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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
Hat tip: Nicholas Helweg-Larsen.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
William Burroughs in 1983. (Creative Commons photo, source.)
I don't actually think I'm going to link to all of Michael Johnson''s Substack newsletters if he keeps up his writing pace, but many of them are of interest to RAW fans! The newest one, for example, "Perception, Editing, Cut-Ups: A Glancing Take," looks at rapid shifts in film editing, to the cut-up prose technique popularized by William Burroughs, to RAW's use of the technique. Including in the post is a long, interesting letter from RAW to Kurt Smith that I don't remember seeing before. The comments also are interesting.
"For those films lovers of your blog, I see that a bunch of RAWs favourite films are now available on 4K Ultra HD.
"For instance I just saw that Harvey is having a 75th Anniversary edition for sale. Looks like it's released in America on August 19th."
Here is "Everything you need to know about 4K Ultra HD."
Here again is the list of RAW's 100 favorite movies. I don't see "Harvey," but he certainly wrote about it.
By OZ FRITZ
I have now created a reading group page for the ongoing online reading group for Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. You can see a link to the page if you look at the right side of this page, and scroll down a bit. The posting for Chapter 7 will post Monday.
I have been hosting online reading groups on this blog for years, sometimes writing blog entries and sometimes enlisting other people. As I noted recently, it's never too late to participate in an online reading group, even if you are just reading the entries as you read or re-read a book. In each case, I've tried to put all of the links for the postings in one place, sometimes in a dedicated space on the right side of the page, sometimes on a separate page, as with Vineland.
Archived reading groups are available for Illuminatus! and for the following Robert Anton Wilson books: Prometheus Rising, Nature's God, The Widow's Son, The Earth Will Shake, Email to the Universe, Cosmic Trigger, Coincidance, Masks of the Illuminati, Natural Law and Quantum Psychology.
There are also archived links for Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Kerman's The Beethoven Quartets. It looks like I failed to create a links page for the Moby Dick discussion group, so I'll have to address that.
The obvious remaining RAW book that deserves an online discussion would be the Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy. (We would have to decide what edition, a vexing question). And I also wouldn't mind leading a Robert Shea discussion group for one of his novels.
Ezra Pound in 1920 (source).
Michael Johnson has a new, long Substack post up about history which I can't really summarize, as he jumps around with a lot of different musings, all of them tied however to the present moment. (I talk about some of the topics he brings up in the comments.) I liked this bit:
I had the idea that fascism was always near. All my voting since age 18 felt like I was voting for the least likely to contribute to fascism, and never “for” anyone. I was never enamored with the Democratic Party, but in my suburban, very white hometown I often overhead things like “Hitler had the right idea; he just went about it the wrong way.” And these people were always staunch Nixon and Reagan lovers. I picked up on quite a lot of coded language. How quaint that all seems now. After I discovered Robert Anton Wilson - a total accident - I knew I had to read Wilhelm Reich, whose name I’d only heard. Reich’s thesis was that fascist authoritarianism was the default mode in History. It was Capital, aye, but crucially: a fearsome, retributive Daddy, leader of the nuclear family.
Logo of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
I got an email from Nicholas Helweg-Larsen the other day, asking about a reference work he had run across online, the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. He asked if I was familiar with it.
I replied, "Yes, it's very good, I use it all the time for looking up SF authors. The brains behind it are British luminaries such as John Clute and Dave Langford. I should do a blog post and recommend it and put up a link. So you have given me a good idea."
There are in fact many entries which might interest readers of this blog. For example, there's one on Robert Anton Wilson, and one on Robert Shea. There's no separate entry on Illuminatus!, but in the RAW entry, critic John Clute opines the work is "clearly spoofing the intensively recomplicated plots of A E van Vogt and those influenced by him."
Pretty much any "name" SF author will have an entry, e.g. Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Harlan Ellison, Jack Vance, Philip Jose Farmer, and so on. It doesn't just explore authors; themes and ideas are also discussed, as in this piece on Libertarian SF. The Prometheus Award has its own entry, although the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award (which went to Illuminatus!) is covered by a link to the award's official site.
Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories, Frederik Pohl. A good collection of science fiction stories.
Xen: The Zen of the Other, by "Ezra Buckley," e.g. Joseph Matheny. I liked it, see my comments here.
Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties, Lucy Moore. I have long been fascinated by the 1920s, and this was vivid and interesting.
Sell More Books! Book Marketing and Publishing for Low Profile and Debut Authors: Rethinking Book Publicity after the Digital Revolutions, J. Steve Miller. A lot of good ideas.
As is his custom, Mark Brown posted on Facebook what he read in July:
When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger 7/1
Tides of Light by Gregory Benford 7/14
Quantum Psychology By Robert Anton Wilson 7/15
Dawn by Octavia Butler 7/23
The Book of Forbidden Words by Robert Anton Wilson 7/24
Bonk: the Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach 7/26
Not a chronicle of last month, but Rob Pugh has published his midyear reading report.
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By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
Early in this chapter I had a sense of the special quality of Pynchon’s writing. I can’t put my finger on what makes his writing so magical. I will see if I can articulate it over the next few months.
When I first read this book in 1990, I found it utterly resonated with my politics. Born in 1962, I had lived through the Nixon and Reagan years, and I found myself saying “YES!” to how Pynchon characterized those eras in this novel. Reading this chapter again in 2025, I found that the politics still resonate for me. Perhaps his new novel Shadow Ticket, due out October 7 of this year, will help me make sense of our current political situation and of how we got here. I know Shadow Ticket deals with the 1930’s, Wisconsin, jazz, and Hungary, etc. I have listened to a bunch of Count Basie getting ready to read the new Pynchon.
Since 1990 I have gotten every new Pynchon novel right when it came out, and the internet has provided prepublication glimpses of each of these novels. Of course, the novels themselves have always defied my expectations.
Frenesi at the end of this chapter always makes me think of the Gang of Four song “I Love a Man in a Uniform.”
I recommend checking out Michael Johnson blog post “Pynchon, Wilson, and TV: Irony, Etc.” at https://substack.com/home/post/p-169809446
This is a comment to the blog I approved this morning (I have to moderate comments to avoid really bad spam on the blog entries). It's from tomlennon:
"Hi there,
"I'm joining the train a year later than Louis, and also plan to travel at the same pace. I've read PR multiple times over the last thirty years, most recently the Oliver Senton narrated audiobook (I was lucky enough to see Oliver play RAW at the Cosmic Trigger play in London some years back). I've often cherry-picked the exercises, and trying to devote enough time to each one was always a weird juggling act, where I'm reading chapter whatever, but still looking for 20p coins. I live in Mexico now (did Bob and Arlen influence that somehow?), so I guess I'll have to convert quarters to pesos. In any case, this allows me to take a more structured approach to a book and its exercises that continue to influence and inspire me."
Posted to Week One of the Prometheus Rising online study group, to a guest post written by Apuleius Charlton.
Of course, this is why I have links the various study groups at the right side of my home page; it's never too late to re-read a RAW book and follow along with a study group. I need to start archiving links for the current Vineyard effort; Eric Wagner has already sent me tomorrow's entry.
Information on the Hilaritas Press version of Prometheus Rising is here.
A new issue of his Substack newsletter finds Michael Johnson writing about "Pynchon, Wilson, and TV: Irony, etc." and the love-hate relationship the writers had with the tube. There's a lot of discussion about Vineland, so many of you will want to take a look at Michael's piece.
I posted a comment, but I forgot to suggest that Robert Anton Wilson might have enjoyed the current heyday of TV streaming services that allow viewers to watch really good shows and movies without being interrupted by commercials. And as I remarked again yesterday, I'm always surprised that RAW never mentions "Twin Peaks" when he discusses his TV viewing habits.
The new John Higgs newsletter dropped today with the announcement that his new book will be about one of my favorite artists, filmmaker David Lynch:
"It’s called LYNCHIAN: THE SPELL OF DAVID LYNCH and it will be out on November 13th.
"This is a short book about why the work of David Lynch affects us in such a profound way. Writing it has been a joy, and it has been an absolute privilege to spend so much time immersed in his mind and his films. If you’ve ever watched Twin Peaks or one of his films and found them incredibly seductive in ways that you don’t quite understand, then I think you will get a lot out of this book.
"It will be out as a handsome hardback in time for Christmas, and as an audiobook and ebook as well. If you are minded to pre-order that would be wonderful - it’s available here and in all the usual places."
I own all of the Twin Peaks episodes. I've never seen evidence RAW was a Twin Peaks fan, but I know Robert Shea was.
Bobby Campbell reports a good turnout for his Wilmington Comic Fest, an event he held to on Maybe Day, July 23 (I boldfaced some news):
"The Wilmington Comic Fest was an absolute blast! We actually had a ton of people come out, (on a Wednesday night no less!) all the artists had a great time, and it looks like we're going to do it again in the Fall :)))
"Here's a link to an IG post that has all of the featured artists linked.
"There's also livestream videos from WiseSpag who went around and talked to the artists:
https://kick.com/wisespag/videos/d4b1b5cb-cd0a-4068-8895-b60cdcf50222
https://kick.com/wisespag/videos/140b12cd-2484-45e4-9403-fd1336a99f86
As for Tales of Illuminatus, the second comic book of the series, Bobby reports, "TOI goes very well indeed! 28 pages down and 15 or so left to go."
While the Kickstarter funded, please note that you can still do a preorder to reserve your copy.
Need a copy of the first issue? Please see Bobby's Weirdoverse Gift Shop on Etsy.
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