Free ebooks from Iain Spence

Iain Spence, mentioned in this recent blog post, has announced that all three of his currently available ebooks are being made available free Saturday and Sunday. 

"All three titles will be free over the weekend, worldwide. No restrictions. I'm not sure if they'll appear by way of east coast or west coast time in the USA. I do know that they (Amazon) go by US time and not UK when it comes to Kindle Direct, but I don't know which zone," he reports.

Links (for the U.S. Amazon, listed in order of publication): 

The Hare Hypothesis: The Quest for Wholeness Within Atavistic Pop Culture; blurb: "The Hare Hypothesis invites us to view pop cultural trends in relation to the four Life Positions of Optimistic Weakness, Pessimistic Weakness, Optimistic Strength and Pessimistic Strength. The study views pop cultural trends as atavistic symbols.

"An exploration of Timothy Leary's Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality with special emphasis on pop cultural trends of a symbolic nature. The book also includes essays on the origins of the four Life Positions in folklore, children's stories and in the four classical humours. It ends with an analysis of quaternities which crop up in modern literature." 

Dreams of the Hare. Blurb: "Essays on The Hare Hypothesis, the current fuss over gender fluidity, the cult of celebrity, quaternary symbolism in mythology and the works of Robert Anton Wilson."

The Breath of the Hare. Blurb: "A series of essays by Iain Spence."

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. 

Happy Maybe Day!

Today, July 23, is Maybe Day. Please go to Maybeday.net for many of this year's offerings and for an archive of past Maybe Day celebrations put together by Bobby Campbell. You'll get a release of the first part of Tales of Illuminatus, the new graphic novel adaptation of Illuminatus! Please check out the Kickstarter page to support the project. 

Steve "Fly" has released The First Trip, the music album supporting the Tales of Illuminatus project. 

Here's a great new interview with Michael Johnson about Illuminatus! And you also get a Bobby Campbell interview with Eric Wagner!

Oz Fritz has a new blog post up, "The 23 Enigima & The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs."

See also, at Maybeday.net, new articles by Iain Spence and Don Dulchinos! 

Please see also, below in a separate post, my own contribution to Maybe Day. 

Iain Spence on library messages from the dead

 

Unsplash photo by  Iñaki del Olmo 

In a recent blog post about the Hilaritas Press podcast on Aldous Huxley, I mentioned the incident in which Aldous Huxley after his death allegedly used a book in the couple's personal library to communicate with his widow. The incident is described in Robert Anton Wilson's first Cosmic Trigger book, and I was a bit sorry that Huxley biographer Nicholas Murray wasn't asked about it. (I emailed Murray after listening to the podcast. No reply.)

After my blog post, RAW fan and writer Iain Spence emailed me and pointed out he has written a whole article about mysterious library doings and famous authors. If you read the piece, you'll get a more detailed account of the Huxley incident and also read an amazing anecdote about C.S. Lewis. "C.S. Lewis and his study could be a strange place to visit," Spence remarks, and it seems difficult to disagree. 

Iain Spence on the 'Psychedelic Prophets'

 

Iain Spence pens an interesting review of Psychedelic Prophets, the correspondence of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond.

The book apparently has lots of interesting bits:

"By the early 1960s, both men were keen to split their own quiet, scholarly approach to psychedelics from Timothy Leary’s work. Gossiping behind Leary’s back, they paint a picture of a psychologist who’s too damned keen to cock a snook at the authorities at Harvard. Of course, at this point, mainstream society had no idea who Timothy Leary was or the remarkable social changes which were just around the corner."

And I was interested in this:

"Other conversations lead them to wonder what is the best classical music to play when under the influence of psychedelics?

"According to Aldous, Bach’s B-minor Suite and the ‘Musical Offering’ were positively overwhelming while other music jarred, such as works of Palestrina and Byrd. Gregorian chanting was reported as grotesque. We are told to avoid highly emotional and tragic music, such as requiems by Verdi, and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis."

Read the whole review. 

RAW 'worst' book? Fans weigh in!

[My initial posting on the new release of The New Inquisition prompted an unusual discussion of what Robert Anton Wilson's worst book is. I'll repost Supergee's comment that began the discussion, post excerpts of other comments and then weigh in myself -- the Management.]

Supergee: To me this is RAW’s worst book: hectoring, clanking with pig irony, unselective in its examples, giving aid & comfort to those who say that when Dr. Fauci discusses viruses, that’s just his eddication talking. But it finishes with a marvelous discussion of how we perceive.

Eric Wagner: I love this book. Bob loved science, but he wanted to apply the scientific method to science itself.

Iain Spence: Once again Hilaritas Press have managed to collapse the price of an old RAW title down to 12 pounds. Some people were coughing up 30+ quid for old dog eared copies of these in the UK. Thank you once again to the dedicated team.
I think Mr Wilson had a bee in his bonnet about the worst excesses of scientific materialism rather than science itself. So it seems like he gets a bit carried away in this volume? I'm intrigued by the comments here...and I'm looking forward to reading it.

Inigo Montoya: I don't think it is his worst book. Among the nonfiction, both Coincidance and Email to the Universe are worse, a mishmash of b-grade and c-grade stuff. (And Moore's intro to the former is dreadful in my view -- and it is clear he never read Korzybski, or if he did, he didn't understand what he was reading. That's the only way I can explain the line "Count Alfred Korzybski’s work implies that almost all human experience is linguistic in its nature..." Whaa? Anyway...)

Among his nonfiction, the Cosmic Trigger books, Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology are his best, I'd say. I would rank this book after those, but above the Coincidance and Email... I think the first chapter is terrific -- it's RAW in all his agnostic glory. The book gets tedious though as it goes on... and RAW piles up example after example (often not persuasive) a la some kind of modern Charles Fort... but I find I skim over those and still find little RAW gems throughout... The tone it's also a bit shrill for him, which may contribute to the negative vibe around the book.

I think the book ends well, the chapter Creative Agnosticism is strong.

I have the New Falcon edition... and I have just bought the Hilaritas edition. I will reread it and see if I think differently on a second reading.

Rarebit Fiend: @Inigo- I love Coincidance- The Finnegans Wake material is worth the entire book. I do agree that "email to the universe" is a bit of a patch up job and would have rather RAW have completed "Tale of the Tribe."

I am incredibly prejudiced to favor Alan Moore and enjoyed the introduction. However Moore definitely has his own intellectual biases and agendas- however RAW's interpretations of information could be heavily influenced by his own expectations. For all our agnosticism we all still have definite biases.

My comments: 

1. It seems to me that in any discussion of Robert Anton Wilson's "worst book," the obvious front runner would be The Sex Magicians, which was published as a pornographic book. I have never seen it listed anywhere in Wilson's own official list of his works, and Hilaritas Press has not announced plans to republish it, so it seems to me it's never been considered part of the canon, even though it was published under Wilson's name.

2. I'm still reading The New Inquisition, but I thought the first chapter of the book was indeed very good, as Inigo Montoya says. It's as good as any nonfiction RAW ever wrote. I did not like one sentence referencing Carl Sagan and there seems to be a consensus portions of the book may be a bit weaker.

But I have to respectfully beg to differ with Inigo on Coincidance and Email to the Universe, which I thought were both very strong collections (and Hilaritas has beefed up the latter by adding a long interview with RAW, otherwise unavailable.)  Both of these books have some of my favorite RAW essays and the overall quality to me seemed strong.  It is true they don't really have a unified theme, although there is a lot of unified Joyce material in Coincidance. 

The only RAW book which has disappointed me so far is TSOG: The Thing That Ate the Constitution. Certainly entertaining and worth a read, but not really as strong as any other book I've read so far. I'm pretty sure Eric disagrees with me on this, but I would have expected RAW writing about the war on drugs to write a better book.

3. Iain Spence raises another point, and it's something Hilaritas Press deserves a lot of credit for, so I want to amplify it. Robert Anton Wilson fans in Great Britain have found it's very difficult and expensive to obtain many titles in Robert Anton Wilson's back catalog. Hilaritas of course is publishing definitive editions for everyone, but they are also making it possible for our British friends, who have done so much to keep Wilson's legacy alive,  to obtain these titles easily and at a reasonable price, and to aid Wilson's family, to boot.

Review: At the Heart of the White Rose

Sophie Scholl. (Public domain photo colorized by Iain Spence)

Book Review: 
At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl (edited by Inge Jens), Plough Publishing House, 366. pp, 2017.

By Iain Spence
Special guest blogger

I first heard of Sophie Scholl in the 1980s when I mixed with German Greens involved in the anti-war movement. They’d taken her life as added inspiration for their Non Violent Direct Action (NVDA) against nuclear bombs. Both Sophie and her brother Hans were executed by the Nazis for being part of The White Rose collective. The siblings carried out non violent resistance against the Nazis during the war producing leaflets calling for civil disobedience.

We are now blessed with the first translation of Sophie and Hans’s diaries from German into English, released by Plough Publishing House. I was spellbound by their diaries and letters as they show both youths to be deep thinkers with much clarity and humour. Not surprisingly the diaries tell us nothing about the actual activities of The White Rose collective but there is enough added commentary by the editor to help put their personal writing into perspective. Whilst young Sophie wasn’t "psychedelic"(Hofmann took his famous bike ride just 2 months after her death), she was a nature lover who hugged trees and wore flowers. Another biography describes her looking a little strange and child-like in her first train journey to university, again with a daisy in her hair.

At one point in the war both Sophie and Hans wore their hair in the protest style common among radicals in Germany: Sophie wore hers very short in the form of a bob in defiance of the long braids so common among women, while Hans wore his long on the Eastern Front where he served as a pacifist medic. Hans would often get screamed at by his CO to get it cut. Sophie and Hans were very well read – with Hans even quoting Lao Tzu in his anti-war leaflets. I wonder if they also encountered Jung's concept of the anima/animus? To quote Jung in 1939, "In the unconscious of every man there is a hidden feminine personality and in that of every woman a masculine personality." We tend to forget how revolutionary this concept was back in the 1940s. Likewise we forget how young people will sometimes react to the extreme polarisation of gender with the way they present their hair.

I found At the Heart of the White Rose a fascinating read. I’ve reviewed it here as I think it might appeal to RAW readers who’ve been involved in the heady experience of NVDA. Robert gives a good description of his own experiences of civil disobedience in Cosmic Trigger II. It sounds like he was pretty well freaked out by his own first arrest. Few of us however come close to the determination and courage showed by The White Rose collective.

Robert Anton Wilson makes a fascinating comparison between the Flower Child of modern times to Ezekiel’s vision of the "unearthly Angel" (in relation to his quaternity of the Angel, Bull, Lion and Eagle) in Prometheus Rising (p. 55). With her gentle persona Sophie Scholl fits RAW’s description very well. There are also some naive aspects to her personality which the reader can find from reading the book. But Sophie Scholl proved that no matter how gentle and dreamy you may be, you can still maintain a quiet inner strength in the face of a terrifying adversary. I’d also recommend, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose (Dumbach & Newborn) for a more detailed biography to their lives. The editor in the Letters and Diaries has kept her bio-comments to a respectful minimum.