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.

A comics recommendation

 

From Joseph Matheny's latest newsletter:

"I discovered his series in the 80s when I saw Timothy Leary at Cross Currents in Chicago, and Del Close invited himself on stage to hawk his new comic series. Want to read a comic where people like Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, and Philip K. Dick (to name a few) appear as characters? Look no further. Available in digital format these days and rumored to be around on free platforms, Wasteland stands the test of time."

The newsletter has other interesting bits at the link.

Meme from Rasa quoting RAW

 

Via Facebook. 

Pittsburgh Maybe Day meetup called off

After discussing the matter with Apuleius Charlton, I have decided to call off our planned July 23 Maybe Day dinner meetup at a Pittsburgh restaurant. About a week ago, I fell down and got various injuries, the most significant being a bone fracture in my wrist. My wife thinks it would not be prudent for me to do a long car drive in the near future, and after thinking it over, I decided she was likely right. (I will have what I hope is an interesting Maybe Day blog post instead). See above, and please consider attending Bobby Campbell's event if you can. 

'Vineland' online reading group, Chapter 3

 

Photo by Elaine Glusac

By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger

"But the games Joyce played – and the games played by Welles, and M.C. Escher, and Borges, and Pynchon, and a lot of our current post-modernists – while just as cute as Doyle's games, have a serious side, just like cutting-edge science and philosophy, which also have encountered Uncertainty. A Final Answer seems impossible, to post-modern artists ... Ergo, the post-modern artist now offers us, not the Problem Solved, but the Problem as Puzzle." – Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger Vol. III.

Hector Zuñiga, Sylvester the cat to Zoyd's Tweety bird, experiences this great uncertainty with his career as described at the top of page 25. His uncertainty with life gets compared to the labyrinthine Casbah topography. The Casbah describes the old, fortified part of a North African city. I know the Casbah of Tangier, Morocco which proved extremely easy to get lost in with its narrow, winding streets and high walls. We were strongly advised not to enter that area without a guide. In Tangier, multilingual kids with 5 or 6 languages hang around the hotels hoping to get hired as a guide. Casbah architecture makes a good metaphor for Pynchon's writing, in general.

Last week I got some sense of the Vineland locale when I went there to record a Queer Country show in Mendocino. I arrived the day before at the house of their drummer and bassist Reyna Cinnamon Coupe and her partner Cynthia Coupe who generously put me up. Reyna met me at the door and we talked for about an hour about the area before I left to record another show in Fort Bragg. I don't recall how we got there but when she mentioned the bombing of Earth First! activist Judi Bari in 1990 and the apparent collusion of the FBI with said bombing, it started sounding like the same violent and fascist tactics employed by law enforcement in Vineland. With all the humor, satire and parody Pynchon uses in his story it's easy to regard the over-the-top police tactics as fiction, but after hearing about some of the things that went down in that era, I realized this shit really happened; Pynchon isn't making it up. We returned to the subject at a later time.

Reyna herself had been an Earth First! type of activist in a former lifetime engaged in non-violent civil disobedience with the intention to protect the environment from destruction by the thoughtless, careless and destructive tactics of the timber industry. In an interview in The New Settler, issue 68, July 1992, Todd, as they were known at the time, details step by step their protest method of tree sitting and how to go about doing it. He even describes how to monetize climbing trees by collecting seeds for the California Department of Forestry. Cinnamon reports that at the time, "they paid $35 a bushel for Douglas fir seeds, $45 a bushel for incense cedar, $20 for Ponderosa pine, and $45 for Redwood. You can get three or four bushels in an hour." After the bombing, Reyna became Judi Bari's virtual bodyguard for the next few years. Darryl Cherney was in the passenger seat when the bomb exploded, but fortunately had relatively minor injuries. He made a low budget film called Who Bombed Judi Bari which is available on You Tube. Along with Bari, they sued the F.B.I. and the Oakland Police Department for negligence (they didn't conduct an investigation), false arrest, illegal search and seizure, and falsifying evidence. "A predominantly conservative jury awarded Judi's estate and Darryl Cherney $4.4 million dollars in compensatory and punitive damages." Quoted from The Ghost Forest - Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods by Greg King. 

Though not central to the story, the malfeasance of the logging industry plays in the background in resonance with the war on drugs. The first American edition of Vineland shows a black and white photograph of a massive pile of dead trees. It's the same image used in the introductory post for this group. It was taken by Darius Kinsey known for his photographs of the logging industry. This one shows a logging camp with the title "Crescent Camp Number One." It makes a great visual metaphor for the struggles and battles in Vineland. Trees, in general, play their part in Vineland, especially at the end.

I asked Reyna and Cynthia if they recalled anything about the war on drugs. They said all through the 1980s it was like a war zone. Choppers were constantly flying overhead. The CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Production) program as it appears in Vineland was a real thing operated by the California Department of Justice from 1983 - 1996. A multi-agency task force, it comprised one of the largest conglomerates of law enforcement at the time. Now we have Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the top of the American fascist heap. Coincidentally, Gabriel ICE, a tech billionaire, shows up as the evil and antagonistic character in Pynchon's Bleeding Edge (2013).

The third chapter describes the relationship between government agent Hector Zuñiga and Zoyd starting with when they first met. The cartoon duo Sylvester and Tweety seems an apt comparison. Hector brings various Spanish words and phrases into the novel. According to Christine Wexler, Pynchon's lover at one point, he knew enough Spanish to read in it. Looking at the Spanish spoken by Hector in this chapter, it starts with an exclamation, "Caray" (p. 28) = Wow in English followed shortly by ése = that; next we see "Ay se va" = Oh it's gone; then "¡Ja ja!" = ha ha; finally "¡Madre de Dios! = Mother of God. The Spanish in this chapter reiterates the theme: Wow, that, oh it's gone ha ha Mother of God.

Pynchon's fondness for the letter "v" comes out in this chapter. Van Meter, one of the Corvairs hopes to score from Hector. The latter uses the phrase "Vaseline of youth" later on. My favorite in this week's offering (p.28):  "there's gonna be some local person about your age come runnin' up, two fingers in a V, hollerin, 'What's your sign man,?' or singíng 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' note for note.

Two fingers in a V symbolized peace in the 60's. In the 40's Winston Churchill used it to represent V for victory. Some say it also presented a semiotic weapon to counteract the swastika, a symbolism of fascism in Nazi Germany. A well-known story in the music biz holds that the song "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly was originally supposed to have the title and lyrics "In the Garden of Eden" but the singer got too stoned to sing that properly so it became as we know it now. Whether true or not, Bart Simpson used it for a joke on an unsuspecting congregation.

p

The bit on p. 25 where Hector plays with his food to sculpt something meaningful only to him recalls a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This foretells the UFO scenario coming up, but it also qabalistically connects with Hector giving Zoyd news about his ex-wife Frenesi. I believe this marks the first mention of her in the story.

I'll end with a statement by Hector that can be heard in at least two different ways (p. 30):

"'The Lord, as they call him around my office, created all of us, even you, with free will. I think it's weird you don't even want to find out about her.'" The "her" refers to Frenesi whom they've been discussing, but it can also refer to the Lord in that sentence. This seems another possible link to E.J. Gold who wrote a two person play called Creation Story Verbatim featuring the Lord God Herself and the Archangel Gabriel. 

Next week: please read chapter 4, pages 35 - 55.

Normal blogging to resume

Unsplash.com photo by Johnny Gios

Here is some information that may turn out to be useful for other people, even if you don't have a fractured wrist. It turns out that Google documents will allow users to use their voice to dictate text.

Unfortunately, the feature was turned off on my phone, and it took me about 90 minutes to find the one person on the internet who could supply a fix. Anyway, now that it is easier to write without hurting my hands, I expect to be able to resume normal blogging.

RAW letter to William Burroughs

William Burroughs (Creative Commons, source).

Something I had missed: RAW biographer Prop Anon posts a letter from Robert Anton Wilson to William Burroughs, then writes commentary. If you are a serious RAW fan. you should get a copy of Prop's book.

Hat tip, Jesse Walker.

Prometheus Awards announced

 

[As I have mentioned before, I am an active member of the Libertarian Futurist Society. RAW was the presenter for the first Prometheus Award and Robert Shea was active in the Libertarian Futurist Society. -- The Management]

The Libertarian Futurist Society, a nonprofit all-volunteer international organization of freedom-loving science fiction fans, has announced Prometheus Award Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction winners.

The 45th annual Prometheus Awards will be presented online in a Zoom awards ceremony open to the public, most likely on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon in late August or early September. David Friedman, an SF/fantasy novelist and a leading economist and libertarian thinker, will be a speaker and guest presenter.

The Prometheus Award for Best Novel

In the Belly of the Whale, by Michael Flynn, won the 2025 Prometheus Award for Best Novel for novels published in 2024.

The posthumous work, published by CAEZIK SF & Fantasy, explores the complex lives, work, challenges and conflicts of 40,000 human colonists aboard a large asteroid ship two centuries into a projected eight-century voyage to Tau Ceti.

With its intricate world-building, believable characters in conflict, and profound grasp of human nature, the epic social novel freshens the SF subgenre of the multi-generational colony ship while raising deeper questions about the enormous difficulties of our species expanding beyond our solar system.

Beyond the usual technological and interpersonal issues of maintenance and survival that naturally arise, the colonists suffer from a dysfunctional bureaucracy, crew class divisions, and a traditional shipboard command structure that has calcified into an authoritarian hereditary aristocracy with enforced eugenics and a loss of focus on the mission goal.

Flynn’s kaleidoscopic novel is a wise cautionary tale and poignant libertarian tragedy about the underestimated challenges facing our species as we dream of someday establishing a beachhead of human civilization beyond our solar system.

Without sustaining the culture of liberty, self-reliance and voluntary cooperation that helped lift Earth civilizations to unprecedented levels of knowledge and prosperity, humanity may be doomed even if such ships reach their distant destinations.

Reflecting Flynn’s well-earned reputation for a high level of craftsmanship and a wintry poetic style, his last novel is an ambitious saga of power, decay and revolution embodying an enduring theme: The price of freedom (and survival) is eternal vigilance.

Visit the Prometheus blog for a full review of In the Belly of the Whale that illuminates how it fits the distinctive dual focus of the Prometheus Award on quality and liberty.

In the Belly of the Whale was the last novel Flynn wrote before his death in 2023 at 75. Flynn previously won two Prometheus Awards for Best Novel for In the Country of the Blind (in 1991) and Fallen Angels (in 1992), the latter co-written with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

The other 2024 Best Novel finalists were Alliance Unbound, by C. J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher (DAW); Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, by Danny King (Annie Mosse Press); Beggar’s Sky, by Wil McCarthy (Baen Books); and Mania, by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins Publishers).

The Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction

Orion Shall Rise, a 1983 novel (Timescape) by Poul Anderson, won the 2025 Best Classic Fiction award and will be inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.

First nominated for the Prometheus Award in 1984, when it was a Best Novel finalist, Orion Shall Rise explores the corruptions and temptations of power and how a free society might survive and thrive after a post-nuclear-war apocalypse on a largely depopulated Earth.

A nearly pure example of social scientific world-building in its plausible economies, polities and cultures, the novel depicts four renascent but very different civilizations in conflict over the proper role of technology. Among them: the Maurai, a constitutional monarchy derived from Polynesian societies; the Mong, a feudal society descended from Russian, Mongolian and Chinese refugees who conquered much of North America; and Skyholm, a technologically advanced aristocracy centered on France and dominated by a lighter-than-air city structure.

Perhaps most intriguing is the Northwest Union, a decentralized and strongly technophilic society that extends roughly from Oregon to Alaska: a culture founded in resistance to the Mong invasion. The Union’s minimal central government, voluntary Lodges and other strong tendencies to libertarianism embody one of Anderson’s more attractive portrayals of this idea.

Avoiding a straight-forward clash of good people with evil, the story creates believable and sympathetic characters representing the best of each culture. Anderson plays fair to all sides, a hallmark of the work of the SFWA Grand Master.

Ultimately, Orion Shall Rise offers a hopeful vision of forward-thinking visionaries who dream of reaching for the stars while trying to revive the forbidden nuclear technology that destroyed their previous civilization.

Visit the Prometheus blog for a full review of Orion Shall Rise that illuminates how it fits the distinctive dual focus of the Prometheus Award on quality and liberty.

Anderson (1926-2001), the first author to receive a Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2001, was a major American science  fiction writer who won the Hugo Award seven times, the Nebula Award three  times and the Prometheus Award seven times (including this year’s award).

This is Anderson’s fifth work to be inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame, following Trader to the Stars (in 1985), The Star Fox (in 1995), “No Truce with Kings” (in 2010) and “Sam Hall” (in 2020.)

The other Prometheus Hall of Fame finalists were “As Easy as A.B.C.,” a 1912 story by Rudyard Kipling; ”The Trees," a 1978 song by the Canadian rock group Rush; and Singularity Sky, a 2003 novel (Ace Books) by Charles Stross.

Prometheus Awards History

The Prometheus Awards, sponsored by the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), was first presented in 1979, making it one of the most enduring awards after the Nebula and Hugo awards, and one of the oldest fan-based awards currently in sf.

For more than four decades, the Prometheus Awards have recognized outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy that dramatize the perennial conflict between liberty and power, favor cooperation over coercion, expose the abuses and excesses of coercive government, and/or critique or satirize authoritarian systems, ideologies and assumptions.

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

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

While the Best Novel category is limited to novels published in English for the first time during the previous calendar year, Hall of Fame nominees — which must have been published, performed, broadcast or released at least 20 years ago — may be in any narrative or dramatic form, including novels, novellas, stories, films, television series or episodes, plays, musicals, graphic novels, song lyrics, or verse.

The Best Novel winner receives a plaque with a gold coin, and the Hall of Fame winner, a plaque with a smaller gold coin.

Update

I have a wrist fracture. Blogging may be a bit light for a little while.

News from Bobby Campbell

Hurt my wrist so this will have to be short, but please see Bobby Campbell's latest news. Tales of Illuminatus, Maybe Day, music news and more! 

'Vineland' online reading group, week two

Vaslav Nijinsky in his rose costume for 'La Spectre de la Rose'

This week: Chapter 2, pg. 14-21 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger 

Attitudes towards mental health have changed since 1984. The phrase “laughing-academy outpatient” (pg. 14) probably would not occur on the news in 2025.  The discussion of the personality which prefers jumping out of windows reminds me of Nijinsky’s leap out the window at the end of the ballet La Spectre de la Rose choreographed by Fokine. Bob Wilson discusses this leap in Prometheus Rising. That ballet portrays another dream narrative, when a young lady (about Prairie’s age) comes home from her first dance with her first rose, and she dreams of dancing with the rose. 

Isaiah Two Four’s idea about a gun themed amusement park seems to presage the rise of Republican ad’s featuring politicians firing guns and Christmas cards featuring their armed families.  

I like the way Pynchon creates fictitious movies in the novel, as well as the way he gives the dates for real movies. 

How do you read?

I've enjoyed the responses to yesterday's post.  If you read Brian Dean's comment, he writes, " I tend to have several tomes on the go at once, which I dip into and read over a long period, rather than "Wham bam thank you ma'am, my quota sorted for the week!" and then gives a long list of books. (Alissa Nutting one of the authors he mentions, used to live in Cleveland, and talked to my book club about Tampa shortly after it came out. It's the only book of hers I've read.) 

I wasn't clear on how many books Brian will read at the same time, but it sounds like a lot.

I typically have 3-4 books going at the same time, although I typically concentrate on finishing one. I just finished Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer (it's due today and the library won't let me renew it, so I had to get it done.) I am currently reading Platinum Pohl by Frederik Pohl (essentially a selected stories) and Sell More Books! Book Marketing and Publishing for Low Profile and Debut Authors: Rethinking Book Publicity after the Digital Revolutions by J. Steve Miller. Also the two online reading group works, Vineland by Thomas Pynchon and the Testament comic book series. 

I'm pretty sure Mark Brown usually has several books going and in fact keeps them in separate rooms of the house. I am mostly sitting in my favorite chair in the living room, though I will sometimes read in the bedroom, on a plane, etc. I go back and forth from paper books to Kindle. I have also been known to read entire books on the phone; that's what I had to do with Tampa, mentioned above, it was the only way I could read it on short notice before my book club meeting. 

While I have a library of paper books at home, I have tended to whittle it down to the essentials. I have hundreds of Kindle ebooks, mostly bought on sale. 

I am on Goodreads as "Tomj." 

What we read last month

 

What I read in June:

The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds, John Higgs. This is the updated version with the thousands of words of new footnotes, a good excuse to read it again. Some comments here. 

Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. I'm told Jill Biden has instructed Biden diehards not to read the book.

Lake of Darkness, Adam Roberts. A horror story about black holes, pretty well done. Mentioned in this blog post. 

Eight Million Ways to Die, Lawrence Block. I have been reading all of the Matt Scudder novels. This is the fifth in the series. 

What RAW fan  Mark Brown read in June (I have myself read the Silverberg novel more than once)

The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick  6/2   

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit  6/6   

A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg 6/24   

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman  6/30

Pittsburgh Maybe Day 2025: Meet the RAW bloggers

Bobby Campbell has asked people to hold in person events on July 23 this year for Maybe Day. 

Bobby is holding a major event on the East Coast, the free Wilmington Comic Fest from 5-9 p.m. July 23 at The Queen Wilmington in Wilmington, Delaware. 

This seems like an excellent event, but I just can't be present. So instead, I've arranged to meet Apuleius Charlton, of the Jechidah blog, who also can't make it to Wilmington. We will meet for dinner at 6 p.m. July 23 at Church Brew Works, 3525 Liberty Ave. in Pittsburgh. Other RAW fans are welcome to join us.

"I think RAW would approve of meeting in a brewery inside a church," Apuleius says. 

So now there are two Maybe Day events, and I'll announce others as they become available. 

Santa Cruz weirdness, Neil Young edition

The Ducks: From left, Johnny Craviotto, Bob Mosley, Jeff Blackburn and Neil Young. (Creative Commons photo, via Wikipedia.) 

Santa Cruz is not a particularly large California city (about 63,000 people) but it has its share of weirdness. For one thing, Robert Anton Wilson lived there for many years in the last years of his life.

I have been listening to a lot of Neil Young lately (my favorite albums so far are Harvest and Rust Never Sleeps) and I recently read about the odd story of The Ducks, a short-lived summer of 1977 rock band that featured Neil Young and three lesser-known musicians. The Wikipedia article details various oddities, such as the fact that Neil Young's contract with Crazy Horse said he could only tour with them, so The Ducks could only play in Santa Cruz and could not leave the city to tour. Young tried to live in Santa Cruz but suffered important losses in a burglary, one factor  that apparently helped spark his exit from the band.

I want to live in a town where I am in a bar with a live band, and I suddenly notice that the bar band has a guy who looks and sounds a lot like Neil Young. 

Is Trump hampering SMI2LE?

Timothy Leary in 1970 (public domain photo).

Richard Hanania, apparently commenting on the Trump administration's attacks on research funding, science, the university system, etc., boldface mine: "The idea that 'let's just shake things up and see what happens' might have made sense at one point, but it's become increasingly clear that with a movement like this, the worst will rise to the top, as will those whose instincts and ideas are closely aligned to right-wing twitter and the uneducated and geriatric Republican TV watcher. This is not how you get to genetic engineering, radical life extension, and space travel." (Source, item 14).

The Peter Thiel interview Hanania references deals with SMI2LE topics. 

Ada Palmer's humility on opinions

I have been reading the new Ada Palmer nonfiction history book, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age. I was surprised to come to a chapter that reminded me of RAW. 

The book has a short chapter, "Are You Remembering Not to Believe Me?" 

Here is a section from the chapter:

"At this point I must remind you that you promised to read this section keeping in mind that Ada Palmer started studying the Renaissance because she was excited by how the First World War shaped twentieth-century literature and Freud's death instinct. The shelf this book came from had ten other books which all agree the classical revival was core to the Renaissance, but which will give different versions of its cause. Most of them are also right."

While the book has many opinions, it also gives many examples of controversies in which there are well-informed historians on both sides, e.g. the character of Savanarola, what Lucrezia Borgia was like, etc. This is unusual compared to the history books I usually read, which typically have the author telling you what to think in any given controversy. 

Compare with the document at the front of TSOG, in which RAW offers a "Contract" with the reader, e.g. in part, "2. Readers must warrant and give assurance that they will not believe or disbelieve any part of parts of this book until they have give some time to careful examination of such a part or parts; and that they will file everything herein under 'maybe' until and unless slowly arriving at 'true' or 'false'."