Oz Fritz continues 'Shadow Ticket' analysis

Oz Fritz has continued his discussion of Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon, with a Part Two post now up at his The Oz Mix blog. 

This one focuses quite a bit on Dante. Oz observes:

"The Divine Comedy by Dante provides a foundational pillar in the canon of Western and Near Eastern literature. It poetically describes a journey through death and the underworld. The influence of this opus on modern and postmodern writers has been profound. You'll find it in James Joyce (Finnegans Wake), Ezra Pound (The Cantos), Robert Anton Wilson (Illuminatus! and others), Malcolm Lowery (Under the Volcano) to name a few."

Here is Oz' first post.   Also, please see my earlier post for links to what Eric Wagner and Peter Quadrino wrote about Pynchon's latest novel. 

A Part Three post is planned with "a Deleuzean perspective."

Dan Simmons has died

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea both loved science fiction, and I do, too, but science fiction writers  still don't get as much respect as other fiction writers; Dan Simmons, who wrote the Hyperion Cantos novels, did not get an obituary in the New York Times after he died on Feb. 21. So I am telling you about it here.

The Hyperion books are really good; the Ilium/Olympos books also are well known, but I was less impressed with them. Simmons also  wrote horror and other work. Here is an obituary from Newsweek. 

Joseph Matheny announces free audio versions of his work

In his latest newsletter, available here, Joseph Matheny announces audio versions of several of his works are now available for free. 

The titles include the audiobook of This is Not a Game, Ong's Hat: The Beginning, Ong’s Hat: COMPLEAT, and Xen: The Zen of the Other. They are torrents, but Joseph includes a video explaining how to use the technology.

Joseph also explains what you can do -- and not do -- with the free versions of his work, and it's worth quoting:

As many of you know, I always make a free digital version of my work available for free after a year of selling it through commercial channels. Some unscrupulous players have taken that to mean that those works are available to be taken, resold, and reused without permission. I shouldn’t have to explain this, but one more time for the folks in the back:

You’re free to download the free versions for your personal use. You are not allowed to resell, remix, or include in any collections without my express, written permission. There are legitinmate, legal copyrights on all my works, for that very reason. The free versions are distributed under the following Creative Commons agreements (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International) and are also legally copyrighted, registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. Look it up. I'm happy to offer my work for free; I’m much less than happy for people or corporations to profit from it.

There are other interesting items in the newsletter. 

Mike Gathers' interesting podcast

As I mentioned I would, I listened to Mike Gathers' in the latest Hilaritas podcast, above, as I was intrigued. It is interesting, personal and candid. Mike talks about his two trips to Costa Rica for Iboga psychedelic therapy, what is was like, how it affected her personal habits and his health. He's planning a follow-up session. Mike is careful to explain that Iboga is dangerous, and not something to experiment with by yourself. 

'Saucers, Spooks and Kooks' news roundup

Saucers, Spooks and Kooks is a new movie based on the Adam Gorightly book of the same name, which I enjoyed. 

Here is an official podcast.  You can also read a roundup of other podcasts.  And there's a post on how the movie got made.  And here's the Substack home page.

Watch here.

Have a nice day!

Atomic bomb test at Bikini Island in 1946 (Wikimedia Commons photo).

One of the reasons I miss Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, besides the obvious ones, is that I wonder what they would make of advances in computers in general, and AI in particular. (They were both fascinated by personal computers; there's a little bit about this in my Robert Shea book.) At age 69, I love my smartphone and marvel at the computer I can carry in my pocket. Technology is wasted on the young. I was a teenager in the 1970s, when our second TV was a black and white with antenna ears, and mobile music meant eight track tapes.

Anyway, here are a couple of things that caught my eye, alarming or black humor, depending on your temperament:

1. "AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations." The lead sentence: "Advanced AI models appear willing to deploy nuclear weapons without the same reservations humans have when put into simulated geopolitical crises."

Via Jesse Walker, who writes, "I was rooting for the resolution of WAR GAMES and instead they kept giving us the setup for THE TERMINATOR."

2. Scott Alexander mentions one of the winners of the ACX forecasting contest and then writes, "Seems potentially bad that so many of the people who win forecasting contests are professionally involved in some form of worrying about AI killing us. Hopefully that’s just a coincidence."

PQ on Joyce and the state violence of evil days

Joyce and Militarism, a book cited by PQ. 

Peter Quadrino has a new piece up at his "Finnegans, Wake!" blog. The new posting is "Evil Days": Joyce and State Violence and it refers to recent events in the U.S. but mostly discusses the brutal repression by Britain when the Irish were trying to achieve independence.

As Peter explains, Joyce had quite a few friends who  were killed by the British, including in the wake of the Easter uprising. (Peter calls these killings "executions," but I think that implies more of a due process than many of the Irish rebels got). Here is Peter on one of the killings:

"One of Joyce's school friends was named George Clancy, he appears in Portrait as Davin, later he became the mayor of Limerick. He was the mayor when one night, the Black and Tans dragged him out of bed and summarily executed him in front of his family. This was in 1921. Joyce was remembering the shock of this almost 15 years later, in a letter to his son Giorgio 4 Feb 1935 he mentions "my poor friend George Clancy (Davin in Portrait). ... He was afterward Mayor of Limerick and was dragged out of bed by the Black and Tans in the night and shot in the presence of his wife." (Letters 1, Gilbert, p. 357)

Mike Gathers' guest? Mike Gathers!

The Hilaritas Press podcast released Monday has a format that's a little different this time. Instead of the usual interview of a guest by Mike Gathers, it stars Mike himself, doing a monologue.

It also sounds really interesting, and I will be listening to it soon. Here is the blurb:

"Hilaritas host Mike Gathers does all the talking this episode as he describes his illuminating experiences with iboga psychedelic therapy."

That's an iboga rainforest shrub behind Mike. 

RAW's circle of friends

RAWnet, the "Friends of the Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson," has moved to a new location on the RAW Trust website.  It's a "people who RAW knew personally who influenced him, or the other way around, and folks who were in some respect experts on RAW," Rasa says.

It can be fun to look at the biographies. For example, I followed the links for Mark Frauenfelder, pictured above,  and discovered he has made several TV appearances, including the Colbert Report. 

'Illuminatus' on list of 'weird books'

 

An article at the Microsoft Network, "32 weird but brilliant books if you are seeking to read something different, as shared online," includes Illuminatus! as one of the books. 

The article is attributed to Asli Akalin, although I wondered if AI was used for the compilation.

Aside from Illuminatus!, I have read a number of books on the list: If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino, A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole, Babel-17, Samuel Delany, and 334, Thomas M. Disch. It's not a bad list.

Hat tip, Nick Helweg-Larsen. 

My latest Bandcamp album

Above is a jazz album, Incandescence, released by trumpeter and composer Sarah Wilson and her sextet, that I bought after I heard one of her songs on a Cleveland jazz station. It was released on Bandcamp, a cool website and app that brings musicians and listeners together.

Jazz artists get little exposure in the modern culture, and I like the album, but I am mainly posting to bring your attention to Bandcamp. If you haven't tried it, it's a place where independent artists can post their music for sale (or even give it away). Typically, Bandcamp lets you listen to music before you decide whether to buy it. Purchase prices are generally quite reasonable and also allow the customer to stream the music from the useful Bandcamp smartphone app.

My collection of purchased material currently has 23 items, and many of the albums are by artists connected in at least some fashion with RAW fandom. So, for example, my music from Bandcamp includes The First Trip, a Tales of Illuminati soundtrack by Steve Pratt; Jukebox Musical by Danny and the Darlings, another Tales soundtrack; Ambient Blue by Starseed (e.g., Rasa's band); Tank Girl by Noah 23 and Squat the Condos by Prop Anon. Of course, I also have good stuff by people with no connection to the topics of this blog, such as Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok by Sassafras (e.g., Ada Palmer's Norse Myth song cycle), and The Time Curve Preludes by  Emanuele Arciuli and Costanza Savarese, music by a modern composer I like, William Duckworth. 

Bandcamp is worth taking a few moments to explore if you are into music. 

Robert Anton Wilson on 'All Things Are Lights'

From a Sept. 4, 1986, letter written by Robert Anton Wilson to Kurt Smith:

"Shea is a nice guy and a good friend, so I told him All Things Are Lights was a wonderful adventure novel. That's my official opinion. I hate the bitchiness and nastiness that infests the literary world and I try to remember never to bum-rap anybody, but especially not old friends."

Via Michael Johnson, thank you Michael! Does anyone have any context, or any other comments by RAW about Shea's novels? I liked All Things Are Lights and it was a favorite of his widow, Patricia Monaghan. 

 

Bobby Campbell comic book volume nears completion

 

Bobby Campbell has posted a new comic, and reports that he will be soon collecting his completion of a long series as one big graphic novel. Here's the report in the latest newsletter:

"Never mind the B.S., here's a new comic!

"Agnosis! #3 Ep. 1 - "BEFORE THE LAW"

"Agnosis! #3 is the fifth and final installment of my OKEY-DOKEY comic book series, nearly 23 years in the making, and soon to be finished and collected in one handsome volume :))) I'll be irregularly serializing the final issue as I go.

"If you need to get caught up on what came before, the entire series has been spiffed up and made more user friendly than ever before!

"https://weirdcomix.com/OKEY-DOKEY/

"OKEY-DOKEY is the forthcoming meta-modern graphic novel by Bobby Campbell, Marcelino Balao III, and Todd Purse. Featuring two intertwined comic book adventures, Agnosis! & BUDDHAFART, which weave together to form the Dream@wake_Sutra, a Discordian Hypersigil that tells the tale of the tribe as a SUN PLAY OF THE AGES in five Acts :)))"