Given that Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea were Blake fans and many RAW fans also love William Blake fans, I thought I would pass on this article recommending the five best books about William Blake, as chosen by Mark Vernon, author of the new book, Awake!: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination.
Don't forget that John Higgs also has written two books about Blake.
Portrait of William Blake by Thomas Phillips, 1807
John Higgs, who has written two books about William Blake, will discuss Blake at an event at 5 p.m., eastern time, October 30 at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut, in the U.S. The event is free but space is limited. Details here.
Here is John's summary of the event, from his latest newsletter: "I’m travelling to America (I know…) at the end of October, for an event at Yale University where I’ll be in conversation with Timothy Young, the curator of rare books and manuscripts at the Yale Center for British Art. This is part of the celebrations around Yale’s William Blake: Burning Bright exhibition. For those who can’t be there, there will be a free livestream which you can find here."
For details on John's William Blake books (and other books) please go here.
In his latest newsletter, John Higgs visits William Blake's cottage and gets involved in efforts to save it:
"I fulfilled a long-standing ambition this month - I got to go inside William Blake’s cottage in Felpham, on the Sussex coast. It’s a building that holds a very special place in the Blake story, as it was here he started to write what became the hymn "Jerusalem" and here that he defined England as ‘that green and pleasant land’.
"It was a day of mixed emotions. I knew before I went that the cottage was in dire need of repair, but seeing first hand the state it was in brought home how urgently work is needed, before the next winter storm. It is propped up inside by supports and - most urgently - desperately needs a new roof."
Also, among other news, an update on the American edition finally coming out of the KLF book:
"It’s lovely to report that THE KLF: CHAOS, MAGIC, AND THE BAND WHO BURNED A MILLION POUNDS will be published in the US and Canada on 9th July. It’s a tense year in America and you have to wonder what sort of reaction a book like that will receive at this particular time. Only one way to find out, I guess! Pre-order the paperback, audiobook or ebook here, or from your favourite stockists."
"It’s a very handsome edition, courtesy of Pegasus Books. It is available from Amazon and all your preferred book shops," John reports. "I’m especially thrilled that my reading of the audiobook will also become available over there on 3rd May as well. If this does okay, it could lead to more of my audiobooks becoming available in the USA and Canada - perhaps even my KLF one, who knows? Let’s see!"
A paperback version becomes available in Great Britain on Thursday.
More John Higgs news and opinion here. Included is discussion of the new KLF movie and John's thoughts on Elon Musk: " I had been thinking of ditching Twitter. I realised that my heart was not in it when I got a Wordle in one and felt no urge to announce this fact. But the notion that Twitter might be about to become a research lab for future Martian civilisation is quite something. Perhaps I’ll stick around on Twitter a bit longer, and see what happens."
Kirkus takes on John Higgs' William Blake Vs. the World, which will be released on May 3 in North America:
" Besides offering perceptive close analyses of Blake’s work (including the art that illustrates this volume), Higgs locates him within the turbulent political and religious contexts of his times: French and American Revolutions, the rise of industrialism, anti-Catholic rioting, the Enlightenment’s privileging of reason over imagination, and the advent of Romanticism. He ranges into theories of consciousness and the meaning and significance of imagination to unravel Blake’s fundamental idea 'that we live in a mental model of reality, rather than reality itself' ,,, An appreciative, well-informed portrait."
"Dave Lee’s ‘We Are All in Chapel Perilous’ is a poem consisting of a few minutes’ magickal agitprop about how to help each other avoid getting sucked into horrible belief systems, complete with crayons and sharpies for the audience." (Via Twitter)
Link for tickets and more details about the event, starring John Higgs, who has a new book, William Blake vs The World. "Poets, performers, playwrites, singers, music makers, mages and painters."
Musician Prince performing in 2008 (Creative Commons photo).
The big news of course is John Higgs' new book, William Blake Versus the World, and John has been publishing pieces to promote the book. "Visionaries Across Time: The Shared Magic Of Prince & William Blake" discusses the surprising commonalities between Blake and the late American musician: "Prince and Blake were the products of very different worlds and they created very different art, of course, but they both saw beyond their contemporary circumstances and came to remarkably similar conclusions. The most prominent themes in their work are spiritual liberation and sexual freedom. They portrayed these not as opposites or contradictions, but as essential and related concepts - interlinked pathways that we need to follow, if we are find our way to paradise."
In Sex, Drugs & Magick: A Journey Beyond Limits (which I've just finished) Robert Anton Wilson makes a similar point about Blake.
RAW writes, "If a man writes a poem to his beloved in a Christian nation, and it too frank about expressing that love, he is in danger of being called 'obscene,' throughout most of Christian history, he could be jailed, tortured or even killed. As William Blake wrote in horror:
Children of a future age
Reading this indignant page
Know that in a former time
Love, sweet love, was called a crime."
A search of my ebook copy of RAW's book shows six references to Blake.
The Social runs an excerpt from John Higgs' soon to be released book on William Blake. A bit of it:
"There is now a long tradition of Blake being celebrated by authorities in ways that were, to those who understand his work, fantastically inappropriate. When the Labour and Conservative parties sing ‘Jerusalem’ at their party political conferences, they are presumably unfamiliar with the context of those words in the preface to the poem Milton. As they heartily bellow the lyric, moved by the stirring music, they seem unaware that they are calling for the revolutionary overthrowing of the ‘ignorant Hirelings’ of ‘the Camp, the Court, & the University'."
Here is another bit.
"His work is deep and rich and no matter who looks into it, they will always find their own prejudices and interests reflected back. Perhaps he is too big a mind for us to ever properly grasp, and we are doomed to always fail. Perhaps the best we can do is find our own version of Blake, and take pleasure in knowing how incomplete it will appear to others.
"We owe it to Blake, though, to at least attempt to get the basics right. Blake’s understanding of the world was profoundly different from not just his contemporaries, but from western philosophy in general. It is a perspective which, if grasped, offers us a vision of ourselves, our country, and the wider world which would utterly transform our future."
I know a lot of Robert Anton Wilson fans like William Blake, but just recently I have been appreciating just how influential he is. Lately everything I read seems to reference him.
The last book I finished in 2020 was the novel Plowing the Dark by Richard Powers, which as I wrote recently seems to reference a line in a poem by William Blake. And the first book I finished this year was Death Sweat of the Cluster by Znore, which has a lot about Blake.
One of the points Znore makes is that Blake readers often seem to have sudden visionary experiences from reading him. Yesterday, I read passages from the new book Lost and Found in Alaska by Joel Rudinger, a retired English professor in Huron, Ohio, not far from Sandusky and about an hour west of Cleveland.
Rudinger's book is a memoir about his decision to go and study in Alaska in the early 1960s, when he was a college student, so a connection to William Blake was not obvious to me. But Blake comes up in the first chapter, which describes Rudinger's decision to head north from Ohio. He's just been shown an article in "Time" magazine which describes a skinned moose skin hanging from the window of a dorm on an Alaska college campus, and the professor in his class walks in and teaches a unit on Blake's famous poem, "The Tyger." Here are the first two stanzas:
In Rudinger's telling, the "What the hand, dare seize the fire" line helped fuel his sudden decision to move to Alaska and become a graduate student in English; Rudinger's book relates subsequent adventures, such as having to go behind a tree to escape a moose attack and almost freezing to death on Christmas Eve. All partially inspired by a line in a William Blake poem.
Tired of "homework" reading such as reading nominees for the Prometheus Award and reading locally written books for my newspaper, I decided to give myself permission to read something I really wanted to read. I'm a big fan of Richard Powers, so I read Plowing the Dark, one of his I had never gotten around to. It's a good novel; I think there's only a couple of his left I haven't gotten to yet.
I mention this because I guess I'm curious about other people's reading habits; one of my tendencies is that when I find an author I really like, I try to read as many books by him or her as I can. Robert Anton Wilson would be an obvious example; for the few I still haven't read, I'm waiting for the definitive Hilaritas Press edition. I've also read everything by Jane Austen I can find, and all of Tom Perotta's books and all of Jack Vance's science fiction titles. I only have 1-2 Iain Banks Culture novels left. Every few years I do another Vladimir Nabokov novel. And so on.
Plowing the Dark is largely about tech geeks in Seattle working on a virtual reality project; the book makes the argument for the novel as a art form, and as a form of virtual reality, as Powers remarks in this interview:
At the end it's as if a digital Byzantium has somehow crossed over into the real world.
That is my metaphor for reading; that's what reading does. In the end, the book becomes an apology for the virtuality of fiction, fiction not as a replacement for the real world, but as a hybrid place where the real world is suspended and reconstituted into something more survivable.
Addendum: I forgot to mention that the title Plowing the Dark apparently takes it title from a poem by William Blake. It's believed to be a reference to "Or the plowman in darkness plow?" line 20 of "Earth's Answer."
John Higgs says, "There's a fair amount of plowing in Blake - hence you find Blake-titled novels like Drive You Plow Over The Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, who won the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago. Plowing in Blake is often a metaphor for revolution, in the French and American sense - the old order needs to be overturned in order that new life can grow - so he talks a lot about the plow passing over nations."
In his latest email newsletter, John Higgs reports that VALA, the new journal of the Blake Society, is available to be downloaded free. I have downloaded my copy and read John's piece, "Blake Under Lockdown."
Much other news in the latest issue. Read it, and if you haven't already, sign up to get future copies by email.
John Higgs has revealed the cover for his Blake book and announced a publication date (for the United Kingdom.)
Above is the cover for John Blake vs. the World. John says,
"I won't lie - as a book it's quite something. It is less a biography or a critique - although it has those elements - and more an attempt to grasp what Blake was trying to tell us. If your reality tunnel has taken a battering these past few years, you'll find this to be good medicine.
"I like that the cover is a return to the pink and yellow of the KLF book. More importantly, it's pink with yellow circles - if you're going to dive into Blake, it's important to do so in the style of Mr Blobby.
"It's out on 27 May 2021, and to pre-order it is an act of unspeakable kindness that would earn my eternal gratitude. You can do so from all the usual suspects like Amazon and Waterstones (Hive and Bookshop UK are yet to list pre-orders, sadly, but your local independent bookshop can take care of you).
"More on this to come, of course!"
No word yet on U.S. publication, according to John, although of course American readers can buy it anyway online.
