created in various ways. A basic example in Vineland comes when Pynchon compares Hector to Ricardo Montalban, a popular Mexican TV and film actor well known to people of a certain age. He nonverbally creates a recognizable picture of Hector's mannerisms to people who recognize the image of Montalban from his acting. This example won't necessarily spark higher awareness, but it shows the same principle of nonverbal communication through association. 

Pynchon seems a master of creating images; a real magician. The more you bring to the game, the more these images open up to you. In this sense, reading a Pynchon work becomes interactive, it requires the reader's active attention and participation to start getting the full effect. There are many ways to go with it, everyone makes their own lexicon of associations to a degree depending upon how deep down the rabbit hole to Wonderland one chooses to go. These images brought to life in the mind of the reader are what I'm calling metalinguistics admittedly a bit of a stretch from the academic definition of the term ("the ability to reflect on and manipulate language, treating it as an object of thought" - Ellen Bialystok). Stefan Mattessich looks at the nature of Pynchon's metalinguistics in Lines of Flight - Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon. Discussing The Crying of Lot 49: "Oedipa Maas's search for the meaning of Tristero and of the communication system known as WASTE is never far away from an impoverishment of sense that threatens to collapse the novel into a heap of ambiguous signs. What I attempt to demonstrate in this chapter is that the meaning of the novel lies in its formal incoherence. ... By undermining its own narrative and analogical consistency, the novel dramatizes a social order that subsumes subjects in immaterial nexuses of discourse, communication systems and information. The reader no less than Oedipa is caught in these nexuses and compelled to grasp the truth of the novel in its parodies of the interpretive act itself. The time of the novel englobes us in its metalinguistic immanence, in other words, and demands a performative theorizing to be understood."

Vineland looks a little different in that there seems more coherence in its form though I would say it has its fair share of "immaterial nexuses of discourse" those episodes when the story goes off on a tangent. Vineland doesn't demand theorizing to be understood, it does just fine as a straight up adventure, but we find a wealth of esoteric information by digging deeper. 

Nonverbal literary communication through images appears related to Chinese ideograms which Ezra Pound explored in The Cantos. Other thematic parallels can be found between Pound's epic tale of the tribe and Vineland's more localized tale of the tribe. "Wilson regarded The Cantos as 'the most ambitious of all modern poems' presenting history as a perpetual battle between those supporting individual rights and those obsessed with power and control" (Chapel Perilous, p. 17). The dialectic between freedom and fascism becomes an overarching theme in Vineland. The end of chapter 4 briefly illustrates this when someone plays a Fascist Toejam cassette before the Vomitones drive off into the future implying a sense of freedom. The freedom/fascism dialectic appears most concisely in the metalinguistics of Fascist Toejam. The only other instance I know of "toejam" in a cultural artifact appears in the lyrics to "Come Together" by The Beatles, a song inspired by (he donated the chorus) and about Dr. Timothy Leary. It goes like this:

"He wear no shoeshine, he got toejam football
He got monkey finger, he shoot Coca-Cola
He say 'I know you, you know me'
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free"

I maintain that these ideograms or nonverbal images, whatever we wish to call them, leads to a form of telepathy, i.e. nonverbal communication. It can also be construed as heightened intuition which we shall see subtle examples of in Vineland. 

Chapter 5 sends us on a loop in time, from the present back to Zoyd and Frenesi splitting up then whirling forward back to the present in the final paragraph. The chapter starts and ends with a business card that we find out more about later. Remember that it entered the story in this chapter, 5. We also find a few references to the old version of the show Hawaii Five-0 and a number of film mentions. The song Zoyd and Takeshi play, Wacky Coconuts, reminds me of the Marx Brothers. The Coconuts was their first film and Wacky is the name of Harpo's character in The Big Store. 

P. 57 "Feel like Mildred Pierce's husband Bert," – Zoyd references a depression era book called Mildred Pierce, a psychological drama by James M. Cain, according to Wikipedia. Mildred's eldest daughter Veda plays a major part in the story.

P. 60 - 62 has multiple references to death. Zoyd contemplates suicide. Later, he's offered "[a] gig of death. He calls a 24-hour number to get hired. Key #24 corresponds with Death in the tarot. Then, "2:30 A.M." gives a 23, a number frequently associated with death; also a number that indicates the bardo.

The number one holds significance for Pynchon, make of that what you will. Using Joycean word deconstruction we have the Vomitones = Vomit-ones. We've met Ralph Wayvone Jr. = Way-v-one. Later we'll meet his father with the same name. In this chapter, right before Zoyd dies in his suicide fantasy he hears "Jack Lord say, 'Book him, Danno – Suicide One.'" P. 62 has Zoyd reaching for a "dash-one" - military slang for a User's Manual. This chapter ends with the phrase, "as if she were supposed to be the one to have it all along." Coincidentally, the word "once" adds to 133 which corresponds with "vine" in Sepher Sephiroth.

Next week: please read chapter 6, pages 68 - 91

'Overweening Generalist' has returned

Robert Michael Johnson, who has contributed erudite pieces to a number of Hilaritas Press books (most recently Eric Wagner's new Straight Outta Dublin) has revived his his old Overweening Generalist blog, this time as a Substack newsletter. 

There have been two newsletters so far, an introductory piece written for Maybe Day and then a new one this weekend, "How Robert Anton Wilson Read Nietzsche," inspired by Eric Wagner's recent Hilaritas podcast. Here's a bit of it:

More than a few times RAW said - no doubt ironically - that the paranoia in his books was from the feeling that the universe was out to kill him. However, he also seems to have become Adept at banishing paranoia and shifting to more exalted - especially humorous and psychedelic - states. He may have had some level of manic depression, suggestive from short statements he made about himself, but some of his letters also hint at very dark moods that occurred after highly productive creative periods. We aren’t sure. I’m not sure. Maybe he just got low when things - money issues - were bad, then they got better and so did he? He self-treated with cannabis, some psychedelics, and reading Nietzsche.

Michael says he plans to post one or two days a week.

Maybe Day links

 

Maybe Day art from Brian Dean at RAW Semantics.

Maybe Day was Wednesday, here are some of the pieces posted, if you missed them:

Maybe Day art at RAW Semantics

Wrapping up the online reading group for The Sex Magicians.

Return of the Overweening Generalist (from Robert Michael Johnson).

Tribute by DNA in Santa Cruz entertainment magazine.

Article at Critical Hit Parader.

Bobby Campbell explains Maybe Day.

Billinformed.com on Maybe Day.

And please see the postings for the last three days on this blog!

New Hilaritas podcast: David Jay Brown & Rebecca McClen Novick

Here's the blurb: "Hilaritas guest host Zach West chats with Mavericks of the Mind co-interviewers, David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen Novick about consciousness, deja vu, lucid dreaming and more."

Here is the Hilaritas reprint of their Mavericks of the Mind. 

This sounds interesting, and I plan to listen.

Hilaritas releases 'The Book of Forbidden Words'

 

Hilaritas Press has released its new edition of The Book of Forbidden Words, formerly Playboy's Book of Forbidden Words, an early RAW book, one of the few I didn't have; I bought my copy of the new edition late last night. Kudos to Bobby Campbell for the great cover!

There's a new introduction from Vincent Murphy.

Rasa writes, in the newsletter announcing the book, "Usually you don't just read a dictionary from start to finish, but the editors and proofreaders at Hilaritas Press did just that, and we were all delighted by the experience. This dictionary offers an astounding view of a cultural history seldom discussed. A couple of us were amused that RAW took one rather salacious description of a complicated sex act, and put it in as a scene in his second published book, The Sex Magicians. You can look in both books for the Flying Philadelphia Fuck. More than just a dictionary, this book was a lot of fun to read."

Maybe Day: Another way to remember RAW

The Palmolive Building, formerly the Playboy Building, in Chicago. Creative Commons photo, source.

Welcome to Maybe Day. Today, Bobby Campbell will be running a free comic book convention in Wilmington, Delaware. Of course, he is hard at work on the second issue of Tales of Illuminatus. Please see his Maybe Day page for updates.  UPDATE: New blog post at RAW Semantics!

 For my special  Maybe  Day post this year, I would like to share my new idea for helping to preserve the legacy of Robert Anton Wilson.

Since Wilson left us in 2007, there have been many attempts to keep Wilson's books and philosophy alive for new generations of readers. 

Hilaritas Press has issued many new additions of Wilson's work, and has been offering a monthly podcast. Brian Dean, Oz Fritz, Apuleius Charlton and myself have been writing RAW blogs for a number of years. There are numerous social media accounts devoted to Wilson's output. Bobby Campbell has been organizing Maybe Day celebrations for several years. Scott Apel published a new anthology of Wilson's writings, Beyond Chaos and Beyond, which was later reprinted by Hilaritas Press. Prop Anon came out with the first book length biography of Wilson, and it has been well received. Eric Wagner has a new book out, assisted by Michael Johnson, which explores the influence of James Joyce on Wilson. Steve “Fly” Pratt has written books and recorded music albums to help continue Wilson's legacy. John Higgs wrote about Wilson in his invaluable KLF book. Daisy Eris Campbell staged a play based upon Wilson's Cosmic Trigger book. 

This is not an exhaustive list, and I am sure I have left out some excellent efforts by other people. You are welcome to fill in with other examples in the comments. Many other people have contributed with their own efforts. 

When I went to Tulsa a few weeks ago to visit my mother, my sister and I ventured out to visit the Church Street studio established by Oklahoma rock musician Leon Russell, which was used for recording many artists signed by Russell's Shelter Records record label. When we were given a guided tour of the studio, the guide pointed to a diner across the street, and said that was where Tom Petty signed his record deal with Shelter Records, launching a long recording career that resulted in Petty selling tens of millions of recordings. 

That gave me an idea for an historical marker. It would make sense, I thought, to put up a marker at the diner or the Church Street studio marking the beginning of Petty's music career. 

Then I came up with another idea. Why not put up a couple of historical markers at sites significant in the life of Robert Anton Wilson?

Each state has its own historical marker program, but as far as I can tell, they all operate in pretty similar ways. An historical marker can be proposed by anyone, but to put up an official state marker, the wording likely would have to be approved by an official in the state's history department. Permission likely would have to be obtained from whoever owns the property where the marker would be located. A good-looking official state marker costs thousands of dollars, so if a wealthy donor was not available, a crowd funding campaign might be necessary.

Here are a few ideas for markers:

The Palmolive Building, Chicago. The Chicago Playboy mansion probably is better known, but the Palmolive Building, 919 N. Michigan Avenue in Chicago, was known as the Playboy Building when it housed the editorial offices of Playboy magazine from 1965 to 1989. An historical marker would note that Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea worked there as editors when they wrote the Illuminatus trilogy. A marker here would perhaps get a lot of attention.

Information about Illinois historical markers can be found here.

Birth of Discordianism, 15545 Whittier Boulevard, Whittier, California. The former site of the Friendly Hills Lanes bowling alley; it closed about ten years ago, but the building was preserved when the site was redeveloped, see this post.  An Aldi grocery store is there now. Discordian historian Adam Gorightly has identified  the bowling alley as the place where Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill created Discordianism. An historical marker would of course note that Discordianism is blargely known because it is featured in Illuminatus!

Information on California Historical Landmarks registration.

The "Maybe Day House," 15176 Rio Nido Road, Guerneville, Calfornia. (North of San Francisco, Santa Rosa is the nearest good-sized city.) Where Wilson had his contact with entities from Sirius, July 23, 1973, according to Chapel Perilous, the RAW bio. This is apparently a rural area, so a marker likely would not attract much attention. 

What other landmarks of the "RAW History Trail" would make sense?

A bit of Tim Leary trivia

The Playboy mansion in Los Angeles (Creative Commons photo, source).  © Glenn Francis, www.PacificProDigital.com

Yesterday, as I was reading a Wikipedia article on the Los Angeles and Chicago Playboy mansions, doing research for the blog post that will go up tomorrow, I ran across something I wanted to share.

The article has a long description of the outdoor area of the LA mansion, including "a Hefner-stipulated sunken tennis court." It adds about the tennis court, "the court itself was long favored by Timothy Leary for practicing yoga."

There's no citation listed for the Leary bit, so I can't add anything more.

'Vineland' online reading group, Chapter 4

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

I would like to thank my mother-in-law, an Artie Shaw fan, for teaching me how to pronounce Frenesi. The first few times I read Vineland I pronounced it Fre-nes-i instead of Fren-i-si. 

The last time I heard Tim Leary talk I asked him what he thought about Vineland. He didn’t seem to like the question, replying something like, “Oh, you want a personal opinion?” He said he didn’t like the novel very much, but he did like the tubal detox stuff. 

I find it humbling to reread a novel I thought I knew very well and to find so much material I had forgotten. I had forgotten about Zoyd astrally projecting to watch Frenesi. Coincidentally yesterday I watched The Wizard of Oz with two of my grandkids, and the scene where Dorothy calls for Auntie Em and then sees her in the crystal ball reminded me of Zoyd astrally projecting to watch Frenesi. (Pynchon has a great bit about The Wizard of Oz in Inherent Vice.) When the image of Auntie Em turns into the witch and the witch breaks the fourth wall and looks directly into the camera, I wondered, “Might one imagine this as Pynchon looking out of the book at us?” 

Reminder: Maybe Day event in Delaware

I wanted to remind everyone that there will be a Maybe Day event in Wilmington, Delaware, on Wednesday, July 23. 

Jesse Walker on what's next for public radio

One of the radios in my collection, a 1970s Admiral table radio.

If you follow the news, you know that Congress has voted to cut off funding for public TV broadcasting and National Public Radio. 

Nobody knows what will happen. Perhaps foundations and individual public radio donors will step up. Perhaps the pessimists are right, and some public radio stations will shut down.

I listen to public radio a lot, mostly classical music and jazz broadcasts. Of course, that's old fashioned. Anyone with an Internet connection and  Bluetooth speaker can listen to music without having to own a radio. I mentioned in an earlier blog post that I collect radios, and I was asked in the comments what I do with them. I listen to them!

Jesse Walker, who wrote an interesting book on alternative radio, has some thoughts on what non commercial radio stations can do to keep the doors open.

Friday links

 

Cover art for the new Pynchon novel, via Eric Wagner.

Rumble strips that play Beethoven.

Are Trump Accounts a step toward a UBI?

Comments after reading Moby Dick.

Is life too short to wash and dry?

Neuromancer TV show on the way.