Pyramid power

It would seem there is life in the pyramid design yet. Story here. 

Maybe April 23 is a good day to immanentize the eschaton?

Fox News illustration for the end of the world. 

In an amusing echo of the April 23 references in Illuminatus! comes this Fox News story: "Biblical prophecy claims the Rapture is coming April 23, numerologist says."

"Is the Rapture finally here? One Christian numerologist says a biblical sign strongly suggests it.

"David Meade tells the U.K.'s Daily Express newspaper that on April 23, the sun and moon will be in Virgo, as will Jupiter, which represents the Messiah."

The first paragraph of Illuminatus! places April 1 as the date when the nuclear powers come close to war, and says that the paragraph was written on April 23.

On second thought, with the new Syrian crisis, and the threat of U.S.-Russia confrontation in Syria, maybe this stuff isn't so funny, after all.

Hat tip, "Hagbard Celine," @amoebadesign on Twitter. 

Martin Wagner's Cosmic project

Martin Wagner, who maintains an important site in Austria for his Robert Anton Wilson research (German version here, but also see his English version) has an important new project: A collection of documents that annotate Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger book.

More soon when this launches.

Follow Martin's archive on Twitter. 

RAW inspired antiwar music video

I don't really know much the above other than what I saw on Twitter this morning, so I'll quote the Tweet (from CosmicTriggerthePlay): "Kopyright Liberation Fnord? RAW-inspired video/trailer from the re-mix album out May 23rd, with work inspired by the JAM's 2023 from the 400. This track is by Mark Love/Merk... scratch video by Andy Gell, vocals @OliverSenton as Bob!"

Pale Fire online reading group, Week 13

Next week, in the final entry, I want to talk about Brian Boyd's book, Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, which I have just finished. But this week, I want to mention another book, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, by Andrea Pitzer, an interesting book which I read in January.

I am not sure why Nabokov's history would be "secret," but Pitzer's point is that Nabokov's biography is largely reflected in his fiction.

Andrea Pitzer 

There are many references to mirrors and reflections in Pale Fire, which is a case in point, and in fact there is a chapter on Pale Fire in Pitzer's book.

The killing of John Shade at the end of Pale Fire may be read in at least two ways: (1) Gradus, the assassin from Zembla, attempts to kill King Charles or (2) Jack Grey, the American escapee from the insane asylum, is attempting to kill Judge Goldsworth, who had him put away, and mistakenly kills Shade, who resembles the judge.

In any case, a man his shot dead in the course of an attempted killing of another person, and Pitzer's book describes in detail the fatal shooting of Nabokov's father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, He was shot to death in 1922 in Berlin by assassins who were attempting to kill someone else (who they failed to even wound.)

Pitzer's book has other instances of how Nabokov's life is reflected in his fiction. For example, Nabokov's wife was Jewish, and anti-Semitism and prejudice in general is a theme that recurs in Nabokov.

Chaos in Britain, and a new book

Ben Graham, from his Twitter account.

Historia Discordia has a guest post by Brenton Clutterbuck, "Chaos in the UK: From the KLF to Reclaim the Streets." It's a history of chaos and Discordianism in Great Britain, told in the form of an interview with Ben Graham, author of A Gathering of Promises: The Battle for Texas’s Psychedelic Music, from the 13th Floor Elevators to the Black Angels and Beyond (Zero Books, 2015).

Much of Ben Graham's work looks like something that would interest sombunall of you, so go here for his website, which includes poetry and journalism, including an interview with Bill Drummond.

Mr. Clutterbuck in a sense buries the lede in his piece -- at the very end, he reveals that his book, Chasing Eris, documenting his worldwide trip to learn more about Discordianism, will be released in May (or thereabouts). (Mr. Clutterbuck went from Australia to much of the U.S. and then on to Britain, although he rightly decided I was too boring to visit, so I've never met him.) I'll have more news on the book as it becomes available.

An early RAW article on hallucinogens

The peyote cactus (Public domain photo). 

Yet another Martin Wagner discovery: "Of Transcendental Beauty and Crawling Horror," describing some of Robert Anton Wilson's early experiences with marijuana, peyote and belladonna. He wrote it as "Ronald Weston" for the first issue of "Fact" magazine in 1964.

The peyote experiences were new to me. The frightening encounter with belladonna appears to be the same incident depicted in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" in Email to the Universe.

At the end, RAW writes that he has decided to give up messing with hallucinogens and leave them to the experts. There is no mention of Timothy Leary in the piece.

Robert Anton Wilson on 'The Prisoner'

The building at 1 Buckingham Place in London used as Number Six's home in 'The Prisoner.'

Martin Wagner, busy as ever, has uncovered another interesting "lost" RAW article: "The Prisoner’s Dilemma," about the Prisoner TV show. 

RAW praises the libertarianism he finds in the show and says it depicts modern brainwashing techniques. His insistence that the TV audience is ready for challenging programming seems prescient:

It was originally shown in this country in 1968, repeated in 1969, and is now back again (on public TV this time). In the San Francisco Bay Area, the revival has been so popular that The Prisoner is already scheduled for a fourth showing, this summer.

This is a rather remarkable success story, since virtually all the TV critics reacted to The Prisoner, in 1968, by praising it with faint damns and predicting that it would be a commercial failure because it was “over the heads” of the alleged morons who are supposed to be the only ones who ever look at The Tube.

Read the whole thing. 

More Martin Wagner news soon!

Follow Martin's RAW Archives on Twitter. 

Classical music 'steals'

I have a hobby of looking for online bargains in classical music. I buy cheap MP3 albums on Amazon, which has an online player that allows me to stream them anywhere I happen to be (obviously, I can also download the files if I want to, but it often isn't necessary. In honor of Robert Anton Wilson's love of classical music, here are some of my recent discoveries:

Big Stravinsky Box — 99 cents for the Firebird (the ballet, not the suite), the Rite of Spring, the Symphony of Psalms, Petrouchka and much else.  The performance of The Soldier's Tale features French actress Madeline Milhaud, wife of the French composer. RAW liked Stravinsky.

Big Shostakovich Box — another 99 cent package from the Bach Guild. Worth it alone for the piano quintet, featuring the Beethoven Quartet and the composer himself on piano, but as with the Stravinsky package, lots of other works.

Richter, the Early Years — A 99 cents package of early recordings of my current favorite pianist, Sviatoslav Richter.  Beethoven, Prokofiev, Debussy, Ravel, etc.

Search "Bach Guild" in Amazon's digital music for other cheap packages of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, etc.

Timothy Leary's birthday party

Creative Commons photo of Parker Posey by Gage Skidmore

Screenwriter and actor Tom Sierchio chances to meet actress Parker Posey and she writes down the address for a party on his hand. He goes to the party, and eventually figures out it's Timothy Leary's last birthday party. (He never meets Ms. Posey again, and it's not even clear Leary knew who Posey was.) An amusing memoir. Via R.U. Sirius on Twitter, who writes, "A legendary bash and I missed it. I was on deadline and it seemed important at the time."

Tuesday links

Today's 'Morning image' from Jesse Walker on Twitter.

Eris of the Month at Historia Discordia: The dwarf planet. 

Technically, you have rights. I'm starting to wonder what it will take to end police abuse in the U.S.

Prometheus Award finalists announced. 

Tickets on sale for Daisy Campbell's 'Pigspurt's Child.'

Ultraculture article on John Dee.

Pale Fire online reading group, week 12

Cover for first U.S. edition of Pale Fire

This week: Please finish reading the book, if you have time. But there will still be another couple of weeks of discussion.

So, what happened?

I lean toward the theory that the narrator is actually V. Botkin, the "American scholar of Russian descent" in the index, whose name, as the index records, can be turned around to make "kingbot," the maggot. In this reading, Botkin is crazy and imagines himself as both the exiled king of Zembla, and as a professor under the pseudonym Charles Kinbote. He writes the book and commits suicide afterward.

At the end, the narrator imagines writing a play that includes "a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire ... "

At the end of the book the narrator grudgingly refers to what really happened: Jack Grey escapes and attempts to kill the judge who put him away, Judge Goldsworth, in whose house the narrator is living; by mistake he takes Shade for Goldsworth.

This theory also fits his admiration for suicide expressed at the end of the book ("God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work.") One of those characters would be Hazel Shade, who in the index "deserves great respect, having preferred the beauty of death to the ugliness of life." (The other person who kills himself is the assassin, Jack Grey).

Nabokov said in an interview, that Pale Fire "is full of plums that I keep hoping somebody will find. For instance, the nasty commentator is not an ex-King of Zembla nor is he professor Kinbote. He is professor Botkin, or Botkine, a Russian and a madman."

For a rundown of various interpretations, see the Wikipedia article. 

R.A. Lafferty Fantastic Megapack

The R.A. Lafferty Fantastic Megapack is an anthology of his early stories, many if not most which were allowed to go out of print, available for just 99 cents for an ebook.

Despite the modest price, this is a really good anthology; Lafferty was never better as a short story writer than he was at the beginning, and many of these stories also are reprinted in the three core anthologies: Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings and Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? If you wonder what all the noise from the Lafferty cultists is all about, this is an affordable way to find out.

As a bonus for RAW fans, one of the stories, "Through Other Eyes," dramatizes a major them of Robert Anton Wilson: How we all create our own realities with our perceptions and nervous systems. (The story also is reprinted in Nine Hundred Grandmothers.)