New 'Eris of the Month'

Although I usually post an illustration here, this time I'll just suggest you go over to Adam Gorightly's Historia Discordia and look at the Eris of the Month. 

Another musician inspired by RAW

Simon Posford. Public domain photo by digitalex

Musician Simon Posford (aka "Hallucinogen") of psychedelic rock outfit Shpongle is interviewed by 303magazine.com. Guess who's a fan of:

303: Who has been the most influential person in your life? 

SP: Robert Anton Wilson, maybe, who wrote Cosmic Trigger, which had a huge effect on me. Raj also had a big influence — Youth as well. Many, many people. Bill Hicks, as well as my dad. [My dad] was a very positive inspiration.

I don't follow pop music closely, but he's been associated with Youth and with Ott, both of whom have been mentioned in this blog.

More here at the interview. 

Hat tip, Advantardeodus on Twitter. 

When you just can't read someone

Ken MacLeod. (Creative Commons photo by Patrick Nielsen Hayden.) 

Haven't we all had the experience of trying to read someone we "should" like, and discovering that we can't? I usually read a bit of horror fiction for Halloween, but I ran in to this phenomena a couple of days ago when I tried to read Hauntings by Vernon Lee. She's supposed to be great, she was recommended to me by critic Michael Dirda whose recommendations I often agree with, but I just couldn't get into her long sentences and finally gave up.

Years ago when I read one of Samuel Delany's nonfiction books, i discovered that he cannot ever finish anything written by Brian Aldiss. (I love Brian Aldiss). Ken MacLeod, the excellent Scottish science fiction writer, wrote an obituary/appreciation for Robert Anton Wilson after Wilson's death but confessed, "Recently I picked up the Illuminatus! trilogy again and was perplexed to find that I couldn't get into it."

I personally find Illuminatus! very easy to read; the structure and the plot are unusual, but on the sentence level, the works seems clear and interesting. But as RAW would say, my nervous system is not the same as yours.

Adam Gorightly on the JFK files and Uri Geller

Logo for the Daily Grail, which y'all should check out, if you haven't already. 

Adam Gorightly has recently become a Daily Grail columnist. His latest is "SPOON-BENDING SPOOK? URI GELLER CLAIMS TO HAVE INVESTIGATED THE JFK ASSASSINATION FOR THE CIA."

The JFK angle is new to me, but some of what Adam writes about will sound familiar to those of you who have read Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger.

The Daily Grail has been revamped into a nice new design and regularly features pieces that sumbunall of you will enjoy. It seems to be a nest of RAW fans.

A Henry George community

A house in the small municipality of Arden, Delaware, built in the style of town founder Will Price. (Information here.) Wikimedia Commons photo. 

In the essay "Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective," reprinted in Robert Anton Wilson's Email to the Universe, RAW approvingly mentions the 19th century political philosopher Henry George, as follows, in a passage listing various Utopian schemes that he'd like to see tried: "I am still fond of the system of Henry George (in which no rent is allowed, but free enterprise is otherwise preserved)..."
"
The wording of Wilson's article suggests that none of the Utopian schemes he liked had ever been tried. So I was surprised to read Jesse Walker's excellent article, "Delaware's Odd, Beautiful, Contentious, Private Utopia," which reveals that a town in Delaware, Arden, and several other towns in the U.S. were founded based on George's principles.

Jesse explains that George was "a 19th century economist who argued that government should be financed solely by a tax on land values. No income tax, no sales tax, no tax on the improvements to a property—just one tax on land."

The town is still run largely on Georgian principles. A private land trust owns the land, and people who lease the land support the town government by their least payments: "The trust collects rent from the town's leaseholders and, as the sole property owner, it pays everyone's county and school taxes. The rest of the rent goes to the municipal government. That bundle of money makes up the vast majority of the Arden budget—usually about 90 percent of it—though the town has a few additional sources of income, such as the rent for the antenna on the water tower (and, yes, the state's street aid). The county provides some services, and the rest are done either internally, as with the volunteers who run the local library, or by companies that contract with the village, as with the business that collects the trash. The big decisions are made in town meetings."

There are a couple of passages in Jesse's article (published in Reason magazine but available online at my link)  that could be read as quiet shout outs to Robert Anton Wilson fans, such as this sentence: "The Alabama town of Fairhope had been established on the same land-trust model in 1894, and several similar experiments were launched in the first few decades of the 20th century—enough for the Single Tax settlements to have their own baseball championship, which Arden won in 1923." 1923 has a 23 and also conforms to the Law of Fives as it adds up to 15, although of course Jesse could innocently explain he had no control over when Arden won its baseball championship. The Illuminati also put in a brief appearance. Is is Jesse's fault the town has been mentioned as a haven for the nefarious secret society?

BONUS! Jesse on the partial release of the JFK assassination files. 

The BBC on Discordianism, RAW and Illuminati paranoia

David Bramwell (from his official website.) I don't know who his friend is. 

The BBC has an article posted online, "The accidental invention of the Illuminati conspiracy," which, apparently relying heavily on the theories of David Bramwell,  argues that the obsession with the Illuminati in the world of hip hop was generated by Discordianism and the popularization of it in Illuminatus! by Robert Anton Wilson (mentioned by name) and Robert Shea (relegated to "another Playboy writer," a particularly clear example of Shea being erased from the record despite his own importance as a writer.)

The article by Sophia Smith Galer mostly moves on to discussing why many people believe conspiracy theories, but I'm more interested in whether Illuminatus! really had such a large effect on popular culture. I'm pleased that it has sold a reasonable number of copies and remains it print, but it never seemed as ubiquitous to me as, say, Stranger in a Strange Land or Lord of the Rings or Dune. 

I decided to ask for a second opinion from the guy who "wrote the book" on conspiracy theory, so I emailed Jesse Walker, author of The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory.  (The book has a chapter on Discordianism, and if you read this blog, you should hunt up a copy.

I emailed Jesse a link to the BBC article and asked, "Do you think it's plausible that 'Illuminatus!' gave rise to all of the Illuminati paranoia of today? I am skeptical, but I thought I would seek the opinion of the guy who wrote the book on conspiracy theory."

He replied, "All of it? No, of course not. Not even all the Illuminati obsessions -- you can trace a lot of that back to the trilogy, but I think there were more significant sources for the hip hop Illuminati stuff."

In any event, pretty cool to see the BBC talking about Illuminatus! Wish I could hear a BBC announcer talking about it.

Bramwell, BTW, has a book out, The Haunted Mustache, that looks interesting.

Coincidance question

Photo by Mohammad Metri from Unsplash.com 

I have been doing a bit of volunteer copyediting for Hilaritas Press, helping to get Coincidance: A Head Test ready for publication. In the introduction to the "Interview with Sean MacBride," Wilson writes, "....yet the Golden Dawn has more to do with the publication of this anthology at this time than most readers will guess."

Can anyone tell me what that statement means?

My illustration is a photo from Unsplash.com, which makes thousands of excellent photographs available for free use, without copyright restrictions.

Tuesday links

Marilyn Monroe reading "Ulysses." See the piece about her in Robert Anton Wilson's "Coincidance." Source. 

He's not the only one. 

DEA fears stoned rabbits. 

Kevin Williamson on "The White Minstrel Show."

America's forever wars.  A rather good New York Times editorial.

The LA Review of Books on Rushkoff's Aleister and Adolf. 

Review of '2023'

Scott from Wisconsin, who has helped this blog before, recently read 2023:  a trilogy by the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (e.g., Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty) and kindly wrote to me to share these thoughts:

"Imagine a book co-authored by Tom Robbins & Neal Stephenson about the intersection of one of your favorite authors (RAW) and a band (KLF) that utilized touch-points from that same author.

"Having first read the Illuminatus Trilogy back in 1976 and subsequently immersing myself in all the threads from the rest of RAW's work since, I probably got about 2/3's of the references listed in 2023.

"Using my current standard of: 'Was it time well spent?'  I would say yes, I enjoyed it."

"Was it time well spent?' seems like a good metric to me. Thanks, Scott!

There's that number again

Sean Young. Creative Commons photo by Luke Ford. 

On Twitter the other day, I remarked that actress Sean Young hadn't gotten much sympathy after being sexually harassed by Warren Beatty during the filming of "Dick Tracy." (She was fired from movie after she resisted his advances.)

I remembered too late that I should have checked to see if she's on Twitter. She's there, as @seanyoung23.

I'm pretty sure it's the famous one ..... sounds just like the Sean Young on Facebook, linked to from the official site.

A note on RAW and Ulysses

Sketch from pinned Tweet at the Linda Joyce Franks Twitter account. A self portrait? 

James Joyce fans who also read RAW are likely to know that Wilson's  Coincidance: A Head Test (new edition out soon from Hilaritas Press) includes four meaty essays that discuss Joyce's Finnegans Wake. When I did my recent interview with Znore of the Groupname for Grapejuice blog, he referenced that. "It's a shame that those essays have not been seriously considered by the academics," he told me.

But I wanted to point out that one of those Coincidance Joyce essays, "Death and Absence in Joyce," devotes most of its attention to Ulysses and makes many good points. If you are taking RAW's advice to read Ulysses 40 times, the piece is worth your attention.

Eric Wagner in his RAW tome suggests that readers new to Joyce should start with RAW's novel Masks of the Illuminati and Joyce's children's book, The Cat and the Devil. 

My edition of Eric's book even has cover art by a Joyce -- the visual artist Linda Joyce Franks. 

Re-reading 'Lord of the Rings'

Although most of the books I read are ones I've never read before, I do have the habit of re-reading books that I consider classics, or at least particularly enjoy. I've read Illuminatus! several times and other RAW books more than once. I re-read Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun about a year ago. And now I'm re-reading Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. (As I write this, I'm nearing halfway through The Fellowship of the Ring.)

There are references to The Lord of the Rings in Illuminatus! For example, Epicene Wildeblood, describing a review he is preparing for a book that sounds very much like Illuminatus!, proudly trots out the insults in the text, including, "If the Lord of the Rings is a fairy tale for adults, sophisticated readers will quickly recognize this monumental miscarriage as a fairy tale for paranoids."

Both "trilogies" are in fact a single literary work, published in three volumes for economic reasons. Both can be described as works of fantasy. Both have appendices. I'm just guessing, but I wonder if Wilson and Shea worked in references to Tolkien because they hoped Illuminatus! would become an instant classic on the order of The Lord of the Rings.

'Waging Peace from the Inkbattle House: Finnegans Wake in the Shadow of War'

A natural followup to yesterday's review of an important antiwar book, Scott Horton's Fool's Errand, is the recent Peter Quadrino blog posting/essay, "Waging Peace from the Inkbattle House: Finnegans Wake in the Shadow of War." The essay posted on the blog is actually the full version of the presentation PQ made at a Joyce conference.

As we seem to be in a time of endless war, as highlighted by Horton's book, with the possibility of worse to come, PQ's discussion of the composition of Finnegans Wake on the eve of World War II seems timely.

As is usual with PQ, he pays careful attention to the text:

Shem the Penman, emblematic of the author of the Wake, composes “o peace a farce” (FW 14), a piece of farcical art that is a force for peace, leading us to wonder “Is the Pen Mightier Than the Sword?” (FW 306) Hiding up in his “inkbattle house” (FW 176), Shem cunningly attacks the powers of “awethorrorty” (FW 516) with his comedic art ...

Some of what PQ writes has echoes of what I've seen in the writings of Robert Anton Wilson:

The Wake’s anthropological view of warfare and militarism is always scatological, invoked right from the first page with “penisolate war” (FW 3), The Peninsular War where Wellington and Napoleon first clashed. Warfare in Finnegans Wake is reduced to a pissing contest (hence, Waterloo), having to do with the nether regions, characteristic of anal-territorial animal aggression implied by using excrement as territorial marker. As Timothy Leary liked to say, “The only intelligent way to discuss politics is on all fours.” Or as the Wake puts it, “All’s fair on all fours.” (FW 295)