Interesting podcast on the new book

I had to do a couple of long drives this week, so I took the opportunity to listen to the new Hilaritas podcast. Some of it I already knew, as I have already read Straight Outta Dublin twice (once in manuscript, and the second time to proofread it), but I still learned quite a bit. A good discussion of Prometheus Rising and a good Robert Heinlein bit, among other highlights. I've made the YouTube version available again, but you should be able to find the Hilaritas podcast at your favorite podcasting app. 

A useful phrase for the RAW fan

AI image from Bing

Guidebooks for tourists will teach you how to ask where the bathroom is and how to order a beer, but what if you are a RAW fan and you want to know how to say, "Keep the lasagna flying?"

Rasa, who runs Hilaritas Press and other operations of the Robert Anton Wilson Trust for Christina Pearson, has filled that gap by compiling a list of how to say that phrase in many different languages. Here is his latest compilation: 

Keep the Lasagna Flying in different languages

Latin for “flying lasagna”

pasta volans!

Esperanto

Konservu la Lasagne Fluganta!

German

Lass die Lasagne weiterfliegen

Italian

Mantenere il volo di lasagna!

Irish

Coinnigh an lasagne in airde!

Scots Gaelic

Cùm an lasagna ag itealaich! 

French

Laissez voler la lasagne - FB suggestion Philippe Borsky Vermeersch

continue à faire voler les lasagnes – another suggestion

Dutch

Laat de lasagne vliegen - FB suggestion Philippe Borsky Vermeersch

Blijf de Lasagne vliegen!

Yiddish

האַלט די לאַזאַניע פליענדיק

Hebrew

שהלזניה תמשיך לעופף

Spanish

Guarde el vuelo del lasagna!

Hindi

लज़ान्या उड़ान रखने के

Arabic

إبقى اللازانيا طائرة

Keep - أبقى

The Lasagna - اللازانيا

Flying - طائرة

Egyptian vernacular

خلى اللازانيا طايرة

Keep - خلى 

The Lasagna - اللازانيا

Flying - طايرة

Chinese?

保持烤宽面条飞行！

Czech

Udržujte lasagne létání!

Hawaiian

E mālama i ka Lasagna e lele ana! (Save Lasagna Flying!)

Indonesian

Jauhkan Lasagna Terbang!

Korean

라자냐를 계속 날아라!

Russian

Держите Лазанью Летающий!

Samoan

Tausi Lasagna lele!

Turkish

Lazanyayı uçmaya devam et!

Maori

Kia mau ki te rere lasagna!

Latvian

Neka lazanja leti

Afrikaans

Laat die lasagne vlieg

Slovenian

Obdržite lezanjo v letečem stanju.

Macedonian

Чувајте ја лазања летање.

( Čuvajte ja lazanja letanje.)

Croatian

Držite lazanju u letu.

Serbian

Држите лазању y лету.

Islandic

Haltu áfram að láta lasagnað fljúga

Latin

Custodi lasagna volans!

Hexadecimal

54-68-65-20-6c-61-73-61-67-6e-61-20-66-6c-69-65-73-20-69-6e-20-6d-61-6e-79-20-6c-61-6e-67-75-61-67-65-73

Binary

0101 0100 0110 1000 0110 0101 0010 0000 0110 1100 0110 0001 0111 0011 0110 0001 0110 0111 0110 1110 0110 0001 0010 0000 0110 0110 0110 1100 0110 1001 0110 0101 0111 0011 0010 0000 0110 1001 0110 1110 0010 0000 0110 1101 0110 0001 0110 1110 0111 1001 0010 0000 0110 1100 0110 0001 0110 1110 0110 0111 0111 0101 0110 0001 0110 0111 0110 0101 0111 0011

~~~~~~~~~~

Branka Tesla said...

Rasa, here is my contribution to your repertorium:

Slovenian

Obdržite lezanjo v letečem stanju.

Macedonian

Чувајте ја лазања летање.

( Čuvajte ja lazanja letanje.)

Croatian

"Neka lazanja leti." or "Odrzavajte lazanju u letu." (Updated from previous translation, see comment). 

Serbian

Држите лазању y лету.

Ukrainian

Тримайте Лазанню Літаючий!

'Being Married to Timothy Leary Was Tough. It Helped to Be High'

A memorable headline, above, for the review in the New York Times for The Acid Queen, a new biography of Rosemary Woodruff Leary written by Susannah Cahalan. (I always thought if anyone was the "acid queen," it would be Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane, but I guess not).

Anyway, the new book about Rosemary Leary is written by Cree LeFavour. The gift link above gets you behind the Times paywall. A bit from the review:

She was the third wife of Leary, the charismatic Harvard professor turned high priest of 1960s psychedelic counterculture who urged us to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Much of “The Acid Queen” focuses on the couple’s chaotic, drug- and sex-filled lives between their first meeting in 1965 and their split in 1971, years that included communal compounds in New York and California, arrests, jail time, a prison break and travel as fugitives in North Africa and Europe.

Cahalan is known for her bestselling book Brain on Fire, which was made into a movie. 

Eric Wagner on his new book

Rasa's amazing cover for the new book. 

Eric Wagner, author of An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson, has a new book out. Straight Outta Dublin examines James Joyce's influence on Wilson. In addition to Eric's own work, there's a long essay by R. Michael Johnson. Eric's new tome has joined his first book on the Kindle app on my phone; I keep them both handy for ready reference.

Eric and his wife live in southern California.  He's a schoolteacher as well as a writer. I had questions about the new book, Eric gave me answers: 

RAWIllumination: Do you regard James Joyce as the writer who influenced Robert Anton Wilson the most, even more than Alfred Korzybski and Ezra Pound?

Eric Wagner: Well, I don't like linear models. I think those three authors all influenced him a great deal in different ways. Bob kept returning to Joyce throughout his life, from his teenage years until the end of his life. Michael Johnson does a great job of tracing that influence over the decades in his wonderful essay in the book.

RAWIllumination: Robert Anton Wilson knew you were working on a book about James Joyce's influence on him, correct? Did he give you any guidance?

Eric Wagner: Yes, he did. We talked about Joyce and corresponded about Joyce from 1986 until just before Bob's death in 2007. He suggested focusing on his Masks of the Illuminati, and he suggested rereading Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era (which has a lot of Joyce material).

Eric Wagner on Jeopardy!, 21 years ago. He won and used his champion money  to take his wife to Paris (Facebook photo). 

RAWIllumination: I don't know that I've ever asked you this: What did RAW say about An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson after it came out? 

Eric Wagner: Bob wrote the very kind introductions to the book as well as doing the introductory interview with me. He said kind words to Michael Johnson about my skill in writing in E-Prime. I have heard about a few other kind comments he made about the book from other sources. I think he asked to have it read aloud to him near the end of his life.

RAWIllumination: It seems to me you have been "working on" this book for many  years. How long have you been in one Finnegans Wake discussion group or another? 

Eric Wagner: I started my first Finnegans Wake group in March 1985 with Conrad Holt and Robert Rabinowitz in Tempe, Arizona. That group continued meeting on Thursdays (Finnday to us) until December 1997 when I moved back to California. I started teaching high school in August 1998, and that school year I started a Finnegans Wake Club which ran for 23 years until I stopped teaching high school. I tried to get in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's longest running high school Finnegans Wake Club, but they declined my submission.

RAWIllumination:  In 1932, when RAW was born, Joyce was 49. Joyce died in January 1941, the month RAW turned 9. Any idea how old Robert Anton Wilson was when he began reading Joyce?

Eric Wagner: In Illuminati Papers Bob says he started reading the Wake at the age of sixteen.

RAWIllumination: You are in California, a good place to launch such a book, are you trying to set up dates at local libraries, etc.?

Eric Wagner: In all honesty the idea didn't occur to me until you suggested it. Working two jobs, I find my energy very low this decade.

RAWIllumination: If I recall correctly, Robert Anton Wilson advised you to read Ulysses 40 times. Can you please tell me about that conversation and tell me what the context was?

Eric Wagner: On page 157 of the second edition of An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson in an interview with Dr. Wilson, I say, "I have a good facility when writing poetry, but prose comes very slowly to me. Pound talks about, 'Go read forty novels by Henry James,' which I haven't done yet."

Bob responded, "Uh-huh. I'd say read Ulysses forty times." This conversation took place in Bob's room in a hotel in Anaheim in 2000. Richard Bandler had brought Bob down from Capitola to participate in an NLP seminar. Dr. Bandler kindly allowed me and a couple of other friends of Bob to attend for free the portions of the seminar where Bob spoke. The day after the interview Bob told me that he had never had much success reading Henry James either. So far I have only read Ulysses thirteen times. 

RAWIllumination: Your book, including the substantial contribution by Michael Johnson, discusses James Joyce's influence on RAW. If people want to understand RAW's writings, should they read your book, even if they haven't read much Joyce?

Eric Wagner: I think this book will greatly increase anyone's understanding of Bob Wilson's work, and I think also it provides a good introduction to Joyce's work. I deal in different ways with Joyce's major works, Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Dubliners and their relationship with Bob's writing. Michael did a wonderful job with his long essay which I think really fits in well with my work.

Sunday links

Latest news from British writer Ben Graham.  He is making progress in his American Underground novel sequence. 

Podcast interview with Mike Gathers: (He is wearing a Cosmic Trigger shirt). 

$100,000 bounty to find the man Aella will marry. (Details at the end of the piece). 

David Thomas, lead singer and founder of Pere Ubu, died on April 23 in Brighton, England, while the MC5 played on the radio.  I wrote an obituary for the Sandusky Register, playing up local connections in the Sandusky, Ohio, area. The New York Times has now published its obit. 

Joseph Matheny is working on a movie

Photo of Mr. Matheny by Marc Fennell, from the official website. 

Lots of interesting stuff in the latest Joseph Matheny Substack newsletter, and I would encourage you to read the whole thing. There's a lot that I won't try to summarize, but here's a particularly newsworthy bit: He's working on a movie!

[After some anecdotes about other attempts to adapt Ong's Hat that haven't worked out] "So, I’m going independent. I’ll develop my own feature-length movie, retaining full creative control. That’s the only way it’ll get made to my standards—and the only way it won’t be hijacked and diluted into mediocrity. I’m working on a treatment and script that weaves elements of Ong’s Hat: COMPLEAT and The Liminal Cycle into a new, third thing. I intend to create something that doesn’t fit the content factory molds, so I will necessarily have to create it outside that system. I don't want to release a movie. I want to make a movie that escapes. I’ll share more once the writing is done and funding is in place."

New Bobby Campbell podcast

 

In his latest newsletter, Bobby Campbell writes, "Very many thanks to the great AP Strange for having me on his show to talk all things Discordian and RAW :))) In what started as a typical podcast spot to hawk the book, but quickly turned into a real convo about these truly weird times!"

'Testament' reading group has begun

 

Over at the Jechidah blog, the Testament online reading group has begun. 

It's led by Bobby Campbell. Bobby has gotten permission from the creators of the comic book series, Douglas Rushkoff and Liam Sharp, to post each issue online for a month, and Bobby has written a thoughtful first blog post, so join in with your comments! 

'Straight Outta Dublin' released, new Hilaritas podcast out

 

Straight Outta Dublin, Eric Wagner's study of James Joyce's influence on Robert Anton Wilson (with a big contribution from R. Michael Johnson) was released today by Hilaritas Press. Here is the official announcement. A bit from that newsletter:

"RAW fans into Joyce will love this book. RAW fans who are curious about Joyce, but maybe not big Joyce fans will also love this book. RAW fans totally unfamiliar with Joyce have some enjoyable eye-opening to do! Eric Wagner and R. Michael Johnson make RAW's love for Joyce understandable… not an easy achievement!"

There's also a new podcast about the book, with Mike Gathers interviewing Eric:

Phil Baker's Austin Osman Spare biography

 

I have just finished Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist by the British writer Phil Baker, and I want to take a moment to  recommend it; while I know little of occultism and British art history, I admire good writing and careful biographical research and I found plenty of both here. Spare was a British artist and occultist; Baker remarks that Spare is "obscure and famous at the same time" (that would also be an apt description of Robert Anton Wilson, perhaps), and I confess I did not recognize Spare's name when Gregory Arnott sent me a copy of the book.

Spare had a habit of telling wonderful stories about himself that did not actually happen to be true, so Baker's task was not easy. Baker notes, "Biography can only follow its subject so far, especially a character like Spare, whose real life was internal. The life of an occultist is very different from the life of a tycoon or a general, and Spare was a hidden figure whose  life is lived largely on the inner planes ... "

I did feel I learned quite a bit about life in London over the decades, the British art scene, and some of Spare's contemporaries. There are many entertaining characters, such as Gerald Gardner and Kenneth Grant, and I read for example about George Moore, an Irish writer whose name was not before known to me: "His several volumes of autobiography are filled with tales of his sexual conquests, but it seems he may, in fact, have died a virgin."(

My copy of the book is the third edition, and Baker took the opportunity with each edition to make corrections and write updates at the back of the book. The publisher is Strange Attractor Press, and as with the other books by that British publisher, it is attractively put together and appears to be carefully edited. (Check out the publisher's website).

'Illuminatus!' cites 'The Crying of Lot 49' [UPDATED]

 

In a recent post I mentioned that I had recently read Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and that it seemed to be an obvious influence on Illuminatus!, and I also mentioned a connection between Robert Shea and Pynchon. 

In a comment, Jesse Walker notes that Illuminatus! actually has a passage that cites Lot 49: 

"We accept Bugs Bunny as an exemplar of Mummu here, too, but otherwise we have little in common with the SSS. That's the Satanist, Surrealists and Sadists— the crew who began your illuminization in Chicago. All we share with them actually is use of the Tristero anarchist postal system, to evade the government's postal inspectors, and a financial agreement whereby we accept their DMM script—Divine Marquis Memorial script— and they accept our hempscript and the flaxscript of the Legion of Dynamic Discord."

The "Tristero anarchist postal system" is from The Crying of Lot 49. Dr. Ignotum P. Ignotius is apparently talking (one of the Discordian names of Greg Hill), and the passage is found on page 275 of the original 1975 Dell mass market paperback -- I don't know the page number of the omnibus edition most people have. 

UPDATE: Please see the interesting comments! Thanks, Jesse, thanks Dr. Johnson! 

'Great Moments in Comic History'

 

Posted by Bobby Campbell. Bobby's own latest  episode in comics history is here. 

Is it really that bad?

A college student reads a Richard Powers novel (AI image via Bing). 

As this is a blog by definition for people who like to read, I thought I would share a recent piece that has been getting a lot of attention. "Hilarious Bookbinder" is a pseudonym for a philosophy professor at a state school who describes his students as average, not the elite students an Ivy League school would have; in a recent issue of his Substack newsletter, Scriptorium Philosophia he writes: 

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.

I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read,2 and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.

The whole thing is pretty depressing; it he exaggerating? 

There's a sequel, with responses to some of the comments.