The war on some drugs suffers a setback

Robert Evans' book, A Brief History of Vice. 

On Twitter, Robert Evans writes, "R.I.P. to Robert Anton Wilson, who would've loved to see this moment."

What's he referring to?

Headline from Vice: "Companies are Getting Rid of Drug Tests Because They Can’t Find Enough Workers."

"In the midst of a global labour shortage, employers around the world are doing away with drug tests in a desperate bid to attract more job applicants, fill more roles and retain more workers.

"A survey, conducted by staffing firm ManpowerGroup and released this week, indicated that 9 percent of more than 45,000 employers worldwide were eliminating job screenings or drug tests as an incentive to 'attract and retain in-demand talent.' That equates to some 4,050 employers, from 43 countries, who are willing to turn a blind eye to workers’ recreational drug use if it means filling vacant positions."

In reply to Evans on Twitter, @amoebadesign replies, "He created this moment...maybe :)."

Andrew Ferguson also replies, saying, "I like to imagine that RAW was one of the few lucky dead granted a vision of the totality, and is thus spending his afterlife in the ecstasy of holy laughter."

(Off topic, I guess, but Ferguson is an expert on R.A. Lafferty, another of my favorite writers. I had no idea he was a RAW fan, too.)

John Sinclair event is Saturday

The above Bobby Campbell piece promotes the John Sinclair "Intergalactic Broadcast" for John Sinclair, the poet, marijuana legalization activist, and former manager of the MC5, a band mentioned in Illuminatus! The event will mark Sinclair's 80th birthday. More here. 

Steve Pratt has worked with Sinclair for years in Amsterdam with radio shows. Radio Free Amsterdam is "Blues Jazz Reefer Music Programmed By John Sinclair." 

Robert Anton Wilson on John Dillinger

 Government mug shot of John Dillinger. 

Martin Wagner tracks down a 1972 article on John Dillinger that offers background on the notorious criminal (and Illuminatus! character.) The opening sentence is hard to beat: 

John Herbert Dillinger—you remember, the big 1930’s hold-up man who looked like Humphrey Bogart—lit a flame in the hearts of Ma and Pa America which no other major criminal has equalled, unless you include a few recent Presidents.

Much of the article covers ground that many of you read in Illuminatus! and also explains the John Dillinger Died For You Society. 

The Wikepedia article on John Dillinger is interesting and shows that much of what RAW wrote is fairly accurate but that RAW's account also includes some mistakes. Here's RAW on the incident in Little Bohemia:

Surrounded by the Feds at Little Bohemia Lodge in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, he escaped out a back window, while Hoover’s Heroes shot lots of holes in four vacationing businessmen who walked out the front door at the wrong moment.

Wikipedia says:

Special Agent in Charge Purvis and several BOI agents approached the lodge when three men exited the building and began to drive off. Agents yelled for the car to stop, but the men had been drinking and did not hear the agents. Agents opened up fire on the car and the driver was killed.

Dillinger and some of the gang were upstairs in the lodge and began shooting out the windows. While the BOI agents ducked for cover, Dillinger and his men got out the back of the lodge toward the lake and were able to get out of the area very quietly.

But the article also offers confirmation for some of the more wild bits in the RAW article, including the controversy over whether Dillinger was the person actually killed by the FBI. (Plans to exhume Dillinger's remains in 2019 apparently fell through.) 

Crowd at the Biography Theater shortly after Dillinger was shot to death by the FBI. 

Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, Week 51

The Colosseum of Rome, built in Rome in A.D. 70-80. Unsplash photo by  David Köhler.

By Eric Wagner
Special guest blogger

Exercise one asks the reader to “Compare Greece in the 4th Century BC, Rome in the First Century AD, Southern Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance, England c.1600-1900, New York c. 1900-1950, and California today.” I find it interesting that the first four categories parallel the structure of Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare. Asimov divides the poems and plays into four categories. He begins with works set in Greece, then in Rome, then in Italy and southern Europe, and then in England. Now the dates don’t exactly parallel those Wilson gives, but Shakespeare seems fascinated by those times and places teeming with new ideas: Classical Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy and his own England. He also had a fascination with the deep background for the England he lived in. Ezra Pound’s Cantos also focus a great deal on the focal points of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, southern Europe in the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, and Early Modern England. 

I love Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God and the BBC television series based on them. I have had the pleasure of showing the TV series to a number of high school classes, often after teaching Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. I found it interesting to teach these works during the last three presidential administrations. I found it interesting to see the parallels between Ancient Rome and contemporary America. 

Contemplating New York from 1900 to 1950 I think of Henry James’s visit to New York in 1904. He seemed deeply aware of the cultures of both London and New York at the time of this transition of world power and wealth. Louis Zukofsky found it significant that James visited New York in the year of Zukofsky’s birth. Zukofsky lived mostly in New York, and Pound had a huge influence on him. Zukofsky’s “A” seems to me a valuable work for examining the shifting strands of world culture and history during this period. Contemplating this period I also think of the evolution of jazz, from the music of Louis Armstrong to that of Duke Ellington to the new bebop of the 1940 developed by Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and others. 

“California today” has at least three meanings: the California of 1983, the original publication date; the California of 1997, the revised second edition’s publication date, and the California of 2021. I first read Prometheus Rising in Arizona in 1985, and I looked towards California as sort of a promised land where Leary lived and Bob had lived (and would live again). I reread the book many times in Arizona and did most of the exercises there. I moved back to California in 1997. (My family had moved from San Jose to Tucson in 1978). It seems less of a promised land to me today, but it also seems as though we find the fastest growing economies today in Asia. In the future I suspect that a lot of future wealth will come from space as we have completed our circumnavigation of the globe over the past few thousand years. 

Sunday links

 Bodge No. 9 is available.  (The zine from the Liverpool Arts Lab.)

F23 Podcast needs help. 

The Psychedelic Experience, 20 minutes, a short film from 1965. Erik Davis writes, "The Psychedelic Experience Jean (female) Millay's rarely seen 20 minute trip short from 1965. Not as nice as the 16mm I saw on the screen once but still a blast from the past...

Earth rising over the Moon. 

Most college students oppose free speech. 

A brain machine undergoes rigorous testing at the RAW Semantics laboratory

The young lady is not wearing a headband. She is wearing her Hapbee, a "smart wearable" advertised as allowing users to "change your mental state." Company website here.  Cost for U.S. customers: $399. 

Brian Dean at RAW Semantics reviews a brain machine, the Hapbee, similar to the brain machines that Robert Anton Wilson used to try. It's a machine that is advertised as being able to beam various moods into a user's brain -- alertness, calmness, being focused, being happy, etc. I don't want to introduce a spoiler into this blog post, but read Brian's interesting review. 

New Hilaritas Press podcast launches

The new Hilaritas Press podcast has launched. The first episode is devoted to Alfred Korzybski; access it here. 

"We are very excited to announce the release of the first episode of the new Hilaritas Press Podcast series. This first episode dives deeply into the life and ideas of Alfred Korzybski, one of the most influential thinkers of the many fascinating people Robert Anton Wilson examined in his explorations of what he called his Reality Labyrinth. In this episode we talk with Dom Heffer from the Institute of General Semantics. The hosts for this episode are Mike Gathers, Eric Wagner and Gregory Arnott. All three hosts have a long history with the ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, and all are advisors to the RAW Trust."

Next month's episode is devoted to Wilhelm Reich. More information here. 

John Higgs on vaccine skepticism and RAW

 

A photo John Higgs posted at his latest newsletter offers a possible clue on the subject of his new book, which he will announce Oct. 5. Do we get to guess the title? My entry is "Bonding with The Beatles."

The latest John Higgs newsletter has an essay on Robert Anton Wilson and vaccine skepticism. I don't want to try to summarize it here, just read it, but here is one paragraph:

The miracle of vaccines, however, is not a story that social media is likely to promote. An issue here is that the success of vaccines is abstract and invisible, which makes them just the sort of thing that our brains are bad at factoring in. We are hardwired to pay more attention to the tale of a friend of a friend who had a funny turn after being vaccinated than we are the tens of thousands of unspecified people who did not die because they had their jabs.

John will announce details of his new book on Oct. 5, and there's plenty of other interesting news at the link. 

'Sex, Drugs & Magick' next at Jechidah

Apuleius Charlton's Jechidah blog has a new entry which will conclude the Ishtar Rising reading group. 

And there's an announcement that a reading group will follow for Robert Anton Wilson's Sex, Drugs & Magick: A Journey Beyond Limits. This is good news for me personally, as I wanted to re-read it and had delayed doing so to take part in the Ishtar Rising group. 

"I won't really know when we're beginning Sex, Drugs & Magick until I finish copyediting TSOG. Hopefully I'll have an update within a month," Apuleius reports.

Erik Davis news roundup

1. On Twitter, I pointed out the recent blog post on Philip K. Dick and The Beatles' "Paperback Writer" to Ted Hand and Erik Davis and asked if they had any comment. (Both are Dick scholars.) Ted said, "I wonder if there's any other information about Timothy Leary's thoughts on PKD." Erik said, "I have never heard the Paperback Writer claim, though I understand it was mostly a Paul song, and Paul's not so PKD. The Lennon/Leary story as far as I know is about Lennon wanting to make a film of 3 Stigmata after Leary turned him on to the book."

2. "Into the Weird," new talk by Erik Davis, now available on YouTube. 

3. Erik is hosting a new online gathering called "The Dharmanaut Circle." 

"The Circle is designed to be a safe and supportive place to explore and discuss experimental and heart-felt approaches to meditation, sensory awareness, psychedelics, and other modes of waking up in these dizzying times. The format will be largely the same as the SFPS: I will gab a bit, lead a guided wander through the sand-box of meditation, and host a healthy conversation. Figure two hours. Suggested donation is $33. You can sign up here."

4. Erik continues to write a Substack newsletter, Burning Shore. As with other Substack publications, some is free but you have to pay to get the full experience (and support Erik's work.) (The "Ask Dr. D." column is behind the paywall, so you'll have to pay up to find out what "Gonzo Philosophy, Gonzo Practice" refers to.)

Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, Week 50

Shanghai, China. (Unsplash photo by Li Yang.)

Notes on Chapter 7

Chapter 7 of Prometheus Rising seemed rich and interesting to me when I re-read it.  Here are some comments; I get one more blog posting about the chapter, so perhaps in that other posting I can cover some of the points I missed here.

It's important to remember that the book dates to 1983; many of the observations it makes seem prescient to me.

Let me give a personal observation on an example of the acceleration of information in my own life.

I got interested in music pretty early. In the 1970s, when I was a teen and really started to work on building up my music collection, I started buying albums. It took up a lot of the income I got from allowances, working at fast food places, etc., but eventually through time I accumulated dozens of albums. The technology of LPs was replaced by a superior technology, CDs. In turn, CDs were replaced by MP3 downloads, which made it easier to expand my music collection. 

All of that has now been replaced by music streaming, which puts thousands of albums in everyone's hands. Many people simply pay $10 a month for Spotify or another music streaming service and are done with the whole business of having to "collect" music. I have a Spotify account and I've subscribed to it sometimes but I usually don't pay the $10 a month, because I've become an expert in the public library streaming services; between Hoopla Digital, Freegal, and Naxos Music Library (a classical music streaming service) and my own music collection (much of it stored the cloud) I just don't need Spotify.

When I was a teen, one of the family LPs was a recording of three well-known Beethoven sonatas. I probably read somewhere that there were actually 32 Beethoven sonatas, but it would be have expensive and difficult in my teens and my 20s to actually accumulate them and listen to all of them. Eventually cheap CDs came out and I was able to get a collection of early Alfred Brendel recordings. Now, thanks to streaming, I have various full sets bookmarked, which I can listen to without having to pay any money at all. And of course it isn't just the full 32 Beethoven sonatas; there are many modern classical composers, and I can explore them much more easily that I could two or three decades ago. 

The same acceleration of information RAW wrote about in the 1980s applies in other ways. In 1983, I was still scouring bookstores and making physical searches for more titles by RAW, Jack Vance and other  favorite authors. Now, except for a few particular titles that have gone out of print and are prohibitively expensive, if I want a book I can download it instantly to my Kindle, or order it and have it show up at my house within a few days.

RAW discusses the westward movement of capital; when he wrote those words, China was not the rapidly expanding economic powerhouse that it is now.  He wrote (this is apparently a passage from a revised edition), "As of 1997, it looks like the Cowboys [i.e. wealth in the western U.S.] are winning; which is what one would expect if there were a real 'law' behind Adams' East-West migration of capital." This was written before the rise of Google, Facebook, cryptocurrencies, etc. 

Referring to modern heirs of the 1960s consciousness revolution, RAW writes, "The same group is now leading the computer revolution; spearheading the drive toward Space Migration;supporting the Hunger Project, which will abolish starvation in our lifetimes; leading the Longevity revolution and the search for immortality, etc." This was written before the rise of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc. 

As I write this, my blood has mRNA antibodies in it. I have to go the store later, but thanks to the mRNA medical breakthrough, I'm not likely to wind up in the hospital even if I catch the latest variant of COVID-19. 

I'll write more about this chapter, but now it's time to hit "Publish" on the blog post that will make these words instantly available to anyone all over the world who wants to read them.

From Illuminatus!

Post at the Robert Anton Wilson Fans group on Facebook, by Ben Predpelski, five days ago. 

Brian Taylor (in the comments) notes it also involves eating bats and self isolating, and provides this link. 

 

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