'Tales' update: The hurricanes are slowing things down a bit

 

In the latest Tales of Illuminatus newsletter update, Bobby Campbell reports that hurricanes are delaying the delivery the paper version of the first issue:

"Just a quick update on a slight delay for our grand plans of world illumination...

"Ka-Blam Printing, the company handling both the printing and shipping for Tales of Illuminatus! #1, just so happens to be located in Orlando, Florida, which has been hit with back to back massive hurricanes over the past couple weeks.

"They seem confident that they'll be back in the office by the end of the week, and it's possible there won't even be a noticeable delay, but it seemed worth mentioning!

"I'll let you know when, in true jumpin' jack flash fashion, our humble little periodical is birthed from the hurricane crossfire and successfully on its way to your doorsteps :)))"

Bobby also provides a review of the new RAW biography, Chapel Perilous by Gabriel Kennedy, that is out on Oct. 22:

"It now appears safe to say the book I was gushing about last week is indeed Gabriel Kennedy’s RAW biography CHAPEL PERILOUS: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. An absolutely spellbinding trip through the lives and ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, a book about RAW that is just as fun as reading a book by RAW, and an instant classic of Discordian lore. Highest possible recommendation!"

'The Sex Magicians' reading group has begun

 

Michelle Olley illustration by Bobby Campbell. 

The online book discussion of The Sex Magicians has begun, so head on over to the first posting at the Jechidah blog. 

This is a good description of what Michelle Olley does in her introduction to the Hilaritas Press edition of the book:

"Michelle Olley contextualizes and absolves The Sex Magicians. Olley is in a unique position of being a pioneer in sexual expression and one who has come out on top of the game. As far as I know, Olley hasn't declared any extraordinarily ugly sentiments about any groups, peccadillos or ways of being. Instead, she applies her myriad and extraordinary experiences to a multi-fold (multi-folderol?) interpretation, framed in empathy and understanding. Having Olley as our barker and initial interloper with the raw material of Wilson's first published novel is a very good thing, and very apropos, for our clarity-by-convolution century."

Iain Spence on Grant Morrison

 Illuminatus! led to The Invisibles, and that led to The Matrix, right? It is a sequence of events that has been suggested to me, and perhaps you have read it, too.

Iain Spence has his doubts, at least about the Invisibles to Matrix connection. He has a new piece up, "Invisible Influences in The Matrix: Debunking Grant Morrison‘s claim that The Matrix wouldn’t exist without his fiction."  It's on Medium, but Iain has removed the firewall so that everyone can read it.

Iain also contends that Morrison has misunderstood Iain's own work:

"Grant Morrison has stated in the past that The Matrix was part of a late 1990s emergence of Hostile Strength celebration within pop culture. He said this in relation to The Sekhmet Hypothesis.¹ As the author of the book, I disagree. The Matrix was a movie, not a raw celebration involving atavistic behaviour within pop culture."

Iain's books are available as Kindles on Amazon at quite reasonable prices. 

Monday links

 Philosopher Michael Huemer on the upcoming  election. 

The Medieval Masterpiece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Digitized and Available Online

Halloween movie recommendations from Grant McPhee.

Conspiracy theories Tyler Cowen believes.

MC5 celebration Oct. 12 in Michigan.

'The Sex Magicians' reading group to begin

Over at the Jechidah blog, a reading group is about to begin for The Sex Magicians. It starts Tuesday. Grab your copy of the Hilaritas Press edition and join in. 

RAW 'politics book' has taken shape

 

An illustration for the Guns and Dope Party website. 

Rasa, the gentleman who runs day to day operations for Hilaritas Press, is careful not to make promises for when a Robert Anton Wilson book will come out; there can always be a last-minute hitch, and a book isn't released until it's done. But I'm pleased to be able to report that the upcoming Wilson anthology of writing about political subjects appears to be quite far along. Rasa has penned an essay on the Guns and Dope Party for the book, and other details are available. Here's the official update from Rasa:

"It’s still a ways off. We seem to have decided on the some 25 essays that span RAW’s career that will be included in the book, and Jesse Walker has written a great introduction,  but since many of the essays are scans of articles, there is still a lot of OCR and editing work to be done."

And here is an update on a recent blog post, where I mentioned that Rasa was looking for the source of an alleged RAW quote, for his Guns and Dope essay: “The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct.”  Rasa asked his "council of advisors" by email for the source, and at the link, I posted the puzzle.

I have possibly solved the mystery, while doing research on another matter. I flipped through the pages of my copy of Rasa's RAW Memes book, and I found this quote from RAW: "Conservatives say it is dangerous to give any group too much political power. Liberals say it is dangerous to give any group too much economic power. Both are right." It's attributed to The Illuminati Papers. There's still no source for the alleged exact quote, but the one I found seems pretty close.

Of course, it's amusing that I cited Rasa's book to solve Rasa's problem. There are many RAW experts out there -- Michael Johnson seems to carry the complete works in his head and Eric Wagner wrote the book -- but Rasa can truly claim he's forgotten more about RAW than most people know! 

See the Hilaritas Press website to see which new and reprinted titles have been released so far. It's an impressive list, and there might be a good one you've missed. 

New RAW biography to be published on Oct. 22

 

The new, long-awaited Robert Anton Wilson biography by Gabriel Kennedy will be published on Oct. 22, according to a listing for the book on Amazon.  The publication information says it is 473 pages long and has forewords by Grant Morrison and Douglas Rushkoff. Mr. Kennedy also performs and writes as Prop Anon. It is listed as a $9.99 Kindle; I will provide information about a paper edition as it comes to my attention. There is every reason to expect that a great deal of research went into the book.

Here is the blurb for the book provided by Joseph Matheny: "Writing a comprehensive, human, inclusive, biography for someone as complex as Robert Anton Wilson is a big bite for a writer to attempt. Thankfully, Gabriel Kennedy did not bite off more than he could chew. This biography made me laugh, cry, and sit silently in contemplation while I experienced the feelings, memories, and nostalgia it evoked. Chapel Perilous showed me points of view about RAW that I had not considered and informed me about aspects of my late friend’s life that I was unaware of. This book is an invaluable source of information about one of the greatest artists and thinkers of our time. It keeps the lasagna flying!”

Blurbs from Jeffrey Mishlove, Richard Metzger and David J. Brown also are available at the Amazon page. 

Latest 'Tales' news: New RAW book on the way

 

The latest Tales of Illuminatus newsletter came out today, and Bobby Campbell reports that a new RAW book apparently will be out soon, although he doesn't provide details:

"I will hastily end things here, because I am desperate to get back to reading my advance copy of that very most anticipated RAW book, which I’d say the name, but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to yet! Suffice to say it is EXCELLENT!"

I've known for awhile that a new RAW anthology or two is on the way from Hilaritas Press. When more details become available, I will share. 

Also, Bobby had to change publishers for the European edition of the first issue, although apparently it is not a big deal:

"A small change in plans for our European readers, though ultimately of negligible importance, but Mixam UK, after nearly 2 weeks of hemming and hawing, decided that the job of illuminating the old continent was just too darn tough, and bailed on our order, which was immediately picked up by Ka-Blam, so the wheels remain in motion, albeit different wheels than originally reported."

 

Harold Bloom on why we read

Harold Bloom with some reading material (public  domain photo). 

After yesterday's blog post, I wanted to share a more positive quote about reading, this time from famed literary critic Harold Bloom (1930-2019).  (I discovered Bloom back in college, when I became infatuated with Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetry and bought a Shelley anthology edited by Bloom.)

Here's the quote (source):

"The great poems, plays, novels and stories teach us how to go on living, even when submerged under  forty fathoms of bother and distress. If you live 90 years you will be a battered survivor. Your own mistakes, accidents, and failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can." 

Is this really the way it is now?

 

I was struck by this quote from an article from The Atlantic magazine, "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books." 

"This development puzzled [Columbia University course teacher on great books Nicholas] Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover."

Richard Powers has a composer obsession, too

I have been reading the new Richard Powers novel, Playground, and I'm on page 141. Johann Sebastian Bach hasn't put in an appearance yet. 

I remarked once again yesterday about the role of Beethoven in RAW's works, and then I realized that Bach plays a similar role in Powers' works. This is most obvious in The Gold Bug Variations, which has a lot about Bach's Goldberg Variations (one of the main characters listens to Glenn Gould's famous 1950s recordings) but Bach is mentioned in many of Powers' other books. 

An interest in classical music also is a theme in Powers' books, most obviously in Orfeo. Here is my interview with Powers about that book. The official Richard Powers website has links to music mentioned in Orfeo. 

Of course, an interest in classical music pervades RAW's "Historical Illuminatus" books, and Mozart even appears as a minor character. 

I've read other works of fiction that mention classical music and specific composers, but when I tried to think of another modern writer who focuses in much of his/her work on one particular composer, I came up dry.

If it isn't obvious, I'm a huge Powers fan. I've read 11 of his 14 novels so far. Powers has won a National Book Award, a Pulitzer, a MacArthur "genius" grant, etc., so he's a good example of a writer embraced by the literary establishment, as opposed to RAW, who spent his life being pretty much ignored by it. I guess the issue is that RAW wasn't published as a "mainstream" writer, but it seems a shame he never got discovered by one of the major literary review magazines, got a lot of press in major newspapers or came up for any of the major literary awards. (Playground was listed as a nominee for the Booker Award even before it came out!)

Footnote: Classical music doesn't loom large in the works of Robert Shea (most of his novels are set in the Middle Ages, preceding such music) but from what I can tell reading his nonfiction bits, he had a particular interest in Mozart. 

Beethoven in 'Cosmic Trigger 2'

Alfred Brendel. (Photo  from official website). 

My fascination with Beethoven continues. I decided a few days ago to listen to all of Beethoven 32 piano sonatas again, in order. I have made it through #5 so far, so obviously I have a ways to go. I am mostly listening to renditions by Alfred Brendel, but for certain performances I am switching to Sviatoslav Richter and Angela Hewitt. (Richter is my favorite piano player, but he never recorded a set of all of Beethoven's sonatas, a good example of how Richter was a maverick and would not do what he was "supposed" to do.)

Robert Anton Wilson's books are peppered with references to Beethoven. My search of the text of Cosmic Trigger 2 (I also have a paper copy, but a Kindle is useful for searches) shows four references to him. For example, in the "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" chapter, RAW writes, "A movie theatre is the best place to learn the true meaning of Plato's parable of the prisoners in the cave, who accept shadows as reality. Every artist who moves us, from a movie maker to Beethoven or Shakespeare, is a bit of a hypnotist."

I am intrigued by another of the references to Beethoven. In the "Attack of the Dog-Faced Demons" chapter, RAW writes, "In a farm in Mendocino, 1972, I was preparing for the Mass of the Phoenix, a ritual designed by Aleister Crowley in which the magician attempts to activate his "True Will." I had taken 250 micrograms of Acid, played some Beethoven, and, when I felt ready, I went to my makeshift Altar and began the invocation."

Why would RAW play Beethoven as part of his preparation? Does anyone want to comment? 

Ralph Abraham has died

Ralph Abraham. Photo posted on X.com by the Mondo 2000 account. 

Ralph Abraham, a California math professor interested in hip culture, has died at age  88. He wrote books on mathematics and philosophy and was interested in psychedelics and lectured on chaos theroy. Many people in the Robert Anton Wilson community have been mourning his death,  here are quotes taken from X.com:

R.U. Sirius: "Ralph Abraham RIP ... the brilliant mathematician and friend to Mondo 2000 et. al. (my recollection is that he wrote for Reality Hackers) master of chaos theory in performance, music, collabs w Terence McKenna he left us at 70. In my limited experience, he was exceptionally kind."

Bobby Campbell: "Ralph Abraham - Dove Sta Memoria. He was the coolest and nicest mathematical genius imaginable. He always answered my silly questions in such an uplifting way that broadened my horizons. May the trialogues never end :)))"

Ted Hand: "RIP Ralph Abraham. I had the pleasure of getting lunch with him, William Sarill, and the late Juan Acosta-Urquidi in Santa Cruz a decade or so back. He told us about a book club he had going with Terence McKenna reading PKD novels. I had been meaning to interview him about that."

Joseph Matheny: "RIP Ralph Abraham. One of my most influential mentors and friends...I worked with Raph on several projects, including going to the Ross School in 2000 and showing students how to author a then-emerging tech video format, DVD. I also often invoked his books (especially "Chaos, Gaia, Eros," a formative book for me) and his concept of The Spiral Curriculum, embodied in his creation for The Ross Academy." (Follow the link thread for a photo and caption and a link to a video).

Here is Professor Abraham's official website.