Great writers and underdogs

The other day, I admitted on Twitter that I've never gotten around to trying any Pynchon, that it was a "hole" in my reading record, and Roman Tsivkin teased, "Jesus, Tom, that ain't no "hole" in your reading, it's a black hole! Quick, read some Pynchon before you destroy us all :)"

Of course, it is embarrassing. But I wanted to say, "But I am reading someone I'm supposed to read, right now! I'm reading Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Read."

The whole business of reading writers that one is "supposed" to read fascinates me. I asked a friend of mine a few years ago if he had read anything by Don DeLillo. He answered, "No, and don't tell  anyone." I loved that answer. I didn't tell  anyone. I haven't read DeLillo, either. But I've read a lot of Richard Powers; does that count for anything?

Also, although I know I need to try writers that are new to me, and I do, my instinct is to keep exploring the authors I love. I have a Vladimir Nabokov at the house I haven't gotten around to reading yet! (Ada.)

For me, it's not just a matter of Great Writers, it's sticking up for writers who are maybe great and definitely in danger of being forgotten. I love underdogs. I view Robert Anton Wilson as a kind of underdog, someone who never seems to have gotten  his due from literary critics. Illuminatus! does have an audience, but not as large as I would like. But at least people mention it. How come nobody but RAW fans talk about The Widow's Son?

I count RAW as a favorite writer, but it's not like he's the only writer I like. But many of my other favorites don't need any help from me. Neal Stephenson, Iain M. Banks, Vladimir Nabokov ... they don't need a blogger sticking up for them.

I did a fan page for George Alec Effinger a few years ago. He was a really good writer, quite an original one, and I'll bet most of you have never heard of him. Maybe instead of Roman  Tsivkin trying to get me to read Pynchon, I should be trying to get Roman to read George Alec Effinger.

Who is  your favorite "underdog" writer?

The Third Head of Cerberus and other science fiction news

Today's blog post provides a bit more information on a couple of items that I have just mentioned in passing. Supergee (aka Arthur Hlavaty) a noted science fiction fan and Robert Anton Wilson expert, will be one of the guests of honor at Detcon 1, a NASFiC being held  July 17-20 2014 in Detroit.

Mr. Hlavaty is, as he points out in a comment a couple of postings ago, the third head in a triad attraction; the official announcement on the Detcon1 home page lists "Bernadette Bosky, Arthur D. Hlavaty and Kevin J. Maroney," explaining, "A long-term triad marriage, combining fan, academic, and pro activity in F/SF." There are biographies of the trio if you click on this link; Mr. Maroney is the publisher of the New York Review of Science Fiction, and as I've noted, you may download the 300th anniversary issue for free.

Mr. Hlavaty, the guy on the right in the red shirt if you check out the official Detcon1 portrait that I've posted with this item, is a very prominent fan writer nominated multiple times for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award. But let's pursue the "local angle" for a moment: He is a big fan/scholar of Robert Anton Wilson. In the olden days, i.e. before the Internet, the way in fandom to pursue a group discussion on a topic was to found an apa. Arthur founded The Golden APA in 1979, and both Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson were contributors. My interview with Arthur about the Golden APA is here.  Arthur's review of The Illuminati Papers (dated, but still interesting, he says) is here. 

A NASFiC (or "North American Science Fiction Convention")  is held in the years when the worldcon is overseas; as I understand it, it is meant to provide a big convention for folks who normally would attend a Worldcon but are not rich enough to journey to Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan or wherever. Next year's worldcon will be in London, so hence Detcon1.

About the above photo: I only met Kevin Maroney in person because years ago, I visited my old friend Brett Cox in North Carolina, before he obtained his Ph.D. and became an English professor (he's now at Norwich University in Vermont). Brett gave me a tour of local bookstores (this is what you do when the book nerd is visiting) and I met Kevin at the science fiction bookstore where he worked in North Carolina's Triangle area. In one of those wonderful coincidences, if you look closely at the above picture, you can see Brett's head, in between Kevin and Bernadette. The photo was taken at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts.

The Detcon1 announcement and even the Hugo Awards are not the biggest science fiction news of the last few days; the biggest would be the death of science fiction writer, editor, fan and memoirist Frederick Pohl. For my attempt to explain why Pohl was perhaps the most remarkable success story in the field, go here.

Housekeeping and links

I've added some new links under "Feature Articles and Interviews" for the latest original articles and republished 'lost' RAW articles featured recently on this blog, including five RAW letters to Green Egg magazine, Wilson and Shea's article on crime and anarchist, Jesse Walker on his new book and Nick Mennuti on his new book.

A few links:

The lies behind this war by Justin Raimondo.

Michael Johnson on the looming war with Syria.  ("This invention of a "red line" that Assad wasn't to step over or the world-straddling Cop On The Beat Unistat will retaliate? It's fucking phony and misses the whole point. Once dropping bombs on civilians from planes was crossing a red line.")

Reading a river passage in Finnegans Wake (by PQ)

Journalist faces 105 year for posting a link. (True, threatening an FBI agent's family on YouTube was certainly a mistake).

RIP science fiction writer Fred Pohl.

Bruce Schneier on how to protect yourself from NSA surveillance (if  you're a total nerd, I guess. Gary Acord understands all this stuff, I don't.)

R. M. Johnson on H. P. Lovecraft

OK, so I take a few days off -- off from work, off from the blog (I wrote all of last week's entries in advance), and I find there's cool stuff to get caught up on. Supergee is the guest of honor for a big convention! Obama is serious about this war thing!

But first, I wanted to say that I hope you didn't miss Michael Johnson's excellent essay on H.P. Lovecraft. Excerpt:

It's cool that maybe a few thousand MA and PhD theses will be written on Lovecraft, but for me: Contra the common claim of critics that HPL's style was "execrable," I love his baroque catachreses and mixed metaphors, his obscure words and borrowings from science and Egyptology and late 18th/early 19th century archaisms, his psychedelic mixture of factual content with the speculative and eldritch bizarre imaginings. If academics see fit to worm Cthuhu into canonicity, fine, but trying to assert that he's not tainted by "being" a science fiction or horror writer (declared declasse and out-of-bounds among the Highly Learned long ago) and rather his classification is now respectably "Weird" like someone in, I don't know.

More here.

Dan Clore plugs his Lovecraft book here. 

Coincidance: Reading schedule and introductory remarks

When I recently posted a proposed reading schedule for the online discussion of Coincidance, which officially begins next week, the main feedback I got was that 10 weeks was too fast. So here is a new schedule which spreads the discussion out over 12 weeks, with about 21 pages a week. (Some weeks will be a few more pages, some a few less; I want to discuss the essays as a whole, not bits of them. So rather than listing page numbers I'll just name the pieces in the book for that week.)

I also thought I'd give a little background  on the book.

Coincidance: A Head Test was published in 1988, when Robert Anton Wilson turned 56. The publication date falls at the end of his second period, which ends with the publication of Nature's God in 1988. (His work seems to fall within three broad periods; the middle period is when he published his novels and the third and last period was devoted solely to nonfiction.) However, like other later collections such as Email to the Universe, Coincidance is a collection which draws pieces from a long span of years from Wilson's career. Also in 1988, Wilson published Neuropolitique (with Timothy Leary and George Koopman, a revision of Neuropolitics, and  Sex, Drugs & Magick: A Journey Beyond Limits (revision of the earlier book). Quantum Psychology, the topics of an earlier online discussion, came out in 1990.

(Note: In the comments, Eric Wagner objects that Sex, Drugs and Magick came out in the 1990s; I was relying on the bibliography at the Wikipedia article and don't have anything handy I can double check. Eric also pointed out that RAW publishes two screenplays in his reputed third period, so I have changed the word "fiction" in the above paragraph to "novels.")

While Coincidance covers a wide range of topics, the book has four long pieces about James Joyce's writing and begins and ends with a Joyce article.

Wilson's publisher, New Falcon, says that Coincidance was one of Wilson's favorite books.

The book illustrates New Falcon's strength and weakness as a publisher. One the one hand, New Falcon put the book out no doubt exactly as Wilson wrote it and has faithfully kept it in print. On the other hand, there are few signs of editing or marketing, and New Falcon has failed to make it available as an ebook.

Incidentally, I was inspired to begin this blog after I read Coincidance for the first time.

The online discussion begins Sept. 16 with Week One.

Coincidance discussion schedule:

Week One: "Fore-Words," "Synchronicity and Isomorphism in Finnegans Wake." (Sept. 16).

Week Two: "Werewolf Bridge," "The Motherfucker Mystique." (Sept. 23).

Week Three: "Mammary Metaphysics," "Jazz Haiku." (Sept. 30).

Week Four: "How to Read/How to Think," "How to Read/How to Think Afterwords," "Shrapnel," "Why Do You Live in Ireland, Dr. Wilson?" "The Poet as Defense Early Warning Radar System." (Oct. 7)

Week Five: "Death and Absence in Joyce." (Oct. 14).

Week Six: "Introduction to Three Articles from THE REALIST," "The Doctor With the Frightened Eyes," "Thirteen Choruses for the Divine Marquis." (Oct. 21),

Week Seven: "The Married Catholic Priests Convention," "Self-Reflexive Surrealists Haiku," "The Godfathers and the Goddess." (Oct. 28)

Week Eight: "The Physics of Synchronicity," "Semper as Oxhousehumper," (Nov. 4).

Week Nine: "Interview with Sean MacBride." (Nov. 11).

Week Ten: "Religion for the Hell of It," "Comix and Cut-Ups." (Nov. 18).

Week Eleven: "No Waters in Cherry Valley by the Testicles," "Shrapnel." (Nov. 25).

Week Twelve: "The Hidden Variables." (Dec. 2).

Murray on the basic income guarantee

Yesterday, I linked to a couple of essays on the basic income guarantee idea as propounded by a leftist writer. I wanted to follow up with a couple of resources for Charles Murray, the controversial libertarian writer who also is an advocate for the idea.

Here are 10 questions for Murray, a reasonably-sized article which offers an introduction to some of his ideas. And here is an hour-long C-Span video from 2006 in which he discusses his advocacy of a basic income, also explored in his book, In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State.  (Apparently I can't embed the video, I can only link to it.)

Here is a New Yorker article about Murray shocking a conservative conference by expressing support for gay marriage.

Two basic income guarantee essays

Robert Anton Wilson advocated a basic income guarantee -- he was agnostic about the form it would take -- and the idea continues to bubble up.

Allen Sheahen has written a new book about the idea, A Basic Income Guarantee: Your Right to Economic Security. Well, actually it's an updated version of an old book.

The excellent Dangerous Minds blog recently has run two pieces by Sheahen, one here and a followup piece here.

Sheahen is a leftist. But interestingly, a look at the reviews of Sheahen's book on Amazon show that his book is endorsed by Charles Murray, the libertarian writer who advocated a basic income guarantee in his book, In Our Hands. 

I suppose it doesn't have anything to do with Sheahen's argument, but I notice that while the Kindle price of Murray's book is a reasonable $11.72, Sheahen's tome costs $25.27.

The war they didn't tell us about

I recently read The Secret Sentry by Matthew Aid, which is a history of the National Security Agency. (I snapped it up for $2.99 when Amazon put the Kindle version on sale.)

Many of the book's revelations were news to me, such as the fact that American forces intervened directly in the civil war in El Salvador (as opposed to sending supplies and advisers, which everyone knew about at the time.)

The El Salvador revelation is included in Chapter 10, Aid describes how reconnaissance aircraft were used to monitor the FMLN, the leftist rebels. He writes, "If he location of FMLN radio transmitters were triangulated, U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunships were called in from Panama to destroy the guerrilla bases, all of which was done in complete secrecy. It was a very serious and very secret war that was being fought in El Salvador." (Aid's notes on the chapter cites a "60 Minutes" TV program from May 21, 1995, as his source for the gunship attacks.)

I was paying close attention to the El Salvador news at the time, and I don't remember anyone reporting this. As usual, the information that U.S. gunships were actively involved was carefully hidden from the American's government's main enemy, the American people.

The science of Maybe Logic

We've talked before on this blog about "maybe logic," about Robert Anton Wilson's suggestion that people would be saner if they qualified their opinions with "maybe,"  and about his goal to convince people to approach opinions in a state of generalized agnosticism.

In an article published in 2008 at Salon, Dr. Robert Burton argues that we would all be less certain that we know the truth about a particular issue if we understood that certainty isn't always connected with a firm grasp of the facts.

"But modern biology is pointing in a different direction. It is telling us that despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of 'knowing what we know' arise out of primary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of rationality or reason. Feeling correct or certain isn’t a deliberate conclusion or conscious choice. It is a mental sensation that happens to us."

Burton writes that understanding brain biology explains "why your red is not my red." Who is the master who makes the grass green?

The article is excepted from a book. Since then, Burton has written another nonfiction book, A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind. He's also written three novels. Burton apparently is a neurologist and novelist; more information here. (Actually, it appears his name is "Robert A." Burton).

Via Timothy Leary Futique on Twitter. Despite the new vogue for uncertainty, I'm pretty sure it's worth following.

Academic Paper on Robert Anton Wilson and Discordianism

Eric Wagner spots something interesting: Academia.edu has made available a paper called "Making the Donkey Visible: Discordianism in the Works of Robert Anton Wilson" by David K. Robertson, available here (after you jump through a couple of registration hoops.) The work only was previously available in an expensive hardcover book.

Extraterrestrial gargoyles on medieval Scottish church

Gargoyles found on a Scottish 13th century church seem  like pretty conclusive evidence that medieval folk may have had contact with extraterrestrials, Dangerous Minds reports. The creatures on the abbey in Paisley, Scotland, look like critters from a science fiction movie or from the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

As authority figures are always telling us, however, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Dangerous Minds explains that many of the original gargoyles were replaced during renovations in the 1990s. "Minister of Paisley Abbey, the Reverend Alan Birss suspects that one of the stonemasons involved in the renovation may have been having a bit of fun."

Hat tip, hagbard celine on Twitter.

Coincidance Discussion

UPDATE: The reading schedule has been updated. Please see the Sept. 9 post.

Let's get the Coincidance discussion going on Sept. 16. Here are some suggestions on how to proceed -- as always, I welcome your suggestions and comments.

I'm going to suggest reading the book over 10 weeks. That's a pace that seemed to work OK for Masks of the Illuminati. My New Falcon edition is 248 pages, so it works out to 24 pages a week, and of course with a collection of short pieces it's easy for everyone to drop in and drop out, according to their interest in the varied subjects Wilson addresses.

A proposed schedule:

Week One: "Fore-Words" and "Synchronicity and Isomorphism in Finnegans Wake."

Week Two: "Werewolf Bridge," "The Motherfucker Mystique," "Mammary Metaphysics."

Week Three: "Jazz Haiku," "How to Read/How to Think," "How to Read/How to Think Afterwords"

Week Four: "Shrapnel," "Why Do You Live in Ireland, Dr. Wilson?" "The Poet As Defense Early Warning Radar System," "Death and Absence in Joyce."

Week Five: "Introduction to Three Articles from THE REALIST," "The Doctor with the Frightened Eyes," "Thirteen Choruses for the Divine Marquis."

Week Six: "The Married Catholic Priests Convention," "Self-Reflexive Surrealist Haiku," "The Godfathers and the Goddess," "The Physics of Synchronicity."

Week Seven: "Semper as Oxhousehumper,"

Week Eight: "Interview with Sean MacBride," "Religion for the Hell of It."

Week Nine: "Comix and Cut-Ups," "No Waters in Cherry Valley by the Testicles."

Week Ten: "Shrapnel," "The Hidden Variables."

I might do more than one entry per week, particularly during weeks that feature wildly different pieces. The titles sound pretty interesting, do they not? It's a good book, I'll enjoy re-reading it.

The book is still on sale at New Falcon, but for those of you who aren't flush, there's always the used book market or libraries or interlibrary loan.

'Illuminate' list on Twitter

Some months ago, when I realized there was no way I could keep up with all of the people I "follow" on Twitter, I put together a list called Illuminate. The description is, "Sombunall of this would be of interest to a Robert Anton Wilson fan," and the list is mostly, but not entirely, folks who are likely to give me leads on something worth mentioning in this blog.

I kept the list private for a long time, because I don't pretend that it lists everyone worth following, and I did not want to hurt the feelings of anyone who I mistakenly (or out of ignorance) did not include on the list. I still don't claim the list is complete or free of errors, but in case anyone else might find it useful, I have made it public and you can see it here.