Timothy Leary and the Beatles

Tim and Rosemary Leary, John Lennon and Yoko One, at Bed-In for Peace, 1969. 

There's probably a pretty good book that could be written on Timothy Leary's influence on pop culture over the years. If you are curious about his influence on the Beatles, you can consult a new book, The Complete Beatles Songs by Steve Turner.

I have mostly quit reading books about the Beatles, because by now I have read so many there are few surprises left for me. Still, Turner worked hard on this book, and I enjoyed gleaning bits about the origins of Beatles songs when my wife brought this home from the library and I flipped through it.

I already knew that The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based On The Tibetan Book Of The Dead by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner provided the inspiration for "Tomorrow Never Knows." That's where John Lennon got the "Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream" lyric. 

It's pretty well known, also, that John Lennon originally began writing "Come Together" as a campaign song for Leary's campaign for governor of California.  Leary also sang in the background on Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance." 

But I didn't know that Leary has played a role in George Harrison's "All Things Must Pass," the title song of George Harrison's most famous and most successful solo album. The song was written while Harrison was a Beatle and finally released in a Beatles version in Anthology 3.

See if you can spot what made me smile in this bit from Turner's book:

The lyric was based on a poem from Timothy Leary's Psychedelic Prayers After the Tao Te Ching (Poets Press, New York, 1966.) The poem was a "translation from English to psychedelic" of part of the 23rd chapter of the Tao that Leary has titled 'All Things Pass': 'All things pass/A sunrise does not last all morning/All things pass/A cloudburst does not last all day ... " As George was to admit, "I remembered one of these prayers and it gave me the idea for this thing." 

A psychedelic novel from a libertarian author

In my duties as a member of the Libertarian Futurist Society, I received an advance review copy of a new novel, The Miskatonic Manuscript, by Vin Suprynowicz, the second in a series of novels about rare book dealers Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens, two gun toting, psychedelic drug taking adventurers who find lost manuscripts by famous authors and who travel through space and time. The book came out Friday and is available as a signed, numbered limited edition and as a $5.99 Kindle ebook. 

There's plenty of action in the book, including sequences in which Stevens gets to blast away with her firearms at dinosaurs and giant spiders, and a lot of heartfelt discussion about the evils of the war on the drugs and the merits of psychedelics. Large passages are quoted from the writings of Terence McKenna and Alexander Shulgin. I have never read either, but many of the sentiments will sound familiar if you have read Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson.

There's quite a bit of violence in which the pro-drug forces murder authorities involved in the war on drugs. I was put off by much of this, and also thought the writing could have been better. The book evidently is self-published, but it says it was prepared for publication by Invisible Order, a "libertarian publishing solutions" company. The folks at Invisible Order chose to do nothing with the many passages in which Mr. Suprynowicz ties together sentences with a comma, and in general the quality of the prose is not the best part of the book.

Anyone interested in the war on drugs and in psychedelic drugs will likely find the book interesting. The book moves along at a good clip, and  Suprynowicz is interested in many of the same topics as I am and seems to know a lot.

The author has a website. 

Thomas Knapp's review is here. 

Spam woes

I got a notice from Google Adsense this week that I need to remove "adult content" from one of my old posts (it was one about John Higgs.) There was no adult content in the actual post, but I had a bunch of tasteless spam ads put on the page as comments that I had to laboriously remove, one by one; it took me about 15 minutes. Does anyone have any advice on how to mass-remove spam comments, or to keep them from being posted?

More on Finland basic income guarantee

Dylan Matthews

It seems that the initial reports on Finland moving toward a basic income guarantee, such as the ones I cited in Sunday's blog post, got an important fact.

Finland is not immediately scrapping all welfare programs in favor of a basic income guarantee, but is carrying out a pilot project, with an eye toward adopting the basic income guarantee if the experiment works out. That's according to this Vox.com piece by Dylan Matthews, who is a basic income guarantee advocate and follows the issue closely. Matthews talked to a Finnish officialsand posted a slide show about the pilot program that  was shared with him. The Matthews article is really good and deserves your attention if you are interested in this issue.

He also wrote a recent piece on whether cash transfers discourage people from working (apparently they don't).

Matthews is generally one of the more interesting Vox.com writers; even his stuff I disagree with shows a genuine interest in facts.

The most popular composers

Ludwig van Beethoven 

I'm going to justify today's blog posting by contending that Robert Anton Wilson, classical music fan, would have been interested in the article I'm pointing to today. 

I've just written a piece for my paper on the most popular classical composers, based on performances during the 2015-2016 performance year by major and regional orchestras. Be sure to click on the infographic that accompanies the story, which has a great deal of information. 

The graphic lists the top ten most popular composers, but I obtained a list of the top 20 and included it in my piece, written as a blog post for my paper's website. The guy I interviewed for the piece was surprised Ravel did so well; Eric Wagner, who found my article on Facebook, was surprised by the omission of Debussy and is surprised at how much airplay Dvorak gets on the Los Angeles classical radio station he listens to. I have heard that one of my favorite composers, Prokofiev, is perhaps the most popular 20th century composer, based on the number of performances of his work. This appears to be an exaggeration, although he does come in at No. 11. 

So much to read, so little time!

Dan Merkur

Via Arthur Hlavaty (and others) is a new BBC list of the 100 best British novels of all time. And the winner is Middlemarch by George Eliot, which of course I haven't read, and now I need to read it. And I still haven't read Virginia Woolf! Though I have my doubts about a list that puts Pride and Prejudice only at No. 11.

Speaking of reading, I heard from Ben Turpin, who mentioned that he had just re-read the essay "Hidden Manna and the Holy Grail: The Psychedelic Sacrament in Arthurian Romance."  That's by Dan Merkur, a psychoanalyst and writer whose works are new to me (and which include a book called The Mystery of Manna: The Psychedelic Sacrament of the Bible. ) He certainly sounds interesting; have any of y'all besides Ben read him?

Monday links

I really liked Gore Vidal's novel about the last pagan Roman Emperor, so I was pleased to see Sean Gabb likes it, too. 

Richard Blake's five favorite  historical novels of ancient Rome.  (AKA Sean Gabb's five favorites.)

Counter culture conference in England featuring Alan Moore, John Higgs and Robin Ince. 

I note Scott Weiland's death.

"I still check every time to make sure it's not a parody account." 

How they voted, by party, on Britain bombing Syria. Had to look up the Plaid Cymru party. Welsh, it seems.

A guide to visiting Cuba for Americans. 

Finland moving toward basic income guarantee

Discussion of a basic income guarantee has moved beyond talk in Finland, according to an article at Quartz:

The Finnish government is currently drawing up plans to introduce a national basic income. A final proposal won’t be presented until November 2016, but if all goes to schedule, Finland will scrap all existing benefits and instead hand out 800 euros per month—to everyone.

It sounds far-fetched, but it’s looking likely that Finland will carry through with the idea. Whereas several Dutch cities will introduce basic income next year and Switzerland is holding a referendum on the subject, there is strongest political and public support for the idea in Finland.

At least in its broad outlines, the proposal seems to follow the suggestion by proponents such as Charles Murray: To scrap other benefits and replace it with the basic income guarantee.

Threatened with prison for passing out pamphlets?

Keith Wood

Robert Anton Wilson's Chaos and Beyond includes an essay discussing jury nullification as an important right in defending liberty in America. When I was in journalism school years ago, I was taught about the John Peter Zenger trial, a landmark in the battle for a free press in America in which a jury acquitted a newspaper publisher in defiance of the wishes of the judge.

It came as a shock to see that in Michigan, a state that's next to where I live, in Ohio, a man named Keith Wood has been hit with a "jury tampering" charge and faces five years in prison for passing out pamphlets in front of a courthouse that discuss jury nullification. 

Here is another article on the arrest.  Here is Popehat weighing in. 

I could not find anything about the case at the Michigan ACLU website, which disappoints me. I've Tweeted the state chapter to ask about its silence.

The judge in the case, Peter Janklevic, is a former prosecutor. 

Wait, Aleister Crowley was what?

The man who destroyed Iraq is allegedly a descendant of Aleister Crowley. 

Io9.com, the science fiction website, has a piece called "According to the Internet, Aleister Crowley Was George W. Bush's Grandfather."

According to the piece by Charlie Jane Anders, the claim is maybe true, but probably not.

Frankie Boyle, RAW fan

Frankie Boyle 

I have a hard time keeping up with American pop culture, let alone British pop culture, so forgive me if I don't know a lot about Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle.  But I do know he's a Robert Anton Wilson fan.

Nick Helweg-Larsen attended a recent event called BAM Live at the Southbank Centre in London hosted by Akala and Frankie Boyle & special guests ("Being A Man addresses the challenges and pressures of masculine identity in the 21st century.")

Nick reports, "In his serious speech he kept mentioning the phrase 'reality tunnels.'

I asked him in the Q+A session about Wilson and he spoke passionately for about 5 minutes.
He talked about E-prime for a while during this."

I don't know who Akala is, either, but Nick says, "I highly recommend Akala's music, such as."

Did Joyce's 'Wake' span the globe?

Peter Quadrino is always an interesting and perceptive writer, although sadly, his prediction that my Cleveland Indians would fare well last season did not turn out to be correct. I'm expecting better luck for his backing of a new suggestion about James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. In a new post, PQ says he is convinced by a new theory that the Wake attempts to represent the geography of the globe.  You also learn something about Ulysses in reading PQ's post.

Reality catches up with science fiction novel

Cover art for The Unincorporated Man by the brothers Kollin 

Alex Tabarrok has a post up at one of my favorite blogs, Marginal Revolution. His piece, "Venture Capital to Buy Equity in Purdue Students,"  is about a company that plans to invest in students by lending them money and then taking a percentage of the student's income after graduation, for a set number of years. It's an interesting idea because it raises risk for the people making the loan but lowers risk for the students. (If the student doesn't make a lot of money, well, too bad for the investor, but at least the young person doesn't have a massive debt.)

Professor Tabarrok doesn't mention it in his posting, and I could find no mention when I checked the comments, but the scheme is reminiscent of a rather good science fiction novel, The Unincorporated Man, by Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin, that came out in 2009. It is largely about a future society in which every new baby is "incorporated" by investors who pay for the kid's education, with the understanding that they will get much of his or her future earnings. The investors get much of the say in what the person will major in, for example, and where he or she will study; citizens seek to become so successful that they can buy up shares in themselves and gain majority control, thus gaining control over their lives.

The system is sold as a way to make sure everyone will get an education and a chance to be successful, but in the end it prompts a revolt from people unwilling to be owned. The protagonist of the novel is a man who has been cryogenically revived. He's from the past, so he isn't owned by anyone.

The Unincorporated Man won the Prometheus Award and is the first in a series of four books, which continue the story with The Unincorporated War, the Unincorporated Woman and The Unincorporated Future. I enjoyed the series very much. They are novels of ideas, but with lots of action and very vivid characters.

The brothers Kollin have been a bit quiet of late, but there's a new anthology with a novella set in the same universe as the novels.

UPDATE: After I wrote this, I noticed it's on sale for $2.99 for Kindle.

UPDATE II: Professor Tabarrok did read the book, and posted about it back in 2010.