Higgs and Matheny: Big in Italy and Japan

I've received two interesting newsletters via email recently, and in the interest of trying to get caught up, I am going to mention both of them here.

In his latest newsletter, John Higgs announces a translation into  Italian of his book about David Lynch. "I’m honoured that the Italian director Alex Infascelli has written a new foreword for this. More details are here."  Still no U.S. edition, apparently. 

John also covers some public appearances, recommends a book and posts a music video. 

Joseph Matheny's newsletter provides an interesting update (of sorts) on his latest work in progress and has this news:

"I was recently notified that there will be a chapter about my work in the following academic publication:

"Publication: NEW GAME ART – The Aesthetics of Play and Worldbuilding

"BNN, Inc., November 2026

"Language Japanese

"More info as I receive it."

Lots of other interesting stuff in the newsletter, including a mention of the surrealist poet Harry Crosby, kind of a wild character. I knew of Crosby from an account in Lucy Moore's Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties.

Maybe Logic on Reddit

 

Bobby Campbell has revived and refurbished the Maybe Logic subreddit.

More at the link, including the rules for posting, but everyone is invited to stop by and post: "Post anything related to Maybe Logic, Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus!, Discordianism, Hilaritas Press, Maybe Day, Maybe Night and really anything connected to the vast constellation of artists, writers, and ideas that comprise this multifaceted countercultural milieu."

'The Classical Style' reading group, week 19

Portrait of Franz Schubert (source). 

Epilogue

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

            

Thank you for taking this voyage with me. I love this book dearly. This final Epilogue serves as a transition to Rosen’s 1995 masterpiece The Romantic Generation.

 I love Rosen’s discussion of Schubert in the Epilogue. When I first read The Romantic Generation it surprised me that he didn’t write more about Schubert. This Epilogue makes clear that Rosen sees Schubert as a transitional figure from the classical style to the Romantic generation. Yes, I had read The Classical Style before I read The Romantic Generation, but this distinction about Schubert’s unique transitional role did not become clear to me until about the fifth time I read The Classical Style. Like Thomas Pynchon, I seem a slow learner.

Ezra Pound tended to translate works he found important. In the same way, Rosen recorded works he found important, and I love his playing of the Schubert sonata he focused on in the Epilogue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD5Rijhkb98&list=OLAK5uy_m2R9E7kdRS8G7yMB3FMM_n-N7lPABHlmo

New Adam Gorightly book, 'Agent of Disruption: The Many Lives of Fred Crisman'

 

Discordian Historian Adam Gorightly, mentioned many times at this blog because of his books and articles on Discordianism, UFOs, etc. has a new book out: Agent of Disruption: The Many Lives of Fred Crisman. It's on Bookshop, so you can support a local bookstore if you order it (also on Amazon and Walmart). 

Official blurb: "An international man of mystery with alleged intelligence agency connections, Fred Lee Crisman left behind a Walter Mitty-like legacy populated by flying saucers, assassination conspiracies, and alleged encounters with those nasty little inner-earth dwellers known as the Deros.

"Strap in yourself in for this long strange trip down memory lane to Maury Island, Dealey Plaza, and all points in between as we explore the many lives of Fred Lee Crisman, a true agent of disruption."

More about the book when I find out more, but here is an article by Adam about Mr. Crisman. 

'Tales of Illuminatus' update

On Bluesky, Bobby Campbell announces that now that the Kickstarter campaign has concluded, single copies of Tales of Illuminatus! #3 "Opus Chao" are now available. You can also buy copies of the first two issues, all available here.  But note that Bobby adds: "This is the last call on single issues of TOI #1-3! Only have a small batch of these left and only going to keep the TPB [trade paperback of all 3 issues] in print after this :)))"

Bobby also reports: 

"The second and final phase of fulfillment has now begun :)))

"The digital versions of Tales of Illuminatus! - The Kether Trip and Illuminatus! Skeleton Key #1 are now available!

"The print versions are being produced as we speak, with shipping set to begin during the first week of October.

"At which point the only item left to be shipped will be the cassette tapes, which should be ready to go within the next few weeks."

Also, Bobby announces: 

"Refurbishing my old blog and archiving my various disparate nonsense :)))

"Here's a quarantine era curve ball re: the high weirdness of the 1970's."

Friday links

Illustration from RAW Semantics post. 

RAW Semantics on AI. He invites comments from RAW fans, and I have chipped in. 

Michael Johnson also recently wrote about AI. Michael writes that rich tech people "are trash," this seems to me to lack nuance (while I'm no Elon Musk fan and I feel let down by Big Tech politics in general), see my comments to the RAW Semantics post. 

Tyler Cowen posts a lot on AI. here is a recent post. "Snap out of it you sad sacks, hope you can recognize negative emotional contagion when you see it!"

"People are still saying that Dick’s novels are turning into reality. But it’s not a joke anymore. It’s feels more like a warning." Ted Gioia on Dick's seven best novels.   I do think he's found some of the best books, I read Flow My Tears the Policeman Said recently and enjoyed it. 

Natural Law Theory Is Obviously False. Bentham's Bulldog Newsletter. 

"I think that whether the right reforms in any meaningful way or continues its slide into stupidity and genocidal vibes will depend on election results. Parties are always responding to messages from voters, and this will continue to be true going forward." From "Why Non-White Voters Must Crush Republicans."

'Modern Occultist' recommends 'Prometheus Rising'

 

The folks at Modern Occultist have put out a short video on the "Top Five Books for Chaos Magic Beginners" which includes Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. (For some reason, I could not find a way to share the code and post the video directly here, as I usually would do).

The magazine also  has begun a new podcast series  and has released its fall issue.  The home page for the magazine is here. 

New Hilaritas podcast: Wingate and Turetzky

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.

Michael Johnson on Luna and Sen. Charles Piercy's daughter

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. 

'The Classical Style' reading group, Week 18

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 

New Jesse Walker paper discusses Wilson and Shea

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. 

RIP RAW daughter Alexander 'Alex' Gardner

 

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. 

Arrived in the mail [UPDATED]

 

My copy of Tales of Illuminatus #3 "Opus Chao" arrived in the mail yesterday. If you participated in the Kickstarter campaign, look for your copy to arrive soon, too. I'm still waiting for some of my stuff, but it looks like fulfillment is moving forward. The Kickstarter site has updates. It looks like much of the digital rewards are available for download, with the Skeleton Key zine and the trade paperback on the way. 

UPDATE: Please see Bobby Campbell  in the comments!