Twitter limits its posts to 140 characters, and Robert Anton Wilson was a writer who came up with many pithy aphorisms to summarize his teaches. These two facts find a happy marriage in @RAWilson23 on Twitter. I'm not sure who writes it, but the Twitter feed does a great job of sending out RAW's thoughts. If you aren't willing to miss with Twitter, you can follow it by going to twitter.com/#!/Rawilson23, or you can follow it with a feed reader such as Google Reader.
Update: It's our friend Bobby Campbell, doing more good work.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Monday, December 12, 2011
RAW article from the 1971 Village Voice
I've posted a link to a newly-rediscovered Robert Anton Wilson article from the Village Voice in 1971, "The WASP as Ubermensch, or I Was Saved by Billy Graham." A pretty lengthy piece with memorable sections. Many thanks to Jesse Walker for sharing the link with me so that I might share it with you.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
List of book lists
The Largehearted Boy book and music blog has compiled a big list of "Best of 2011" book lists. Fun to browse through, and I'm pleased that he has linked both to Michael Johnson's article on this blog and to the book list on my work blog that I also mentioned here.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
What some libertarians believe
Robert Anton Wilson quite often referred to himself as a "libertarian," and I've often called myself that, even now, even though I am wary of being tied too closely to any ideology. On some occasion, I will get around to arguing that even perfectly intelligent, nondogmatic people can proudly self-identify as libertarians.
Today, though, I want to observe that, unfortunately, the "freedom movement" includes not a few folks who aren't terribly well-informed or respectful of other opinions. Today,when I checked my email, I got a forwarded message asking me to read it carefully.
It was this. (It was attributed to David Kaiser.) (Blogger's note: As Michael points out in the comments, not the same guy who wrote How the Hippies Saved Physics.)
Related to this, here's an observation from RAW, from the "New Libertarian Notes" interview reproduced at this site: "I also read at least one periodical every month by a political group I dislike -- to keep some sense of balance. The overwhelming stupidity of political movements is caused by the fact that political types never read anything but their own gang's agit-prop."
Today, though, I want to observe that, unfortunately, the "freedom movement" includes not a few folks who aren't terribly well-informed or respectful of other opinions. Today,when I checked my email, I got a forwarded message asking me to read it carefully.
It was this. (It was attributed to David Kaiser.) (Blogger's note: As Michael points out in the comments, not the same guy who wrote How the Hippies Saved Physics.)
Related to this, here's an observation from RAW, from the "New Libertarian Notes" interview reproduced at this site: "I also read at least one periodical every month by a political group I dislike -- to keep some sense of balance. The overwhelming stupidity of political movements is caused by the fact that political types never read anything but their own gang's agit-prop."
Friday, December 9, 2011
Book picks from 2011
For a blog written for my day job, I posted book picks from a variety of folks, including a number of writers, including Tom Perrotta, Elinor Lipman, Lawrence Block and Geoffrey Landis. When I got to my own recommendations, I was pleased I was able to work on titles by both Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
New book on Pearl Harbor
Yesterday, on Pearl Harbor Day, Brian Doherty on Reason's Hit and Run blog noted the recent publication of a revisionist Pearl Harbor book, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath.
Doherty notes, "There is a rich history of such revisionist arguments about blame and heroism leading up to World War II, and such thinking used to be a significant element of the inchoate libertarian movement in the 1940s and '50s, though little discussed today. Two of my own biggest libertarian influences, novelists Robert Heinlein and Robert Anton Wilson, both found the war revisionist historians influential on their own ideological development, in complicating the heroic narrative usually told about your own government."
RAW fans will recall that he often discussed his interest in revisionist accounts, for example in the Lewis Shiner interview available at this site.
Doherty's history of modern libertarianism, Radicals for Capitalism, has a chapter that discusses RAW.
Doherty notes, "There is a rich history of such revisionist arguments about blame and heroism leading up to World War II, and such thinking used to be a significant element of the inchoate libertarian movement in the 1940s and '50s, though little discussed today. Two of my own biggest libertarian influences, novelists Robert Heinlein and Robert Anton Wilson, both found the war revisionist historians influential on their own ideological development, in complicating the heroic narrative usually told about your own government."
RAW fans will recall that he often discussed his interest in revisionist accounts, for example in the Lewis Shiner interview available at this site.
Doherty's history of modern libertarianism, Radicals for Capitalism, has a chapter that discusses RAW.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Illuminati trending on Twitter
Back to books tomorrow, but this morning when I logged on to Twitter, I saw that #Illuminati, mentioned a couple of posts ago, ranked No. 3 among "Trends" in the United States. (Worldwide, it was No. 2!) It wouldn't break my heart if all of this upsurge inspired the purchase of a few more copies of ILLUMINATUS! RAW fan Jesse Walker, with an eye toward his upcoming book, Tweets, "I wake up to see #Illuminati is trending. Could you folks do this again when the book is done? Thanks!"
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
MIchael Johnson's recommended books for 2011
(Starting today I intend to do a series of book-related posts looking back at 2011. First up I have contribution from Michael Johnson, he of the excellent Overweening Generalist blog. Michael's been on a hot streak lately on his blog, with posts about surveillance and privacy on the Internet and a two-parter "On Obscure, Coded and Alchemical Texts." -- The Mgt.)
Books Read This Year: Some of My Favorites
By Michael Johnson
Only two of these actually came out this year. This year I spent a lot of time reading IN some fantastic books while not reading the entire volume. I keep a list of what books I read cover-to-cover (mostly so I can cite them if need be), and this year there's only 38 books on the list; in past years there's been 105, 97, etc. I also find as I get older I tend to spent more time re-re-re-re-reading in some books that I love so much: Ulysses, Montaigne, Vico, Robert Anton Wilson's oeuvre, Korzybski, Popper, Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality, Lakoff and Johnsons's Metaphors We Live By, etc.
But this year I really enjoyed reading Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs by Morton A. Meyers, MD, which originally appeared in 2007. This guy knows how to tell a story. He's a radiologist who wanted to image some part of the body, using a radioactive dye, and he ended up accidentally finding out how tumors spread: a pretty cool breakthrough. This book goes a long way in bolstering Nassim Nicholas Taleb's idea that most great things happen after a lot of "tinkering." It also bolsters the anarchist sociologist of science Paul Feyerabend: the classic "scientific method" isn't really how new breakthroughs happen; they happen when people are dinkin' around and have the creativity and wherewithal to NOTICE that they don't have a "failure" but something that might be applied somewhere else. The last chapter in on LSD. The Intro, about "the scientific method" and the nature of serendipity, is worth reading alone for anyone who got the bug for how scientific knowledge progresses from some Kuhn or Popper or Lakatos or even Francis Bacon. (Or Robert Anton Wilson's The New Inquisition?)
From Counterculture to Cyberculture, by Fred Turner first appeared in 2006 but I finally got around to reading it cover-to-cover this year. David Kaiser cited John Markoff's What The Dormouse Said in his How the Hippies Saved Physics; Turner's book is sort of a more academic and longer version of Markoff. It's told with Stewart Brand at the center, but it's really well-researched and a lot of RAW fans would love it: Buckminster Fuller, Tim Leary, John Von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Berkeley in the Sixties, Gregory Bateson, John Perry Barlow, etc. If the Reader liked Markoff's book they might love this one...
I'm not sure how well this will resonate with readers of RAWIllumination, but I really liked a book about heavy metal that came out earlier this year titled Mean Deviation, by Jeff Wagner, a dedicated metalhead, but by far dedicated - a true scholar, really - of "progressive" metal: from Rush to Voivod to Celtic Frost to Dream Theater to Watch Tower to Opeth and literally hundreds of bands in between, Wagner has something to say about how these bands constantly strove to change from album to album. Which is pretty much the opposite of most "pop" music act, who hit it big with some sound then are afraid to alienate their fans by trying anything new. The things these guy did to stay fresh! Get much better on their instruments, for one! But also: long, story-like epic songs with many parts, odd instrumentation, sudden jazz of classical influences, a sudden obsession with odd time signatures. Wagner is so knowledgeable and writes so well about some of these bands - many I'd never heard before - that he made me search out some of the bands and my musical horizons have been expanded due to this book.
Visions and Affiliations vol 1 and 2: A California Literary Timeline, Poets and Poetry 1940-2005, altogether 1200 or so pages, by Jack Foley. Arriving earlier this year, this is an education in itself, and for anyone interested in Wilson's and Leary's theory of "westerning," the locus of money and culture traveling throughout history westward "and mildly northward," as Buckminster Fuller said, might find this of interest. LA/San Francisco seemed to have been where the poetic world zeitgeist fermented in the second half of the 20th century. Foley's assembled research is totally staggering, and even when he's writing about the art/poetry scene in Los Angeles in 1959 or San Francisco in 1990, he writes in present tense. The cabals, the social movements, the gossip, the theories surrounding some new poetry group, who knew who and who they were influenced by and what they did and how they died and how weird they were: it seems that everything is here. This is a compendious, astonishing work of detail and breadth, and even if you're reading this in London of New York of Cleveland you can still find much of interest here. Foley, like Wagner, is so thoroughly steeped in his subject - even knowing personally many of the "famous" personages - that it's infectious, a labor of love that's filled with so many fascinating characters it's hard to put these two massive tomes down. The two volumes look like reference works, but they are immanently readable page-turners.
Similar in massive scope, 2004's Orgies of the Hemp Eaters, edited by Abel Zug and Hakim Bey, is a total feast for fans of the vilified herb. Subtitled "Cuisine, Slang, Literature & Ritual of Cannabis Culture," this book delivers in a way many a dope book doesn't. 694 pages, well-indexed with a tremendous bibliography (I'm a connoisseur of annotated bibliographies and this one's a delight), this is the most underrated pot book as far as I'm concerned. Almost 300 pages cover India and Islam and the history of pot/hash/and the myriad ways it was used, the social effects it had on those cultures, and how it influenced artistic, religious and intellectual culture. My favorite portions are the scientific and literary commentaries and excerpts. There's a history of cooking with cannabis, too, complete with recipes from 1790's "Sweetmeat of Cannabis" to 1995's "Leary Biscuit." It's copiously illustrated and I almost guarantee a contact high from just holding this tome in your hands.
Books Read This Year: Some of My Favorites
By Michael Johnson
Only two of these actually came out this year. This year I spent a lot of time reading IN some fantastic books while not reading the entire volume. I keep a list of what books I read cover-to-cover (mostly so I can cite them if need be), and this year there's only 38 books on the list; in past years there's been 105, 97, etc. I also find as I get older I tend to spent more time re-re-re-re-reading in some books that I love so much: Ulysses, Montaigne, Vico, Robert Anton Wilson's oeuvre, Korzybski, Popper, Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality, Lakoff and Johnsons's Metaphors We Live By, etc.
But this year I really enjoyed reading Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs by Morton A. Meyers, MD, which originally appeared in 2007. This guy knows how to tell a story. He's a radiologist who wanted to image some part of the body, using a radioactive dye, and he ended up accidentally finding out how tumors spread: a pretty cool breakthrough. This book goes a long way in bolstering Nassim Nicholas Taleb's idea that most great things happen after a lot of "tinkering." It also bolsters the anarchist sociologist of science Paul Feyerabend: the classic "scientific method" isn't really how new breakthroughs happen; they happen when people are dinkin' around and have the creativity and wherewithal to NOTICE that they don't have a "failure" but something that might be applied somewhere else. The last chapter in on LSD. The Intro, about "the scientific method" and the nature of serendipity, is worth reading alone for anyone who got the bug for how scientific knowledge progresses from some Kuhn or Popper or Lakatos or even Francis Bacon. (Or Robert Anton Wilson's The New Inquisition?)
From Counterculture to Cyberculture, by Fred Turner first appeared in 2006 but I finally got around to reading it cover-to-cover this year. David Kaiser cited John Markoff's What The Dormouse Said in his How the Hippies Saved Physics; Turner's book is sort of a more academic and longer version of Markoff. It's told with Stewart Brand at the center, but it's really well-researched and a lot of RAW fans would love it: Buckminster Fuller, Tim Leary, John Von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Berkeley in the Sixties, Gregory Bateson, John Perry Barlow, etc. If the Reader liked Markoff's book they might love this one...
I'm not sure how well this will resonate with readers of RAWIllumination, but I really liked a book about heavy metal that came out earlier this year titled Mean Deviation, by Jeff Wagner, a dedicated metalhead, but by far dedicated - a true scholar, really - of "progressive" metal: from Rush to Voivod to Celtic Frost to Dream Theater to Watch Tower to Opeth and literally hundreds of bands in between, Wagner has something to say about how these bands constantly strove to change from album to album. Which is pretty much the opposite of most "pop" music act, who hit it big with some sound then are afraid to alienate their fans by trying anything new. The things these guy did to stay fresh! Get much better on their instruments, for one! But also: long, story-like epic songs with many parts, odd instrumentation, sudden jazz of classical influences, a sudden obsession with odd time signatures. Wagner is so knowledgeable and writes so well about some of these bands - many I'd never heard before - that he made me search out some of the bands and my musical horizons have been expanded due to this book.
Visions and Affiliations vol 1 and 2: A California Literary Timeline, Poets and Poetry 1940-2005, altogether 1200 or so pages, by Jack Foley. Arriving earlier this year, this is an education in itself, and for anyone interested in Wilson's and Leary's theory of "westerning," the locus of money and culture traveling throughout history westward "and mildly northward," as Buckminster Fuller said, might find this of interest. LA/San Francisco seemed to have been where the poetic world zeitgeist fermented in the second half of the 20th century. Foley's assembled research is totally staggering, and even when he's writing about the art/poetry scene in Los Angeles in 1959 or San Francisco in 1990, he writes in present tense. The cabals, the social movements, the gossip, the theories surrounding some new poetry group, who knew who and who they were influenced by and what they did and how they died and how weird they were: it seems that everything is here. This is a compendious, astonishing work of detail and breadth, and even if you're reading this in London of New York of Cleveland you can still find much of interest here. Foley, like Wagner, is so thoroughly steeped in his subject - even knowing personally many of the "famous" personages - that it's infectious, a labor of love that's filled with so many fascinating characters it's hard to put these two massive tomes down. The two volumes look like reference works, but they are immanently readable page-turners.
Similar in massive scope, 2004's Orgies of the Hemp Eaters, edited by Abel Zug and Hakim Bey, is a total feast for fans of the vilified herb. Subtitled "Cuisine, Slang, Literature & Ritual of Cannabis Culture," this book delivers in a way many a dope book doesn't. 694 pages, well-indexed with a tremendous bibliography (I'm a connoisseur of annotated bibliographies and this one's a delight), this is the most underrated pot book as far as I'm concerned. Almost 300 pages cover India and Islam and the history of pot/hash/and the myriad ways it was used, the social effects it had on those cultures, and how it influenced artistic, religious and intellectual culture. My favorite portions are the scientific and literary commentaries and excerpts. There's a history of cooking with cannabis, too, complete with recipes from 1790's "Sweetmeat of Cannabis" to 1995's "Leary Biscuit." It's copiously illustrated and I almost guarantee a contact high from just holding this tome in your hands.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Sunday, December 4, 2011
The Illuminati, on Twitter!
I am apparently late in discovering that The Illuminati are on Twitter. Using an eye in the pyramid icon, "they" post various bits of fortune cookie wisdom, such as "The greatest mistake you can make in life is continually fearing that you'll make one." @TheIlluminati has more than 275,000 followers but doesn't follow anyone, which I guess makes sense.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
German Illuminatus! cover
A cover for a German translation of ILLUMINATUS! Vol. 3, written by two of my favorite authors, Robert Shea und Robert A. Wilson. (Via Jeff Gardner on Twitter, @jg_sj.)
Friday, December 2, 2011
RAW at Esalen
After yesterday's post, an anonymous commentator kindly pointed me to a link that connects Robert Anton Wilson to Esalen. The page says, "Robert Anton Wilson, author of The Illuminatus Trilogy, and other well-known science fiction writers have brought their creative input to the community since the 60s. Wilson came to Esalen frequently through the early 90s and led many workshops."
Thursday, December 1, 2011
New movie coming about Esalen
One of my favorite "hippie physicists," Nick Herbert, reports on this blog that a new documentary on Esalen is in the works. (I don't know if Robert Anton Wilson ever taught there, but I know he spent time in a hot tub there.) Herbert links to the trailer, which features Herbert and other names that RAW fans may find familiar.
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