Reading 'Gulliver's Travels'

Just finished re-reading Gulliver's Travels. Not sure I'll follow Robert Anton Wilson's example of reading all of Swift's works, but I like Gulliver very much.

I read Gulliver for the first time in the 1980s, when I belonged to a book club for couples back in Oklahoma. We would all agree to read a book and then discuss it the next month. I remember I talked them into reading Gulliver's Travels, and I loved it, and I was very excited looking forward to the discussion. To my chagrin, when we assembled, I discovered nobody else had bothered to finish it. There wasn't much of a discussion.

Re-reading it this time turned inadvertently into an experiment on the best way to read a public domain book if you don't have a dedicated electronic book reader. I started out reading it on my cell phone, in QiOO format. Then I read it on a Web browser, on Google Books. Finally, I finished it as an EPUB downloaded from Project Gutenberg, read on my laptop. That was the best -- big, easy to read type and good bookmarking.

I hear from 'Alien Code'

I have been re-reading Cosmic Trigger I, one of my favorites, which as you'll recall is largely about possible contacts with alien intelligences. (RAW is careful not to provide any absolute answers. This didn't save him from being an object of fun in Charles Platt's Dream Makers, but really,I think it's an awesome fun.

Anyway, I'm struck by the fact that I'm more than 100 pages into the book, and my Twitter account (@jacksontom) is now being followed by @Alien_Code_2020, who explains in the profile, "After a near death experience on 22 Jan 2010 and huge Supernatural encounter on May 1, 2010, I have been receiving messages about the truth. Please Re-tweet :)" (Aliens are going to contact Earth on July 1, 2020. You'll learn other stuff, too.)

Coincidence, you say? Alien Code begs to differ. "There are NO co-incidences... TIMING is Everything." (May 8).

Douglas Rushkoff book available free

Author Douglas Rushkoff reports that his audiobook, "Rushkoff Live: A Talk Based on Life Inc." normally $10, is available free "for a limited time." He doesn't say what the limit is, but if you want a copy, I'd go here pretty quickly.

Basic income enters political discussion in Germany

Over at alt.fan.rawilson, Sue Howard notes that there is a best-selling book in Germany titled (in English translation) "1,000 Euro for everyone. Freedom. Equality. Basic income." (The German title is "1.000 Euro für Jeden: Freiheit. Gleichheit. Grundeinkommen", by Götz W Werner and Adrienne Goehler.) Sue links this to Robert Anton Wilson's advocacy of basic income, for example in "The RICH Economy" in The Illuminati Papers.

Sue links to an article in Spiked about the proposal, commenting, "The first half of the review I go along with, pretty much. The second half seems, to me, a sort of logical travesty. Non sequitur in great abundance. But worth a read to see the weird forms that reactions to Basic Income take."

R. Michael Johnson, in reply, says this group "also seem resonant to RAW's economics."

In the U.S., to the extant that this is discussed at all, the proposal is linked to Milton Friedman's proposed negative income tax. The negative income tax recently has been advocated by Will Wilkinson, the liberaltarian commentator. I asked Wilkinson for an interview via e-mail, and he agreed, but alas I never succeeded in getting him to actually answer my questions.

RAW vs. the Velvet Underground

There's an old joke that only a few thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but that all of them went out and started their own rock and roll bands.

I sometimes think that Robert Anton Wilson has the same effect on readers. Not everyone who reads him becomes a published novelist, of course, but all of the RAW-fans that I can think of are writers in some fashion or another. (And indeed, RAW was a writer for years before he became a "novelist.) Eric Wager is a poet and an author, R. Michael Johnson is an essayist ("blogger" doesn't really capture it), many SF writers such as L. Neil Smith cite him as an influence, etc. etc. Rumor has it that there's even an obsessive-compulsive nut out there who does a blog devoted entirely to RAW.

Latest example: Here is an article about a new "zombie apocalypse novel" from Jean-Paul Corriveau. "His interest in literature started around the same time he read "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy and some of H.P. Lovecraft's writings. Later in high school, he found spiritual fraternity in Robert Anton Wilson's quantum psychology philosophies."

Why 'Email to the Universe' is so good

Robert Anton Wilson's last book, 2005's Email to the Universe, is a very strong collection of essays and short pieces. It's a great exit.

The quality of the work might count as a bit of a surprise. The last novel, Nature's God, has many fine passages but is not his best work of fiction, and the penultimate book, 2002's TSOG: The Thing That Ate the Constitution, likewise is a fun read but not at the level of, say, the Cosmic Trigger books. Wilson had serious health issues the last years of a life, and although he heroically kept writing, his best work came earlier.

It seems likely that one reason why Email to the Universe is strong is because it drew from rawilsonfans.com, the site put together by the efforts of Mike Gathers.

Gathers explains, “RMJon [R. Michael Johnson] and I always assumed that Wilson got many of the essays for _eMail_ from the fans website, but that's just speculation our parts - although it scores pretty high on my MaybeLogic scale... Over half of the essays in the book were ones that we had converted from print to digital and put up on the website, a couple were already posted on the MLA site, and a couple more were ones I found out in the remote corners of the internet and linked into the fans site.”

He adds, “I built the fan site based on the old FAQAFUQ that Marc ’elmyr’ Lutter developed in collaboration with the regulars at alt.fan.rawilson back around 1999. Using that as a base, I added the “A/V lounge” section with several tracks from _The Chocolate Biscuit Consipracy_ found on Napster. Alt.fan.rawilson regulars Clore, Wagner, RMJon, and BS have all contributed paper copies of essays and/or digitizing articles collected here and there, and I’ve received contributions from a wide variety of folks who found the site and wanted to add to the collection. In 2009, Alterati/Hukilau graciously began hosting the site and I’ve fallen seriously behind on updates, but one of these days I will refresh the links and someday even give it a makeover so it doesn’t look like such a relic from the early 90s.”

Temple Illuminatus

Via Twitter, I discovered an outfit called Temple Illuminatus, who say they are the home of the "Neo-Illuminati." I don't know much about these folk, but there's lot of Robert Anton Wilson material there. On Twitter, they tend to send out inspirational quotes, e.g. on Tuesday it was, "There is no right path. Only the one that allows you to sleep soundly and wake up excited." -- Jennifer Louden.

Ivan Stang's blog

I moved to the Cleveland area in 2003, so I'm sorry to report that I only discovered a few months ago that Cleveland is the world headquarters of the Church of the Subgenius.

The Rev. Ivan Stang, founder and leader of the group, has a blog.

In his Oct. 3, 2006, entry, "Time to Repay RA Wilson for All the Slack," Stang wrote, "I have said many times to interviewers that were it not for Robert Anton Wilson (and the late great Robert Shea, who co-wrote Illuminatus), there would be no Church of the SubGenius."

Context for RAW's Dylan diss

In an earlier post, I remarked on RAW's amusing, wrongheaded criticism of one of my favorite musicians, Bob Dylan. (From the 1976 "New Libertarian Notes" interview, one of RAW's best interviews: "Dylan seems to me a totally pernicious influence -- the nasal whine of death and masochism. Certainly, this would be a more cheerful world if there were no Dylan records in it. But Dylan and his audience mirror each other, and deserve each other; as Marx said, a morbid society creates its own morbid grave-diggers."

Who knew that I'm a "morbid grave digger?" Do I have to put away my copies of Bringing It All Back Home and Nashville Skyline? But it gets better.

On May 24, Bob Dylan's 70th birthday (a world-historical event, obviously), I sent friendly greetings to various fellow Bobby Zimmerman fans, including Jesse Walker. My Twitter-note to Walker said, "Happy Bob Dylan's birthday! I thought RAW's diss of him was surprising, but funny."

Walker replied, "He was echoing Timothy Leary's attack on Dylan in National Review, which Leary later repudiated. I wonder if RAW changed his mind too."

Who knew that Timothy Leary wrote for "National Review"?

I searched on Google for more information on the article, and found a review in 2006, in "The American Conservative," of Robert Greenfield's Leary biography, written by one Jesse Walker.

The whole piece is worth reading, and it does supply an explanation for Leary's piece. It turns out that Leary needed to get out of jail and show that he was "rehabilitated," so he wrote the article to prove that he wasn't a dangerous hippie anymore.

Walker says of the Leary piece, "Pages of bile were directed at Bob Dylan and his 'snarling, whining, scorning, mocking' songs. At one point Leary declared, 'Squeaky Fromme stands in a Sacramento courtroom … for believing exactly what [Dylan] told her in the Sixties' and blamed her attempted assassination of Gerald Ford on the fact that 'she was unlucky enough to have owned a record player in her vulnerable adolescence.' "

Lord, Lord, so she shot Gerald Ford down.

It seems likely that RAW read the "National Review" piece by his buddy Leary shortly before the "New Libertarian Notes" interview. Does anyone know if RAW ever warmed to Dylan?

Bobby Campbell connects the dots

Bobby Campbell's comment to my recent Grant Morrison posting is so interesting I want to turn it into a blog posting, in case anyone missed it:

Here's a fun little game of connect the dots I like to play...

"Illuminatus!" seems to have obviously influenced "The Invisibles," and "The Invisibles" seems to have obviously influenced "The Matrix."

"It's really simple. The truth of that one is that design staff on The Matrix were given Invisibles collections and told to make the movie look like my books. This is a reported fact." - Grant Morrison

He elucidates further: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Grant+Morrison/

An interesting exercise in iteration!

New RAW audiobook

But not by Robert Anton Wilson, but about him.
Robert Anton Wilson Remembered, published by the folks at Hukilau, features Douglas Rushkoff, Antero Alli, Tiffany Brown, David Brown, Zac Odin, Joseph Matheny and Alan Meridian. The list price is $6.99, but it's $3.99 via Amazon. Length, 1 hour and 17 minutes. I haven't had a chance to hear it yet.

Some housekeeping notes

The "Feature Articles and Interviews" section of the blog, probably the best part, had a couple of broken links; I have gone through and tested them all and fixed the two that were broken. They should all be working now. (Again, the idea is to provide useful material that hasn't been reprinted at rawilsonfans.com yet.)

I know I probably have some broken links in the other blog entries; if you notice one, email me (with a link to the offending entry) and I will fix it.

For that matter, I also welcome emails with news tips, information on unpublished RAW material, etc.

The Christian Crusade

Although I was born in California and have lived in Ohio for years, I consider myself an Oklahoman, because I lived in Oklahoma for most of my life. I think of Tulsa as my hometown, because I grew up there. I've yet to talk about the glancing mention that ILLUMINATUS! gives to the Sooner State, but I'll do so now.

On page 128, ILLUMINATUS! mentions publications such as Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles and Rhythm, Riots and Revolution, put out by "the Christian Crusade in Tulsa, Okla." The novel says these are books put out after the anti-Illuminati folks feed information to the Christian Crusade through "third parties" about the Illuminati's nefarious use of pop music.

The publications mentioned in ILLUMINATUS! may sound like satire, but they are real, and so was the Christian Crusade; I once went to a service as part of a religious studies class at my Unitarian church, and I knew a kid in junior high who went there. The church, explicitly anti-Communist, was led by an evangelist named Billy James Hargis. An excerpt from the Wikipedia biography: "He preached on the evils of sex education and Communism, and urged the return of prayer and Bible reading to public schools long before the modern Religious Right. He accused the government, media and pop culture figures — among whom he included the Beatles — of promoting (directly or indirectly) Communism. (A subordinate, Rev. David Noebel, was the author of the 1965 work Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, which he expanded into Rhythm, Riots and Revolution the following year. Both pamphlets were published by Christian Crusade.)"

Hargis' career was undone by a sex scandal; one young couple, on their wedding night, allegedly realized that Hargis had slept with both of them.

More true Oklahoma facts: the Legislature for years had a Democratic member named John Monks, who warned that when Communists take over a country, the first thing they do is outlaw cockfighting.

Cockfighting was finally outlawed in Oklahoma a few years ago, so perhaps the Communists finally won. Then again, it seems unlikely that the Republican majority in the Legislature and the Republican governor would look the other way if radicals took over. Years ago, when I was a political reporter, the Legislature approved a bill to make Woody Guthrie's "Oklahoma Hills" the official state folk song. The great folk singer was an Oklahoma native, and the bill was requested by the small town of Okemah, where Guthrie was born.

The idea, in other words, was to aid tourism -- Okemah has an annual Woody Guthrie folk festival -- but many Republicans in the Oklahoma House voted against the bill, because they could not bring themselves to vote for a "Red" like Woody Guthrie.