Dr. Douglas Wingate & Dr. Rachel Turetzky return to the Hilaritas podcast. Here is the blurb:
"Guest host Zach West chats with Dr. Douglas Wingate & Dr. Rachel Turetzky of Eight Circuit Ascension who have recently released a practical workbook and created an online metaprogramming certification course over at Psychedelics Today. Doug, based in Oregon, is a licensed psilocybin facilitator and Chinese-medicine practitioner. Rachel brings complementary depth in psycho-spiritual practice and education. They discuss the new course, the rapidly shifting legal landscape, early developmental imprinting, and the practical art of metaprogramming, and more."
More information here. The two also appeared in a previous episode.
.jpg)
Sen. Charles Percy
Michael Johnson has a new Substack piece up: "When Tragedy Bridges Politics," about the death of Robert Anton Wilson's daughter Luna, as described in the first Cosmic Trigger book, and the murder of U.S. Sen. Charles Percy's daughter.
I thought it was one of Michael's better pieces, but it's also good background for the upcoming online discussion group for Wilson's Schrödinger's Cat books. There is discussion about passages in the first book of the trilogy, The Universe Next Door, describing the grief of the character Benny "Eggs" Benedick, who as Michael says is "a very Wilson-ish character."
Michael posted about Luna's death on Saturday morning, the same morning I posted the sad news about the death of another one of Wilson's daughters, Alexandra Gardner. Kind of a sad synchronicity.
VII. BEETHOVEN
Beethoven's Later Years and the Conventions of His Childhood
By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
"More of Beethoven's intelligence is needed, desperately, to create a signal that the current Lenins cannot ignore, that will make them weep, and stop hitting heads."
- Prometheus Rising, pg. 271
Writing about the page around 29:41 - 29:58, Charles Rosen wrote, "This transitional page is one of the most astonishing in the history of music. No other work until then, to my knowledge, combined the effect of almost uncontrolled improvisatory movement with such a totally systemic structure" (The Classical Style, pg. 429).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5jBD_vxy8w
"Beethoven was conducting celestial astronomy in his own way. Before our eyes (this fugue cannot be completely realized in sound, so the printed music is important in its own right) he demonstrates the various rotations of the planets: retrograde, inversion, augmentation - at the same time reaching the frontier of atonality."
- Wilhelm Kempff on the last movement of the Hammerklavier Sonata
A 1967 publicity photo of John Carradine.
Jesse Walker has completed and published a new paper that I wrote about earlier, "Birchers, Discordians, and Sex Education: The Libertarians in the Anaheim Sex-Ed Wars." It's available here.
The abstract captures why the paper is of interest to readers of this blog: "Anaheim, California, was one of the first battlegrounds in the wars over sex education that started erupting in the 1960s. Radical libertarians found themselves playing notable parts on both sides of the conflict. This paper examines the roles of R.C. Hoiles on the anti-sex-education side of the debate and of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea on the pro-sex-education side; it also describes how another radical libertarian, Ralph Raico, essentially synthesized the Hoiles and Wilson/Shea positions. These rival approaches reflect conflicting ideas about liberty that can also be found outside the libertarian movement, sometimes in ways that confound conventional models of the political right and left."
Jesse's paper, published in the UC Berkeley Journal of Right-Wing Studies, has an amusing opening paragraph:
"Long before a certain sort of conservative took to casually calling his foes 'groomers,' the Malibu-based record label American United released The Child Seducers. On the disc, narrator John Carradine opined on everything from Rosemary’s Baby to 'the flaming pornography of the nudity cults,' but his chief target was sex education. 'The schools of America are sex saturated,' Carradine warned, just three years before the always-game-for-a-paycheck actor appeared in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex."
It's a fun paper; expect references to Illuminatus!, discussion of Wilson and Shea, etc.
Disclosure: I am named in the Acknowledgements and my Robert Shea book is cited.
Alexandra Gardner (Facebook photo)
Christina Pearson reports the sad news that her sister, Alexandra "Alex" Gardner, 71, Eugene, Oregon, died on August 29. All condolences to Christina and to her other family members and friends.
No formal obituary has been posted, at least yet. Christina flew to Oregon to deal with the necessary details. Ms. Gardner has been cremated. Christina told me the news when she wrote to me about another matter and then gave me permission to post about it here.
Without an obituary, there are few details of her life I can report. According to her Facebook page, she was born on February 23, 1955, and listed Huntington, New York, as her hometown. She owned Junior Properties, LLC, a real estate company, and also worked for Flying Lasagna Enterprises. She also was a hypnotherapist. According to written testimony she submitted in 2017 to the Oregon legislature, her main source of retirement income was a few rental properties she owned.
Chapel Perilous, the RAW biography by Gabriel Kennedy, provides a few passing biographical glimpses, and the notes show that Ms. Gardner helped with the biography, granting the author many interviews.
Robert Anton Wilson of course mentioned all four of his children in his books; in the first Cosmic Trigger book, Alex is mentioned a few times under the name Karuna.
John Wisniewski, who has done other interviews for this blog, returns with an interview with the author of an important new book. Ru Marshall is the author of American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda.
Marshall's publisher, O/R Books, says the new book, released June 25 this year, "unravels the story of the secretive faux-anthropologist who pulled off one of the greatest literary hoaxes in modern history." Reviewers seem to agree. Publisher's Weekly, for example, said it is "an entrancing biography." The New York Times review, by Kurt Andersen, called the book "illuminating and relevant."
When I was a college student in the 1970s, a friend of mine persuaded me to read Castaneda's breakthrough book, The Teachings of Don Juan. I remember finding the book's revelations of insight gained from indigenous psychedelic practices hard going, but others were more impressed. The publisher's blurb notes, "Admirers ranged from John Lennon and Joni Mitchell to Federico Fellini, George Lucas, and Octavio Paz. His books became international bestsellers and remain the most popular titles ever published on Native American spirituality—despite having little to no connection to actual Indigenous practices." It seems hilarious to me that Castaneda actually apparently didn't use drugs, as Marshall reveals.
Michael Johnson, writing about Castaneda for this blog in 2022, surmised, "At present, my main model of Castaneda is that he never went to the Sonora Desert and probably wrote all the Don Juan books from sources in the library at UCLA. When he submitted his thesis, he was asked to show his field notes, and basically: the dog ate 'em, and they signed off on his degree anyway."
Ru Marshall is an American artist, writer and critic. They labored for 20 years on the Castaneda biography. See also the official website.
You can also read Mr. Wisniewski's interview with Nick Herbert, his interview with Adam Gorightly, the Tea Krulos interview, the David Halperin interview, and two interviews of John Higgs, here and here.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Are there many who believed in Carlos Casteneda, as far as his writing is concerned?
RU MARSHALL: There were millions. Although exact figures are impossible to ascertain, he was among the four or five bestselling nonfiction authors of the 70s, and his books continued to sell handsomely well into the 80s. For the first five years following the publication of The Teachings of Don Juan, almost no one publicly questioned the authenticity of his work. That rare exception being Gordon Wasson.
Did Don Juan Matus exist? No. He was a fictional creation.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Did Casteneda have a coven of witches who were his companions?
RU MARSHALL: I wouldn’t use the word “coven.” Castaneda never called it that. But there were three women, Taisha Abelar, Florinde Donner Grau, and Carol Tiggs whom he referred to as his witches, and who claimed (falsely) to have met Don Juan. Florinda and Taisha both disappeared immediately following his death in 1998, and all evidence points to they’re having committed suicide to follow him into the next dimension.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Would you consider Casteneda to be a cult leader?
RU MARSHALL: You bet. Definitions of a cult vary, but the one I employ in American Trickster is as follows: a tightly bounded social group the underlying purpose of which is the aggrandizement of the leader or leaders at the expense, psychological but also financial, emotional, so forth, of the followers. Castaneda’s followers were told to cut off their families, leave behind partners, pets, and jobs to become part of his magical, alternative family. It rarely ended well.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: What was Casteneda's early life like?
RU MARSHALL: This is sort of too massive a question to answer. He was born in Cajamarca Peru, his birth name was César Arana. He came from the not quite so wealthy branch of an extremely wealthy family. Although his parents were revolutionaries, he was, on his father’s side, descended from one of the most infamous genocidiares in Peruvian history. Carlos attended art school in Lima, where, shortly before fleeing to the U.S., he impregnated a thirteen year old girl.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Why were Casteneda's documents and paper work burned by his followers, at the time of his death?
RU MARSHALL: One of the central principles of his work and in his cult was the mandate to “erase personal history.” He did not want his real story told. This didn’t make my life easy.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Does the Casteneda cult continue to this day?
RU MARSHALL: I no longer pay close attention to this, but it appears to still exist, although it is likely less cultlike than when Carlos was alive. But you can still take classes in Tensegrity, the faux Toltec movement practice which Carlos and the witches suggested could provide the opportunity for eternal life.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Did Casteneda use drugs to alter his consciousness?
RU MARSHALL: Shockingly, there is almost no evidence that he did. He gave them to others, and artfully plagiarized accounts by others. In interview after interview, I was told, “he only did them with Don Juan.” But there is definitive evidence that don Juan was a fictional creation. I came across only one eye witness account of Carlos ever using any psychoactive plant or drug—Datura. And, in this account, by Jack Leoffler, he did it wrong. No one got high. He clearly never used mushrooms, since his account in his books has him getting high by smoking them. This doesn’t work.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Have his works proven to be an influence on the New Age movement?
RU MARSHALL: Absolutely. He is quoted often, and still regarded with reverence by many.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Why was Casteneda's life so often shrouded in mystery?
RU MARSHALL: Because he went to great lengths that it be so. He had far too much to hide.
As we are going to do an online reading group pretty soon on Robert Anton Wilson's Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy (I don't have details yet, I need to discuss them first with Eric Wagner), I thought I would share something I had missed: A review of the first book of the trilogy, The Universe Next Door, by the prominentt science fiction fan and book reviewer James Davis Nicoll. The review was posted in January 2024, but I missed it at the time.
Here is a sentence that seems to capture his views: "I don’t regret rereading this book despite it being a dated hot mess." There are other mixed comments in the review.
Obviously, i like the book better than he does, but it's something else to discuss .
Beethoven in 1818, i.e. around the time his Piano Sonata No. 29 was written. (Source).
Part VII BEETHOVEN
By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
We have entered the Hammerklavier Zone. We will not leave until the Schroedinger's Cat study group finishes, if then. For the last six years I found myself dwelling in an exercise in the fifth circuit chapter of Prometheus Rising where Bob told the reader to attend a Sufi weekend seminar . Now I find myself in a dinner party in Schroedinger's Cat surrounded by concert pianists, all of whom got invited so the host could discuss the Hammerklavier with them. Steven De Groote got invited, and he brought along a few of his students including my friend Jai Jeffryes. Steven kindly allowed me to tag along. I recognize Charles Rosen, Vladamir Horowitz, Glenn Gould, Maurizio Pollini, Martha Argerich, Alfred Brendel, Murray Perahia, Arthur Rubenstein, Sviatoslav Richter, Radu Lupu, Rudolf Serkin, Peter Serkin, and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.
I remember when Jai first told me about the Hammerklavier back in August 1980. He saw a Rudolf Serkin LP of the Hammerklavier in a used record store. A week or so later Jai, his friend Jim, and I sat in Jai's dorm room listening to either the Serkin or Brendel recording of the sonata. Jim commented that every pianist but Pollini sounded like "they were about to fall off the end of the piano bench at the end of the sonata." In 2005 Rafi Zabor turned me on to Solomon's recordings of Beethoven's late piano sonatas. I mentioned Jim's comment about the Hammerklavier to Rafi, and he said Solomon didn't sound ready to fall off the piano bench at the end of his recording.
I used ChatGPT to make this picture depicting Atlantis shortly before they discovered advanced AI and destroyed themselves.
Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary were very interested in computer technology, and typically technology positive, but alas they left us before AI really got going. I wish I knew what they would have said.
I have been reading many articles lately about the purported dangers and benefits of AI. One article I would particularly recommend is a Substack piece by Tracing Woodgrains, We Will Never Have “Normal Times” Again. Here is a bit of it:
Forget your instinct to dismiss, honed by years of promises of a crypto revolution or NFTs or another Next Big Thing, while all that changed in your life was a new iPhone and the social media takeover of the world. Forget all of that, and just look. Five years ago, you probably did not know what OpenAI was, and Anthropic barely even existed. Five years ago, if you wanted to get a computer to do something, you wrote by hand in machine-tailored language.
The article pairs well with the Fareed Zakaria piece I mentioned in this earlier blog post. I got zero comments, but I am happy with that post.
If you want optimistic takes on AI, you can read Richard Hanania and Deep Left Analysis For pessimism, there a new Michael Johnson and Ted Gioia.
In a comment for the Hanania piece, one of my favorite bloggers, Scott Sumner, wrote: "While I am pretty dismissive of the jobs fears associated with AI, I am agnostic on the safety issue. I don't know enough to have an intelligent opinion, but FWIW my biggest fear is not misalignment, it's alignment. More specifically, AI alignment with a rogue scientist that wishes to produce a global pandemic--the virologist equivalent of that Malaysian pilot that ditched his plane in South Indian Ocean. Again, I have no idea if that's possible, but I worry more about evil people working with cooperative machines than I do about evil machines."
UPDATE: AI safety update posted Sunday by Scott Alexander.
The one-volume omnibus editon of the Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy, which I suspect is the one we will have to use for our upcoming discussion group, has considerable cuts in comparison to the original three books that were published separately. The Wikipedia article references the cuts, but the best detail I can find is in Eric Wagner's very useful An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson.
Eric's book (in the Lexicon section, in the entry "My favorite Wilson book," says, "The one volume Schrödinger's Cat has about 212 pages cut, plus some slight revisions." So the cuts are considerable.
While there has been a lot of discussion from Wilson and Shea about the cuts made in Illuminatus!, I would like to know more about the cuts in SC. Why was the omnibus edition cut so much? Did Wilson himself make all of the decisions on what to cut, and what did he think about having to make the cuts? Was there any principle about the sorts of cuts that were made? I regard SC as a major work of fiction, and I am baffled that I know so little about these questions. Can anyone help?
#/media/File:Ludwig_Van_Beethoven_LCCN2003663903.jpg){kind=link}