'Liminal Currents' podcast interviews Rasa about RAW

Episode 23 of the Liminal Currents podcast features an  interview with Rasa. "On this episode he shares many interesting stories about RAW, his concepts and a bit about Timothy Leary as well!" I have not had time to listen yet, but I will check it out soon. I have linked to the Apple podcasts site, but it appears to be available at many of the usual podcasting locations and apps. The host apologizes for accidentally referring to Rasa as "Robert" in the podcast. 

The Liminal Currents podcast appears to have other episodes that might be of interest to sombunall RAW fans.

RAW and Shea material at the Princeton library

Letter from RAW to Ed Sanders. 

 Bobby Campbell on Bluesky: "I had a great day at the Princeton Special Collections Dept! Documenting a treasure drove of original RAW documents from his correspondence w/ poet Ed Sanders. (On behalf of the OG!) 213 pages of RAW & Shea material. Processing everything now. Decent chance there's some unique gems in here :)))"

Background on Ed Sanders. The Princeton library has a website for Ed Sanders Papers, 1939-2021 (mostly 1960-2010). I look forward to learning more. 

RAW Semantics on the new Shea book

 RAW Semantics on Bluesky: "I'm currently reading Robert Shea's 'Every Day is a GOOD Day' (the new collection edited by  @jacksontom.bsky.social - see my post above) & like it a lot. I've quickly warmed to Shea's voice, but I don't know enough about him to attempt a review such as this one."

Thanks, Brian, and thanks again for the review, Michael! As I noted earlier, Brian has posted notes on the new Robert Anton Wilson book, A Non-Euclidian Perspective. 

More here on Every Day is a Good Day. 

Five books about William Blake

Given that Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea were Blake fans and many RAW fans also love William Blake fans, I thought I would pass on this article recommending the five best books about William Blake, as chosen by Mark Vernon, author of the new book, Awake!: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination.

Don't forget that John Higgs also has written two books about Blake. 

John Higgs' book on David Lynch released

John Higgs announces that his new book on David Lynch, LYNCHIAN,  has been released in the United Kingdom. Go here to see the various places where the book can be ordered online. See the newsletter for new dates for appearances. 

I don't see the book on Amazon, so U.S. readers apparently will want to order the book from Britain and have it shipped over here. 

A new book about Malcolm Cowley

Malcolm Cowley. Public domain photo by Carl Van Vechten. 

Dwight Garner reviews a new book about Malcolm Cowley for the New York Times, and the review (and apparently the book) highlights the role Cowley, a writer, editor and critic, played in reviving the career of writer William Faulkner:

"It’s hard to believe now, but in 1944 every one of William Faulkner’s 17 books was out of print except for 'Sanctuary,' a thriller he’d written to pay the mortgage. He was only in his late 40s but his career was in eclipse. Maxwell Perkins, the venerated Scribner’s editor, had declared: 'Faulkner is finished.' Faulkner’s publisher nudged him further into oblivion when it donated some of his novels’ printing plates — who’ll need these again? — to be melted down for the war effort.

"Among the books out of print were several interrelated novels written between 1929 and 1942, 'The Sound and the Fury,' 'As I Lay Dying,' 'Light in August,' 'Absalom, Absalom!' and 'Go Down, Moses.' Each was set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Miss. Each is now recognized as among the most vital and important novels of the 20th century, but that was hardly the case at the time. Faulkner’s work had never sold well, and it had long ago been pounded into dust by popular critics such as Clifton Fadiman of The New Yorker, who found Faulkner a puzzling bore."

The review relates how Faulkner's fortunes were reversed when Cowley succeeded in getting Viking to let him edit and publish The Portable Faulkner, despite the fact that "Almost no one at Viking thought the book worth doing."

The book Garner reviews is The Insider by Gerald Howard; Faulkner is not the only writer Cowley helped. See the link, above, and the Wikipedia bio. 

I mention this not just because RAW was a Faulkner fan (Faulkner gets a mention in Illuminatus!) but because the new book raises an important point: Who or what will help bring more attention to the works of Robert Anton Wilson (and Robert Shea)? Is there a Malcolm Cowley out there somewhere?

At least, thanks to Hilaritas Press, we don't have to worry about RAW going out of print. There's a lot currently available for any reader who discovers RAW and wants to get more. 

 

RAW letter in 'Heavy Metal' magazine

Harlan Ellison (Creative Commons photo by Pip R. Lagenta, more information)

Jesse Walker spots a "letter to the editor" from Robert Anton Wilson in the October 1981 issue of Heavy Metal magazine.

The text:

"Dear All,

"Loved the Burroughs article on immortality. That man is the greatest prose artist since Joyce. I was less impressed with the Ellison piece. His rhetoric always reminds me of the kind of speech that traditionally ends up, 'And let's get a rope and string the bastards up right now.' Doesn't he ever stop hating everybody and anybody in sight? Oh, well, that's his shtick I guess: different maps for different chaps, different scenes for different genes, different lanes for different brains ....

Live long and prosper,

                                                                                                                                    Robert Anton Wilson                                                                                                                                               Berkeley, Calif."

The Harlan Ellison piece, "Fear Not Your Enemies," is here.  It's an essay arguing for gun control that appeared after John Lennon's murder. It's reprinted in the Ellison collection Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed: Essays. 

The William Burroughs piece is here. The AI summary when I searched  for it says, "William Burroughs' piece 'Immortality' was featured in Heavy Metal Magazine in May 1981. This work is a heavily edited version of an essay that later appeared in his book The Adding Machine. In "Immortality," Burroughs explores themes related to the human desire for eternal life and the implications of advanced medical technologies, such as transplant techniques, on society."

Michael Johnson on psychedelic research

Dr. Gül Dölen

Robert Anton Wilson, defending Timothy Leary, campaigned for research into the benefits of psychedelic drugs, and I often wished he could have lived to see the research efforts that have been going on in recent years. Michael Johnson's latest Substack newsletter, "Recent Psychedelic Drug Research and German Ethology," is an interesting primer on some of the work that's going  on. At the end of the piece, Michael loops back to Leary: "The Leary scholar James Penner thought Leary’s ideas around 'de-conditioning' and 'reimprinting' using psychedelic drugs were his biggest breakthroughs."

A book recommendation site

As this is a blog aimed at people who like to read, I thought I would pass on a suggestion from Mark Frauenfelder, from the latest issue of the newsletter Recomendo: 

"book.sv, is a free book recommendation engine built by scraping 43 million Goodreads users. I entered about ten favorite books, and the results impressed me. It surfaced other books I’ve read and loved, validating its taste-matching algorithm. More exciting were the new titles it suggested: intriguing picks I hadn’t encountered before (like Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze). Unlike Goodreads’ algorithm, this feels like getting suggestions from someone who actually understands my reading taste. — MF"

So I decided to  try it. I entered 14 favorite books, ones that I had read more than once, and it gave me 30 book recommendations. Most were titles I knew about, all were authors I had heard of. Nineteen were books I had already read, which I guess shows that the recommendations work; I liked almost all of the books I had read, although a couple did not impress me much. There were only a couple of books I don't know much about, Light by M. John Harrison and The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies. But the recommended book I am likeliest to read next is The Magus by John Fowles; Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea were both Fowles fans. I probably should also try The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth. (I read The Floating Opera in college and liked it, but I've never read any other Barth. RAW liked him.)

Basic income for artists in Ireland moves forward

Photo from Unsplash

Here is some news that combines several of Robert Anton Wilson's interests: Ireland is moving ahead with a program to provide basic income payments to artists. The program was an experiment and is now being made permament. 

While I got frustrated trying to find one really good news story that answered all of my questions (what kinds of artists? How many people are likely to qualify in the future?) here are some articles: From Smithsonian,  also an article from Ocula, and also an article from Business Insider. 

A new meme from RAW Semantics

 

Just wanted to draw a little attention to it. Posted on Bluesky to draw attention to the recent RAW Semantics posting about A Non-Euclidean Perspective: Robert Anton Wilson’s Political Commentaries 1960-2005.

My John Higgs synchronicity

 

My sister's copy

I recently flew to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to visit my mother. While chatting with my sister in my mother's living room a few days ago, my sister mentioned that the local branch of the public library has a table where people can put books they own they have finished reading, and other library patrons are invited to take them and bring them home. Kind of like the "Little Free Libraries" that are common in the U.S. Susi mentioned there was a book that offered a different history of the 20th century.

The next day, Susi, knowing my interest in  history, brought the book over to show to me, and to my surprise it was John Higgs' Stranger Than We Can Imagine. It's one of my favorite John Higgs books.  I have my own copy, autographed by the author,  and I also had bought a copy and given it to my father. It was one of the last books my Dad read before he passed away.

"I know that guy!" I exclaimed. I explained that Dad had read it. Then I picked up my mother's copy of Every Day is a GOOD DAY, the Robert Shea book published by Hilaritas Press that I edited that came out in September. I showed them the quote on the back cover, from John, endorsing the book.

At this point, you probably are curious what John said about the Shea book, here it is: "“Entertaining, thought provoking and richly varied, Every Day is a GOOD Day is a perfect introduction to the anarchistic principles and humane thinking of Robert Shea - a man more interested in finding flaws in his own beliefs than he is in forcing those beliefs on others.”

Other endorsements are here. 

Lots of Discordian news in 'The Mycelium'

The October 2025 issue of The Mycelium has been released, and there's lots of Discordian news, including several events in Britain. 

Some of Michelle Olley's newsletter covers news we have mentioned here: The new Non-Euclidian RAW book, the new Robert Shea book, Tales of Illuminatus No. 2 and John Higgs' new David Lynch book. And we appreciate the shoutout for this blog.

Also: A Day of the Dead bricklaying ceremony in Birkenhead Park in Liverpool ("The JAMs return to Merseyside for the annual laying of the bricks in The People’s Pyramid, presided over by Callendar, Callendar, Cauty and Drummond funeral services and our own Bricklayer, Daisy Eris Campbell and Krew"); a screening of David Bramwell's movie, The Haunted Mustache ("The story of a mysterious inheritance, seances, psychedelics and Brighton’s 1990s alt-cabaret scene is woven together with inimitable charm by writer, broadcaster and performer David Bramwell"), Melinda Gebbie's new art book and a new version of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies. 

Read all about it.