Robert Anton Wilson's amusing friend Tim

I've been reading Chaos and Beyond, one of the very few Robert Anton Wilson books that has been allowed to go out of print. It's a collection from his newsletter, "Trajectories," and while there is plenty of RAW material, there are also contributions from a number of other writers.

I've been particularly impressed so far by the pieces chipped in by Timothy Leary; he apparently was a very funny writer. (I admit I've never sampled his writing before, unless you count his foreword to Cosmic Trigger I.)

In one of his "Trajectories" pieces, Leary says he's had little luck publishing letters to the editor in Los Angeles newspapers that were written under his own name, but had done pretty well by writing letters using phony names.

"The most effective info-raid technique, I have found, is to avoid stating dissident opinions openly," Leary writes. "Simply adopt the current Establishment line, exaggerate it a bit (in the manner of Voltaire) and 'defend' it in the passionate jargon of the true believer. Satire reaches those deaf to logic and evidence."

As an example, Leary offers the following letter to the editor, written under one of his false names, Mary Alice O'Brien, during debate over a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning:

Dear Editor,

Even flaming liberals agree that scrawling anti-American or anti-religious graffiti on the Washington Monument should not be constitutionally protected. Nonetheless, some card-carrying ACLU lawyers apparently convinced the Supreme Court that a flag bought and paid for by some mental patient is not a national monument.

Surely, now other self-appointed Civil Liberties lawyers will defend the more insidious case of "closet creeps" who will undoubtedly continue to burn flags in the privacy of their own homes, thus evading detection and prosecution even if Bush's proposed Amendment is passed. Can not our schools and police educate children to turn in such parents?
In the current climate of global disrespect for authority and for sacred symbols, should not the right to possess, transport and sell sacred symbols like the flag, the Blessed Sacrament, guns and Bibles be restricted to patriotic and God-fearing citizens whose loyalties are beyond suspicion and who can be counted on not to desecrate in public or in private?

For example, suppose you saw a Jesse Jackson follower like Willie Horton swaggering down the street with a flag in his hand, or a Dukakis follower with a Bible in his hand. Wouldn't it make you wonder uneasily what they might do with these sacred relics when nobody is watching?

Mary Alice O'Brien

In a more serious vein, or at least a different one, I wanted to share Dr. Leary's contribution to The Book of Rock Lists by Dave Marsh and Kevin Stein. Despite his encyclopedic writings on almost everything, Robert Anton Wilson left little behind in the way of rock criticism. So instead, Dr. Leary steps in with "Timothy Leary lists the techno-erotic vector bands":

1. David Bowie
2. King Crimson
3. Manuel Göttsching
4. The Jimi Hendrix Experience
5. Roxy Music (Brian Eno, Brian Ferry)
6. Klaus Schulze

A couple of podcasts

I have a long commute to work and sometimes I pass the time by listening to podcasts. A couple that might be of interest here include Episode 23 of the Right Where You Are Sitting Now podcasts, close to two hours of discussion on Robert Anton Wilson from Ken Eakins and company. Lots of discussion about mysticism and reprogramming yourself, but I noticed there was no discussion of topics such as libertarianism or James Joyce. I don't know if this is a Brit thing or a Right Where You Are Sitting Now thing, or just an illustration that even a long podcast about RAW has to leave out a lot of topics. Anyway, many interesting points are made in the podcast, although at times it has a certain slapdash quality. At one point, one of the experts claims that no books have been written about RAW, an assertion that might surprise Eric Wagner.

Wagner pops up as a guest on R.U. Sirius' 2006 podcast about Robert Anton Wilson. It's quite good.

RAW the immigrant basher? I don't think so

I love it when other writers and other writers quote Robert Anton Wilson. Some of these bloggers do not share my interests or my opinions, and that's cool. RAW was a guy who had a lot of opinions and a lot of interests, so at the end of the day, "my" Robert Anton Wilson is not the same as "Michael Johnson's" or "Eric Wagner's" or "Arthur Hlavaty's." As much as wel all try to understand RAW's thought and work, the portion that particularly interests me may not hold as much fascination for other folks. I wonder sometimes if L. Neil Smith realizes that RAW isn't exactly the kind of libertarian that Mr. Smith is, but that's cool.

But with all of those caveats in mind, I still think it's a stretch for an anti-immigration blog, VDare, to appropriate Wilson's writings for an anti-immigration message.

In a Nov. 7 blog post entitled "Anti-Immigrant Sentiments from Robert Anton Wilson: 'Here Come Those Lousy Vikings Again'," a fellow named James Fulford quotes a passage from Nature's God:

“Historians agree that, when not combing the lice out of his beard or getting drunk, your average Viking preferred to spend his time cracking skulls with axes.

Incidentally, we know the Vikings spent a lot of time combing lice out of their beards because archaeologists have made careful scientific catalogs of the Danish and Norse artifacts found around Dublin Bay, and lice combs outnumber swords and all other implements of war about a hundred to one. As Sherlock Holmes would tell you, “Observing thousands of lice combs, one deduces the existence of many, many lice.” When the Irish said, “Here come those lousy Vikings again,” they were probably being literal.

I know the movie people left the lice out of that epic adventure, The Vikings, starring Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, but Hollywood has a tendency to glamorize things."

I have not gotten around to re-reading Nature's God yet (I'm currently busy with Chaos and Beyond) and I don't remember the context for this passage, but I'm pretty sure the Vikings weren't immigrants, any more than the Wehrmacht "immigrated" to Poland in 1939. I haven't read every word Wilson ever wrote, but I've read a lot of them, and if he ever expressed anti-immigrant sentiments, I missed them.

There's also the small point that the kind of scapegoating that Mr. Fulford embraces was anathema to Wilson's way of thinking. Here is a complete list of the blog entry categories listed on Mr. Fulford's blog:

Crime, Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome, Immigration, Not Reporting Race, Race, and War Against Christmas.

On the other hand, the blog seems quite useful for getting the concept of "reality tunnels" across.

Archiving of The Realist is complete

Ethan Persoff has announced that the effort to compile a digital archive of Paul Krassner's "The Realist" (1958 to 2000) is now complete.

This is an important announcement for Robert Anton Wilson fans because RAW frequently published here.

Jesse Walker of Reason magazine posts about the completion of the archive and recommends Wilson's (anonymous at the time) article about working as an editor for a "schlock factory," while Joel Schlosberg also posts about the project and suggests reading Krassner and Wilson's interview with Albert Ellis. Bandito notes at alt.fan.wilson, "Ethan Persoff put a hell of an effort into this over the last 3-4 years. He deserves a hell of a round of applause."

For earlier posts from this blog about the Realist, including links to various Wilson pieces, a please click the label for this post.

RAW on Philip K. Dick

Robert Anton Wilson, remembering Philip K. Dick:

Phil Dick and I had a long conversation one afternoon at Santa Rosa, and it was only a year later that I found out that he and I had exactly similar experiences at approximately the same time, which left both of us wondering if we'd been contacted by god, by the devil, by an extra-terrestrial from Sirius or by some evil parapsychologist working for either the CIA or the KGB, or if we had just gone temporarily crazy. Then I realized this whole long conversation was Phil's attempt to find out how crazy I was. If I was sane, there was a chance that he was sane too. But if I was crazy, that increased the probability that he was crazy. He apparently decided that I was sane enough that could trust that he was possibly sane took, so he started publishing some of his experiences, which now are in several books: Valis, The Divine Invasion, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Radio Free Albemuth and the Exegesis. My accounts of similar experiences are in Cosmic Trigger Vol. 1."

From issue 11 of PKD-Otaku, an electronic fanzine. Via a posting at the Total Dick-Head blog.

Marking "High Holy Daze" in Santa Cruz

David Jay Brown has an article on the Santa Cruz Patch Web site on "holidays celebrated in Santa Cruz that are associated with cannabis and psychedelics." The holidays mentioned in the piece include Ram Dass Day, Medical Marijuana Day, Bicycle Day and, of course, Robert Anton Wilson Day (on July 23).

Alterati "Undoing" podcasts

The folks at Alterati have begun a series of podcasts of Christopher Hyatt's "Radical Undoing" teachings. (See yesterday's posting on Undoing Yourself with Energized Meditation and Other Devices, by Christopher Hyatt.) The first two podcasts are here.

New Falcon announces book re-releases

Here is some news from New Falcon, Robert Anton Wilson's main nonfiction publisher. The publisher has announced (on its Facebook feed) the re-release (or availability) of several of its titles. I will mention the two that apparently have substantial revisions.

Undoing Yourself with Energized Meditation and Other Devices, by Christopher Hyatt, is a release that "contains new material," according to the announcement. Robert Anton Wilson wrote an introduction for the book and supplied this promotional quotatation, "Undoing Yourself is the latest attempt by the Illuminati Conspiracy to reveal the hitherto hidden teachings." It is billed as containing "practical techniques to transform your life."

The Dream Illluminati: A Global Revolution Takes Wing by Wayne Saalman also includes an introduction by RAW. "This is a brand-new edition of the book, revised and expanded," New Falcon says. Apparently this is a novel.

RAW crossed paths with the Fug

Over at alt.fan.wilson, RMJon23 (e.g. Michael Johnson) mentions writing to poet and Fug Ed Sanders . "I wrote Ed a fan letter about how much I love his books on American history written in his 'investigative poetry' style. I also asked him about his relationship with RAW and a few other RAW-related Qs."

Sanders' response, quoted by Johnson:

I met RA Wilson a few times; went to his house in NJ in 1964.
But didn't know him well. He sent me his newsletters over the years.

As for America, a History in Verse, I've completed Vols 4 and 5, which
take the tracing
through the year 2000 and its stolen election.

JFK and the Unspeakable is right here in my writing nook, it's an
excellent book and one I dip into now and then.

More on RAW and the Fugs here.

Not a good day for RAW's politics

This is not a very political blog. If it's politics you want, you're better off at places like Supergee, whose proprietor was mentioned as a RAW expert by my weekend interview subject, David Hartwell.

But having argued (here and here for example) that RAW was a "liberaltarian," the current term for someone who is basically a libertarian but somewhere to the left of the average Libertarian Party member, I'll note that the liberaltarian movement didn't fare well in Tuesday's national election in the U.S.

Republicans gained control of the House, boding ill for a pro-peace U.S. foreign policy. (Not that Democrats had represented much of a change.) U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, the only U.S. senator to vote against the Patriot Act, lost his re-election bid. And marijuana is still illegal in California.

The curious literary career of Robert Shea

Robert Shea, Robert Anton Wilson's writing partner for ILLUMINATUS!, began his literary career with a joke and accelerated it after losing his job.

The two worked as editors in Chicago for the Playboy magazine's "Playboy Forum" feature. The "Playboy Forum" received many letters containing conspiracy theories. Depending on which account you read, either Shea or Wilson suggested that it might be funny to write a novel based on the premise, "Suppose all these nuts are right, and every single conspiracy they complain about really exists."

Wilson left Playboy went on to make a career of writing books largely inspired by the success of ILLUMINATUS!, but according to Wilson's account in Chapter 4 of Cosmic Trigger Vol. 3, My Life After Death, Shea might never have written another book if he hadn't suddenly lost his job at Playboy. Wilson writes, "When Playboy fired him, Shea endured terrible anxiety about keeping his house, and dashed off a few novel outlines while looking for another job. He sold his first novel before finding a job and never stopped writing again." The Wikipedia entry on Shea lists seven published novels and two that were uncompleted or unpublished. Shea died of cancer in 1994 at age 61, cutting short an active literary career.

I tried to fact-check Wilson's account by writing to Mike Shea, the author's son, who maintains the official Robert Shea Web site, where electronic versions of all of Shea's books may be downloaded for free. After consulting his mother, Mike Shea wrote back, "Yep, your version is pretty much how it happened. According to my mom: 'He was writing at night and was looking forward to having the time to write all day, too!'."

I've only read Shea's Shaman, but I've just started All Things Are Lights.

More Robert Anton Wilson merchandise

Etsy is a site that specializes in homemade goods, particularly jewelry, apparel and the like. (It's a good place to get unique gifts for women that generally are not terribly expensive.) But it also a place to get Robert Anton Wilson merchandise -- searching the site for "Robert Anton Wilson" brights up a t-shirt and a Guns and Dope Party coffee mug.

David Hartwell on Wilson and Phil Dick

I landed an interview with famed SF editor David Hartwell about Robert Anton Wilson and I will be posting the results soon. But while it was fresh in my mind, I wanted to record something he said about Wilson and Philip K. Dick after I turned my recording off (because he could answer one of my questions, not about RAW, only if I turned the recording off).

I remarked that Paul Williams, a very close friend of Hartwell's, had done a wonderful job as Philip K. Dick's literary executor and that I wished someone could do a similar job to raise interest in Wilson and preserve his work for future readers. Hartwell replied that Williams had a rare combination in that he both had a close appreciation of Dick's work and an intimate understanding of the publishing industry. Both of those abilities were needed, he said. He also remarked that such an undertaking takes a lot of effort and that someone doing so would have to expect to treat it as a part time job for a period of about 10 years.