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

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

RIP Tom Robbins

 


Tom Robbins (public domain photo)

Novelist Tom Robbins, a Robert Anton Wilson fan, has died. His heyday was decades ago, but I enjoyed his work. Here is the New York Times obituary (gift link).  And you can also read the Seattle Times obituary. 

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

'Tales' website revamped, 'New Trajectories' webring fixed

 


As Bobby Campbell prepares to launch the second Kickstarter campaign for the second issue of his Tales of Illuminatus comic book series, he's done some renovations to his Internet presence, as announced in his latest newsletter. 

The Tales of Illuminatus website has been revamped. The site now has newsfeeds from Bluesky, you can sign up for the prelaunch for the second issue and Bobby has decided after getting feedback to restore the free web version of the first issue. 


As for the webring, Bobby explains, "Back in 2022 we established a Discordian webring as part of that year’s Maybe Day celebration, though due to the limitations of some of the walled garden platforms people use, or trouble with placing HTML code, many of the sites weren’t able to display functioning navigation links, so the webring didn’t quite work as a ring, and was rather more of a directory.

"Though as part of network updates leading into issue #2 I thought it would be interesting to create a fully functioning webring. So I’ve limited entrees to those sites with functioning navigation links.

"(If anyone’s site was removed that would like to rejoin, LMK and I’ll help with installing the code!)"

Eleven websites are currently listed in the webring, including this one, and Jechidah, which has just added  another entry in the ongoing Sex Magicians reading group. 

Monday, February 10, 2025

Moby Dick online reading group, Chapters 95-100

 


William Carlos Williams (portrait by Man Ray, public domain photo)

This  week: Chapter 95, "The Cassock," through Chapter 100, "Leg and Arm"

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

Chapter 96 reminds me of Lovecraft at times:  

Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm. 

Coincidentally, I have mentioned Ecclesiastes repeatedly to my seventh graders this week, which Ishmael calls “the truest of all books.” I find it interesting that optimistic Bob Wilson loved Moby Dick so much, and Ishmael seems very pessimistic. Perhaps Melville did not share Ishmael’s pessimism. Or perhaps I oversimplify Ishmael’s perceptions. 

In chapter 99 various characters interpret the doubloon as we interpret the novel and the interpretations of the doubloon, and then we interpret each other’s interpretations of the interpretations. 

Look at

                                                what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
                        despised poems.
                                                It is difficult
to get the news from poems
                        yet men die miserably every day
                                                for lack
of what is found there.

- “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”, William Carlos Williams, 1955 

“I have nothing to say and I am saying it.” - John Cage. I think I first encountered this quote at a concert for composer Elliott Schwarz’s fiftieth birthday on January 19, 1986. Cage loved Finnegans Wake. 

I feel grateful to this study group for helping me make it through the transition to the second Trump presidency. I don’t feel like I have much to say about the novel, but it helps me put things in perspective. I still don’t understand the connection with Koko’s lucky harpoon in the “Yacht Rock” web series. The final episode of the series does remind me of the ending of Bob Wilson’s The Homing Pigeons. 

I don’t think of Moby Dick as poetry, but I do read it out loud usually. When I read that quote by Williams, I often think of Homer, but I don’t know what Williams really had in mind. Our current situation, what Bob Heinlein called “The Crazy Years”, does feel like finding oneself lost at sea. 

Next week: Please read Chapter 101, "The Decanter," to  Chapter 104, "The Fossil Whale."






Sunday, February 9, 2025

Alternative cover 'Tales' released [UPDATED]

 


As promised, a new alternate cover Tales of Illuminatus has been released, with a new cover by Todd Purse. Get it here. This is a limited edition second print run. 

UPDATE: Shortly after I posted the above, Bobby dropped another Tales of Illuminatus Substack newsletter, chock full of news.  So check it out, I will have a followup blog post. Relevant to the above: "We started with 50 and are already down to 37, so haste may be warranted."

Saturday, February 8, 2025

What I read last month




Alliance Unbound,
C.J. Cherryh and Jane Fancher. An enjoyable space opera. Cherryh continues to write very readable books after decades of producing SF novels.

Love and Loss: The Short Life of Ray Chapman, Scott Longert. A book about the Cleveland Indians shortstop who was hit in the head by a New York Yankee beanball pitcher in a 1920 game in New York and who died hours later. Also an interesting look at professional sports back in the day. 

Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, Danny King. I'm doing a lot of reading for the Prometheus Award. This one is a satiric novel about a woke, left wing Britain in which cancelled people are sent to concentration camps. Pretty well done, funny and grim. I had never  heard of the author before, but apparently he is prolific. 

Terra II ...A Way Out. Timothy Leary and collaborators. Inspirational Hilaritas Press reprint of a key Leary text. Here are some of my comments on the book. 

Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy, Michael Huemer. Feeling the need to get a general background in philosophy after getting interested in Epicureanism, I read this introduction, which is interesting and had plenty of humor. Among other opinions, Huemer is a libertarian and a vegetarian. 

Interstellar MegaChef, Lavanya Lakshminarayan. Another book I read as a Prometheus Awards judge, about a woman who flees Earth to participate in a cooking competition on another planet. Not terrible, but I have  no desire to read the sequel.

Waffle Irons vs. the Horde, Dr. Insensitive Jerk. Another Prometheus Awards assignment, an unusual novel by an unusual author. As with his other books, lots of cruelty, lots of amusing bits. 



Friday, February 7, 2025

Social media update


Artwork for the "Robert Anton Wilson" Bluesky account. 

While there are still RAW fans on X.com, there has been a definite shift over to Bluesky, continuing a trend I wrote about earlier. 

I'm still on both, as I still find both useful. There are quite a few accounts that seem to mostly if not always post on Bluesky rather than Twitter. A couple of examples: the "Robert Anton Wilson" account maintained by Bobby Campbell is only posting daily on Bluesky now, and Bluesky also is where to go to follow RAW Semantics. But the Robert Anton Wilson Trust is only on X, at least for now. Many post at both places, e.g. Jesse Walker for example. 

On both services, I tend to rely on my own lists rather than the feeds offered by the company. On Bluesky, for example, I mostly rely on my "Illuminating" list. 

I am on Facebook, too, but try not to spend too much time there. 


Thursday, February 6, 2025

Book review: 'A Half-Built Garden'


[My friend Tracy Harms, formerly of Cleveland, now in the mountains of Colorado, came back into town a few months ago and mentioned he was reading a really interesting novel. When he finished it, he offered to give me a book review, and as this is by definition a blog for people who like to read, I thought sumbunall of you might be interested. The Management.]

By TRACY B. HARMS
Special guest blogger

What If? What if climate change actually is an existential crisis, but humanity gets on top of the problem? What if the political climate shifts to reprioritize around Earth's ecology? What if technology is deployed to reverse the accumulated effects of early industrialization, while providing an improving standard of living for humans? What if technology is directed toward understanding the biosphere, understanding economic production trade-offs, and helping people come to agreement using such information?

What if, in getting our act together, humanity winds up Woke As Fuck?

A Half-Built Garden is a 2022 novel by Ruthanna Emrys that's utopian, introspective, tech-savvy, intricate, and full of amusement.  It's totally conformant to the familiar formula of first contact stories.  There aren't a lot of surprises to be had here at the large scale. The title tips us off to the optimism that pervades this story. The dance of attempts between humans and aliens at mutual comprehension proceeds with rather few twists and turns; this isn't a display of dazzling plot construction. It is, however, an intricate accomplishment of character development, relationship nuance, social variety, and cultural tensions.

This novel is indisputably Hard Sci Fi, at least if one concedes the familiar allowance that the aliens show up with a faster-than-light hack.  Who among us will not happily allow that in?  It's required for the classic First Contact motif and does not grate.

Insofar as we look at the technology of Earth in this near-future setting, it's an extremely plausible extension from today, with features that are impressive advancements for the few years it rolls the calendar forward. Computer interface improvements stand out, but the innovations in communication networking are a foreground topic.  Biology is also prominent as a science continually relevant to story development.  The one tech aspect I thought might be unrealistic was an absence of AI-chatbots; even new SF novels can't help being dated.

What we yearn for in science fiction is not just portrayals of technologically improved futures, though, right?  We (or at least, I) want a story that shows how people live in some imagined world of the future.  How are their lives different? What's normal then that's not normal now?  What new problems do they have?  What tensions are they carrying from the past, especially around whatever changed in the world between our Now and this fictional Later?

A Half-Built Garden delivers big-time in that regard.  Learning about society on Earth is arguably more interesting than learning about the society of the newly arrived aliens, which is saying something.  The aliens are indeed alien, with various complexities among them that lead to suspenseful situations.  But the humans are alien, too.  Or maybe they're extremely familiar.  It will depend on who you know, what circles you frequent, and what counts as normal in your family and among your friends.

Which is why I capitalized "woke" near the start of this review.  If that word sets you off, and if adding to it ideas like "trans" make it worse, you might find this novel difficult to get through.  The dominant powers that be in this world of the future might be called commune-dwelling eco-freaks or even "radical left lunatics" to borrow a phrase from a successful politician.  There's nothing between this book's covers that's going to buffer the reader from ontological shock if these sorts of people aren't part of the reader's ontology.

Yet, everyone is up against this problem, not just readers of A Half-Built Garden but also the characters within it.  Diversity rubs everybody the wrong way, at some limit, and this story is about hitting those limits and having to find ways to overcome the frictions. It's a tale of problems and problem-solving where social problems are prominent and their solutions vital.  Yet these clashes are frequently very funny.  I grinned and laughed out loud often!

Between the plausible and distinctive personalities we're introduced to and the unfamiliar layers at which these people clash, the story is propelled by psychological engagement. Yes, it's a slow burn; this is not begging to become an action movie.  There's a good deal of cooking, eating, and cleaning up. There's child care to be done.  There are crops to be grown and pollution to be monitored.  Real life doesn't stop just because the aliens popped in unexpectedly.  That's part of the implicit message of this book: how we choose to live had better be viable for the long term if we're actually serious about survival over the long term.

By the climax of the story we have come to know roughly a handful of factions that are contending to shape the future according to their own sensibilities.  All of them have the long-term, large-scale flourishing of all people as their goal.  It truly isn't clear which options are best, but it is clear that some possibilities would be tragic.  The author succeeds at communicating several conflicting perspectives rather than collapsing the crisis into a sermon as to How We Should Solve Global Warming, a possibility one guesses might have been tempting.

What arrives instead is a sense of priority to problem solving and how the adoption of appropriate means is itself a valuable end.  It's a meditation on the necessity of change, the discomforts of change, and an optimism of approaching impending change with resolve to cherish one's values in the process.  Pretty cool if you ask me.  With the final page turned, I'm going to miss the people I got to know in A Half-Built Garden.




Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Prop Anon podcast interviews Jesse Walker

 


"The United States of Paranoia: A Conversation with Jesse Walker" is a new episode of the Prop Anon podcast. 

About the podcast, Jesse wrote on Bluesky, "I had a good conversation with @propanon.bsky.social about literature, politics, conspiracy theories, and why it sometimes feels like history is in a holding pattern."

Prop's blurb says, "In this episode, I spoke with Jesse Walker, books editor at Reason magazine and author of The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, about his book and the five "primal myths" of conspiracy theories, the literary legacy of Robert Anton Wilson, and the incoming Trump administration. Are we living in the United States of Paranoia?"

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

New Bobby Campbell video

 


Thought I would share Bobby Campbell's video on YouTube, commenting on the current situation. You can subscribe to Bobby's Weirdoverse channel. 

Monday, February 3, 2025

Moby Dick online reading group, Chapters 88-94

 


Ambergris in its dried  form.  (Creative Commons photo,  source.)

Moby Dick online reading group, Chapters 88-94,  “Schools & Schoolmasters” through “A Squeeze of the Hand”

Chapter 88

This chapter, describing schools of whales, also was one of my favorites. I liked this passage about the "rock stars" among the whales: "For like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that might be named, my Lord Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower; and so, being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies all over the world; every baby an exotic."

And I liked this passage about whales becoming solitary savants when they get older, like Sigismundo in the woods in Nature's God: "Almost universally, a lone whale—as a solitary Leviathan is called—proves an ancient one. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets."

Chapter 90

Anything involving the British royal family seems to be a case of "you can't make this shit up." According to Wikipedia, "Under the law of the United Kingdom, whales (mammal) and sturgeons are royal fish, and when taken become the personal property of the monarch of the United Kingdom as part of his or her royal prerogative." We are also  informed, "Under current law, the Receiver of Wreck is the official appointed to take possession of royal fish when they arrive on English shores. The law of royal fish continues to excite some notice and occasional use, as evidenced when a fisherman caught and sold a sturgeon in Swansea Bay in 2004.[7] After informing of the sturgeon to Queen Elizabeth II, the fisherman, a man named Robert Davies, received notice that he could use the 264lb catch 'as he saw fit'."

I'm sure any British person can tell  you what the Receiver of Wreck is, but I'm an American, so I looked it up: "The Receiver of Wreck is an official who administers law dealing with maritime wrecks and salvage in some countries having a British administrative heritage. In the United Kingdom, the Receiver of Wreck is also appointed to retain the possession of royal fish on behalf of the British crown."

Chapter 91

The chapter about a ship called the Rose-Bud made me think of Citizen Kane. 

Chapter 92

"Now this ambergris is a very curious substance ...  " I've posted a photo, above, if anyone is curious about what it looks like. 

"Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant, when as a general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance of exercise; always out of doors ..." Even when I read  19th century novels, I am nagged about taking care of my health.  

Chapter 93

I wasn't quite sure what this passage about poor Pip meant, but I thought it was quite striking: "He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God."

Chapter 94

I liked this passage about getting pleasure: "I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country."

Next week: Please read Chapter 95, "The Cassock," through Chapter 100, "Leg and Arm"


Sunday, February 2, 2025

Gabriel Kennedy update

 


Many of you have probably read the well-researched Robert Anton Wilson biography by Gabriel Kennedy (e.g. Prop Anon), Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson.

If you want more, Mr. Kennedy has done two recent podcasts. Details and links via his most recent Substack newsletter, where he writes, "I’ve sought to include differing information about Wilson in each interview. So, one can listen to each and gain a deeper wider expanse of knowledge around Wilson’s life and times."

The Hilaritas Press podcast interview with him, previously announced for this month, apparently has been pushed back to March. 

Saturday, February 1, 2025

John Higgs: Dr. Who book, David Lynch and the current moment


 The Palmer House from Twin Peaks. Interesting article here. 

The latest newsletter from John Higgs gives an update on his new Dr. Who book, and there's also an interesting essay on David Lynch and the current political moment.

The new book is Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who and it will be out in April, at least in the UK; I don't see a listing on Amazon, so it may be an import for American readers, at least for  now. If you live in Great Britain, chances are good you'll have a chance to see John talk about the book: "So far I’ve got events lined up in York, Liverpool, Stratford, Bath, Margate, Shoreham, Laugharne, Belfast, Wendover, Sheffield, London, Lewes, Clevedon and Cardiff. Keep an eye on my events page, where I will be posting further links and details as soon as I have them."

The death of David Lynch inspires a new essay from John, also in the newsletter. I don't want to try to summarize it, but one aspect of the essay is that he contrasts Agatha Christie style mysteries with David Lynch mysteries:

"Lynch-type mysteries tend to be shunned by the mainstream, but they linger in the mind in a way that Christie-style mysteries don’t. Once seen, they can never really be forgotten. And the fact that his work affects people so profoundly, I think, can teach us something valuable about the digital world."