Eric Wagner on his new book

Eric Wagner, responding to my inquiry, wrote to brief me on Straight Outta Dublin, his book on James Joyce's influence on Robert Anton Wilson, which he hopes to complete in 2013.

"The appendix in my first book on the influence of Joyce on Masks of the Illuminati grew into my master's thesis, The Influence of Finnegans Wake on Robert Anton Wilson's Masks of the Illuminati.  A slightly modified version of my thesis makes up the first section of my new book.  I decided next to write an antithesis, following the five phase model of history put forth in Illuminatus!  I've nearly finished the antithesis and I've written a chunk of the synthesis.  I've put Joyce on hold for a while because I want to finish reading Proust.  I do have a weekly Finnegans Wake Club at the high school where I teach.

"I hope to finish Proust by June.  In August I hope to begin teaching a class at the Maybe Logic Academy on Wilson's Schroedinger's Cat.  I think that will help to return my focus to Wilson and to Joyce.  At least I hope so."

Obviously, as more information becomes available on the Maybe Logic course, I will report it here.

Eric Wagner on RAW and misunderstanding Finnegans Wake

[I liked  Eric Wagner's posting about RAW and misunderstanding Finnegans Wake, which he put up on alt.fan.rawilson on Feb. 28, so I thought I would reprint it here. Love the vegetarian restaurant anecdote, too. Mr. Wagner's book, An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson, remains available. -- The Mgt.]


I started reading Bob Wilson in 1982, which led me to check Finnegans Wake out of the library in 1983. I had little success with the book, but after reading more of Bob’s writing I decided to buy a copy of Finnegans Wake on February 2, 1984, Joyce’s birthday. I still couldn’t make much sense out of the book. In 1985 I read Prometheus Rising in which Bob mentioned a Finnegans Wake study group. Aha, I thought, I could do that, patterning it on Bible study groups I’d attended – a group of people studying a book few if any of whom had read all the way through and likely none of them really understood. I invited everyone I knew to come over one Thursday, and only one other person showed up, but we kept Finning on Thursdays for the next twelve years at least semi-regularly, joined by various other pilgrims, until I moved from Arizona back to California.

In 1988 a group of us brought Bob Wilson to Arizona to give a talk and a workshop. I wanted to make Thursday a Finn day, so we took him to see the new film of The Dead, which he loved because it reminded him so much of Dublin. We went to a vegetarian restaurant that night which one of our group recommended, but afterwards Bob asked me to take him back to the hamburger joint we had enjoyed the day before. That night Bob came over to my house and we had a raucous Finn session enhanced by Guinness Stout.

My Finn group meets on Wednesdays now, so it fell on the anniversary of Bob’s death last week and it fell on his birthday this week. We’ve almost reached the song at the end of chapter two, which makes me think of the performance of that song at Bob’s Memorial BB-Q five years ago. I still have trouble understanding Finnegans Wake, but it always makes me think of Bob, and I feel grateful for the ongoing confusion.

RAW as a 'gigantic and benign floating head'

The quotation I've picked out of the blog post by Scott Jeffery, "academic, comedian, wrecker of civilization" to put in my headline is a little unfair, taken out of context. But who can resist a "gigantic and benign floating head"?

The full quote: "So this is just some thoughts on Wilson, whose work had a profound impact on my philosophical and psycho-spiritual development and who still sometimes (not sure if I should mention this so I will) appears to me as as a kind of gigantic and benign floating head whenever my more unusual states of consciousness seem like they might get too much. Which, by the way, is awesome and I don’t care if its not really him; everyone gets the Robert Anton Wilson they deserve. So, an intellectual influence then and, in some strange way that only writers who you love but have never met can be, a friend."

The last two sentences capture rather well how I feel about Wilson (whom I never met, either.)

This is part of an interesting post on why the first Cosmic Trigger book is "hands down, my favourite book in the world."

Thanks to Rob Pugh on Twitter for calling this to my attention.

Prometheus Award finalists announced

The finalists for the Prometheus Award have been announced. (I am a judge on the nominating committee).

With the understanding that I am only speaking for myself, and not for anyone else or for the award, I want to offer a couple of comments. The list of finalists is quite strong this year. I'm particularly pleased by the nomination of Delia Sherman's The Freedom Maze, Ernest Cline's Ready Player One and Ken MacLeod's The Restoration Game. If the Hugo Award this year goes to a novel as strong as any of those three, it will be a good year for the Hugos. (Hugo nominations will be announced Saturday.)

Ken MacLeod's blog posting about making the Prometheus ballot is here. If you haven't read MacLeod, you are in for a treat. MacLeod, Iain Banks and Charles Stross are all talented Scottish SF writers; I love Banks' SF novels.

Official press release follows:

2012 PROMETHEUS AWARD FINALISTS ANNOUNCED

The Libertarian Futurist Society has announced finalists for this year's Prometheus Awards, which will be presented during the 70th World Science Fiction Convention over Labor Day weekend in Chicago.

The Prometheus finalists for Best Novel recognize pro-freedom novels published last year:


  * */The Children of the Sky/* (TOR Books) - A sequel to Vernor Vinge's *A Fire Upon the Deep* and in the same universe as Prometheus-winning *A Deepness in the Sky*, this novel focuses on advanced humans, stranded and struggling to survive on a low-tech planet populated by Tines, dog-like creatures who are only intelligent when organized in packs. The most libertarian of the three human factions and their local allies must cope with the world's authoritarian factions to advance peaceful trade over war and coercion.


 * */The Freedom Maze/* (Small Beer Press) - Delia Sherman's young-adult fantasy novel focuses on an adolescent girl of 1960 who is magically sent back in time to 1860 when her family owned slaves on a Louisiana plantation. With her summer tan, she's mistaken for a slave herself, and she learns the hard way what life was like.  In the process, she comes to appreciate the values of honor, respect, courage, and personal responsibility.

  * */In the Shadow of Ares/* (Amazon Kindle edition)- This young-adult first novel by Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson focuses on a Mars-born female teenager in a near-future, small civilization on Mars,
where hardworking citizens are constantly and unjustly constrained by a growing, centralized authority whose excessive power has led to corruption and conflict.

  * */Ready Player One/* (Random House) - Ernest Cline's genre-busting blend of science fiction, romance, suspense, and adventure describes a virtual world that has managed to evolve an order without a state and where entrepreneurial gamers must solve virtual puzzles and battle real-life enemies to save their virtual world from domination and corruption. The novel also stresses the importance of allowing open access to the Internet for everyone.

  * */The Restoration Game/* (Pyr Books) - Set in a world whose true nature is a deeper mystery, this philosophical and political thriller by Ken MacLeod (winner of Prometheus awards for *Learning the World*, *The Star Fraction*, and  *The Stone Canal*) explores the dark legacy of communism and the primacy of information in shaping what is "reality" amid Eastern European intrigue, online gaming, romance and mystery.


  * */Snuff/* (Harper Collins) - A Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett (winner of a Prometheus Award for *Night Watch*, also set in Discworld),  *Snuff* blends comedy, drama, satire, suspense and mystery as a police chief investigates the murder of a goblin and finds himself battling discrimination. The mystery broadens into a powerful drama to extend the world's recognition of rights to include these long-oppressed and disdained people with a sophisticated culture of their own.


Thirteen novels were nominated this past year and read and voted on by 10 judges, selected from LFS members. The other nominees:  */Cowboy Angels/*, by Paul McAuley (Pyr Books);  */The Hot Gate: Troy Rising III/*, by John Ringo (Baen Books);  */REAMDE/*, by Neal Stephenson (William Morrow);  */Revolution World/*, by Katy Stauber (Night Shade Books);  */Sweeter Than Wine/*, by L. Neil Smith (Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick);  */Temporary Duty/*, by Ric Locke (Amazon; Kindle edition, Ric's Rulez blog); and  */The Unincorporated Woman/*, by Dani and Eytan Kollin (TOR Books).

For more than three decades, the Prometheus Awards have recognized outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy that stress the importance of liberty as the foundation for civilization, peace, prosperity, progress and justice.

                                         **

The 2012 Prometheus finalists for Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) were announced earlier.  This category honors novels, novellas, stories, graphic novels, anthologies, films, TV shows/series, plays, poems, music recordings and other works of fiction first published or broadcast more than five years ago:

  * */Falling Free/*, a novel by Lois McMaster Bujold (1988);

  * /"'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman,"/ a story by Harlan Ellison (1965)

  * /"The Machine Stops,"/ a story by E. M. Forster (1909)

  * /"As Easy as A.B.C.,"/ a story by Rudyard Kipling (1912)

The Worldcon's Prometheus Awards ceremony most likely will take place, as in previous years, on the Friday afternoon of Labor Day weekend (to be confirmed this summer at a Chicago Worldcon hotel and meeting room to
be announced).

Oz Fritz, mixing magick and music

Oz Fritz often seems to straddle the boundary between magick and music. His interesting post on drummer Ginger Baker (from Cream, Blind Faith) etc. includes a section on a jazz/rock/African album called The Map is Not the Territory (!) by a band named Temporary Autonomous Zone (!!). It's a rather obscure album -- I could not find a listing for it on Allmusic.com -- but Oz helpfully includes the first track from the album (called "Invoke") and links to another blog which lists the musicians.

I did succeed in finding a long list of Oz Fritz's credits on Allmusic (everyone from Laurie Anderson to the Ramones to Iggy Pop, and various other artists I'm not hip enough to recognize.)

Here is information about Oz Fritz's album, "All Around the World," which Allmusic.com describes as a "cross between imaginary travelogue and meditation tool." $8 as an MP3 download from Amazon.com, where I just bought my copy.

Put Natural Law back in print

Natural Law is a good little book, but I had to read a copy posted at the Anarchist Library because it's been out of print for many years. I wish the estate would reprint it. At its current size, it would make sense as an inexpensive Kindle Single. Fleshed out with other material concentrating on political philosophy, it also could be the centerpiece of a normal-sized book.

Natural Law -- notes on the "main characters"

I just finished reading Robert Anton Wilson's Natural Law, or Don't Put a Rubber on Your Willy, and I thought it might be useful to say something about some of the people mentioned in the essay.

Samuel Konkin was the publisher of New Libertarian Notes and New Libertarian Weekly and published not a few articles by Robert Anton Wilson and also published this interview with Wilson, one of my favorites. According to this entry on Wikipedia (libertarians appear to be very active on Wikipedia) Konkin dressed in black, refused to vote, opposed involvement in the Libertarian Party, saw libertarianism as a movement of the left and was a proponent of agorism. He died on Feb. 23, 2004. See my interview with Agorist Kevin MacArdry if you want an example of a current proponent.

Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) was a very influential libertarian who espoused "anarcho-capitalism." His book For a New Liberty was very popular and influential (I dutifully read it in the 1970s after I discovered libertarianism) and he remains influential, particularly among the Antiwar.com and Lew Rockwell types. His portrayal in Natural Law is not flattering, but I'll note that he was a vigorous proponent of peace.

George H. Smith is an American libertarian and atheist. Confusingly for a libertarian science fiction fan, he is not the same person as SF author George H. Smith, or SF author George O. Smith.

Arthur Hlavaty also is mentioned in the text, e.g. "Although I do not agree with the almost Manichean attitude of critic Arthur Hlavaty, who regards nature as a combination of slaughterhouse and madhouse against which, by great effort, a few human beings have created a few enclaves of reason and decency, I do agree with, e.g., Nietzsche, Lao-Tse and the authors of the Upanishads, all of whom held that nature or existence combines so many diverse elements that we cannot judge or measure or compare it with anything, and cannot describe it as a whole except in contradictions." Hlavaty is this guy.

Robert Anton Wilson on libertarianism

(I extracted this from RAW's Natural Law, which I just finished reading -- The Mgt.)

If libertarianism means anything, it should certainly mean progress, not stasis; change,  not medieval dogma; a liberation of energies, not a new cage.

Of course, there is an opinion broad in the land that libertarianism does mean a mindless, heartless and mechanical system of medieval dogma. I don’t know how this impression came about, although it probably has something to do with Randroids and other robot Ideologists who occasionally infest libertarian groups. Frankly, I have always loathed being associated with such types and devoutly wish libertarianism could be sharply distinguished from Idolatry and fetishism of all sorts. If liberty does not mean that we can all be more free, not less free, then I need to find a better word than “liberty” to describe my aspirations ...

I am not interested in Ideologies and don’t give a damn about labels at all, at all. I am interested only in what makes the world a little more reasonable, a little less violent and somewhat more free and tolerant than it has been in the past.

Robert Anton Wilson Fans revamped

RAWilsonfans.com, the best collection of Robert Anton Wilson material on the Internet, has been revamped with a new look and new material. As Mike Gathers notes in a new posting on the site, it will continue to be a work in progress. Thanks to everyone on Twitter who spread the news about the relaunch.

RAW on Irish politics

Jesse Walker, hard at work in the stacks of the University of Michigan library as he toils on his upcoming book, The United States of Paranoia (see my interview with Mr. Walker) took time to share part of a letter with me that Robert Anton Wilson wrote to Don Werkheiser. The letter is dated Jan. 6, 1985, and was written in Dublin. The excerpt:

Irish politics: Garrett Fitzgerald is the current Taoiseach (pronounced tea-shuck, roughly). His policies are remarkably like those of Reagan and Thatcher. He has a Ph.D. in economics and is a monetarist. Charlie Haughey is the leader of the opposition. He wrote the law under which writers are exempt from income tax so, against my better judgement, I like him. He stood trial in 1970 for running guns for the I.R.A. but was acquitted; “everybody says” he was guilty as hell, but the jury was pro-I.R.A. in those days. He has tapes of the whales singing off the coast of his Kerry home, and other voices singing back at them; he claims the other voices are faeries. Neither Fitzgerald nor Haughey ever disagree with the Catholic hierarchy about anything, although they disagree about everything else. Dick Spring is the head of the Labour Party and does disagree with the Church, but guardedly (“We need to rethink the question,” etc.) The head of the Workers Party gets so little publicity that I have forgotten his name; he damns and blasts the Church openly, when he can get the press to listen. He is a Marxist, and former head of the I.R.A., although no longer friendly with them; they call him a “Stalinist stickie,” i.e. lost in the past. The head of the Sinn Fein (shin fayn) party is one Gerry Adams, who is widely believed (I might say universally believed) to be the head also of the I.R.A., although it is libelous to say so explicitly. There is actually a law against interviewing him on television (!) although he may paradoxically be interviewed in newspapers (!!). He says the Church sucks, capitalism sucks, all the other parties suck, and “armed struggle” is the only answer, although he denies that he is involved in it. There is also an Ecology Party and an Ecologist Party, but they get so little publicity that I have not discovered what vital ideological difference distinguishes them.


Whatever one thinks of all this, it is at least less monotonous and more entertaining than the two-party system in the U.S.


Werkheiser, by the way, is mentioned in this interview with Robert Anton Wilson.

Prometheus Rising and the "rat race"

San Francisco attorney and NLP practitioner Elizabeth Coleman is reading Prometheus Rising, and the book inspires a blog post on the "rat race" and being goal-oriented as opposed to enjoying life as you live it. See also her post "De-bunking Plato: Math is an invention, like language," which relates nicely to what Robert Anton Wilson wrote in Natural Law, among other places.

An unusual lawsuit

Here is an unusual lawsuit, reported by the Courthouse News Service:

MANHATTAN (CN) - An American expatriate in Bulgaria claims the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the Office of International Treasury Control and the Italian government conspired with a host of others to steal more than $1.1 trillion in financial instruments intended to support humanitarian purposes.


The 111-page federal complaint involves a range of entities common to conspiracy theorists, including the Vatican Illuminati, the Masons, the "Trilateral Trillenium Tripartite Gold Commission," and the U.S. Federal Reserve.


Plaintiff Neil Keenan claims he was entrusted in 2009 with the financial instruments - which included U.S. Federal Reserve notes worth $124.5 billion, two Japanese government bonds with a combined face value of $19 billion, and one U.S. "Kennedy" bond with a face value of $1 billion - by an entity called the Dragon Family, which is a group of several wealthy and secretive Asian families.


More here. 

The article says that Keenan is represented by William H.  Mulligan Jr., of the law firm Bleakley, Platt and Schmidt, located in White Plains, N.Y., who apparently is a real lawyer.  Neil Keenan's Facebook page is here.

Hat tip, John Merritt.

Bookplate blog talks to Bobby Campbell

Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie's latest confession is that he's interviewed Bobby Campbell. The topic at hand is the bookplate Bobby did for Robert Anton Wilson's library.