Zine interview with RAW

Adam Gorightly has uncovered a zine interview with Robert Anton Wilson,  apparently published in the mid to late 1980s, from the zine "Off the Deep End." I think it's an interview that hasn't been available on the net before, but it's hard to check that, since RAWilsonfans.com remains down as of this writing. Anyway, Adam has posted the interview.

Excerpt:

T.C. [Tim Cridland]: You've written a number of books on widely differing subjects. Is there an underlying subject or theme that runs through all your works?

R.A.W.: Yes. The underlying theme is that there are a lot of available realities, and you don't have to live your life in the one your parents bought. There are plenty of  hucksters out there selling alternative realities, and you can buy any one you want for yourself. Or, you don't have to buy any of them -- you can look at them all as an anthropologist does. Or you can rent them and go from one reality to another, trying various ones out, until you find one you like best. Or  you can keep on moving forever without tunneling in any of them. 

As for RAWilsonfans.com, the site's host, Joseph Matheny, explains that he is moving all of his websites and that it should be back up soon.

Week 25, Illuminatus! online reading group

Robert Shea

(This week: Page 242, "Waving their crosses over their heads and howling incoherently," to Page 252, "His mother was Norwegian.")

We tend, as we read through Illuminatus!, to focus on Robert Anton Wilson, and his obvious literary influences, such as James Joyce. 

But this section of Illuminatus!, with its underwater battle at the ancient city of Peos in Atlantis, is redolent of lost cities, weapons of super science, ancient races, alien creatures, old science fiction novels such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, action-packed pulp sequences. It sounds a lot like something written by a science fiction, and not a young one; rather, a science fiction fan who might have read old pulp magazines decades ago. It sounds a lot like Robert Shea.

And indeed, in the Robert Anton Wilson interview reproduced in Science Fiction: An Oral History by D. Scott Apel, RAW says flatly, "Atlantis is all by Shea." 

The introspective passages in the Atlantis segment sound rather like RAW, so perhaps he had a hand in these. But the narrative passages remind me of Shea's novels, the ones he wrote after losing his job at "Playboy" magazine and reinventing himself as a historical novelist.

The biography in Wikipedia is really not very good; to know about Shea's ties to science fiction and science fiction fandom, you have to read elsewhere. 

See, for example, this essay by Shea on his relationship with Larry T. Shaw, the legendary science fiction magazine editor, a piece I found when I tracked down back issues of Shea's fanzine, No Governor. Shea writes, "I met Larry Shaw at a gathering of the Hydra Club, a science fiction professionals' association, in 1959."

This sentence places Shea at the heart of science fiction fandom in New York City. Wikipedia helpfully explains, "The Hydra Club was a social organization of science fiction professionals and fans. It met in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s.

"It was founded October 25, 1947 in the apartment of Judith Merril and Frederik Pohl on Grove Street in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York. As nine founders were present, the club took its name from the legendary nine-headed monster, the Hydra.

"Among its members were Lester del Rey, David A. Kyle, Frederik Pohl, Judith Merril, Martin Greenberg, Robert W. Lowndes, Philip Klass, Jack Gillespie, David Reiner, L. Jerome Stanton, Fletcher and Inga Pratt, Willy Ley, George O. Smith, Basil Davenport, Sam Merwin, Harry Harrison, and J. Harry Dockweiler."

Here is a 1951 article about the Hydra Club by Judith Merrill, featuring a caricature of many of its members.

Notice that on the official Robert Shea page, maintained by his son, Mike Shea, you'll see that Shea's first published stories were in magazines such as "Fantastic Universe" and "If." (I miss "If" and "Galaxy." I know that dates me.)

It's clear from the Shea essay on Shaw that Shaw was a mentor in many ways -- in teaching Shea about how to work at magazines, in helping to introduce Shea to anarchism, in helping Shea with his fiction and in getting Shea involved in science fiction fandom:

Larry was a quintessential science fiction fan. He had come to New York City from Schenectady in the 1940s and had been a member of that legendary science fiction fan club, the Futurians. He was editor of Infinity, a respected magazine that flourished and perished along with the sf boom of the late 50s. He was always working on one fanzine or another.

Larry and his wife Noreen were among the members of the Fanoclasts, and with their encouragement I boldly went deeper into fannish realms than I'd ever gone before. He introduced me to the fascinating people who were active in New York fandom in the 60s and got me to read fanzines from the stacks he kept on his coffee table. He even inspired me to start a publication of my own, a mimeographed literary magazine called The Scene, ancestral to the journal you hold in your hands.

Yikes! Where can I find copies of "The Scene"?

Shea stayed on at "Playboy" after Wilson left and remained in the Chicago area. Wilson explains in Cosmic Trigger 3 what happened next: "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 is first novel before finding a job and never stopped writing again."

Shea's first "solo" novel, Shike: Time of the Dragons, came out in 1981. He published several historical novels before he died of cancer, age 61, in 1994. His widow, the late Patricia Monaghan, is listed on the faculty of Maybe Logic Academy. I exchanged some emails with Monaghan, herself a respected author and expert on paganism, and I was very sorry to discover as I prepared this blog post that she died in 2012. I wish somebody had told me about it at the time. She was a very nice lady and always was helpful to me when I researched Shea for this blog.

Patricia Monaghan 

Shea's novels are all still available in one form or another, thanks to the efforts of his son, Mike Shea, who maintains the official Shea page.

I am very fond of All Things Are Lights, which I have argued is a "thematic prequel" to Illuminatus! Monaghan wrote to me in a 2011 email, "All Things are Lights is my favorite of Bob's books, I'm glad you wrote about it."

Here is an email exchange I had with Monaghan about All Things Are Lights, taken from this blog post: 

From my email:

I'm very fond of "All Things Are Lights," and I tend to think of it as a kind of prequel to ILLUMINATUS!, as there are references to many topics covered in the other work, such as the Assassins, the Templars, secret societies and so on.

But I did not notice any directly links between the two works. Were there any names I missed that are common to both works, or anything else that directly ties the two works together? Do you remember if Mr. Shea ever said anything about the relationship between the two?

Part of Dr. Monaghan's reply:

I'm glad you like All Things, which is such a terrific book. You are right in the "prequel" idea in that Bob's interest in secret societies and such folded over from Ill! to All Things, but there was not direct connection. What drove Bob as an historical novelist was an interest in the underdogs of history, the people who were "lost" from a historical point of view. (I keep thinking that Saracen should be made into a movie, now, with the rise in interest in the Islamic world--but of course Bob's Muslim characters weren't terrorists! Well...they were...sort of....) The Cathars were persecuted in what was really a land-grab by the French against the Spanish--in Languedoc today, you can still see, in bars, maps of France before and after the "Albigensian crusade," which make very clear that France exploded in size after grabbing that land. Bob's last published book, Shaman, looked at the Black Hawk War from the Indian side. That was his way--always to focus on the "other" in any historical situation.

(Next week: Page 252, " 'What color where they?' he said suddenly to Hagbard," to page 262, "until long after this meeting is over, Mr. Muldoon.")

L. Neil Smith is seriously ill

I am making an exception to my "one post a day" rule to pass on some breaking news: Science fiction author L. Neil Smith, a hardcore libertarian heavily influenced by Wilson and Shea, has suffered a stroke but is recovering. Sean Gabb has posted news about this. Let's hope he has a full recovery and can resume writing and attending conventions.

William Burroughs, the occult and H.P. Lovecraft

Matthew Levi Stevens

So, John Merritt sends me a link to this Reality Sandwich article, "The Beat Godfather, the Great Beast, & the Necronomicon," about the connections between William Burroughs, the occult and H.P. Lovecraft (among other things), and I wondered if Oz had seen it. Then I wondered if the rest of you had seen it.

It's from a new book, The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs.  The author is Matthew Levi Stevens. 

RAW, from anarchism to libertarianism

Jake Shannon

Jake Shannon, who finds all kinds of interesting items for his Discordian Libertarians group, finds an interesting quote from RAW:

My early work is politically anarchist fiction, in that I was an anarchist for a long period of time. I'm not an anarchist any longer, because I've concluded that anarchism is an impractical ideal. Nowadays, I regard myself as a libertarian. I suppose an anarchist would say, paraphrasing what Marx said about agnostics being "frightened atheists," that libertarians are simply frightened anarchists. Having just stated the case for the opposition, I will go along and agree with them: yes, I am frightened. I'm a libertarian because I don't trust the people as much as anarchists do. I want to see government limited as much as possible; I would like to see it reduced back to where it was in Jefferson's time, or even smaller. But I would not like to see it abolished. I think the average American, if left totally free, would act exactly like Idi Amin. I don't trust the people any more than I trust the government.

"Robert Anton Wilson: Searching For Cosmic Intelligence" - interview by Jeffrey Elliot (1980)

Jake has a new book out, which I plan to read soon. He also has a blog. 

Friday links

Oz Fritz on "Jodorowsky's Dune" 

Science fiction writers, lined up for and against the Vietnam War. You can also follow the links in the posting to learn about the current controversy among SF writers.

No fly list increases tenfold under Obama.

Good observation. 

Lovecraft Bar. 

162 things we've learned about the NSA.

Has the libertarian moment finally arrived?

James Joyce complains of hounding by the press. 

Adam Gorightly on Illuminatus!, Week 24

THERE IS NO ENEMY ANYWHERE

Adam Gorightly has a new post up about the business card of page 236 of Illuminatus! that says, "There is no enemy anywhere."

It's an actual card that Greg Hill  used to give out as part of Operation Mindfuck, and as Adam points out, there is a serious point behind it. He explains that it was a "LDD programming tool" (e.g., the Discordian "Legion of Dynamic Discord") and that it "was another method to deliver a new imprint to Oedipuski’s head—that neither the radical right or radical left were 'real' enemies of one another—and that to become truly free, one needed to escape the Us-Against-Them groupthink matrix."

The "Us-Against-Them groupthink matrix" is a regular feature of U.S. politics, and is generally used to disguise the fact that the most important decisions already have been made -- it's OK for a U.S. president to start a new war anytime he wants, it's OK for the government to spy on everyone and assemble massive dossiers, it's OK to give massive amounts of tax money to Israel,  it's OK  to give away tax money to support specific private enterprises, and so on. These are policy positions that most Democrats and Republicans agree on, regardless of their supposedly important partisan differences.

I'll also add that much of the U.S. political system is driven by classifying foreigners are "enemies." Politicians from both parties are forever reminding us that they want to take away our jobs through trade, they want to swarm across the borders to live next to us, they want to commit acts of terrorism against us, they want to force us to do something about global warming, and on and on and on.

I'm afraid I've taken Adam's post and gone off on a bit of a rant. So to return to his post, it's another illustration of how knowing the history of Discordianism can educate the reader on how the movement had a strong influence on the text of Illuminatus! 

Libertarians discuss basic income guarantee

The Cato Institute, a Washington think tank with a libertarian perspective, has launched a series of articles to debate the basic income guarantee, an idea that has been championed by a number of libertarian-leaning folks (including Robert Anton Wilson). First up is this piece by Matt Zwolinski. 

Not everyone thinks this is a great idea. Justin Raimondo, in his full-on "libertarian pope" mode, issued a series of Tweets (such as this one) that denounced the idea of having even a discussion, essentially issuing a fatwa against any libertarians who advocate for the idea.

I understand where Justin is coming from; in a larger sense, this is the usual debate between libertarians who want to fight for the vision of the libertarian utopia they carry around in their heads, vs. the folks who recognize that utopia isn't scheduled to arrive anytime soon and that there are things that can be done to move the current system into a more libertarian direction. Justin is apparently beaming his Tweets from a planet that doesn't have an expensive and intrusive welfare bureaucracy; that's not what obtains in the U.S. on Planet Earth. To put it a different way, we're going to have a taxation system that takes away large sums of money from people for the immediate future; what are we going to do with that money? Do we have to use all of it to build bombs and spy on people?

Jesse Walker, meanwhile, has a piece on Reason arguing that the welfare system can be made more like a basic income guarantee system, to make it less intrusive.

Jesse writes, "When libertarians discuss this idea, a great deal of stress gets put on the idea that the grants should replace the existing programs completely and not merely add another payment to the mix. With that proviso, the proposal attracts a lot of libertarian support: The new system would be less paternalistic, less bureaucratic, and possibly (depending on the details) less costly than the old one. But the proviso isn't exactly politically realistic. Replacing the entire welfare state in one fell swoop is a tall order, especially if you want to include popular middle-class entitlements as part of the deal. Zwolinski admits that the scenario is, for the time being at least, 'a bit of speculative fancy.' "

If you are going to have a really adequate basic income guarantee, then it makes no sense to keep the rest of the welfare state. I hope libertarians don't give up on the idea too quickly just because it isn't "politically realistic." Marijuana legalization wasn't "politically realistic" in the U.S. until very recently.

Thanks to John Merritt for help with this blog post.

UPDATE: Merritt notes the issue also is being debated in Germany.

Illuminatus! reading group notes

A couple of notes on the Illuminatus! online reading group: We've gotten through most of the first book, The Eye in the Pyramid, and I've added to the list of posts to give page numbers for each post; if there is a passage that particularly interests you, you can easily find the particular posting and see what the various contributors said about it. This should become more useful as we get farther along.

My offer to invite anyone who wants to give it a try to submit a guest post still stands; as we are going in increments of about 10 pages, you could work a few of weeks in advance and pretty much figure out which section you'd be writing about.

Week 24, Illuminatus! online reading group

(This week: "That's what we call a Bavarian fire drill," page 234, to "We'll show you how to pilot the second stage," page 242.)

And though she feels as if she's in a play
She is anyway

"Penny Lane," Lennon and McCartney

Here we get into a self-referential bit of the book. (The artwork by Bobby Campbell posted above, his kind effort to help promote the group reading, references the original Dell cover art and also the cover of the Dell omnibus edition, which I assume is what most of you have.)

At Confrontation magazine, the editor, top researcher and top reporter have all disappeared, but Peter Jackson is trying to put out the next issue, anyway; at least he still has other writers (page 238). Epicene Wildeblood has promised a review of an unnamed new work:

"It's a dreadfully long monster of a book," Wildeblood says pettishly, "and I certainly won't have time to read it, but I'm giving it a thorough skimming. The authors are utterly incompetent— no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of ghastly boring subjects. And the time sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce. Worst yet, it has the most raunchy sex scenes, thrown in just to make it sell, I'm sure, and the authors— whom I've never heard of— have the supreme bad taste to introduce real political figures into this mishmash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy. You can be sure I won't waste time reading such rubbish, but I'll have a perfectly devastating review ready for you by tomorrow noon."

In a couple of ways, Illuminatus! is ahead of its time. The self-referential aspect of the book now seems familiar, but many of the books that do similar things came after: Martin Amis' Money, whose characters include an author named "Martin Amis," came out in 1984; Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2, which includes a character named "Richard Powers," came out in 1995.

Similarly, authors ranging from Margaret Atwood to Michael Chabon to Kate Atkinson have helped blur the line between genre "pop" fiction and literary fiction, but Illuminatus! came before them, and even now a novel that explicitly invokes both James Joyce and H.P. Lovecraft feels unusual.

"Well, we don't expect you to read every book  you review," Peter says mollifyingly (page 239). Gore Vidal used to allege in print that some reviewers didn't actually read the books they write about, although I can't come up with a citation right away.

A couple of notes:

"The only hope for the left at this time is coalition politics. We can't exclude anybody who wants to join us." Page 239. The sorts of debates that Shea and Wilson are still satirizing still play out; I've read articles on left leaning websites that say progressives should not participate in peace or civil liberties rallies with libertarians, because, well, icky libertarians!

"There's an article in there by the University College physicist F.R. Stannard ... " page 241. Nick Helweg-Larsen actually tracked down a copy of the paper; for more on this, go here. 

(Next week: Page 242, "Waving their crosses over their heads and howling incoherently," to Page 252, "His mother was Norwegian.")

Illuminati 'recruitment' in Illuminatus!

The comments are often the best part in the weekly Illuminatus! online discussions. There were a lot of good comments for episode 23. 

One that stuck with me was Oz Fritz's comment about Iluminatus! as a recruitment tool for the Illuminati. He wrote, "Speaking of eternal serpent power and the Illuminati Secret RAW writes of in CT1 recalls hearing a recent internet rumor that the Illuminatti are recruiting. They need more Illuminati and Illuminatus! tells you how. Maybe this book functions as a clandestine (or not so clandestine) recruitment algorithm?"

This is perhaps an example of a serious intent behind all of the Illuminati jokes. In Appendix Lamed, the authors write, "This book, being part of the only serious conspiracy it describes — that is, Operation Mindfuck — has programmed the reader in ways that he or she will not understand for a period of months, or perhaps years."

Adam Gorightly's new Historia Discordia has many documents that shed light on Illuminatus!, but one of the most interesting, for me,  is the "Constitution of the Illuminati" on page 109, which Gorightly attributes to Wilson and Shea. It lists "Five Rare Precepts" (perhaps playing off the Five Precepts of Buddhism?) Here are Shea and Wilson's "Five Rare Precepts," which I'm reprinting after asking Adam's permission:

1) We renounce and oppose the use of coercion in human affairs, whether for the purpose of monopolizing land or industrial property, resolving disputes, or that of advancing any political cause;

2) We renounce and oppose the use of deception and secrecy in human affairs, except for the purpose of an occasional harmless put-on now and then;

3) We adhere to the principles of participatory democracy, decentralism, and individualism within our association;

4) We give unqualified support to freedom of expression and freedom of belief;

5) Our specific purpose is to promote understanding and appreciation of anarchist ideas and practices in the political realm; we also encourage and support the cultural anarchism of surrealism and dada in the arts.

Supergee news roundup

Arthur Hlavaty, right, was the fannish guest of honor at the recently-concluded NASFiC in Detroit, along with Bernadette Bosky, center, and Kevin Maroney, left. Bosky is mentioned in the acknowledgements of Robert Shea's classic novel, All Things Are Lights. Maroney is the publisher of the New York Review of Science Fiction. 

Longtime science fiction fan and Discordian Arthur Hlavaty, still typing away frantically, has posted his latest Nice Distinctions zine, which includes some of the best material from his ongoing Supergee blog. and also has posted The Island of Dr. Gernsback 2.0.  Also, ICYMI, his excellent Robert Heinlein piece is here.  I notice that Arthur is listed in the "A Who's Who of Early Discordianism," one of the features in Adam Gorightly's new Historia Discordia. 

Bonus science fiction link: The hot new science fiction novel, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, raises a few eyebrows (fourth item, beginning with "Gregory Feeley").

The hippie physicist reads Timothy Leary reading the hippie physicist

Nick Herbert looks at Timothy Leary's handwritten comments on a copy of Herbert's book. 

The most interesting "hippie physicist," Nick Herbert, blogs about his discovery that Timothy Leary had read, and annotated, a copy of Herbert's book Quantum Reality. It was part of "a room full of materials that the New York Public Library decided not to include in their Tim Leary collection."

In the comments, Jack Sarfatti wants to know if Leary mentioned him or Saul-Paul Sirag. (All three are mentioned in RAW's Cosmic Trigger).