Mark Fraunfelder plugs 'Prometheus Rising'

Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing fame puts out more than one newsletter. His Book Freak newsletter focuses on nonfiction books with ideas that can be applied to your life. There are paid and free versions of the newsletter.

I previously wrote about Mark's discussion of Robert Anton Wilson's Natural Law. That one was behind a paywall, and I had to buy a one-month subscription to be able to read it.

But Mark's latest, on Prometheus Rising, is a free issue, and everyone can read it here. 

Mark keeps his Book Freak newsletters short, but he squeezes in a lot of content. The Prometheus Rising newsletter covers four core concepts -- Whatever the Thinker Thinks, the Prover Proves, You Live in a Reality Tunnel, Society Is a Brainwashing Machine and The Nervous System Can Be Reprogrammed -- and then suggests four "try it now" exercises. There's also a brief summary of the book and an explanation of the eight circuit model.

This blog's Prometheus Rising discussion group remains available on the right side of this page (scroll down). 

Hilaritas Press published what I suspect is the definitive edition of the book. It is the only title in the Hilaritas catalog available as a hardcover, as well as the usual paperback and ebook editions. 

Bonus link: In the last few years, I've become very interested in Epicureanism. It's a powerful philosophy and rather different from what most people think the term means. I was surprised to see that Mark also had a recent issue covering Living For Pleasure by Emily Austin, which I recommend and which is usually considered the best modern introduction to the philosophy. 

Mark Frauenfelder on 'Natural Law'

 

Mark Frauenfelder's Book Freak newsletter has a new piece out on Robert Anton Wilson's Natural Law essay:

"Shortly after I bought it, my wife Carla and I heard that Wilson and Timothy Leary were doing a joint book signing somewhere in Los Angeles. We gathered up as many Leary and Wilson books as we had — which was a lot — and headed over. When I handed Wilson the Loompanics edition of Natural Law, he looked up at me and said, “Where the hell did you get this?“ He seemed genuinely surprised that anyone would own it.

"Here was the author, astonished that a reader had found his own book. It confirmed what I already suspected: Natural Law is a deep cut, even by Wilson’s standards. That’s why it’s the first book for our new Deep Cut Edition — subscriber-only posts about books that are obscure, strange, or underrated enough to deserve special attention."

I subscribed so I could read the whole thing, though you could read the first part for free. 

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. 

Boing Boing posts about RAW

Mark Fraunfelder (Creative Commons photo). 

The popular Boing Boing blog (originally a magazine, which I subscribed to back in the day) has recently had two posts about Robert Anton Wilson.

The first, which went up Dec. 1, was by Mark Frauenfelder and covers the latest Hilaritas Press book, A Non-Euclidian Perspective: Robert Anton Wilson's Political Commentaries 1960-2005. Mark writes, "reading it today, his thinking feels more urgent than ever."

The second, also by Mark and posted Dec. 17, talks about RAW's love for  mystery writer John Dickson Carr and links to my blog post on the subject. And, in turn, my post began with a post on BlueSky by RAW Semantics. 

Mark and his wife, Carla Sinclair, founded bOING bOING the magazine, before it became a blog. I once called the phone number listed for the magazine when I was wondering why I hadn't seen a new issue for months, and a young woman told me that "Mark" had been busy helping Billy Idol with Idol's latest album. I was too shy to say, "Hey, are you Carla?!" but I was told later it was likely Ms. Sinclair. 

A book recommendation site

As this is a blog aimed at people who like to read, I thought I would pass on a suggestion from Mark Frauenfelder, from the latest issue of the newsletter Recomendo: 

"book.sv, is a free book recommendation engine built by scraping 43 million Goodreads users. I entered about ten favorite books, and the results impressed me. It surfaced other books I’ve read and loved, validating its taste-matching algorithm. More exciting were the new titles it suggested: intriguing picks I hadn’t encountered before (like Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze). Unlike Goodreads’ algorithm, this feels like getting suggestions from someone who actually understands my reading taste. — MF"

So I decided to  try it. I entered 14 favorite books, ones that I had read more than once, and it gave me 30 book recommendations. Most were titles I knew about, all were authors I had heard of. Nineteen were books I had already read, which I guess shows that the recommendations work; I liked almost all of the books I had read, although a couple did not impress me much. There were only a couple of books I don't know much about, Light by M. John Harrison and The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies. But the recommended book I am likeliest to read next is The Magus by John Fowles; Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea were both Fowles fans. I probably should also try The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth. (I read The Floating Opera in college and liked it, but I've never read any other Barth. RAW liked him.)

Mark Frauenfelder's book recommendation

In the latest issue of his newsletter, "The Magnet," Mark Frauenfelder provides a book recommendation, and I think you'll see why I'm quoting it here:

"I wrote about Scott Snibbe’s book in one of my other newsletters, "Book Freak." How to Train a Happy Mind: A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment, is about analytical meditation, which I didn’t know about. I’m more familiar with passive imagination, where you focus on breathing as a way to calm the mind. But analytical meditation is a way to change the mind. As my friend David (who is also reading Snibbe’s book) told me, the different meditations in the book remind him of exercises that Robert Anton Wilson might have shared in the books he wrote in the 1980s, like Prometheus Rising. I’ve only been doing them for a few weeks, but they have already helped me think about the world, and my own mind, in new ways." 

Was the RAW gorilla story 'too good to check'?

 At the Boing Boing website, RAW fan Mark Frauenfelder mentions that he has been reading RAW's Cosmic Trigger 3 and decided to track down an anecdote in the book about a prankster in Uganda who tranquilized gorillas and then dressed them up in clown suits. Mark tries to track down the story and can't find any confirmation and finally decides that it might have been "too good to check." 

In the comments section, this remark from the current Fortean Times news editor might be relevant: "I can confirm that it is indeed from us, via the Coventry Telegraph. It is definitely one of the more unlikely stories we’ve run, but we are as much about the strangeness of the media as the strangeness of the world, so do run tales like this without going deeply into verification, but provide the source for those who feel motivated to follow up."

"Without going deeply into verification" is a good description for a great deal of Fortean material, apparently; see this discussion of The New Inquisition. 

Deer and Recomendo bleg

My cat is sick and I'm not going to do the long blog post I had planned, but here is Martin the deer visiting Rasa. (More here). 

Also, Sunday is when the free weekly Recomendo newsletter comes out, featuring Mark Frauenfelder, so you can look at the latest issue and decide if you want to sign up. Right now, if you sign up for the newsletter, you can get a free digital book. 

Mark Frauenfelder on 'Cosmic Trigger 2'

 

Cosmic Trigger 2: Down to Earth is my favorite underrated RAW book, so I am always happy to pass on a recommendation. Here is a sentence from an email from Boing Boing founder Mark Frauenfelder: "By the way, I recently finished Cosmic Trigger II, and was astounded by how relevant it is in today's uncertain world!"

One of the points RAW makes in the book is that technology has made life better for many people. When I think about current politics, I get depressed. When I think about advances in technology, I feel optimistic.

The above picture, a girl holding a flower in the style of Salvador Dali, was made by an artificial intelligence art program named Conjure, which I read about in Mark's Substack newsletter, The Magnet. I've tried making several pieces of art with Conjure, and the one above is the one I like the best so far. Below is another one that came out pretty well, when I told the program to give me a picture of a bush with berries on the Siberian taiga.

You have to pay to get all of the issues of The Magnet, but something else  Mark that's free for everyone is Recomendo, a weekly newsletter with six recommendations in each issue from Mark, Kevin Kelly and Claudia Dawson.

What Kevin Kelly has in common with Mark is that you can't go wrong paying attention to him.  Kelly just turned 70, and celebrated by offering "103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known." Some of his advice sounds like RAW, e.g., "If your opinions on one subject can be predicted from your opinions on another, you may be in the grip of an ideology. When you truly think for yourself your conclusions will not be predictable."

Substacks of possible interest

The Erik Davis newsletter includes an "Ask Dr. D" section for paid subscribers. 

It seems to me that if Robert Anton Wilson were still with us, he would have a Substack newsletter. With the help of Scott Apel, he used to have a newsletter  called Trajectories. The Substack system is ideal for a writer who has a dedicated following.

We'll never know what form a RAW Substack would have taken, but I have noticed a number of Substack newsletters put out by RAW fans; here are ones that have come to my attention:

The Magnet -- I have a paid subscription to this one, done by Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing fame. 

Burning Shore -- The Erik Davis Substack. 

Octannual Manual -- The John Higgs newsletter, recently moved to Substack. 

Dank Philosophy -- Dr. Richard Waterloo's newsletter. He has a work in progress about reality tunnels. 

Mitch's Newsletter -- The Mitch Horowitz newsletter, with no content yet. 

Ad for RAW's newsletter

 

The clever "why you should subscribe" advertisements used to be one of my favorite parts of the old Boing Boing magazine (which came out in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the well-known website). 

It turns out that the ads for Robert Anton Wilson's "Trajectories" newsletter, put out by RAW and D. Scott Apel, were pretty interesting, too. Here is an ad from "Magical Blend," April 1991, posted on Twitter by Michael Clinton.  (Michael and Ken Condon are the folks behind the work featured at the Zendrites.com website; if that doesn't ring a bell, go look at it.) And of course, much of the material for Beyond Chaos and Beyond, edited by Apel and published in 2019, as well as RAW's Chaos and Beyond came from RAW's newsletter. 

This would have been about the time I subscribed to Boing Boing, by the way. I never subscribed to "Trajectories" or even heard about it until years later; maybe they should have run an ad in Boing Boing. (Back issues of Boing Boing are available at the Internet Archive.) 

Boing Boing was put out by Mark Frauenfelder and his wife, Carla Sinclair; I currently subscribe to Mark's new newsletter, The Magnet. 

Mark Frauenfelder launches a newsletter

I've been a loyal fan for years of Mark Frauenfelder, the co-founder of the Boing Boing fanzine/magazine/website and also a writer, artist, arbiter of coolness, etc., and I've supported many of his ventures. 

Mark is a longtime Robert Anton Wilson fan, although I didn't know that at first when I started buying Boing Boing magazine many years ago and then signed up for a subscription. The first issue of Boing Boing had an interview with RAW by Frauenfelder and his wife, Carla Sinclair.  The Boing Boing website has run quite a bit of material on RAW. I was once so upset at not getting an issue of the magazine for several months that I called the listed phone number and talked to a young woman who explained that "Mark" had been busy working on a Billy Idol album. I think my informant was Carla but I was too shy to ask.

Anyway, Mark has now joined the latest fad for pundits and journalists, launching a paid newsletter. Mark's is called The Magnet. "I write about tips I find useful, things that interest me, what I’ve learned, interviews, recipes, quotations, and more. I also include excerpts from my favorite newsletters," Mark explains.

The first issue and the second issue are free, but to get all of them you have to pay a subscription fee of $50 a year; for a "limited time" you can get 40 percent off (e.g. $30 a year) at this link. I am an early adopter. 

See also Recomendo, the free newsletter Mark does with Kevin Kelly and Claudia Dawson, which I eagerly check every Sunday morning. 

RAW and the origins of Boing Boing

In connection with the publication of Ishtar Rising by Hilaritas Press, Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing reprinted the piece Christina Pearson, RAW's daughter, wrote for the official email announcement of the book. It's a great piece, which I assume many of you already have read, as I linked to it earlier on this blog. But I also wanted to draw attention to what Mark wrote in his intro:

As you might know, Robert Anton Wilson (1932 - 2007) is one of Boing Boing's patron saints. Raw's humor, skepticism, optimism, and ability to reveal the deep weirdness underlying almost everything were deeply influential to Carla and me when we launched bOING bOING as a zine in 1987. In fact, we kind of started the zine as an excuse to interview RAW at his house in Santa Monica that year. I'm very grateful I was able to get to know RAW, and honored that he wrote a regular column for bOING bOING. I'm also grateful to have become a friend of Bob's daughter, Christina, a delightful person who is active in keeping her father's books in print. Here's an essay Christina wrote about a new edition of Ishtar Rising, a book originally published by Playboy Press called The Book of the Breast. — Mark

I didn't know a desire to interview RAW helped launch the whole Boing Boing publishing empire. You can get that first issue with the RAW interview and other issues at the Internet Archive.

Happy anniversary to Boing Boing

Mark Frauenfelder (Creative Commons photo)

Few organizations have been as supportive of Robert Anton Wilson and his fandom as Boing Boing, first a zine, then a magazine and now a long-running blog/website. The very first issue of the original fanzine, which you can read here, contained an interview with RAW by Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair. RAW was interviewed and discussed in subsequent issues (see this archive.)

The zine evolved into my favorite magazine (once, when it had gone months between issues, I was so upset I called the phone number listed in it and talked to a young woman -- Carla? -- who told me "Mark" had been busy working on a Billy Idol album) and then a blog.

Mark penned a memoir a few days ago, describing the early days of Boing Boing and how it evolved.  "It's incredible to me that Boing Boing still has the original band line-up. I’m always excited to see what my co-editors post every day, and Boing Boing remains my favorite place on the Web, because I love their points of view," he wrote.

See also Mark's contribution to the RAW revival, the numerous posts for "Robert Anton Wilson Week" at Boing Boing in 2012 (which actually lasted for more than a week.)

Mark is a member of the RAW Trust Advisors, called upon from time to time by Rasa to offer advice.

Follow Mark on Twitter.

Celebrity and its uses

Years ago, when I happened to be in a business that had a TV set on, I was amazed to see a "celebrity endorsement commercial" that featured Mark Frauenfelder (RAW fan, writer, artist, Boing Boing founder, guru of cool etc.) He was explaining why he switched from a Windows machine to Apple. (I don't know when the commercial was made, but this Slate article, written by a guy who apparently has no idea who Mark is, dates to 2002).

This was a rare example of a celebrity endorsement I would actually be willing to listen to, although when I saw it (I think I may have been in a barbershop) I was already following my habit of buying used/cheap laptops and installing Linux on them. (Lately I do my home computer on a cheap Chromebook).

Anyway, it seems to me we need a high profile "celebrity endorser" for Robert Anton Wilson, or some other way to get his name out to the large majority of people who have never heard of him. RAW wrote somewhere once that he wished he could get on TV to share his ideas. During his lifetime, most people never had the opportunity to hear his ideas or find out about him.

My wife is a librarian; he specialty is cataloging. So by the nature of her job, she knows the names of many book authors. (If you describe a book to her, she can probably tell you from memory what the catalog number is likely to be) She never heard of Robert Anton Wilson  until she married a weirdo. Most of the people she works with in the library never heard of RAW.

I even did a blog post last year about a librarian at her library who has read Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Gordon White and H.P. Lovecraft, and he didn't know who RAW was.

So I think there's a potential audience out there for RAW that hasn't been tapped.

Archive of fact magazine

A posting at the Boing Boing website by RAW fan Mark Frauenfelder reports that there is an online archive of 22 issues of fact magazine, where Robert Anton Wilson served as editor and where some of his articles ran.

Mark illustrated his piece with a picture (pictured) of the Ronald Weston article,  "Of Transcendental Beauty and Crawling Horror," which as RAWIllumination.net readers and Martin Wagner fans know, was written by Wilson.  Mark did not know that, however, until Michael Johnson pointed it out to him in the comments.

Hat tip, Nick Helweg-Larsen.

Antero Alli interviews RAW in bOING bOING

From the Danny Hellman illustration from bOING bOING

I was going through some back issues of "bOING bOING" magazine at the Internet Archive when I ran across an interview of Robert Anton Wilson by Antero Alli, in 1991. I did not see the interview when I checked at RAWilsonFans.org, so perhaps the interview is new to you, too. Here is the link to the issue. 

Also, here is a wonderful retrospective on bOING bOING by Mike Dank.  The Internet Archive collection of back issues is here. Some really great stuff. Hat tip: Mondo 2000 on Twitter. 

Excerpt from the interview:

A A: Quantum mechanics is something of a second language for you. How does it help you communicate and live a better life? 

RAW: Quantum physics does help a lot in understanding daily life. The major discovery in this field is that the reality we perceive with our instruments is created by our instruments, partly. It’s not an objective reality. It’s created by our minds - by what instruments to use, what measurements to take, and what experiments to design. That happens in our daily life in the area of our decision- making, which is our instrument ... about what to observe, what to enter into, what to avoid and so on. Quantum mechanics just emphasizes by the magnification of scientific instruments what’s happening all the time, anyway. Modern psychologists, especially those branching out into neurology and perception theory make it very clear that the situation of a brain receiving signals has the same relativity and indeterminacy as you find in quantum mechanics’ “brain plus instrument receiving signals.” Whether there’s an instrument there or not, the brain’s the main creator of what gets organized ... not the only creator but the main one.

'Lost' Timothy Leary manuscript

Boing Boing founder, guru of cool and in-house Robert Anton Wilson fan Mark Frauenfelder reports that an unpublished Timothy Leary manuscript is being made available for auction.

Fraunfelder writes, "Timothy Leary wrote The Periodic Table of Energy while he was in Vacaville state prison in 1974. "The work explores 'correspondences among the Periodic Table of Elements, the Neurogenetic Theory of Evolution, the Tarot, the I Ching, [and] the Zodiac.' The 203-page typescript is profusely annotated and edited in manuscript, and illustrated with images, advertisements and articles clipped from newspapers and magazines."

Auction house press release is here.

Boing Boing's Robert Anton Wilson posts (lots of good stuff) is here.

RAW Week at BOING BOING

I've put up a permanent link under "Resources" for BOING BOING's apparently-concluded "Robert Anton Wilson Week."

I tried to link to somebunall of the best articles, but there was a lot of material. BOING BOING's special section featured pieces by Mark Frauenfelder, Paul Krassner, Gareth Branwyn, Antero Alli, Douglas Rushkoff, Jay Kinney, R.U. Sirius, Lewis Shiner, Erik Davis, Ivan Stang, Christina Pearson (in an interview), Richard Metzger, Mark Dery, Propaganda Anonymous and Angus Stocking. Also, some good RAW quotes picked out by Mark, and a "Giant mind-map of Discordianism." Lots of good links in the pieces, too.

A rare RAW interview

The very popular and successful bOING bOING blog originally was an offbeat magazine edited by gurus of cool Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair. It was my favorite magazine (I once phoned it because I was so upset that it hadn't published any new issues) and Mark and Carla have ever since been big favorites of mine. I let my subscription to "Playboy" magazine expire after it dropped Mark's Internet column. (Carla once was photographed for the magazine, so they both have a connection with the publication where Wilson worked and conceived ILLUMINATUS!)

But I missed the first couple of issues of the magazine, and so I did not know, until Thursday, that the very first issue included an interview with Robert Anton Wilson. A PDF of that first issue is available for $2. I bought a copy after being tipped off by a friend, Gary Shindler, who keeps on eye on pop culture for me.

A taste:

BB: I was disappointed when I learned that last year's Libertarian candidate for president, Ron Paul, is an anti-abortionist.

RAW: I didn't know that. I'm theoretically a Libertarian, but I know they're never going to win so I don't even pay that much attention to the Libertarian Party. What I like about the Libertarian Party is they throw good parties. They invite me to their conventions and I have a good time. I kind of wish that they would have nominated Russell Means. I thought he would have been a colorful candidate. The idea of a Native American running on the Libertarian ticket would have gotten more publicity. I mean, it's all show biz these days. I keep telling all the Democrats I know they should persuade Paul Newman to run for president. He's been a Democrat all his life and he'd win hands down. The Republicans have nobody they can put up against him. Could they get Charlton Heston? Hell no! Heston looks his age, Newman doesn't. Newman hands down, a walk in. The Democrats don't think that way. The Republicans are way ahead of them in terms of PR.