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

Thursday, September 18, 2025

Valis trilogy on sale


I think of ebooks as modern paperbacks, i.e. inexpensive ways to build one's personal library, and I like to occasionally note book sales that might be of interest to readers of this blog. I noticed this week that the Amazon Kindle ebook version of Philip K. Dick's Valis trilogy (VALIS, The Divine Invasion, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer) is about $2 right now, cheaper than many cups of coffee. (If  you don't want to give your money to Amazon, you can also get it as an ebook for $2 from Barnes and Noble.

Dick is an example of a classic science fiction writer whose books often go on sale as ebooks; I've noticed that Philip Jose Farmer, Poul Anderson and Clifford Simak books, for example, are also often cheap. I recently took advantage of a similar sale to buy and read Dick's Flow My Tears the Policeman Said when it also sent on sale for about $2; it's back up to $14 now. I thought it was one of Dick's best books. 




Wednesday, September 17, 2025

About the new 'Pynchon movie'


Paul Thomas Anderson (Creative Commons photo, details)

One Battle After Another, the new loose adaptation of Vineland by director Paul Thomas Anderson, has gotten Thomas Pynchon's blessing, according to an interesting article at The Film Stage

“ 'Realistically, for me, Vineland was going to be hard to adapt. Instead, I stole the parts that really resonated with me and started putting all these ideas together. With [Pynchon’s] blessing,' Anderson notes, confirming he’s one of the rare individuals on the planet who has crossed paths with Pynchon, the reclusive postmodernist author whose new book Shadow Ticket arrives just after One Battle hits theaters."

Describing the new movie, the article says, "While the story of revolutionaries is inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland (moving up the events a few decades), Anderson’s film barely lifts a sentence from its source material, instead using just the basic structure to tell a story all his own."

I have not crossed paths with Pynchon (that I know of, of course) but when I read Chapter 11 of Vineland, I did wonder if Pynchon has been to Oklahoma, where I grew up and lived for any years and still have relatives; the description of Oklahoma City was accurate, and the details of the big storm coming into the city sounded like it came from someone who was familiar with Oklahoma's violent thunderstorms. I ran a couple of searches, but I can't find any proof Pynchon has traveled to Oklahoma.

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

'Stop blaming them'

Tyler Cowen

[Tyler Cowen says the following is "more political" than his usual posts, and it's more political than MY usual posts, but I think it fits  in well for a Robert Anton Wilson blog, given that RAW was opposed to scapegoating groups (see for example, "Shocking Hidden Facts About Male Non-Violence" from Email to the Universe.) -- The Management.]

One of the most dangerous collectivist arguments in the wake of Kirk’s murder is to blame the “trans community.” Some have reported that Robinson lived with a transgender romantic partner. Regardless of whether this proves to be true, there is no good evidence that trans individuals are especially likely to commit murder (try asking Grok). There is also no evidence that this particular trans individual contributed to the murder plot; rather, reports indicate the person in question is cooperating with the authorities.

If there is generalized evidence for anything, it is that trans individuals are likely to be the victims of violent attacks.

And yet, Elon Musk is approvingly reposting the following: “It’s time for a complete and total ban on cross-sex hormones. They cannot change your sex. They turn men with perverse fetishes into deranged bioweapons, and women trying to escape sexual trauma into androgynous osteoporotic goblins. These people need to spend a long time in an asylum—some of them, indefinitely.”

Constitutional rights, anyone? The right for peaceful individuals to avoid involuntary incarceration? How about basic toleration? Musk is an individualist in many other contexts, but it appears not this one. As a strategy matter, why go out of your way to make left-wing charges against the right seem plausible?

-- Tyler Cowen (source)

Monday, September 15, 2025

'Vineland' online reading group, Chapter 12


Fred Astaire in 1941 (public domain photo). 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger 

Another tai chi reference on page 264: I started doing t’ai chi ten years ago, and I have not reread this book during that time. This morning I heard a bit of a review of the Sex and the City sequel on television, and while reading the scene of Frenesi and DL talking in Mexico, I imagined Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Catrall playing them. (They could take turns playing the parts, the way some actors take turns playing Iago and Othello.) 

I put an asterisk in the upper right hand corner of page. 265, probably back in 2006 when I taught this novel in a community college English class. I don’t remember doing it, and I don’t remember why, but I find this paragraph ominous in 2025: 

“Then again, it’s the whole Reagan program, isn’t it – dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity - ‘I don’t like the way it came out, I want it to me be my way.’ If the President can act like that, why not Brock?”  

The reference to Fred and Ginger on the next page makes me think of David Thomson’s idea of casting Fred Astaire as Dr. Jekyll and Jimmy Cagney as Mr. Hyde. Fred would have made a great Brock Vond. 


Saturday, September 13, 2025

Michael Johnson's book reviews

Michael Johnson's latest Overweening Generalist Substack episode, "Book Reviews on Acid." , is a roundup of reviews of three books: Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium by Erik Davis; The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary by Susannah Cahalan and Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age by Norman Ohler. 

The reviews are well-written and Michael brings considerable knowledge of his own to bear; these reviews would not be out of place in a slick magazine or the New York Times book review section, but we get to read them in a Substack sent out as an email (or if you prefer, at the website or in your smartphone app.) If you haven't checked out Michael's newsletter, this would be one place to start. 

The book on Rosemary Woodruff Leary is not a flattering portrait of Timothy Leary, as other reviewers of the book have noted; I thought Michael handled it well. 

Friday, September 12, 2025

RAW biography now available in Spanish

 


Here is something interesting: the RAW biography, Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson, by Gabriel Kennedy,  is now available in Spanish. Details here.  Aurora Dorada (e.g., "Golden Dawn Editions") is located in Spain. "Independent publishing house of underground esotericism, counterculture and Lovecraftian themes founded in Xàtiva in 2019 ... Among its most notable authors are: H.P. Lovecraft, Austin Osman Spare, Arthur Machen, Aleister Crowley, Thomas Ligotti, Clark Ashton Smith, Phil Hine, Michael Bertiaux, Phil Baker, Peter J. Carroll, Nema Andahadna and S.T. Joshi." The book can apparently be ordered from the publisher, but if you want to search for it from another vendor, the title in Spanish is La Capilla Peligrosa. Vida y crímenes mentales de Robert Anton Wilson.

Thursday, September 11, 2025

'Tales of Iluminatus #2' close to being finished

 


Bobby Campbell reports that the second issue of his Tales of Illuminatus! comic book series will be out soon:

"I'm very happy to announce that we are in the final stages of production on Tales of Illuminatus! #2!

"Specifically, I only have 5 pages left to draw :)))

"We didn't win a lottery spot to exhibit at the Small Press Expo this year, so our hard deadline got a little softer, but the end is still very much nigh!

"I'll be shutting down late Kickstarter pledges next Friday (9/19) and begin the process of collecting addresses for shipping out our pre-orders.

"I'm not quite ready to nail down a specific date yet, as circumstances remain variable, and I'm leaning towards quality over speed, so I hope you will accept an amorphous, yet incandescent, 'SOON'."

More details at the Substack, which you can subscribe to. 


Wednesday, September 10, 2025

RAW Semantics on physicist Roger Jones


 A new post from Brian Dean, "‘Physics as Metaphor’ & RAW." It begins:

"Here’s a book that Robert Anton Wilson cites intriguingly: Physics as Metaphor, by Roger Jones (1982). And what an unexpectedly wide, deep and luxuriant read. Bob W. references it several times, and it’s on at least one of his book lists (’50 books from the library of Robert Anton Wilson’, RE/Search #18). I said 'unexpectedly' as I haven’t seen it mentioned before in the wider Wilson world. Hence this post, and a query."

As is usual with Brian, the accompanying artwork is arresting, and as is usual with me, I've nicked one. 


Tuesday, September 9, 2025

I keep running into Yukio Mishima

 


Yukio Mishima in 1955. Public domain photo by Ken Domon. 

If you are a serious reader, you have probably heard of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, who died in 1970, age 45, in a ritual suicide after a failed coup attempt. 

For years, I didn't consider reading him, in spite of his literary fame, as I assumed he was the sort of ultranationalist, far right wing nut who could be safely ignored. Lately, though, I have wondered if he falls into the Ezra Pound category, i.e. a person with terrible politics who is nonetheless worth reading. I keep running into references to him by people who have nothing to do with Mishima's  political views.

I am a fan of the surrealist American poet Charles Henri Ford (1908-2002) and when I read one of his anthologies, I noticed a poem about Mishima (titled "Mishima," as part of "Four Elegies.") It's not entirely flattering ("Actually you were more attracted to power than to people or to art") but the fact that Ford bothered to write about him at all interested me.

I don't know what Robert Anton Wilson thought about Mishima, but Robert Shea was a fan. Here's an interview with Shea is Science Fiction Review:

SFR: What contemporary authors do you get the most out of reading?

SHEA: The list is continually undergoing revision as my taste changes and my reasons for reading change, but John Fowles, Romain Gary, Norman Mailer, Yukio Mishima, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Thomas Pynchon, J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert Penn Warren seem to have taken up permanent residence in my literary pantheon.

I am currently reading Kumano Kodo: Pilgrimage to Powerspots (about an old pilgrimage trail in Japan) by J. Christian Greer and Michelle K. Oing, and it relates a short story by Mishima.

So: Should I read Mishima? 


 

Monday, September 8, 2025

'Vineland' online reading group, Chapter 11



By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger

"The informal slogan around 24fps was Che Guevara's phrase 'Wherever death my surprise us.' It didn't have to be big and dramatic, like warfare in the street, it could happen as easily where they chose to take their witness, back in the shadows lighting up things the networks never would ..."Vineland, p. 202-203

"Those thinkers in whom all stars move in cyclic orbits are not the most profound: whoever looks into himself as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence."
– Nietzsche, The Gay Science 

The character Weed Atman has an interesting name. Sometimes Pynchon goes opaquely occult with his signifiers, other times he's screamingly obvious. Atman is a Sanskrit term for the True or Deep Self. It's the part of you that survives obliteration in death and gets reincarnated, according to Hindu doctrine. Atman can also get thought of as the essential nature of something. In philosophy they talk about the being of this or that. To give one example, Deleuze wants to find the being of the sensible in his philosophy of difference. Weed Atman could signify the being, or the essential character of Vineland given that various forms of cannabis consumption - weed - run throughout the book. Not necessarily the character Weed Atman, but his name, the only name in the book with this blatant a definition.

To state the obvious, marijuana has an explicit role in Vineland. After breakfast, Zoyd begins his day (and the book) smoking half a joint. If a reader proved highly suggestible, they'd already be stoned in the second page of text. We find two or three amusing cannabis references in the working practices of the 24fps enclave in chapter 10. There's another weed reference in chapter 11; I think a character turns up with a joint in their mouth. To state the less obvious, marijuana has an implicit role in this book. In chapter 10 we find DL's initials given a number of times and at least once in chapter 11.
DL = 34. Chapter 34 in The Book of Lies is called "The Smoking Dog".  Pynchon seems quite fond of both smoking (weed) and dogs. Vineland starts (the Copeland quote) and ends with a dog. I'll leave that for the reader to unlock.

DL's initials appear capitalized (although reversed) as Love and Death in "The Smoking Dog." I highly recommend reading that chapter and commentary as an adjunct to reading Vineland. It's easily found online and clocks in at less than two pages long. Crowley calls Love and Death "greyhounds" that chase us. Pynchon puts us in a greyhound bus station with Zoyd and a baby Prairie in a later chapter, 14, I believe. DL herself seems all about death and love with the vibrating palm delivering death and her love for Frenesi, Takeshi, and the gesture of love she showed Prairie. Also, D = daleth = Venus, the goddess of love.

Apart from entertaining his audience in such a delightful way, Pynchon provides keys for establishing a presence in the higher dimensions – Leary's brain circuits or systems 5 through 8. Weed Atman appears as one of two characters who starts out living but ends up dead, in the bardo as a Thanatoid. In general, the bardo can be thought of as the territory "in between." Metaphorically speaking, an explorer of higher modalities (brain circuits 5 - 8) needs to temporarily die to their conventional self image, their mundane identity (as determined by their experiences and actualizations in C 1 - 4) in order to establish a lasting awareness in C 5- 8. We can think of that presence in the higher circuits as our Atman, our True Self. Weed Atman, the being of Vineland, seems an obvious key for getting there. According to Wilson and Leary, marijuana activates C5. Though I suspect Pynchon doesn't care much for Bob Dylan (I could be wrong) the 24 fps slogan 'Wherever death may surprise us' reminds me of "Rainy Day Woman #12 & #35."



Weed Atman, the being of Vineland. I submit that atman symbolizes the land of the vine, the territory of the higher dimensions. Ingesting cannabis seems one easy way to start off in that direction when somewhat adhering to set, setting and dosage guidelines. According to Google AI's Overview: "A true vine is a long-stemmed plant that uses other objects for support as it climbs to reach sunlight. It develops specialized climbing structures like tendrils (eg., grapevines) or clinging aerial roots (eg., ivy) to attach to surfaces." This seems isomorphic to connecting more consciously with the inner galaxies that make up the atman.

* * * * * * 

This appears the 4th chapter in a row giving an emphasis on attention: "Then, in a shot of the whole crowd, she noticed this moving circle of focused attention as somebody made his way through, until a tall shape ascended to visibility. "Weed!" they cried, like a sports crowd in another country, the echo just subsiding before the next Weed!" This quote also could serve as an illustration of someone moving into the higher dimensions ("another country"). It will be observed by those who pay attention to these things that Pynchon's use of the SC combination has noticeably increased in frequency since Prairie made her Spinach Casserole with its UBI (universal basic ingredient though universal basic income works just as well in the occult symbolism of SC). Most of this chapter takes place at the College of the Surf; the quote has "sports crowd."

Earlier someone mentioned family as a recurring trope or theme in Vineland. In Chapter 11 we hear about "Weed's infamous family weekend get-togethers, when everybody was supposed to wallow in retro-domestic Caring and Warmth ...". Vineland ends with a big, annual family reunion. The only other main character who dies (maybe) in the book does so at the end. I have no idea if this has any relevance.

The storm that occurs when Frenesi and Brock are in Oklahoma that they also track on the Tube shows parallels with Pynchon's first published story, "The Small Rain." It's set in the aftermath of a weather event responsible for a lot of death. Like Wilson, Tom spreads his characters and themes throughout his written output. For instance, 86 has come up a bit in the Vineland discussion. Speaking of his younger self in the 3rd person on page 1 of his introduction to Slow Learner: "I mean I can't very well 86 this guy from my life." In the same introduction Pynchon explicitly connects the SC code with "The Small Rain" by informing us that the characters in it comprise a branch of the military called Signal Corps. The SC combo doesn't appear in the story at all.

The College of the Surf recalls a brief but scintillating adventure in my younger days. In 1978 a friend and I hitchhiked down to California from Western Canada. We spent a few days at Isla Vista, the locale of the University of California at Santa Barbara. One evening we hung out around the small night life area buying beer for underage students. We were underage too, the drinking age was 21 at the time, we were 18 but I guess we looked older due to our scruffy appearance from living on the road. The night before, we had tried staying in Santa Barbara on the beach, but were accosted by the police with their guns drawn on us – the only time that's happened to me. After searching us and failing to find any drugs, they took us to an area where homeless people camped and told us to get out of town before sundown the following day. After helping the students obtain their drug of choice, we dropped some acid and had a wonderful all night adventure finally crashing at dawn by the ocean. LSD gets a mention in Chapter 11.

The chapter ends with an interesting passage showing Frenesi reflecting on life, time and the way of service: "...time was rushing all around her, these were rapids and as far ahead as she could see it looked like Brock's stretch of the river, another stage, like sex, children, surgery, further into adulthood perilous and real, into the secret that life is soldiering, that soldiering includes death, that those soldiered for, not yet and often not in on the secret, are always, at every age, children" (p. 216). We see a lot there – Frenesi comparing her life to a river recalls Finnegans Wake; maybe a reference to Chapel Perilous; soldiering for children aligns with some lines from The Book of the Law, etc.  What struck me the most was that I had never considered surgery as a stage in life. But I guess as you get older and the body starts to fall apart all the medical stuff one has to go through does become a stage in life. I can relate to that.

Synchronicity: when researching atman I found out that the root word it comes from means breath. On Wednesday, someone I know very well went in for a lung biopsy and relayed a coincidence. One of the nurses asked what kind of music would he like to hear during the procedure. He said older Pink Floyd, please. When they wheeled him into the operating room the song "Breathe" from Dark Side of the Moon was playing. It couldn't be a more perfect choice, he thought.

Next week: please read Chapter 12, pages 218 - 268.

Sunday, September 7, 2025

More on basic income

 


The links-with-commentary is one of my favorite items in the Astral Codex Ten Substack, and the "Links for September 2025" did not disappoint. After I did the recent posting on new basic income information, and read the comments that followed, I discovered that Scott also had covered the recent controversy (item No. 54). Scott adds this bit:

"GiveDirectly, a charity involved in basic income experiments, has a response here; they say that some studies are positive, and that the ones that aren’t might have tried too little cash to matter, or been confounded by COVID making everything worse. They also point out that basic income is harder to study than traditional programs like giving people housing, because if you’re giving housing you can measure housing-related outcomes directly and have a pretty good chance of getting enough statistical power to find them, but since everyone spends cash on different things, the positive effects might be scattered across many different outcomes (and therefore too small to reach significance on each).

"Everyone involved in this debate wants to emphasize that the poor results are for First World studies only, and that studies continue to show large benefits to giving cash in the developing world."

There are also other points Scott makes.

Also in the same newsletter, interesting news about AI, age of consent in different European countries and other matters, including the observation, "Andy Masley’s AI art is good." An example is above. 


Saturday, September 6, 2025

'Magnificent Ambersons' to get AI treatment



Photo from the Magnificent Ambersons, with Anne Baxter in the middle. 

From the Hollywood Reporter:

"Since the rise of generative artificial intelligence in 2022, the technology has mostly been plugged into parts of the production pipeline as far as its deployment in Hollywood. Think visual effects, dubbing and storyboarding. As it stands, it’s mostly thought of as a tool to streamline certain processes and cut costs.

"But others have their sights set on completely overhauling the entertainment industry’s use of AI. At the forefront: Showrunner, which plans to reconstruct the destroyed 43 minutes of Orson Welles‘ The Magnificent Ambersons."

More here. 

This is an update to some news I reported back in 2023, but AI wasn't mentioned yet. 

Still no word on using AI to restore the lost pages from Illuminatus! That's a joke, of course. Well, I think it is ...

Friday, September 5, 2025

New studies don't cast basic income in a good light


Photo by Colin Watts on Unsplash

I've done past blog posts on the basic income guarantee, the idea that the government should use cash transfers to make sure everyone has a minimum income, because it's an intriguing idea and Robert Anton Wilson was interested in it. 

I've noticed recent news here and there that recent studies of such programs haven't been very encouraging, and Substacker Noah Smith, in a recent piece, has a good summary, excerpt:

"In recent years, some new research has come out that tempered my enthusiasm for the cash benefit revolution. First, a basic income trial in Denver failed to decrease homelessness, which is one thing you’d really like to see basic income do. Then, an even bigger basic income trial in Texas and Illinois found that just $1000 a month caused 2% of people to stop working — a very big disemployment effect, contradicting the results of earlier studies. Worryingly, this study is much more believable than any of the more optimistic studies, since it’s a very large randomized controlled trial. (Of course, it’s just one study; the papers showing little effect are still more numerous, even if no single one is as reliable.)

"Meanwhile, a lot of these studies are finding that cash benefits aren’t really doing much to improve quality of life for the people who get the cash. You can measure various things we think curing poverty ought to improve, like health, education, employment, housing, etc. And unfortunately, these recent studies show that cash benefits aren’t making those indicators look much better."

There's more at the link. I should note that Smith still favors cash transfers:

"A more valid counterargument — and one that Bruenig touches on, but could have been a lot more explicit about — is that poor people having more cash is simply a good thing in and of itself, whether or not their kids become healthier or they get a better education or they report less depression. Being able to afford more food, more transportation, more housing, etc. makes your life better, even if it doesn’t make you lead a healthier lifestyle."

In his newsletter, in an issue that I can't link to because its behind a paywall, Richard Hanania says those results are unsurprising. "The underlying premise was wrong. There's this idea that poor people are just normal people with less money, rather than understanding they're poor in the first place because they have dysfunctional traits. Money will not solve low intelligence, poor impulse control, an inability to cope with unexpected challenges, etc. This is something conservatives have been historically more likely to take for granted."




 

Thursday, September 4, 2025

Who's our greatest living novelist?


Richard Powers (Creative Commons photo by Phoebe Ayers, details here.)

In his recent piece on Thomas Pynchon that I blogged about a few days ago, PQ writes, "Pynchon is arguably the greatest living novelist on the strength of Gravity's Rainbow (1973) alone ... "

This is obviously not an unreasonable opinion, but it made me wonder what other writers plausibly could be suggested. (For the sake of discussion, let's limit this to writers from the U.S.) Colson Whitehead? Don DeLillo? Anne Tyler? N.K. Jemisin? Alice Walker? Stephen King? Percival Everett? Barbara Kingsolver? Who am I missing?

My three favorite "name" writers are Richard Powers, Neal Stephenson and Tom Perrotta. Whenever any of those three issues a new book, I have to read it, ASAP. 

Powers probably would be the writer among those three with the biggest literary reputation. He won the National Book Award for The Echo Maker, the Pulitzer Prize for The Overstory and was awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant. The Gold Bug Variations is another well-regarded novel, and I liked Playground, the one that came out last year. 

I actually interviewed Powers via email after another novel I liked, Orfeo, was published, here is my interview. 


Wednesday, September 3, 2025

What we read last month


What I read last month:

The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin, Michel Krielaars. About musicians and composers who faced persecution in the Soviet Union. I especially liked the chapter on Prokofiev.

Keys to a Successful Retirement: Staying Happy, Active, and Productive in Your Retired Years, Fritz Gilbert. Some good ideas.

Salt, Adam Roberts. First novel by a British writer I have gotten interested in. Roberts is consistently a good read. 

The Sex Magicians, Robert Anton Williams. A re-read to participate in the online reading group at the Jechidah blog. 

The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism, James Warren editor. A good collection of essays. I've now read 14 books on Epicureanism.

The Book of Forbidden Words: A Liberated Dictionary of Improper English, Robert Anton Wilson. An easy read, I learned some things. Not a core RAW book for me. 

What Mark Brown read last month: 

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem  8/2  

Beyond Apollo by Barry N. Malzberg  8/8 

The Jonah Kit by Ian Watson  8/16  

The Illuminati Papers by Robert Anton Wilson  8/20   

Mythologies by Roland Barthes  8/21   

The Deathworld Trilogy by Harry Harrison  8/31

I'm busy reading classic science fiction this month as a judge for the Prometheus Hall of Fame award, so my list next month will look more like Mark's. 

 

Tuesday, September 2, 2025

An 'Illuminatus!' anniversary


Alerted by an anonymous comment to Sunday's post about Illuminatus!, I pulled my old copy of The Eye in the Pyramid, dating to the 1970s, off my bookshelf and read that the first printing was September 1975. In other words, this month is the 50th anniversary of the publication of the first book of the trilogy! I am particularly delighted about this for reasons that will become clear shortly. 

Monday, September 1, 2025

'Vineland' online reading group, Chapter 10



By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

Deep breath. Most of what I remember and most of what I love about this novel happens in the first half of the book. Perhaps I will understand and appreciate the balance of the novel reading it in 2025, Thanatoids and all. I did enjoy the bit about Rolls Royces in chapter nine.  

The discussion of faces on film on page 195 makes me think of two things. First, I think of the character on Fear the Walking Dead who recorded interviews with people about their experiences during the zombie apocalypse. Second, I think about the documentary Hôtel Terminus. The surviving members of the French Resistance in that film seem full of life, whereas the collaborationists and Nazis seemed, as Pynchon says, “evasive, affectless, cut off from whatever they had once been by promises of what they would never get to collect on?” 

Pg. 197, xanthorcroid means, “of, relating to, or designating races having light-coloured hair and a pale complexion” according to Collins Dictionary. That fits with the reference to the sisters’ attitude towards the surfing community in this passage. 


Sunday, August 31, 2025

Michael Johnson on 'Illuminatus!'


Michael says this copy of the book is signed! I still have my three original 1970s mass market paperbacks, but I'm afraid they aren't signed. 

The latest Michael Johnson piece for Substack, "Thoughts on the Structure of Illuminatus!," takes on one of my favorite literary works. Michael explains that it is an "anatomy" under Norbert Frye's definition and offers other points. I am wary of trying to summarize Michael's new piece, but you can read it here and then read the comments, such as mine.



Saturday, August 30, 2025

Timothy Leary heckled

A footnote to the posting a few days ago about the new movie on the Nova Convention:  Jesse Walker sent along this sound clip, remarking that is is "Notable less for RAW's participation than for the bit of audience jiu-jitsu that Leary pulls off at the beginning." And indeed, Leary copes well with the heckling. 



Friday, August 29, 2025

A bit more on Pynchon and some links

My favorite bit in Oz' last post was the textual evidence he finds to show that "Wilson & Shea wink at Pynchon in Illuminatus! and Pynchon winks right back at them in Vineland through the shared rubric of "Kick out the Jams." I think Oz makes a pretty strong case.

Here's a bit where RAW is asked about Pynchon:

JW: How do you regard Pynchon as important? Obviously he's a conspiracy theorist...

RAW: We have a lot in common. It's one of those things, like Darwin and Wallace, when the time is right a couple of people are going to be saying pretty much the same thing. There are enough differences between Pynchon and me that I think I'm a little more than just an echo of Pynchon. At least I like to believe that. Shea and I were finished with Illuminatus! when we read Gravity's Rainbow and then on the rewrite we deliberately threw in a couple of references to it, but we had worked out the structure on our own, mostly on the basis of the nut mail that Playboy gets.

Of course, there's no Pynchon interview I can cite, but Oz' citations convince me.

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia entry on Robert Anton Wilson says (about Illuminatus!), "Throughout, the Paranoia engendered by any and all attempts to understand these pixilated conspiracies, of which all the things of the world were emblems, reminded many readers of Thomas Pynchon; but an unPynchonesque lightheartedness permeates the sequence." Vineland certainly has a lot of lighthearted humor; could that be the influence of Illuminatus! on Pynchon? Just throwing that out there to see if anyone thinks that makes sense. 

A few links:

Here's an old post from me, we did eventually do Pale Fire. 

A possible RAW reference Spookah spotted in Inherent Vice. 

Rufus Flypaper on RAW vs. Pynchon. 

A reminder that Robert Shea once published Pynchon. 



Thursday, August 28, 2025

PQ on Pynchon

 PQ has a new post up about Thomas Pynchon, worth a careful read, here is the opening bit:

"Back in April, a screaming came across the sky, the announcement of a new Thomas Pynchon novel, to be published in October, entitled Shadow Ticket. This marks a literary event, an unforeseen comet spark in the darkness. Pynchon is arguably the greatest living novelist on the strength of Gravity's Rainbow (1973) alone, but the reclusive 88-year-old had not published any new books since 2013's Bleeding Edge, so his fans might've been forgiven for thinking his days of writing new stuff might be over."

The title of the piece is "Return of the Counterforce." Peter explains what the Counterforce is and reveals his favorite Pynchon novel. Here is another bit:

"I'm glad to see in the summer of 2025, Thomas Pynchon is now having a moment. It means great literature is having a moment. A new book from such a legendary writer is some of the best news of this year. I've been seeing copies of Vineland stacked forefront in bookstores across the country in the past year. A new movie inspired by Vineland is about to drop, with Benicio del Toro and DiCaprio. And then we get Shadow Ticket. Something like the counterforce is returning."

Tuesday, August 26, 2025

Harold Garfinkel, a RAW influence


Harold Garfinkel (Creative Commons photo. By Arlene Garfinkel - Garfinkel's family, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12017435)

While we wait for Michael Johnson to write the definitive article (or book) about Thomas Pynchon and Robert Anton Wilson, here is another can't-miss Substack piece: "Robert Anton Wilson and Ethnomethodology," on the influence of famed sociologist Harold Garfinkel on RAW. The Wikipedia article on Garfinkel provides some background, but Michael has some great additional angles. I have not had a Harold Garfinkel as a label on a post until now, so this is apparently an underrated influence. 

Monday, August 25, 2025

'Vineland' online reading group, Chapter 9

 


By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger

"Unfortunately for anyone's peace of mind, especially his own, a shaman's behavior will tend to be a blend of his most annoying manifestations, magnifying his complex conflictual relationship with social protocol; nerve-wracking non-sequitur and unexpected blasphemies constantly send ripples of shockwaves through unsuspecting bystanders; he seems utterly unresponsive to the most obsequious blandishments." E.J. Gold, Life in the Labyrinth.

Takeshi reveals his shamanic nature in this chapter beginning at the bottom of page 147: "Through years of stately unfoldings of the deep actuarial mysteries that allowed him to go on making a living, Takeshi had come to value and watch closely in the world for signs and symptoms, messages from beyond, and even discounting the effects of drug abuse, nothing about the city seemed quite right tonight."

"Stately unfoldings" is an interesting phrase; "stately" connects with the beginning of Ulysses,  a novel which unfolds in a way related to shamanic exploration. The beginning of Wikipedia's description of actuary also applies to a shaman: "An actuary is a professional with advanced mathematical skills who deals with the measurement and management of risk and uncertainty."

I see this as an inflection point in the book; from this point on the subject of death increases its presence dramatically. Takeshi is about to experience a series of events that puts him in a position of confronting the distinct possibility of imminent death directly every day. This plot point seems an excellent metaphor for the Sufi advice to die before you die; or for Castaneda's shamanic advice to always keep death just behind your left shoulder. We seem never more alive when faced with the prospect of dying soon.

Not only does Pynchon write about shamans, his writing exemplifies modern shamanism – going out into the unknown, coming back and writing about it; communicating his vision. The unknown includes crossing over to the other side through the veil of death. 

"Even an apparently simple thing like a common language which we are all forced to use in order to communicate with others becomes something different in the hands of a shaman. Shaman always seem to lean heavily toward those tooth- gnashing, fingernail-scraping, annoyingly Ivesian-Stravinskian-Schoenbergian ways of communicating that just don't seem to be able to conform themselves to well-defined human conventions." - Life in the Labyrinth. 

Pynchon was denied the Pulitzer Prize for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974. The jury who decides these things unanimously recommended it but the Pulitzer advisory board refused to give it to him on the grounds that the book was obscene and unreadable. No award was given that year. In Schrödinger's Cat, Robert Anton Wilson asks if his novel might not serve as a shamanic manual. Some of the more adventurous and imaginative Quantum physicists perform shamanic functions, though usually communicating in a very technical way. Writers like Pynchon, Wilson, Joyce and others use literature and literary tricks to bring the attentive and ambitious reader into their headspace, into the non-ordinary territory they've explored.

"A shaman will often seem to make a sudden shift to left field, leaving the linear literal mind holding the bag, so to speak, temporarily off-balance and unsure of its footing, but the shaman knows that nothing is ambiguous; he sees the underlying causes and knows how to attune himself to them. He knows the irony of expectation, and the ecstasy of disappointment; he has learned to follow life as one's vision follows the face of a lover." - ibid.

Pynchon shows great fondness for the letter V; it becomes a tag for him. We can only speculate why. Attentive readers have already observed this in Vineland.  As a shifting signifier, his affinity for this letter likely has multiple explanations. Of course, his first novel is V. Pynchon's most famous teacher at Cornell, Vladimir Nabokov has a narrator called V in one of his novels, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Parallels in plot, theme and writing style between the two books have led some scholars to infer Nabokov's influence. Nabokov's full name begins and ends with a V. He claims to have no memory of Pynchon at Cornell. His wife Vera (whose full name also begins and ends with a V) recalls grading Pynchon's papers.

Eric Wagner recently wrote to me: "The Germans surrendered on May 8, 1945, Tom Pynchon's eighth birthday, Victory in Europe Day, V-E Day. I have long suspected that that influenced Pynchon's interest in the letter V and in the end of the war in Europe in Gravity's Rainbow."  That book, his third, firmly established him in the literary world. The V-2 rocket plays a central role in it. So, Pynchon turned 8 on May 8th of '45 - V-E Day. At a critical juncture in this chapter (and the book), shortly following the Vineland quote above and a few steps before Takeshi's life irrevocably changes, he can "hear large V-8 engines idling" (p. 148).

The passion for V stretches across TP's oeuvre including the little nonfiction he wrote. Evidence for it turns up in the introduction he wrote for his good friend Richard Farina's novel of the '60s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. In the introduction to Slow Learner discussing his short story "Entropy" and the origin of this word coined by Rudolf Clausius, Pynchon comments: "If Clausius had stuck to his native German and called it Verwandlunginhalt instead, it could have had an entirely different impact." This is more commonly written as two words, Verwandlung Inhalt and translates as "transformation content." Kafka's most famous short story, "The Metamorphosis" has the German title Di Verwandlung. The reader's transformation or metamorphosis seems one major intent of TP's writing. 

If we may go into the weeds for a moment . . . I was startled by a character in Bleeding Edge that seems to correspond V to the Hebrew letter Feh, a variation of Peh –  "Phipps Epperdew, better known as Vip ...". The difference between Peh and Feh delineates the sound of the letter. Peh gives the hard p sound while Feh gets pronounced more like an f or ph. Phipps has both in one name. Peh and Feh both = 80 in Gematria. Therefore, in traditional Kabbalah both the English P and F letters = 80; V traditionally corresponds with Vau = 6. Crowley changed that in his Qabalah reckonings by assigning F to Vau ostensibly due to F and V sounding similar though it also aided his calculations. I suggest that Pynchon uses the same logic (sound similarity) to reverse Crowley by corresponding V with Feh thus giving it the value of 80, in this instance. What does this have to do with the price of tea in China, or the price of hash in Morrocco? Maybe nothing. It's explored more in my post on Bleeding Edge here: https://oz-mix.blogspot.com/2021/08/bleeding-edge-pynchon-robert-anton.html

In Cosmic Trigger Vol. 1 Robert Anton Wilson describes all the synchronicities he experienced with the number 23 as a key into his Cabalistic lexicon. Pynchon uses 23 as a tag for Wilson in Bleeding Edge– see my blog above. V might be a key into unlocking TP's cryptography. Focusing back on Vineland: though only halfway through we can already observe the predominance of female characters, intelligence, and energy along with the struggles they face. We have the Sisterhood of lady ass-kickers and DL harassing an all-woman motorcycle club. By its shape (the shape of the individual letters holds significance in Kabbalah), the letter V suggests the female reproductive system as well as being the first letter of vagina. Giving V and P the same mathematical identity – Peh and Feh both = 80 – suggests a union of penis (Peh) and vagina (Feh), the blending of male and female as frequently discussed regarding Vineland. Male and female symbolically represented as different aspects of the same general letter suggests Adam Kadmon a symbolic composite being comprised of the balanced union of male and female.

Earlier, in connection with chapter 5 and the TV show Hawaii 5-0, we stated that 5 appears significant to the lexicon of this novel. At the end of this chapter, 5 appears both explicitly: "zigzagging toward I-5" and implicitly:

"DL driving, singing
Oh, kick out the jambs, motherfuck-er,
'Cause here comes, that Stove once again –
You though I was somethin' in Olathe,
Wait till, you see me in Fort Wayne"

Though all the lyrics are different except the first line, to me, this appears an obvious reference to the MC5 song "Kick Out the Jams," a proto-punk rock song. The Fort Wayne reference conjures Wayne Kramer, a co-founder and co-leader of the MC5.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvJGQ_piwI0

Listening to the first 15 seconds seals the deal about that. Slight digression: Illuminatus! has people carrying signs saying "Kick out the JAMs" which in that case stands for the Justified Ancients of Mummu (Illuminatus! p. 127 -128 Dell omnibus edition - thank-you Vineland wiki). Five pages before that in Illuminatus! a TWA stewardess finds notes left behind by a "John Mason" on his way to Mexico City (where Pynchon lived at one point in the 60s). Wilson and/or Shea begin riffing on 5 a little way into these notes:

"Christianity all in 3s (Trinity, etc.) Buddhism all in 4s. Illuminism in 5s. A progression?
Hopi teaching: all men have 4 souls now, but in future will have 5 souls. . . .
Who decided the Pentagon building should have that particular shape?
'Kick out the Jams' ??? Cross-check.

. . .

D.E.A.T.H. – Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn. Does Pynchon know?" 

                                                                    – ibid. p.123 (italics in the original).

The way I read this: Wilson & Shea wink at Pynchon in Illuminatus! and Pynchon winks right back at them in Vineland through the shared rubric of "Kick out the Jams."

V also = the Roman character for 5. Vine = 133 in its Hebrew spelling. 

133 (vine) x 5 (V = vagina) = 665 = "The Womb" in "Sepher Sephiroth." Adding the upright 1( a phallic symbol) gives us 666, a solar number (Tiphareth thrice), the number of THE BEAST and "The Name Jesus." DL briefly refers to Takeshi as a beast when having sex in this chapter. The other city mentioned when DL sings her version of "Kick out the jams" is Olathe, Kansas. Olathe is a Shawnee word for beautiful, another reference to Tiphareth

 Circling back and speaking of reversals, we find an example regarding V in this chapter with Brock Vond (BV) balanced by Vato and Blood partners in "V & B Tow company." Vond and Vato = two proper names starting with V with an opposite qabalistic sense. Vato  = 86 = "A name of God asserting the identity of Kether and Malkuth" as we saw earlier with the channel 86 TV station. Blood describes a Hermetic metaphor for how an individual might go about uniting Kether with Malkuth aka uniting the macrocosm with the microcosm. This gets made evident and put into the student's body and heart along with the intellect through practicing "The Mass of the Phoenix" (takes about 10 minutes), chapter 44 in The Book of Lies; 44 = blood.  

Tow recalls "Fascist Toejam" (kick out the fascist jams) as well as "Cheetos" = Chi (Chinese vital energy = Kether; mentioned a few times in this chapter and key to what DL does to Takeshi)) + toe or toes (Malkuth on the Tree of Life) as I elaborated earlier. Vato = V + a (aleph = The Fool, an androgenous symbol) + to (pronounced toe).

Vond, on the other hand, = 130 = The Devil (raw male energy) = the 5 of Cups (disappointment, trouble, pain, grief and represents a lack of fulfilment or non-attainment of expected results which we get told is Brock's situation regarding Frenesi. Both Brock and Prairie search for Frenesi). But it doesn't seem all black and white. 130 also = "Deliverance" and "The Angel of Redemption" a version of which may or may not happen to Brock during the novel's conclusion; the reader will have to decide.

* * * * * *

A comment I couldn't get to last week: the emphasis on attention in chapter 8 reveals the strong influence of Gold's school. Prairie sees the Head Ninjette emerge from invisibility and asks if she can learn how to do that. "Takes a serious attention span." . . . "Common sense and hard work's all it is. Only the first of many kunoichi disillusionments – right, DL? – is finding that the knowledge won't come down all at once in any big transcendent moment." There's also a short phrase about attention, great  shamanic advice, in chapter 9.

Chapter 9 Notes:

p. 141, a passage covering most of this page got me considering Frenesi = a manifestation of Eris. Hail Eris!

P. 142, "Wawazume Life & Non-Life" seems the first introduction to the bardo chambers up ahead.

p. 147, "shabu" – Japanese slang for speed.

Back on p. 128 Pynchon makes a connection to his first novel, V. In that book, one aspect of V turned out to be Victoria Wren. In Vineland, the Sisterhood's financial consultant is "Vicki down in L.A. who moves it all around for us." – the only mention of her in the book.

In Straight Outta Dublin Eric Wagner writes of the importance Robert Anton Wilson placed on masks and their various ramifications. Chapter 9 brushes upon the subject of masks in a few different places – chapter 8 too, I believe. The chapter in Life in the Labyrinth following the one with the quotes above talks about masks. It's called "Shapeshifting Up the Totem."

Chapter 9 has two or 3 very subtle allusions to the Sufi classic, The Conference of the Birds by Attar. It seems very related to shamanic voyaging if not identical or close to it. Also at least a couple more music references: "People Are Strange" by the Doors when DL assembles a mask and disguise for herself and "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen with the lyric commonly misheard as "Me gotta go" (p. 190). That lyric seems a shamanic prerequisite: you gotta drop the ego, at least temporarily, to access the higher dimensions. 

Next week: please read Chapter 10, pages 192 - 203

Sunday, August 24, 2025

A lost William Burroughs film


An article at Filmmaker.com features an interview with the directors of “The Nova Convention… a Free Artistic Experiment," a film featuring "lost" footage, here are the opening sentences: 

"Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’s Nova ’78 centers around the Nova Convention, a late ’70s avant-garde extravaganza that took place at NYC’s now defunct Entermedia Theater (Second Avenue and 12th Street) in honor of William S. Burroughs’s return to the U.S. after living more than 20 years abroad. It was also a great excuse to gather a who’s who roster of counterculture icons to perform in the presence of the postmodern wordsmith who’d profoundly impacted them all. That would include Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye, Laurie Anderson and Julia Heyward, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, Brion Gysin, Timothy Leary, Merce Cunningham, Philip Glass, John Cage, Jackie Curtis, Robert Anton Wilson, Terry Southern, Frank Zappa and the list goes on. Quite the happening indeed!"

I don't know if RAW is in the film; the "Bob Wilson" referred to in the interview is the famous director, not RAW. I searched for the title at justwatch.com and couldn't find any information on how to see this thing, perhaps it will be available for streaming at some point.

More information. 

Hat tip: Nicholas Helweg-Larsen.


Saturday, August 23, 2025

David Lee on Hilaritas podcast

 

 

As customary, Hilaritas Press has released a new podcast today on the 23rd, and the new one features David Lee.

"Hilaritas guest host Zach West, chats with chaos magickian, author, and educator David Lee on his essay in the recently released anthology assembled by Peter Carroll, This is Chaos."

Probably available wherever you get your podcasts, but here is the official page with links. 

Forty eight episodes so far, with more to come!

Friday, August 22, 2025

New music video from Steve Pratt

 


Renaissance man Steve "Fly" Pratt has just released a new music video he made for a track by the jazz fusion group Garaj Mahal, which recently released a new album. 

I learned about the above video via Steve's Substack, but his Patreon offers the clearest explanation of what's going on here:

Roughly a month ago I was invited to experiment with some visuals for the new album by Garaj Mahal: Rotifer. I accepted and went deep into the microcosmos, a place I've been swimming around for a while with water bears, and came up with the goods.

The first full length video just went live. Enjoy.

@GarajMahalMusic⁩ is: ⁨@FareedHaqueMusic⁩ , Kai Eckhardt, Oz Ozzeldin, Hassan Hurd. Video content generated using Gemini Veo. The creator intends to plant a tree for each full video and encourages anybody who enjoys this video to go support a local artist, or plant a tree, or both!

Stay tuned at: https://www.youtube.com/@GarajMahalMusic

All love

--Fly


The Internet Archive has live performances of bands that allow their shows to be recorded and released by fans, i.e. the Grateful Dead's policy, so  here is a Garaj Mahal performance featuring Steve  that Steve thought was "particularly good."   (I am a Gin Blossoms fan, so here is the Gin Blossoms live collection.)

Here are some of Steve's musical adventures, "interesting throughout," as Tyler Cowen likes to say. 

Thursday, August 21, 2025

A useful movie reviewer


Scott Sumner (Creative Commons photo, information). 

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

A couple of links:

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

More film reviews. 

Overlooked films. 

More film reviews. 

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

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

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

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

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





Wednesday, August 20, 2025

Ben Graham on Julian Cope

 


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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, August 19, 2025

Respecting another person's reality tunnel


New York Public Library image via Unsplash 

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

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

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




Monday, August 18, 2025

'Vineland' online reading group, Chapter 8


By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

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

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

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




Sunday, August 17, 2025

Twin Peaks and Discordianism


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

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

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


Saturday, August 16, 2025

'Loosely based' on 'Vineland'?

 

 

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

Friday, August 15, 2025

Classical music notes


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

What are your musical interests?

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, August 14, 2025

Lots of RAW letters apparently could be published


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

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

"Here’s the story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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