Feel free to email me what you read last month to be included in these chronicles, or just post your own list in the comments.
What Mark K. Brown read last month:
The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche 10/18
Brave New Word by Aldous Huxley 10/19
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut 10/21
Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein 10/25
A Non-Euclidean Perspective by Robert Anton Wilson 10/26
What I read last month:
Every Day is a GOOD Day: Robert Shea on Illuminatus! Writing and Anarchism, Robert Shea. Yes, I read the book I edited when I got my paper copies from the publisher, Hilaritas Press. I thought it was pretty good. Michael Johnson wrote a review for his Substack newsletter, he obviously gave the book a careful read.
Vineland, Thomas Pynchon. I kept up with the reading group.
The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told, Bill Janovitz. New book about one of my favorite rock groups. I obtained a review copy, read it, interviewed the author, and wrote an article about it.
All the Humans Are Sleeping, John C.A. Manley, Prometheus Award nominee.
In his latest Substack newsletter, John Higgs has a piece which uses the SNAFU principle from Illuminatus! (communication is possible only between equals) and applies it to the dangers of AI chatbots and billionaires:
"There’s been a lot of welcome attention on AI psychosis lately - the ‘insidious risks’ to a person’s sanity that come from talking to chatbots. The sycophantic approving attention that LLMs bestow on us feels safer than the messy unpredictability of speaking to humans, which can lead to an addictive cycle of increasing isolation and divorce from reality. LLMs are a bit like drugs – most people who experiment with them will be fine. But not everyone will."
Also:
"Great wealth means that tech oligarchs can have everything they want - except for people they can relate to as equals. They have no-one who will tell them when they are being an idiot, for fear that this will hurt their position and income. And as a result, billionaires become increasingly deluded and insane as the years pass and their wealth grows. I’m sure we can all think of examples."
Also, the David Lynch book comes out in less than two weeks, and John has talks scheduled on Lynch, William Blake and Dr. Who, see the newsletter for details.
Are AI doomers a big risk to AI safety? "Eliezer is like a parent raising a child and giving the kid bad ideas. Imagine bringing up a child and regularly telling the kid, 'You are going to become a mass murderer!' Who could possibly think that is a good idea? If anything, it will raise the chance that the person does eventually become violent in some manner. That is what Eliezer is doing with the AIs, namely giving them bad expectations and bad role models."
Apparently I am not the only person excited about the big new Robert Anton Wilson book (514 pages!), A Non-Euclidean Perspective: Robert Anton Wilson’s Political Commentaries 1960-2005, as the RAW Semantics blog already has a post about it. Whereas I have only gotten a few dozen pages in, as I'm also trying to read two other books at the same time, Brian wasted little time, consuming the book in a weekend:
"Don’t expect smooth surface consistency and neat little category boxes from someone as prolific, pluralistic, open-minded and adaptable-to-situation as Robert Anton Wilson. That’s the 'warning' I’d give to someone, new to RAW’s work, about to read this amazing and exhilarating collection."
Jesse Walker also wrestles with the diversity in his "Discordia Rising" intro to the book.
I also plan to blog about the book, but kudos to Brian for getting out of the gate early! I'll be going back to his notes as I get through the new book.
BTW, amazing art from Brian as usual, please see the post for that, too. I love the comic at the top.
Each year I try to find some horror to read for Halloween, and this time I am reading the Standard Ebooks edition of Melmoth the Wanderer, an 1820 Gothic novel by Charles Robert Maturin. It's great fun so far. The Wikipedia article about the novel convinced me to go ahead and read it, e.g. "The novel was described by H. P. Lovecraft as "an enormous stride in the evolution of the horror-tale", and Maurice Richardson also wrote an essay for Lilliput magazine praising Melmoth. Melmoth the Wanderer was cited by Karl Edward Wagner as one of the 13 best supernatural horror novels. Thomas M. Disch placed Melmoth the Wanderer at number four in his list of classic fantasy stories. Devendra P. Varma described Melmoth the Wanderer as "the crowning achievement of the Gothic Romance". Michael Moorcock has described Melmoth the Wanderer as "one of my favourites".
If you aren't familiar with the website, Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-run organization that attempts to prepare excellent ebooks of public domain works. Here is the site's horror titles, including Dracula, works by H.P. Lovecraft, etc.
La Purísima Mission State Historic Park near Lompoc.
A New York Times photo feature shows the locations over much of California where the new movie, One Battle After Another, loosely based on Vineland, was filmed. The article features photos of California from one end of the state to another. (While I can provide a gift link to the article, I am wary of violating the Times' copyrights, so I have instead taken the above photo from the website for a state park). The Times says the movie "hidden corners of the state that even natives seldom see."
Baruch Spinoza. Created by Barend Graat. Public domain image.
'Vineland' Addendum
By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger
The world moves on a woman's hips
The world moves and it swivels and bops
The world moves on a woman's hips
The world moves and it bounces and hops
– Talking Heads, "The Great Curve" from Remain in Light.
Like many Thomas Pynchon enthusiasts I dived in to Shadow Ticket within days of its release. I strongly suspect Uncle Pinky knew the attention fader would be brought up on Vineland due to the massive publicity halo around One Battle After Another so timed the publication of his latest to shortly follow the cinematic release. Shadow Ticket appears to make sly references back to Vineland like introducing the reader to the Hungarian word for grass: fű which they smoke. Readers of Against The Day with a good memory will recognize Lew Basnight.
Themes, characters, modalities and connections traverse across the Pynchon universe; Basnight makes a great example. Shadow Ticket follows the adventures and misadventures of Hicks McTaggart on what seems to him a dubious mission as a private investigator. Lew Basnight is also a P.I. in Against the Day in the employ of White City Investigations. Basnight becomes Hicks' mentor in Shadow Ticket. The timeline between the two novels even fits. Against the Day ends around 1919 with the events in Shadow Ticket occurring in 1932 and the occasional look back at the 1920s for context.
Arc/arch imagery provides another clear example of cross textual referencing. Pynchon's most famous book, Gravity's Rainbow, begins with the arc of a V2 rocket in WWII England, heard but not seen. Several scholarly interpretations say this refers to the novel's title since a rainbow appears in the form of an arc across the sky. The fourth paragraph of GR shows people evacuating: ". . . they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only look like loops of an underpass . . ." These "secret entrances of rotted concrete" appears either a direct reference or a coincidental parallel with something from Autobiography of a Sufi by E. J. Gold, but I digress. Mason & Dixon, Pynchon's next big epic after GR opens with the phrase: "Snow-balls have flown their Arcs...". In Vineland Hubbel Gates receives word of the birth of his granddaughter Prairie "just as he was cracking apart the first white-flame carbons of the evening into sky-drilling beams of pure arc light" (p. 287). Shadow Ticket has a moment when Hicks lights a cigarette for Daphne, the female cheez heiress he's been hired to bring back home: " . . . bending in toward him carefully, an intimate of flame at many levels from candles to arc lamps . . ." Later, we come across "... thickets of electric arc beams crossing from every roof, prismatic, cylindrical, masses of shadow, flanges of vane and light."
I commented on an arc theme in the discussion group for RAW's The Widow's Son [available here on the right side of the page -- scroll down -- Tom]. I derived that one from the mysterious Latin phrase, Et in Arcadia Ego (And in Arcadia I) that recurs in the plot. In one instance it appears at the end of a list connected to Freemasonry just below La Fils de la Veuve which translates from Latin to "The Widow's Son." Wilson writes: "The last part (of the list), then, was in code. That would not be put into writing at any time, but only communicated viva voce (lively voice)." We've already discussed Pynchon's propensity for using the letter V which continues unabated in Shadow Ticket. I suspect Wilson's use of the three letter Vs in Latin right before and after Arcadia (Veuve, viva voce) signals an arc across the bow from Uncle Bob to Uncle Pinky.
* * * * * *
The philosophical influence of Baruch Spinoza permeates the written output of Pynchon, Wilson and James Joyce, the latter also influencing profoundly the two former. Spinoza seems one of the first philosophers of the modern era to take a scientific approach to the presentation of his thought. He imitates the form of Euclid's classic work on geometry, Elements in his signature work, Ethics. Both Tom and Bob incorporate much Science into their fiction, sometimes rather obscurely. Spinoza famously came up with the concept "Deus sive Natura" in which he postulated an impersonal God that finds expression in Nature. For this new perspective on divinity he was deemed an atheist and excommunicated from the Jewish religion. Others labelled him a pantheist; this seems more accurate. This concept became more popularly known as Nature's God. Wilson used this as the title for his final book in the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles.
Spinoza also had a profound influence on Gilles Deleuze who regarded him as the Christ of philosophers in part, I guess, due to the concept of Nature's God making divinity immanently accessible to anyone. The traditional model of the Judeo-Christian God holds that "he" exists in a transcendental realm outside the direct reach of humanity similar to Plato's Ideal Forms. Deleuze does away with religious sounding language by resurrecting the concept of Univocity or Univocity of Being. Coming from the medieval thinker John Duns Scotus, GD applies it to Spinoza's view that the universe comprises a single substance in an infinite variety of forms. "Being is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself" (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition). All being speaks with a single voice (univocity) in many different ways describes how I understand the concept. This reminds me of viva voce from the Wilson quote above.
A qabalist, being trained in the art of looking at things backwards (see Magick in Theory and Practice by Crowley) might look at Pink's inclusion of dogs in his oeuvre, many of them talking, as a coded reference to God. "Is a God to live in a dog? No! but the highest are of us." (The Book of the Law II:19) I won't pretend to know what that means, I quote it to show a well-known (to occultists) reversal of dog. Joyce uses the dog/god wordplay twice in the Circe episode of Ulysses. Earlier, I listed a number of reversals in Vineland's last chapter, but left a subtle one out. The Bob Dylan reference has a musician alluding to Woody Guthrie ("This machine kills fascists" sign on his guitar) in search of the Vomitones and mentions an album title suggestive of a Dylan album. Woody searching for Dylan reverses the actuality that Dylan went in search of Woody Guthrie (literally and metaphorically) . . . and found him. Recall that Vineland ends with the family dog, Desmond, finding Prairie and thinking he was home. I also gave the Sufi code fog = face of god, representing, perhaps, another material encounter with Nature's God aka Life. "That is god . . . a shout in the street" (Joyce, Ulysses). In a morning broadcast earlier this week Lon Milo Duquette mentioned that Kabbalah influenced both Kant and Spinoza. I personally Kant believe that ... not.
Todd May, a Deleuze scholar, says that Deleuze's favorite Spinoza quote is "We do not even know of what a body is capable." In other words, we don't know what a body can do – speaking of all material bodies. Pynchon's science fiction often explores the abilities humans may acquire through exercising their attention in certain ways. Some of the things he writes about seem possible, i.e. immanent: ESP, astral travel; others, like the Ninja Death touch, further out of reach, but you never know.
Frederich Nietzsche also strongly influenced Pynchon, Deleuze and Wilson. Perspectivism, the idea that any given individual's reality seems an interpretation by that individual, abounds in Pynchon. Also, every reader will have a different perspective on TP's literature. Nietzsche's philosophy affirms life. He opposed the Christianity of his day because he felt them to be nihilistic; they denied life on Earth telling believers to wait for the afterlife when everything will be groovy. Pynchon appears essentially life affirming, in my perspective, while showing much resistance to the affirmation as in Against the Day, or the fascism in Vineland and Shadow Ticket.
I see the conclusion (much of the last chapter) of Vineland as very life affirming. Analyzing the symbolism in the last sentence and a bit we find:
"deer and cows grazing in the meadow" – different species in peaceful harmony; meadow = Old Norse for vin as in Vineland (courtesy of Spookah; see his comment in the last chapter's post for elaboration); the word "meadow" occurs twice in the long penultimate sentence of the book.
"sun blinding in the cobwebs on the wet grass, a redtail hawk in an updraft soaring above the ridgeline"
– much symbolism with "sun," the most obvious being Tiphareth which corresponds to the heart; "redtail hawk = Horus aka "the crowned and conquering child." Horus corresponds with the red planet Mars,
"Sunday morning about to unfold" – an additional solar affirmation.
"when Prairie woke to a warm and persistent tongue all over her face." – tongue suggests the Christian holy day Pentecost when "tongues like as of fire" (Acts 2:3) descended upon the disciples of Jesus after his death. The Hebrew word for tongue adds to 386 which corresponds with Jesus (Sepher Sephiroth).
The Hebrew letter shin looks like this: ש. It's associated with the element Fire. In Kabbalah, the three prongs represent "three tongues of a divine flame" (the Zohar). In Christian Cabala when shin descends into the name of God - YHVH (Jehovah) it forms the word YHShVH (Yeshua = Jesus). This symbolizes the descent of divine spirit into matter, or Qabalistically, Kether into Malkuth. The number 86 and chee-tos in Vineland provide different semiotics representing Kether in Malkuth. In The Book of Lies Chapter 69 "The Way to Succeed and The Way to Suck Eggs!" Crowley writes of tongues and discusses their symbolism in connection with his word/formula ABRAHADABRA which he calls "the Holy Hexagram." The two interlocking triangles (looks like a Star of David) symbolizes the descent of spirit and the ascent of matter. 69 also simply indicates a reversal which we see that Pynchon loves to do. By Notarikon "warm and persistent tongue" = 96 = Work.
"It was Desmond, none other ..." I see the name Desmond as representing the everyday, common WoMan similar to Joyce's HCE. See (or better yet, listen to) "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" by the Beatles. One huge difference between regular Christianity and Thelema is that the former worship an alleged historical character who promises to take care of things if you believe in him. The latter get instructed to make efforts to attain that level of consciousness on their own i.e. the level of Tiphareth which I consider conterminous with Leary's C6.
"the spit and image of his grandmother Chloe" – Grandmother reprises the Mother archetype. Chloe derives from an ancient Greek word meaning"young green shoot", "blooming" or "fertility" and serves as another moniker for the goddess Demeter. The Greeks had a festival in the spring called Chloeia to celebrate the return of plant life. Chloe as "blooming" could refer to Leopold Bloom (central character in Ulysses) in homage to Joyce and/or to Mel Brooks who put Leopold Bloom into his film The Producers. According to Deleuze, sense must get produced (The Logic of Sense). Sense, in Deleuze's rendering, indicates not only linguistic meaning, but also something similar to Bergson's elan vital – vitality.
"roughened by the miles" – there always seems resistance to affirming life; related to the idea that the gnosis always gets busted from Cosmic Trigger I; one battle after another.
"face full of blue-jay feathers" – as discussed earlier, blue connects with Nuit, Crowleys Mom archetype. Attention is repeatedly brought to the striking blue brilliance of Frenesi, Prairie and Sasha's eyes in Vineland. "So she (Nuit) answered him, bending down, a lambent flame of blue, all touching, all penetrant, her lovely hands upon the black earth, & her lithe body arched for love . . ." (BoTL I:26). We also have "Babe in the egg of blue" referring to Hoor Pa Kraat, the female aspect of Horus. Jay appears a somewhat outdated slang word for a reefer joint. For some reason unknown to me Pynchon chooses to hyphenate blue jay in the last sentence in Vineland while the first sentence has blue jay without a hyphen. Maybe a typo? Blue jay appearing at the very beginning and the very end could allude to the circular nature of Finnegans Wake.
"smiling out of his eyes" – reminds me of Learys SMI2LE formula.
"wagging his tail" – a canine affirmation of life
"thinking he must be home." All kinds of obvious symbolism with this, but I'm reminded of a scene from Duck Soup. Pynchon seems a Marx Brothers enthusiast. He has various references to them throughout his works.
This clip only runs for a minute.
* * * * * *
Thomas Pynchon's literature beautifully exemplifies Nietzsche and Deleuze's view of writers as "'physicians of culture' for whom phenomena are signs or symptoms that reflect a certain state of forces." Although written in 1990, Vineland presciently reflects current events most poignantly with the freedom v fascism dialectic. Deleuze writes, "The aim of writing is to carry life to the state of a non-personal power." He looks at the function of literature in an essay called "The Literary Machine."
"For art, Deleuze argues, is essentially productive: the work of art is a machine for producing or generating certain effects, certain signs, by determinable procedures. Proust suggested that his readers use his book as an optical instrument, 'a kind of magnifying glass' that would provide them with 'the means of reading within themselves,' in much the same way that Joyce described his works as machines for producing 'epiphanies.' . . . The question Deleuze here poses to the literary work is not "What does it mean?' (interpretation) but rather "How does it function?' (experimentation)" - from Daniel W. Smith's Introduction to Essays Critical and Clinical by Deleuze.
What kind of machine might Thomas Pynchon's literature be called? How does it function? By no means am I an expert on Pynchon, more of an enthusiast, but I'm brazen enough in my ignorance to hazard a guess. In the Introduction to Slow Learner where he mercilessly criticizes his early short stories, one inside look caught my attention as perhaps indicative of his oeuvre as a whole. Discussing the story "Entropy" he looks at the etymology of the word: "Well, according to the OED the word was coined in 1865 by Rudolf Clausius, on the model of the word 'energy,' which he took to be Greek for 'work- contents.' Entropy, or 'transformation-contents' was introduced as a way of examining the changes a heat engine went through in a typical cycle, the transformation being heat into work."
For the moment, until something better comes along, I choose to think of Pynchon's works as machines for producing "transformation-contents." Earlier I wrote to the effect that what you get out of Pynchon's books appears dependent on the energy put in to understanding them. It requires work of a certain kind. I suspect that simply the effort put in to following the plot with all its twists and turns, digressions, sidetracks and tangents; its obscure words, references and engineering details will necessarily bring about at least some small transformation in the reader's neural circuitry by just attempting to grasp what the hell is going on.
* * * * * *
I thoroughly enjoyed One Battle After Another; perhaps the best action movie to flicker into these eyes. Though not faithful to Vineland, as advertised, I strongly feel that director Paul Thomas Anderson channelled the spirit of it. For instance, since the beginning of this series I've been harping about the problematic fascist dominance of unbalanced, aggressive male energy. Col. Stephen J. Lockjaw, based on Brock Vond and brilliantly played by Sean Penn, gets called "Dickhead" the first time Perfidia Beverly Hills (based on Frenesi) addresses him. I saw other examples that make explicit themes I've written of, but don't wish to give too much away. I'll only say that the film makes a great adjunct for grokking the book, and vice versa.
Shortly before embarking upon this journey, an idea got floated that maybe all this renewed Pynchon interest and energy might serve as a kind of resistance or counterpoint to the fascist power grab going on in the United States, and to some extent, in many other places around the world not fascist already. I considered it a kind of wishful thinking, but to an operator of magick, wishful thinking seems part and parcel of the territory. Then came the excellent report from A Building Roam titled "Return of the Counterforce" which echoes and elaborates upon this sentiment quite well. After voyaging through the powerful trifecta of Vineland, One Battle After Another, and Shadow Ticket I know longer consider it wishful thinking. It looks and feels to me like real magick; different forces at play.
In actual life, Sean Penn, appearing in two of the three, seems an active and dynamic facet of the counterforce with his Community Organized Relief Effort (CORE), "a nonprofit humanitarian organization that responds to disasters around the world." Their logo shows the C and O making an infinity sign. Infinity at the core seems quite appropriate to this Pynchon narrative.
I recently listened to a podcast called "Nietzsche's Most Important Teaching" about his essay "Schopenhauer as Educator." Presented by Keegan Kjeldsen, he states his interpretation of Nietzsche's goal: ". . . to draw the heroic out of us. He wants to draw the aspiration for freedom out of the modern man." I get this feeling from Vineland, an aspiration for freedom. The heroic quite obviously gets drawn out of Bob Ferguson (based on Zoyd, played by Leonardo DiCaprio) in One Battle After Another. After the heyday of his revolutionary life serving as an explosives expert Bob settles into a passive stoner's existence raising his daughter, Willa. The heroic gets comically drawn out of him after Willa gets abducted by Lockjaw and he persistently endeavors to rescue her ... dressed like the Dude.
I have finished an initial go around with Shadow Ticket and recommend it highly. It seems as good or better than anything Pynchon has written. Information rich, it has way more than I could grasp in a single reading. I plan to read it again before writing a review though I don't know when. Two more connections with Vineland to bring up here. Despite the action taking place in Milwaukee, Chicago, Central Europe, the Balkans and at or under the sea, the word "prairie" gets mentioned about 6 times though I wasn't keeping count; once near the very end. The theme of attention comes up a few times, though due to the density and often obscurity of the information in the story, if you blink, you'll miss it.
NPR published an article the other day headlined: "Mental exercise can reverse a brain change linked to aging, study finds." It goes on to say: "A 10 week study of people 65 or older found that doing rigorous mental exercises for 30 minutes a day increased the levels of a chemical messenger acetylcholine by 2.3% in a brain area involved in attention and memory. . . . So at least in this brain area, cognitive training appeared to turn the clock back by about 10 years." Read Pynchon or fiction by Wilson or Joyce, etc, for rigorous mental training that's FUN!
The new Hilaritas podcast on the brand new Hilaritas Press book, episode, with Hilaritas host Mike Gathers chattting with Jesse Walker, books editor of Reason Magazine about A Non Euclidian Perspective, Robert Anton Wilson’s Political Commentaries 1960-2005, is really good. I have embedded the podcast again in this post, but you should be able to find it in your favorite podcasting source or app.
Jesse explains how the big new collection shows off RAW's thinking over a long time period and says many of the pieces in the book will be unfamiliar even to many devoted fans. Jesse also offers his version of the final secret of the Illuminati.
Hilaritas has a podcast coming up on the Robert Shea book I edited. Jesse is among the writers who has endorsed the book, see his endorsement here.
GRAND JUNCTION, COLO. — Hilaritas Press has published the first new book in more than 30 years by Robert Shea, best known for co-writing “Illuminatus!”, the popular cult novel written with his friend, Robert Anton Wilson.
The book “Every Day is a GOOD Day,” a collection of Shea’s writings, is edited by Tom Jackson, a former Lawton resident and reporter for The Lawton Constitution who now lives in Ohio. Jackson has often written about Shea at his RAWIllumination.net website.
Shea was known for his historical novels such as “Shike” and “All Things Are Lights,” books that still draw rave reviews from readers at websites such as Goodreads, Jackson said. When Shea died in 1994, an obituary announced that a book would come out collecting his short pieces. That plan has finally been realized 30 years later with the publication of “Every Day Is a GOOD Day.”
Episode 50 of the Hilaritas Press podcast series features Jesse Walker, who wrote the wonderful introduction I read yesterday to the new Robert Anton Wilson book, A Non Euclidian Perspective, Robert Anton Wilson’s Political Commentaries 1960-2005, which was released yesterday. I have not had a chance to listen yet but will do so soon.
"This book has been a labor of love spanning some three years, where Mike Gathers, Chad Nelson, Jesse Walker and Richard Rasa poured over a mountain of essays, interviews and other writings so we could present an overview of Robert Anton Wilson's political ideas as they evolved over some 45 years. A nod to Tom Clisson, proofreader extraordinaire, is also essential. Jesse Walker, an editor at Reason magazine and author of The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, wrote an extensive introduction for the book, and Jesse did a masterful job at pulling all the threads of RAW's ideas into a coherent picture. Richard Rasa penned an afterword that takes a look at the Guns and Dope Party, RAW's only semi-official dabbling into the political theater when he ran for governor of California in a special election. Rasa's afterword also attempts to examine the question of RAW's standing in terms of left vs right. Fortunately, RAW goes a long way in explaining that himself in one of the essays in this book, that both Jesse and Rasa referenced."
Mr. Walker at the Museum of Illusions in Pittsburgh. This may not be the official jacket flap photo.
From Jesse Walker: "I'm writing another book, folks. It's called THE ANARCHIST AND THE REPUBLICAN, and it relates the stories of Karl Hess, John McClaughry, and the decentralist movements that both men moved through, one working within the system and one ever further from it. It'll be published by Creed & Culture, a new press that's about to debut with a book by Walter McDougall."
Latest newsletter from Tales of Illuminatus comic creator Bobby Campbell:
"Oh, frabjous day! Tales of Illuminatus! #2 “The Invisible Crown” is now available!(Digital version available now! • Print pre-orders are otw! • Kindle pre-orders deliver on the 23rd!)
"Join us for the pulse pounding conclusion to our first trip through the official comic book adaptation of the immortal Illuminatus! Trilogy :))) New mysteries! New realities! New conspiracies!"
More here. It sounds like paper copies will be arriving in the mail soon for Kickstarter supporters. If you were a Kickstarter participant, you should have received an email from Bobby with a download for a digital copy. I got my email for "digital delivery" on Oct. 18. I enjoyed the digital version, I am looking forward to getting my paper copy for the full comic book experience.
Bobby has picked up some nice endorsements for his comic:
“I loved Tales of Illuminatus!”
– Grant Morrison
“This is the yarn that presaged everything we are experiencing today, lovingly translated to a medium through which it can inoculate anyone from the mind virus of certainty. Reality is up for grabs, and you, too, can join the grand conspiracy.”
– Douglas Rushkoff
“Tales of Illuminatus keeps the lasagna flying and playfully rap-tap-taps on your head like the medium has a message for you. If you love your RAW you will love your Bobby Campbell.”
I have lately been reading Don't Try This At Home, an anthology of science fiction convention reports by David Langford. I don't really know most of the fans he talks about in the book, but Langford is a witty and inventive writer, so that keeps me reading.
The ebook is one that I downloaded free from the TransAtlantic Fan Fund Free Ebooks website maintained by Langford. There are 117 titles so far; they are collections of fanwriting written by well-known science fiction fans. The idea is that if you like your free ebook, you invited to donate to the Trans Atlantic Fan Fund, which pays to send SF fans across the Atlantic. I made a small donation as I was working on this blog post.
Many of these TAFF ebooks are convention reports, a staple of SF fanzines.
My new Robert Shea anthology,Every Day is a GOOD Day, includes a convention report written by Shea, "Hasta La Vista, Chicon," a report on the 49th World Science Fiction Convention, held in Chicago in 1991. Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary and Philip Jose Farmer all put in an appearance. Shea was a science fiction fan who went to SF conventions, so the report reflects that side of him.
Gabriel Kennedy/Prop Anon has been awarded the S.I. Hayakawa Book Prize from the Institute of General Semantics for his book, Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson.Prop announced the award on his Substack:
"On October 3rd, 2025, I was presented with the award at the 73rd Annual Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture held at The Players in Manhattan, New York. After punching away at a keyboard in a cloistered warehouse away from the world for longer than I can clearly remember, I received a grand welcome back in the Big Apple from a great group of super smart media ecologists, semanticists, and educators. The weekend was an overwhelming experience that really left me humbled enough to go radio silent for a number of days just to digest the opulent display of hospitality and admiration that both I and my book has received from the IGS. I’m truly grateful."
Follow the link for the acceptance speech and the text of a presentation, "Semantic Engineering: Robert Anton Wilson and the Rewiring of Human Thought."
I was curious about the award, so I found a website which lists some of the other winners, although apparently the site needs to be updated -- the last winner listed is for 2021. It does appear to be an annual award. I can fill in one of the missing years -- in 2022 the award was given to The Genes of Culture: Towards a Theory of Symbols, Meaning and Media Volumes One and Two, edited by Carolyn Wiebe and Susan Maushart.
Many of the others who have won are quite well-known -- some of the past winners include John H. McWhorter, Tom Wolfe, Elizabeth Kolbert and Sherry Turkle. "First given in 2009, the Institute of General Semantics awards the S. I. Hayakawa Book Prize to the most outstanding work published in the past five years on topics of direct relevance to the discipline of general semantics. The prize includes a cash award of $1,000."
[Eric Wagner, author of An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson and Straight Outta Dublin: James Joyce and Robert Anton Wilson, recently contributed to the Vineland online reading group discussed in yesterday's post. -- The Management].
Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon.Penguin Press, 304 pages, released Oct. 7, 2025.
By ERIC WAGNER Special guest blogger
The novel opens with a quote “’Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney...perhaps not.’ - BELA LUGOSI in The Black Cat (1934)." The Monkees film Head used a clip from that film of Bela saying that quote. Bela Lugosi appears in Pynchon’s Against the Day. Pynchon mentions the Monkees on pg. 232 of Inherent Vice. TCM will show The Black Cat on Tuesday, October 21, 2025. Boris Karloff also appears in that film. Mr. Karloff loved cricket, and cricket plays a minor role in Shadow Ticket, but not nearly as big a role as bowling plays in the novel. All the bowling references made me think of my father, a very good bowler. The novel takes place in 1932, the year of my dad’s birth.
Shadow Ticket made me laugh out loud many times. Cheese played an important role in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, and it plays an even bigger role in Shadow Ticket. Reading the ending of Mason & Dixon when it came out in 1997 helped prepare for my dad’s death later that year. Reading the new Pynchon novel reminds me of visiting my mom the last few years of her life. When I would say goodbye to her, I would wonder if I would ever see her again. I feel blessed to get to read the new Pynchon novel, but I don't know if he will ever publish another one. I know he tends to work on multiple projects at once, so who knows what books may emerge in the future.
When I started reading Pynchon in 1983, he only had three books out, and it looked like he might never publish again. My friend Paul Chuey had told me about The Crying of Lot 49, and we had both read Tim Leary's accounts of reading Gravity's Rainbow while in solitary confinement. Paul got me Gravity's Rainbow for Christmas in 1983, and it took me four years to finish it.
Now we have ten Pynchon books and a bunch of secondary material (little of which I've looked at). The Huntington Library has his papers. I wrote to them about looking at the papers, and they said they did not have the papers available for viewing yet. Their tone did not seem encouraging. I don't know if they will allow me near the papers. I don't know if I will ever read Pynchon again after reading this new novel. We will see.
When I finished reading Shadow Ticket a few minutes ago, I declared it a masterpiece, whatever that means. One could read it as a commentary on the world in 2025. It includes a wealthy man who does not pay his bills and who lusts after his daughter. It includes a U-boat used for smuggling, suggesting the submarine Leif Erickson used for smuggling in Illuminatus!.
I am now caught up on the page that has links for all of the reading group posts on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland written by Oz Fritz and Eric Wagner. (You can also find a link to the page if you scroll down a bit on the right side of this page). Oz covered the last chapter with his most recent post, but if Oz and Eric have some further thoughts and want to do another post, they are welcome to send me something, and I will post it here and add it to the links page. Note that you can click the "Thomas Pynchon" tag to get more Pynchon material. The "Vineland" tag points to posts that aren't part of the reading group.
Of course, thanks to the comments from various people, there are good contributions from many of the blog readers. Spookah was particularly active, you can go through the links or click the "Vineland Online Reading Group" tag and find his many contributions.
"Eli Elster, $13K, to research traditional psilocybin use in Africa. Psilocybin, aka magic mushrooms, is in the process of being integrated into mainstream psychiatric practice; it is already approved for treatment-resistant depression in Australia, and undergoing (currently promising) FDA trials in the United States. Much of what we know about the preparation and administration of psilocybin - including widespread ideas about 'set and setting' and 'integration' - comes from traditional use by the Mazaetec Indians. In 2023, anthropologists discovered that traditional healers in Lesotho, Africa also use psilocybin mushrooms - the first time such a practice has been found in the Old World - and that they seem to prepare and administer it differently from the Native Americans. Eli and his collaborator Betsy Sethathi conducted the first in-depth fieldwork on the topic earlier this year; our grant funds a return trip to Lesotho to further investigate their ethnobotanical practices and see if we can learn anything from them."
There are other interesting grants listed in the newsletter, including "a new asteroid-hunting algorithm," "free speech in the UK" and " a secret project involving snakes."
An email sent to Kickstarter backers announces the release of Tales of Illuminatus! #2 "The Invisible Crown" and provides a link for downloading the PDF. The mailing out of print editions will begin soon, Bobby reports.
"In the early 2000s, before YouTube became a sprawling repository of his recorded lectures (over 250), DVDs of McKenna's legendary raps could be obtained from a mail-order catalogue called Sound Photosynthesis. In my early 20s, I watched in awe as McKenna weaved a dizzying array of ideas into what seemed like genuine prophecy. As far as I was concerned, these were the oracular utterances of a modern-day seer. Humanity's survival, I came to believe, was a matter of two things: spreading the use of psychedelics as far as humanly possible, and broadcasting McKenna's message across the entire planet.
"Over the next two decades, as I became more familiar with McKenna's source material (Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, Gordon Wasson, Mircea Eliade, and Marshall McLuhan, primarily), I began to suspect that things were more complicated. As the historian Graham St. John illustrates in Strange Attractor, his delightful new biography of the man, McKenna was a 'master bullshitter'."
A Bluesky posting says, "The film is inching closer to a release, thanks to everyone that has helped along the way. Stay tuned for more details and enjoy!"
Robert Shea with a stack of pages from a novel manuscript. Photo provided by Mike Shea.
The Record North Shore, a Chicago area news site that covers the city's suburbs, has published a well written article on the new Robert Shea anthology, Every Day is a GOOD Day, put out by Hilaritas Press.
While I knew some of the information in the article written by Samuel Lisec, there were also some scoops. The photo, above, was one I hadn't seen before. And the article opens with an anecdote new to me:
One of Mike Shea’s favorite memories of his late father came from watching him write.
Robert Shea — the co-author of the popular series with a cult-following “Illuminatus!” and author of historical novels like “Shike” and “All Things Are Light” — drafted his works on typewriters before he purchased an early Apple IIe computer and backed up all his chapters on floppy disks, Mike recalled.
Once he completed a book, Shea would hand feed each page into a letter-quality printer over the course of two weeks to eventually produce a 10-inch stack of papers he could package and mail from his family’s home in Glencoe to his editor in New York.
“I asked him, ‘God, isn’t this killing you?’” Mike said of his father’s printing process. “He said ‘No, this is the best part. This is the part where I take all of this stuff that’s been sitting in a computer, that doesn’t exist anywhere, and now I’m making it real, I’m physically making it real.’”'
"There is often a scent of madness around Thomas Pynchon's fan base, and I say that as someone who has been one of those fans for around 40 years. The man has a reputation in some quarters as an unapproachable writer rarely read outside the academy, but the Pynchon cultists I encounter are more likely to be eccentric autodidacts prone to building elaborately strange mental models of the world."
In any event, Diana (or "Diana") wants to recommend Prometheus Rising: "For anyone seeking to expand their mind, cultivate self-awareness, or explore altered states of consciousness, Prometheus Rising is both practical and transformative."
I can second the recommendation in the piece for Neal Stephenson's Anathem.
In any event, this blog post is not written using AI. I'm afraid you are stuck with me!
"Shadow Ticket is brisker than Thomas Pynchon's other work, but it's full of his usual vaudevillian sensibility and it addresses his favorite theme: how to live freely under powerful systems of control."
– Andrew Katzenstein, The New York Review.
"I still didn't know what to do to develop Jung's fourth faculty . . . Intuition.
That had to wait until I discovered Acid and Aleister Crowley." – RAW, Cosmic Trigger II.
"They were in a penthouse suite high over Amarillo, up in the eternal wind, with the sun just set into otherworld transparencies of yellow and ultraviolet, and other neon-sign colors coming on below across the boundless twilit high plain, and she was watching him now with newly cleansed attention, her light-bearing hair, against the simplicity out the window, a fractal halo of complications that might go on forever . . . one of those moments men are always being urged to respond to with care and sensitivity."
– Vineland, p. 381
Already I see parallels between Shadow Ticket and Vineland without yet reading the former. For instance, when Sasha and Frenesi first reunite (p. 361 - 362) they dance to the same kind of early jazz music featured in the forthcoming release. On a political/sociological level in Vineland, it seems the fascists have the upper hand. On the personal level, it appears that the main revolutionary characters have found a sense of joy and freedom in their lives despite the revolutionary dream having gone bust. Music has a prominent role in that joy and freedom. The "how" in the NY Review quote gets presented in Vineland through various techniques, instructions, hints, suggestions and allusions to Increase Intelligence – to raise consciousness. The lexicon of correspondences playing out through puns, music, TV and film associations, Qabalah, etc. plays a key role.
The Wilson quote is brilliantly elucidated in a piece by Michael Johnson, "23 Riffs On Robert Anton Wilson, Aleister Crowley, Psychedelics, Intuition, and Everyday Metaphysics" found in Lion of Light. Intuition, related to ESP, seems a product of Leary's extra-terrestrial circuits, maybe C6. Crowley, in this context, seems a conceptual personae for Magick. Learning or knowing how to look up the correspondences of the Tree of Life seems a prerequisite for Magick. I began using Cabala after picking it up from Cosmic Trigger I and Illuminatus! Frequent use of this art exercises and grows the intuition or esp like a bodybuilder going to the gym every day to develop their muscles.
The context of the Vineland quote comes about from Takeshi and DL making love after years of enforced celibacy toward each other. Metaphorically, "a penthouse suite high over Amarillo" puts them in the Supernal Triad on the Tree of Life. Amarillo translates as yellow from Spanish; yellow corresponds with Tiphareth on the Queen Scale of Color. This indicates stage 15, tantric sex, in Leary's 8 Circuit (24 stages) Model of Consciousness. Finally, ". . . a fractal halo of complications that might go on forever" makes a pretty good description of Pynchon's writing in general especially the epics like Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day.
We've seen several parallels between TP and RAW with one or two more to elaborate upon which we'll get to. But it also appears TP became familiar with Timothy Leary's post LSD philosophy. This isn't surprising. Leary read, reread and raved about Gravity's Rainbow when he acquired a jailhouse copy during his period of incarceration. It seems ironic that he didn't pick up on his own influence in Vineland. He probably didn't read it 4 times like I did before I saw it. Vineland gives Ralph Waldo Emerson "quoted in a jailhouse copy of The Variety of Religious Experience, by William James." Both James and Leary taught psychology and philosophy; both worked at Harvard. On page 339 we find Hector "watching Sean Connery in The G. Gordon Liddy Story." Liddy and Leary debated each other in a tour of America in 1982 that got made into a film, Return Engagement. They first met when Liddy, a prosecutor at that time, led a raid on Tim's house in upstate New York looking for drugs. Later, he became one of Nixon's henchmen, initially leading an illegal break-in of the office of a psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg became known for leaking the Pentagon Papers which revealed how much the U.S. government lied to the public about the Vietnam War. Not too long after, Liddy organized the break-in of the DNC offices in the Watergate complex that eventually brought down Nixon. In the 2023 mini-series White House Plumbers we learn that Liddy liked to listen to speeches by Hitler. So the G. Gordon Liddy story at the time he debated Leary shows another iteration of the fascism v. freedom dialectic. Having Sean Connery as the lead seems another of Pynchon's jokes as Connery found fame playing the suave and cool secret agent 007 James Bond while Liddy comes up looking just the opposite in his secret agent attempts.
More irony: right before the Liddy sequence we meet two film investors, Sid Liftoff and Ernie Triggerman, who sign up Hector to make the first anti-drug movie. "Cid," a homonym of Sid, became a slang term for acid - LSD - in the 60's. "Liftoff" seems pretty self-explanatory if one has the slightest inclination for deconstructing signifiers á la James Joyce. Ernie's initials are E.T., the common abbreviation for extraterrestrial. Leary regards the four lower circuits in his model as terrestrial and the four higher circuits as extraterrestrial.
Weed Atman meets Prairie and tells her about his Bardo. He tells her he almost reincarnated as her which I find interesting as earlier I called Weed's name a symbol of the being of Vineland. Weed Atman represents stage 13, the first stage of extraterrestrial consciousness. Leary and Wilson connect that with the Tarot card The Hanged Man in The Game of Life. Stage 14 corresponds with the Death card. Stage 13, like Weed Atman, has to go through death to get to the next stage. Weed describes Rex, the dude that killed him as a "ceremonial trigger-finger" which recalls Ernie Triggerman, ET. I mentioned an illustration of stage 15, tantric sex, above. At the start of that passage Takeshi calls it "Oriental love magic."
At the Becker-Traverse reunion, Prairie gets involved in a "nonstop crazy eights game" with her uncle Pinky. I first got into Pynchon when invited to participate in a reading group looking at Against the Day. The first character in it, Randolph St. Cosmo reminded me of E.J. Gold. I told Gold that a famous writer seems to have based a character on him and that also wrote bardo-like sequences like he did. When I said it was Pynchon, he replied that Tom used to come to his classes down in L.A. and that he thought his name was pronounced "Pink-on." One of the more infamous places Gold gave classes was in a building on Cosmo Street, a street in the heart of Hollywood. St. Cosmo's partner is named Heartsease and she is the first to get pregnant in the novel.
Timothy Leary felt young people held the keys to the future because they appear more open to innovation and change. They seem more adaptable, their belief systems less calcified. Chapter 14 radiates a sweet quality from Zoyd's devotion to baby, then toddler Prairie. After being set-up, Zoyd goes through a metaphorical death/rebirth at the prospect of going to jail for years separated from his daughter. He starts acting like a baby crying all the time. Another metaphorical birth into a higher stage of evolution occurs when DL and Takeshi start being lovers. Extraterrestrial levels of consciousness seem extremely volatile until stabilized through repeated exposure and exploration. Pynchon alludes to that here (p. 383):
". . . though you could tell the Head Ninjette was interested at least in a scientific way in whether the Baby Eros, that tricky little pud-puller, would give or take an edge regarding the unrelenting forces that leaned ever after the partners into Time's wind . . ." He continues by illustrating some of the specific impedances or resistances to staying high. Timothy Leary, following Aleister Crowley, persistently applied scientific principles and techniques to the personal evolutionary process. The initials of "Baby Eros" spells BE. Hamlet's famous line" "To be or not to be that is the question" definitely applies to residencies in the extraterrestrial territories of the brain and nervous system.
This recalls a scene from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life more effectively communicated through a video clip. It's titled "People Aren't Wearing Enough Hats" and clocks out at 1:40 in length. " Wearing Hats" can serve as a Cabalistic metaphor for trying to reach the ET circuits.
Something Bobby wrote in one of the Pynchon comments inspired me to consider the "soul" as in a box similar to the one Schrödinger placed a cat in his famous thought experiment where it's unknown whether the cat survives a quantum process that potentially releases a poison gas. The outcome appears uncertain until the box gets opened and a measurement taken. The soul's development looks unknown until we open the box (C1-4) at death – either literal . . . or metaphorical as in the death of the ego. Sorry for the digression, I got distracted.
* * * * * *
I've outlined a number of congruencies between the writings of Bob Wilson and Tom Pynchon. However, I missed the Nixon Monument image that appears in both Illuminatus! and Vineland. Thank-you Tom Jackson for showing it the light of day. Cabalisticaly, they both use the word "colossus", but Pynchon alters course slightly. Illuminatus! signifies the former president by his full name, "Richard Milhous Nixon." RMN = 290 = "Thine enemy." Vineland has: " . . . on how the work was going on the new Nixon Monument, a hundred-foot colossus in black and white marble at the edge of a cliff . . ."(p. 205). NM = 90 = The Emperor (tarot) qualified by 100 = The Moon (tarot). In a classic Pynchon technique, he mixes black and white for a symbolic chiaroscuro effect. The darkness of Nixon blends with "the odor of marijuana smoke" in the next sentence; young people ("student body") getting high. Then there's some word play with statues and "statutes about Being In A Place." BIAP = 93. Illuminatus! remains an important work in the canon of the 93 current, i.e. Magick and Thelema. As a student with a body I first learned about Aleister Crowley and his philosophy through Cosmic Trigger I and Illuminatus! I definitely wasn't alone. Grady McMurty, the Outer Head of the O.T.O. gave Lon Milo Duquette a copy of Illuminatus! after his initiation into the order. Duquette tells the story in Lion of Light. In Gold's school "Being" aka the Voyager replaces the soul as a term for what survives death. Crowley uses the word "place" magically in chapter 57 of the Book of Lies. Pynchon gives us a hawk, a symbol of Horus and the 93 current in the penultimate sentence of the book.
Pynchon circles back to this chiaroscuro image in chapter 14 referring to: "the increasingly mysterious activities necessary to get Hector's colossal dopechunk out of the house again." Colossal connects back to colossus; much much more marijuana in the picture. I consider this a form of magic realism.
At one of the talks they gave together at the 1980 Cosmicon Convention in San Francisco E.J. Gold and Robert Anton Wilson got into a discussion on the trope that the original script for the TV series Star Trek had been written by Gurdjieff; the main characters represented the different centrums with the whole ship being a composite terrestrial human voyaging out into extraterrestrial territories. Scotty, the ship's engineer personified the physical centrum, Leary's C1. Leonard McCoy, the ship's doctor aka Bones stood in for the emotional centrum, C2. Spock, obviously, portrayed the intellectual centrum, C3. Captain James T. Kirk represented the personality, C4. I haven't heard this talk in a number of years, but do recall Gold and Wilson disagreeing on one of these attributions; not sure which one. This trope seems part of Star Trek lore, it wasn't originated by them, I don't know where it came from, but it was out there in the underground buzz. References to Star Trek appear in Vineland more than any other show. This esoteric, albeit fictional interpretation perfectly suits the theme in Vineland of being on the edge of humanity's next big cosmic step. The valorization of surf as in the College of the Surf fits this model too. The surf exists at the edge of sea and land. Going out into space represents humanity's next big evolutionary step according to Leary and Wilson comparable in scope to life emerging out of the ocean to evolve new land dwelling biological forms. In the 1970s, 80s and 90s it felt like we were on the edge of this; that's what was advertised. The College of the Surf seems a humorous stand-in for Vineland itself considering the idea of educating young people for the next big evolutionary step.
Pynchon tweaks the Star Trek memes for his own purposes. He creates a fictional offshoot, Say, Jim (p. 370) where all the actors are black except the communications officer, Lieutenant O'Hara, an Irish twisting of Uhura. This harkens back to the Black Panthers acquiring Rex's precious wheels and naming it Uhuru – another example of the author mixing white and black. In this spinoff, whenever Spock comes on the bridge they all make the Vulcan hand salutes "and went around high-threeing" suggesting Binah. Chapter 15 shows multiple references to the Mother archetype both implicit and explicit. Hector, Sid and Ernie dine at Ma Maison. Interpreting the first word in English, the second in French gives "Mom's House." House = beth = The Magus (tarot). One of my favorites comes when Zoyd's lawyer brings up luck and chance culminating in the phrase "... life is Vegas." Vegas = 75 = Nuit. When Crowley was asked what life is he answered "a play of Nuit" (Tobias Churton, Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin)
The riff on luck and Vegas ties in to Nietzsche's philosophy of valorizing operations of chance and random processes. "Nietzsche means that we have managed to discover another game, another way of playing: we have discovered the Overman (ET consciousness) beyond two human-all-too-human ways of existing; we have managed to make chaos an object of affirmation instead of positing it as something to be denied."
(Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy).
When the three female Traverse descendants, Sasha, Frenesi and Prairie meet up at the reunion, Grandma Sasha breaks the ice by treating Prairie like a young child. They reminisce over baby Prairie (less than 4 months old) first noticing the Tube with Gilligan's Island. This appears another show where a ship enters the unknown away from most humans though this time unintentionally, only because they hit a storm and got lost. They have to learn to survive by their wits. It seems a little analogous to a new life coming into the world and having to learn all the basics of survival. In one of the MLA online courses RAW had Eric Wagner provide the Leary brain circuit correspondences for the crew on Gilligan's Island. I don't remember them all. The Professor obviously appears C3 and I remember the Skipper as C2. The name Gilligan when Cabalistically analyzed fits in with the lexicon and themes of Vineland. I'll save that for another time.
It delighted me to find a clear Bob Dylan allusion. Right near the end Prairie meets a young Russian fisherman looking for American rock and roll. He has an acoustic guitar "with Cyrillic stenciling on it, as if he'd been preparing to use it as a weapon." This alludes to the sign Woody Guthrie had on his acoustic guitar, "This machine kills fascists." Alexi asks Prairie if she knows the Vomitones "'83 Garage Tapes."
suggesting Bob Dylan and the Band's quite famous Basement Tapes. Dylan began his performing life imitating Woody Guthrie and hitchiked to New York to meet him. Pynchon even gives the genealogy of a brief music reference.
Desmond the dog seems to have been named after a character in the Beatles' "Ob la Di, Ob la da" song. Listen to it and you'll hear themes from Vineland. In one verse Desmond watches the children while his wife Molly does her face then goes singing with a band. In the next verse it's Molly who watches the children while Desmond does his face then sings with a band. Pynchon clearly loves to reverse things. In this chapter alone he reverses the orientation of Heaven and Hell, the skin color of the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise and makes the Woody Guthrie-like character a Russian.
Hector throws out a number when negotiating with Sid and Ernie: 2.71828 (p. 342). This is known as Euler's number. It's used to calculate compound interest, but also appears fundamental in differential calculus which measures rates of change. This might be another reference to Deleuze's philosophy of difference. He goes into differential calculus looking at how things change to become different though he never brings up Euler's number. Eula Becker Traverse is the matriarch of the Becker/Traverse clan. Make of that what you will.
Fog comes up repeatedly in Vineland, almost like a non-human character. The Sufis use that word as an acronym for "face of god." Most, but not all of the time, fog just seems like fog. Sometimes the Sufi pun works. It's also in the penultimate sentence.
I suspect Pynchon tricks the reader in the final paragraph of the novel. It seems ambiguous.
Vineland and RAW's Schrödinger's Cat end the same way: with something beloved returning home.
Thank-you everyone for your presence and attention.
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