Caitlyn Kiernan's 'Black Helicopters'

A recommendation on Twitter by Ian "Cat" Vincent for a short novel by Caitlyn Kiernan:

"Caitlin R Kiernan's novella BLACK HELICOPTERS is a Lovecraftian classic, and explicitly Discordian, with nods to #RAW & Bucky Fuller, even calling on Eris Herself."

Looks like I have something else for my "to read" list.

Here's a link to the expanded edition. 

Kiernan actually lives in Providence, R.I. You can read the Wikipedia bio and visit the official page. 

New RAW group on Facebook

I recently ran across a new (or new to me, anyway) RAW group on Facebook: "Robert Anton Wilson fans who try to be open and thoughtful as a rule." It's a closed group, and I had to answer three questions about RAW in order to join. As the name of the group implies, it's an effort to elevate the quality of the discussions. 240 members so far (you can look at the members list before you join) and you'll see some familiar names.

Come to Pittsburgh, meet with RAW fans!

As I've written before, I am asking RAW fans to who want to meet other RAW fans to consider coming to Confluence in Pittsburgh, July 27-29. Greg Arnott, who led our online reading group for Email to the Universe, and artist and writer Bobby Campbell have committed to coming. In fact, Bobby did the above graphic to help the cause!

Confluence is listing my proposal for a "Robert Anton Wilson in 2018" panel as "likely to occur," meaning that convention program participants may sign up for it. Bobby, Greg and I all have presentations we would like to give, although we don't have a venue yet; we'll figure something out. Confluence has been around for awhile and seems to be well run. Writer Catherynne M. Valente will be one of the guests of honor.

John Dillinger (and RAW) write in to Playboy

The above images were sent to me though the kindness of Martin Wagner, who doesn't know if RAW wrote the reply to the first letter, but notes "Kevin O'Flaherty" (August '68 issue) was one of RAW's pen-names. At the end John Dillinger himself, who apparently lived in Dallas at the time, steps in to the discussion ..." Note the relevance to Illuminatus! If the image with the letters doesn't get bigger when you click on it, try downloading it and blowing it up to make it legible.

Wednesday links

Alex Tabarrok, a libertarian worth paying attention to.

Robert Anton Wilson: Donald Trump is (Adjective) Crazy (Via @advantardeodus on Twitter)

Alastair Fruish's "The Sentence," listen online.

New book: Occult Features of Anarchism. 

Article by Ferdinando Buscema on making life decisions with a roll of dice.  Buscema performed at RAW Day in Santa Cruz last July. Via Branka Tesla.

Alex Tabarrok on sex and disability.

Alex Tabarrok on Iran. 

Jack Parsons miniseries starts soon

Strange Angel, a CBS miniseries based upon the life of Jack Parsons, premieres June 14 as "A CBS All Access original series."

Here is the CBS blurb:

Strange Angel, a drama series created by Mark Heyman (Black Swan, The Wrestler) and based on George Pendle's book of the same name, explores the dramatic intersection between genius and madness, science and science fiction.

The story follows the life of Jack Parsons, a mysterious and brilliant man in 1940s Los Angeles, who by day helps birth the entirely unknown discipline of American rocketry, and by night is a performer of sex magick rituals and a disciple to occultist Aleister Crowley.

Strange Angel will be produced by CBS Television Studios in association with Scott Free Productions. Mark Heyman, David DiGilio, Ridley Scott, and David W. Zucker will serve as executive producers; Clayton Krueger will be co-executive producer, and David Lowery (A Ghost Story, Pete's Dragon) will direct and executive produce.

But does Robert Heinlein turn up as a character?

The Parsons book the series is based upon is not the one with an introduction by Robert Anton Wilson.  

Hat tip, Charles Faris.

New 'Chasing Eris' book released

Brenton Clutterbuck has released his new book, Chasing Eris, about the Australian author's worldwide journey to find out about modern practitioners of Discordianism. The book is available for purchase here.  An ebook edition should be available soon.

The book's blurb says, "It's the most influential religion you've never heard of: Discordianism took the world by storm when it was revealed to two young hippies in 1958 or 1959.

"Who would have thought this goofy nuttiness would eventually turn into a worldwide caper involving the assassination of a US President, Timothy Leary, a rubber gorilla, a ten hour play, a million pounds of burnt cash, the German secret service, a pumpkin launching trebuchet, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Charles Manson, twelve arrested New Orleans Mardi Gras participants, a series of murders, Kermit the frog, and an extremely confused Australian who wrote this very silly book?

"Not me, that's for sure."

More from Adam Gorightly at Historia Discordia. 

Catch 23 lineup announced

The lineup for Catch 23 (July 7-9, Sheffield, United Kingdom) has been announced: It includes John Higgs and Michelle Olley. Also HENGE, Kermit & the Super Weird Sound, Forest Sounds, Cuckoo Clocks and Super Weird Missionaries.

Tickets here. John Higgs says, "The early bird tickets sold out almost immediately so dithering not advised." (Advice from his newsletter.)

Two RAW letters published

Robert Anton Wilson Fans Germania, Martin Wagner's project which recently launched the Cosmic Trigger Companion, has now published two letters concerning the imprisonment of Timothy Leary.

"A letter from the DNA Society" protests that "Leary has been incommunicado for seven months." The DNA Society is described as a nonprofit interested in Leary's ideas. The people who signed the letter are Michael Horowitz, John S. James, Robert Newport, M.D., Carl Spann, Carol Tickner and Robert Anton Wilson. (Mr. Newport rescued and preserved the Discordian Archives; Michael Horowitz was Leary's archivist. The other names don't ring an immediate bell.)

"Why is Dr. Timothy Leary in Prison?" is a letter written by RAW.

'Ronald Weston' writes to Playboy

Playboy, March 1972, where the letter below appeared

A note from Jesse Walker, who discovered Robert Anton Wilson's use of "Ronald Weston" as a pseudonym, or at least helped confirm it: "The *Jaguar* exchange gave me a little brainstorm, and I did a search at the Internet Archive for 'Ronald Weston.' I found that 'Weston' periodically wrote letters to the Playboy Forum."

An example:

THE ONLY MAILBOX IN TOWN
When I read that the U.S. Postal Service and the Bureau of Customs are inspecting first class mail from overseas without warrants or prior consent of the addressee (Forum Newsfront, October 1971) I heard a loud whirring sound. I finally recognized it as Thomas Jefferson spinning in his grave. I also heard the ghoulish laughter of Lysander Spooner, anarchist and constitutional lawyer, who predicted in 1848 that a government mail monopoly would eventually lead to this type of thing.
                                                                                                                             Ronald Weston
                                                                                                                             Cuernavaca Mexico

Jesse used Google for the search, e.g. site:archive.org "ronald weston"

Music, arts festival to feature John Higgs, Michelle Olley

Michelle Olley (and friend). Twitter account photo. 

Lunar, a music and arts festival scheduled for July 27-29 in north Warwickshire, will feature bands such as the Stranglers and some speakers who include names familiar to the RAW community, such as John Higgs and Michelle Olley.

The Lunar website's summary of John's work is pretty good:

John Higgs is author of The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds; I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary; and Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century. He also writes fiction under the name JMR Higgs, including The Brandy of the Damned and The First Church on the Moon.

John is a writer who specialises in finding previously unsuspected narratives, hidden in obscure corners of our history and culture, which can change the way we see the world. The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds, was described as “Adam Curtis brainstorming with Thomas Pynchon” by The Guardian. Ben Goldacre (Bad Science, Bad Pharma) called it “By far the best book this year, brilliant, discursive and wise.” The leading music website The Quietus said it “Might well be the best music book of the 2010s” and it was named as one of the top ten music books of 2013 by The Guardian, The Independent and Mojo.

About Michelle Olley, the site says,

Michelle Olley is a RAW-inspired writer, editor, filmmaker, Cosmic Trigger play and event co-producer. In the 1990s, she was a director of Skin Two magazine – the world’s leading fetish lifestyle and culture magazine, and instigated their charity event, the Skin Two Rubber Ball.

She spent her twenties and thirties herding cats and scraping deadlines on various magazines, including Attitude, fashion quarterly P.U.R.E, and pioneering gay lifestyle title, Fable. She spent her forties monkey butlering in TV, principally with the European arm of late-night comedy mavericks, Adult Swim, where she championed a number of shows, not least, the criminally under-rated Venture Bros.

Much more at the Lunar site. 

Of course, if you can't make it to England that weekend, you can come to Confluence instead!

Via the latest John Higgs email newsletter, which has lots of other news.

Crowdfunding launched for Adam Gorightly's new movie

A crowdfunding campaign has been launched for "The Hill and the Hole," a horror film based on a short story by Fritz Leiber that stars our favorite Discordian historian, Adam Gorightly (pictured). Adams says he plays "a wise-cracking sociopathic freemasonic fry dough truck operator and cult leader! If everything goes as planned, you may even get to see me kill a person or two."

Michael Johnson on liberation from the Black Iron Prison

This is a "promoted from the comments" blog post (to steal a phrase from Tyler Cowen); I liked Michael Johnson's comment from Sunday's post and wanted to make sure everyone will see it. But first, if you haven't already, please read RAW's interview with William Burroughs, so you can see the statements which (I think) provoked Michael's comments, which I don't think are "off topic" at all.

From Michael Johnson:

Off-topic, but last week I was reading in Joseph Campbell's _The Inner Reaches of Outer Space_ and happened on this bit:

"Thus a mythology is a control system, on the one hand framing its community to accord with an intuited order of nature and, on the other hand, by means of its symbolic pedagogic rites, conducting individuals through the ineluctable psychophysiological stages of transformation of a human lifetime - birth, childhood and adolescence, age, old age, and the release of death - in unbroken accord simultaneously with the requirements of this world and the rapture of participation in a manner of being beyond time."
-p.xxiii

We can read this as a "glass half full" variation of what WSB and RAW saw as word-made metaphorical human constructs that imprison our full potentials, but a fuller reading of Campbell suggests he's sympathetic to the gnostic views of RAW and WSB and words/metaphors and systems of social control so prevalent most people never even "see" them.

Also NB: Campbell's use of the term "framing" and Lakoff's work.

Finally: was WSB's master trope - that words are a virus from outer space that have found a perfect host in the nervous systems of humans - a precursor to Dawkins's "meme" thing? WSB studied directly under Korzybski and I can't help but think this "infection" idea from words was influenced by Korzybski. The theory of the cut-up/fold-in method was a further method of self-defense. RAW used cut-ups and all of Korzybski's extensional devices plus AK's student David Bourland's logical extrapolations from AK: E-Prime. 

All of this in the name of Liberation from the historical social construction of the Black Iron Prison.