Jack Williamson and Jack Parsons

Jeff Jones cover for Darker Than You Think

I have been reading a lot of classic SF lately (as part of my duties with the Libertarian Futurist Society) and I can report that Jack Williamson's novella, "With Folded Hands," holds up really well. I haven't yet read the novel-length version, The Humanoids.

But the work I wanted to mention today is perhaps Williamson's best-remembered work, Darker Than You Think, a werewolf novel. Have any of y'all read it? I finally read my copy after getting it autographed by Williamson at the 1998 worldcon. (Williamson, born in 1908 in "Arizona territory," spanned a long period of science fiction with his work. As a teenager, Isaac Asimov was a fan. When I was a teenager, I read some of his latest stories in the Ted White-edited "Amazing." Williamson won a Hugo for best novella in 2001).

Darker ThanYou Think is a really good fantasy novel. It tells the story of a young man's attraction to a young red haired woman who turns out to be a rather wild girl.  When I finished "With Folded Hands" the other day, I looked up entries about Williamson at the Science Fiction Encylopedia and on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia piece quotes this from Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist Jack Parsons by George Pendle:

"Parsons had a particular interest in one of Williamson's stories that had recently appeared in the fantasy magazine Unknown.
...
"The story's description of a scarlet-haired woman riding a great beast recalled Crowley's own personal mythology, and the tale of Will Barbee seems to have captured Parsons' imagination because it resonated with his own awakening fervor for the OTO."

Another book that I want

Here's a book I want, published in England but available in the U.S. as an import: The Odditorium: The tricksters, eccentrics, deviants and inventors whose obsessions changed the world, edited by David Bramwell and Jo Keeling. From the publisher: "The Odditorium is a celebration of history's lesser known creative mavericks; the tricksters, subversives and pioneers whose passion and obsession proved there are no limits or rules when it comes to human potential."

One of our British correspondents, Nick Helseg-Larsen, just bought a copy. He writes, "One of the contributors is John Higgs and there is a 4 page piece on Bob as well as others such as Leary, Crowley, Bucky, Watts, and Emperor Norton."

Thinkforyourself pundits

Will Wilkinson 

I like thinkers who lean libertarian but who also think for themselves and don't just spout an ideological party line. RAW of course would be an example. I finally got a day off Thursday and created a Twitter list, "Thinkforyourself pundits," with six Twitter accounts — Scott Adams, Jesse Walker, Charles Murray, Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson and Will Wilkinson. It's really for me, but I did make it public in case anyone else was interested. The idea is to keep up with folks who won't just spout the same old predictable stuff. The idea is to keep it manageable so I can keep up, so I'm trying to decide whether to add anyone else.

Here is a posting from back in May by Will Wilkinson on "Why Trump Might Win." Seems spot on.

Robert Anton Wilson on the election Experts

Huffington Post Expert Ryan Grim, who deserves props for apologizing to Nate Silver. 

The 2016 election was not a good outcome for some of our nation's Experts, as Robert Anton Wilson called them in Cosmic Trigger Vol. 3.

Here, for example, is the Huffington Post forecast that put Clinton at having a 98 percent chance of winning.  You can also read the Huffington Post expose of Nate Silver,  by Ryan Grim which rips Silver for saying that Trump has a chance to be elected. I saw innumerable headlines from Experts at Salon about Trump's impending humiliating defeat, such as this Amanda Marcotte piece. 

Commenting on the strange fact that Experts sometimes are wrong, Robert Anton Wilson wrote (in CT #3): "Yesterday a Gay Rights demonstration occurred in Washington. Naturally, the Expert police estimate of the crowd (300,000) falls far short of the estimates given by the Expert organizers (1,000,000 or more). Even in counting heads, people 'see' in accordance with pre-established programs."

Also: "You become a leading Expert by acting as if everybody else's opinion deserves no attention and never even deserves the courtesy of an answer."

Thanks for Michael Johnson for his help with this blog post.

Bonus links on the election:

Arthur Hlavaty weighs in. 

Tyler Cowen on who rises and falls in status. 

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, who predicted a Trump win, answers questions. 

Jesse Walker says third party candidates can't be blamed for the Trump victory. 

Marijuana was legalized in four more states. 

Obama the optimist

President Barack Obama served as the guest editor for the current editor of Wired magazine. The issue includes an essay by the president, and as Charles Faris noted when he wrote to me to call it to my attention, "The optimistic tone here is very Bob-like." (The essay is titled, "Now Is The Best Time To Be Alive.")

Excerpt:

Let’s start with the big picture. By almost every measure, this country is better, and the world is better, than it was 50 years ago, 30 years ago, or even eight years ago. Leave aside the sepia tones of the 1950s, a time when women, minorities, and ­people with disabilities were shut out of huge parts of American life. Just since 1983, when I finished college, things like crime rates, teen pregnancy rates, and poverty rates are all down. Life expectancy is up. The share of Americans with a college education is up too. Tens of mil­lions of Americans recently gained the security of health insurance. 

More here. 

Cosmic Trigger reading group notes

Charles Faris

First of all, I want to thank Charles Faris for the wonderful job he did in leading the Cosmic Trigger online reading group discussion. He tackled each episode with diligence and insight. Consider, also, the all-star team he assembled of guest bloggers and interviewees: John Higgs, Adam Gorightly, Jack Sarfatti, Daisy Eris and Saul-Paul Sirag.

In the Week Thirty and last installment, Charles posted three comments, on 34 personalities in the book, on people in the book and on themes in Cosmic Trigger. I left them there, of course, but I wanted people to be able to easily find them, so I copied them to separate pages, turning them into appendices. All 30 installments of the discussion and three appendices are now archived as handy links on the top right of this page.

All online discussions held so far are archived here, so that if you like, you can read all or some of the entries as you read or re-read one of Robert Anton Wilson's books. There are discussions available for the Illuminatus! trilogy, Cosmic Trigger 1, Coincidance, Masks of the Illuminati and Quantum Psychology. 

Monday links

Secret Illuminati plot in outer space?  Hat tip, John Merritt.  Website with revolving Eye of Horus is here. 

A new spin on the quantum brain. John Merritt, again.

Was 2016 a missed opportunity for Libertarians? David Weigel in the Washington Post.

How to win the presidency with 23 percent of the popular vote. Charles Faris called this to my attention.

The crazy RAW fans who burned a million pounds. For more information, see the John Higgs book. 

Apparently, this is real

Illuminatus! brand marijuana cigarettes in California, "for medical use only."

There's a Twitter account.

Hat tips, Charles Faris and Adam Gorightly.

How would RAW vote? How will you?

Recently, Kevin Williamson wrote a piece on what William F. Buckley might have thought of the 2016 election,  noting that it's tempting to imagine what WFB would have to say, but concluding, "If you think you know what Bill would have had to say about Trump vs. Clinton — or anything else, really — then you did not know Bill."

It is also tempting to wonder what RAW would have made of the 2016 election, but his political views are not always easy to predict. I know RAW fans who supported Bernie Sanders, who support Hillary Clinton, who support Gary Johnson, who support Donald Trump.

I don't know what upset me more in the current election — the "libertarians" who wound up enthusiastically backing Trump, or the "progressive" enthusiasm for Clinton, despite her record on peace, civil liberties and other issues that Democrats care about when a Republican happens to be in the Oval Office. The only people I could relate to this time were the "lesser of the two evils" voters.

If anyone cares, I supported Johnson but wound up voting for Hillary Clinton in a vote swapping arrangement. The latest polls suggest that Trump is actually leading in Ohio, or at least very competitive. I had noticed on Facebook that a Facebook friend, a woman I knew years ago in Lawton, Oklahoma, had planned to do a vote swap but it had fallen through. I wrote to her and asked if she was still interested, and we agreed that I would vote for Clinton in Ohio, a "swing" state where such a vote is useful, if she would vote for Johnson in Oklahoma where Trump seems sure to win. I had looked forward for months to voting for Johnson, but my trade means that he didn't lose any votes. I would hate to see Trump carry Ohio. That's my ballot, above, before I mailed it in Friday. (I voted for Ted Strickland for Senate after hearing him say in a forum that his most important vote in Congress was against the Iraq War and he opposes U.S. ground troops in the Mideast.)

There is a site dedicated to this sort of thing. 

There were no Libertarian candidates, by the way, as the party is not a recognized party in Ohio. Getting Johnson on the ballot in Ohio was a big hassle.

Arthur Hlavaty on Alan Watts and on Illuminatus!

Arthur Hlavaty (with Bernadette Bosky)

You have too many publications to keep up with, I have too many to keep up with, we all do. But I look at the Supergee Livejournal blog every day.

Arthur Hlavaty on Alan Watts:

Watts Happening 

Shortly after reading Stranger in a Stranger Land, I read my first Alan Watts book. Oh. That's what "Thou art God" means. (Well, one part of it.) Watts introduced me to the whole Hindu/Buddhist/Taoist thing (and as a full-fledged sloppy syncretist, that's how I still think of it). Yes, I do realize that quantum physics doesn't really tell us that we must eat our vegetables and refrain from clubbing baby seals, but the images of unity and wholeness and interdependence that the East teaches us do have some relevance. Watts may be the best spokesman for this sort of thing, or at least he speaks to me, and he has furnished my mind: Light shines in darkness because what else would it shine in? The environment is my body. Laws against consensual sex and drugs turn the police into armed clergymen. 

On the other hand, he drank himself to death, which suggests that he was not entirely Enlightened.

My favorite brief introduction to Watts's thought is The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are. In My Own Way is a charming, if not altogether reliable, autobio. Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship, The Supreme Identity, and The Wisdom of Insecurity are also excellent.

Here’s a discussion of him.

Thanx to RAW Illumination.
Tags: religion

Arthur on finishing Illuminatus!

01 November 2016 @ 05:01 am

Illumination day  

41 years ago today, I finally got my hands on the last volume of the Illuminatus! trilogy and read it. Like the authors, I knew that half of it was BS, but I wasn’t sure exactly which half. One part that was true was that it programmed me in ways that weren’t obvious for months or even years, and unlike W.C. Fields and the woman who drove him to drink, I thanked the authors for it.
Tags: annual message

[from the comments]

elenbarathi on November 1st, 2016 08:14 pm (UTC)
Sheesh, it must have been 1978 when I first read it - it was brand-new out in paperback then. How Time does fly.

Tom Jackson on November 2nd, 2016 01:53 pm (UTC)
How do you happen to remember the exact day? Do you know where you bought it? I still have my three original mass market paperbacks from the 1970s, but try as I might, I cannot remember where I bought them.

El Coyote Gordo: booksupergee on November 2nd, 2016 02:20 pm (UTC)
Paperback Booksmith in the Cross County Shopping Center (long gone of course). I kept track of things like that.

Daisy Campbell asks for help

Daisy Eris Campbell 

Daisy Eris Campbell has gone live with the new web site designed to aid the "pilgrimage" to Santa Cruz, Calif., next July, pointing to a July 23 performance of the Cosmic Trigger Play.

The site has an area where people can pledge help. Explanation:

So – here’s the plan. Should you dare to press the button marked PLEDGE, you will find a list of absolutely everything we need to make the full bells-and-whistles production. Can you bring tools, or costumes, or lights, or perform, or put one of us up – or bring us love on a Tuesday afternoon?

Listen, we’re coming anyway – a few of the hard apple core. We’ll be there the 13th-23rd July. So something will happen on July 23rd 2017, but on what scale of loveliness and magic, is entirely up to you. Will it be a read-through on the beach? Or will it be the fully costumed, lit, musically inspiring, Greatest Show on Planet World?

This may be a pretty good opportunity to find the others.

We believe that the period of 13th-23rd July in Santa Cruz may develop into a larger festival of Bob across the town. So if you’re planning any Bob-related fun, do consider bringing it to Santa Cruz over those ten days.

Hat tip, Nick Helweg-Larsen.

Michael Johnson on Alan Watts

Alan Watts. From www.alanwatts.org

Michael Johnson has a new piece up about Alan Watts. The whole thing of course is quite interesting, but given the focus on this blog, I wanted to call attention to Michael's rather pithy summary of how Watts influenced Robert Anton Wilson:

Watts became a sort of mentor to Wilson, telling him there were some very interesting Harvard professors investigating psychedelic drugs in the context of religious experience. (RAW and Leary became friends and intellectual collaborators from the mid-1960s to Leary's death in 1996.) At another meeting, Watts told RAW he'd just read a fantastic book by Israel Regardie, about Aleister Crowley. RAW went on to become one of the world's most erudite explainers of Crowley, and indeed an Adept himself. At another time, Watts said that the biggest error in history books is the idea that the Roman Empire "fell." It never ended. This became a riff repeated in RAW's and Philip K. Dick's books.

Michael talks about how RAW influenced Watts, too. More here.

I keep running into 23

I have been watching the World Series games as much as I can (it really has felt like Cleveland against the world, although of course I understand why everyone outside Ohio is rooting for the Cubs) and I keep running into the number 23.

The above commercial, where "the 23rd time is the charm," has run a lot during the series.

Ben Broussard

My wife and I have been wearing a lot of Cleveland Indians garb lately. The other day, she put on a T-shirt for one of her favorite former Cleveland Indians players, Ben Broussard, and I noticed it had the same number as when Broussard played for the Texas Rangers, above. The number currently is worn for the Indians by Michael Brantley, the team's injured star outfielder.

Last night, I had the night off from the series, so I read an old story by James Schmitz, "The End of the Line," as it's being considered for a Prometheus Hall of Fame award and I'm on the nomination committee. The climax of the story is about a person hidden away in room 23 of a spaceship.

Probably just a lot of confirmation bias, but still ....