Denver decriminalizes 'magic mushrooms'

In a rather startling libertarian victory, Denver has voted to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms. I admit that I had assumed it would fail, but last minute ballot counting pushed it over the top.

On Twitter, Michael Tracey comments, "Wow, this is genuinely amazing. Great for humanity. I'm not kidding in the slightest.

"I really think so many psychological maladies could be mitigated (or cured) if more people consumed psilocybin mushrooms -- ideally in a controlled environment with proper supervision if necessary. It's always been a disgrace that the Govt. criminalizes the use of this substance.

"Some journalist should ask Colorado presidential candidates John Hickenlooper (former mayor of Denver) and Michael Bennet how they feel about this groundbreaking referendum, including whether they voted for it. Also ask if they themselves would be willing to consume mushrooms!

"The scientific evidence demonstrating the multifold benefits of psilocybin mushrooms is now indisputable, and thankfully the citizenry is finally acting through the political process. I actually did a great interview with Rick Doblin about this in 2017."

(N.B. In case the point is unclear, I think the freedom to control what you put in your body cuts both ways; I think the folks who pressure other people to drink are assholes. Late last year I transitioned from "light drinker" to "teetotaler.")

Sounding like RAW?

A couple of things I read on the Internet reminded me of some of Robert Anton Wilson's writings, so I thought I would pass them on.

Via last week's issue of Recomendo, an email newsletter I subscribe to that features Boing Boing founder (and RAW fan) Mark Frauenfelder, I read the article "88 Important Truths I’ve Learned About Life" at Raptitude, a "blog about getting better at being human" written by David Cain. I liked the piece and agreed with most of his observations, but some of them also reminded me of Wilson, e.g.

13. If you never doubt your beliefs, then you’re wrong a lot.

15. Nobody has it all figured out.

17. Every passing face on the street represents a story every bit as compelling and complicated as yours.

85. When you’re sick of your own life, that’s a good time to pick up a book.

The "Experiments" at the site look interesting.

Meanwhile, here is a quotation from Tyler Cowen:

My most absurd belief, perhaps, is the extent to which I think people should be truly uncertain about almost all of their beliefs. And it doesn't sound absurd when you say it, but I don't on the other hand know anyone who agrees with it. Take whatever your political beliefs happen to be; obviously, the view you hold you think is most likely to be true, but I think you should give that something like 60:40. Whereas in reality most people will give it 95:5, or 99:1, in terms of probability that it's correct.

The context. 

Report on the pilgrimage

This is a picture of 67 Pilgrims. The 68th Pilgrim Cassandra Sutton took the photo. And the 69 Pilgrim - Peter & Heiko our two Bus Drivers - were asleep. It was taken at @Damanhur who were the most gracious and open-hearted of hosts. (Caption from Jonathan Harris, @jonone100)

On Twitter, Jonathan Harris offers an account of the pilgrimage to CERN led by Daisy Eris Campbell. "It really was something beyond special. All of us feel lucky to have participated in such a transformative event."

The Earth Will Shake reading group, Week 11

Mozart in 1763 as a small child. 

This week: Please read from page 209 ("One week later that letter was posted to Napoli ... ") to page 229 ("Their music isn't as good as ours, either.")

I loved all of the discussion of English political ideas in this section, and the Turk's Head Tavern was a real place. But my favorite bits were the discussion of classical composers such as Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach and Johann Christian Bach.

The description of Mozart sounds rather as if RAW was influence by the movie Amadeus, although in fact the movie came after the book; did Wilson see a production of the play it was based on?

I have a big online library of Mozart's music. The depiction in The Earth Will Shake of Mozart's precociousness and talent is hardly an exaggeration. My favorite fact about Mozart is simply that he was only 35 when he died. His production in his brief life is astounding. Even allowing for the fact that many of his early works are little performed today, it's painful to think about what he could have written if he had lived another ten years; many of his most famous pieces were written in the last few years of his life. By comparison, Beethoven made it to 56, and J.S. Bach to 65.

Some of my favorite Mozart works: The Marriage of Figaro (I still haven't heard many of the operas, but then again he wrote 22!), symphonies 39, 40 and 41, piano concertos 20, 21 and 24, piano sonatas 11 and 14, the Rondo in A minor for piano, the piano quartet in G minor, K. 478. The latter is not famous, and in fact there is a large body of not famous Mozart pieces that are also very good. You can buy a huge amount of Mozart for almost nothing if you search for "Bach Guild" at Amazon's online music store.

Johann Christian Bach, the "English Bach," tutored Mozart and is buried in London. 

The news from table 23

Yesterday my wife and I were at an Associated Press news awards lunch in Columbus, Ohio, where I won a first place "best news writer" award, apparently for stories about the opioid crisis such as this one. 

I probably wouldn't have mentioned that here, except that I was quite amused when we showed up and I discovered that my newspaper (The Sandusky Register) was assigned to table number 23. (Ted Hand commented on Twitter, "Synchronicity is endless). Then again, Sandusky's original street design was laid out by a freemason to reproduce the masonic compass and square design, so perhaps it was appropriate I was assigned the Illuminatus! table.

RAW on Psychedelic Salon podcast

The Psychedelic Salon podcast features RAW in an episode here (and on the usual podcasting apps.)

The episode is named "RAW Theology" and it's a lecture that dates from 1987. The first part is a discussion of religion and collects many of Wilson's thoughts on the subject, on Discordianism, Catholicism, the Church of the Subgenius, and so on. It's very funny. The rest is a wide ranging question and answer session.

About one hour and 45 minutes.

Letter to Timothy Leary about Illuminatus!

Above is a letter from Robert Anton Wilson to Timothy Leary, dated May Day, 1974. (If you can't read it on your computer screen, downloading the image and blowing it up).

Included in the letter is the announcement that Dell is going to publish Illuminatus! next year. "The full title, by the way, is Illuminatus! or Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus Productions Presents or Swift-Kick Inc. or Telemachus Sneezed or The Untidy Ape: A Head Test."

Via Martin Wagner.

Also from Martin: "How to Wage Nonviolent Revolution" (likely by RAW) and "Death Universe: A Review of Mondo Cane." 

Beyond Chaos and Beyond now in paperback [UPDATED]

Beyond Chaos and Beyond, the new RAW book edited by Scott Apel, is now out in paperback, for $19.95. You can still get the Kindle version for $4.95.

I recently reviewed and recommended it, and I notice that Rasa gave it five stars in an Amazon review. You can read my review by clicking on the link; Rasa wrote, "Scott Apel was an old friend of Robert Anton Wilson and the two of them worked together on his Trajectories magazine, offering a wonderful series of writings from this iconic author. Scott has assembled Volume Two of these gems, but the unexpected bonus in this book are the essays Scott wrote himself, describing the process of putting together the magazine but also his personal experiences with Bob. A wonderful read!"

UPDATE: Scott reports that if you buy the paperback, you can get the ebook for $1.99.

John Higgs about to release new book

One of my favorite writers, John Higgs, is about to publish his latest book, The Future Starts Here: Adventures in the Twenty-First Century. It's out May 16 in Britain; there are no plans yet to release it in the U.S., so I guess I have to buy it from Book Depository, like I did his last book. Details from John's latest newsletter:

I’m launching it with a special, one-off, not to missed night in the Brighton Fringe, along with a group of mighty guests perfectly curated to demonstrate the argument of the book. If you can make it, it will be well worth your time. 

Follow the link to buy tickets.

If you can't make it to Brighton, John is launching a book tour that takes him to London and Liverpool and elsewhere; details here.

John is also coming out other books this year; read the newsletter for details of his frantic life, but there's no actual information on the books available yet. 

'Finnegans Wake-End' interview

PQ interviews Derek Pyle (the "Waywords and Meansigns" organizer) and Gavan Kennedy about "Finnegans Wake-End," a series of events for the birthday of Finnegans Wake, which is May 4.

I know people find about about Joyce's book in a variety of ways, but I would not have guessed that for Pyle, it was Marilyn Manson.

Derek also has a new podcast in the works. 

The Earth Will Shake reading group, Week Ten

Frankenstein Castle, near Darmstadt, Germany. Creative Commons photo by Pascal Rehfeldt. 

This week, please read from page 189 (the quotations from Patrick Henry and Jean Jacques Rousseau) to page 209 (the end of the March 31 letter from Sigismundo to Uncle Pietro).

There's something thrilling and also quaint about the idea of a book being so "dangerous" that you could get into trouble for  having it. l assume that in Sigismundo's day, there must have been many countries where that was the case (and few countries, such as England, where owning a book was relatively safe.) After reading the passages about The Key of Solomon, I tried to think of countries where having certain books in your possession could get you into trouble. Maybe North Korea and Saudi Arabia?

Frankenstein Castle is a real place and Wilson correctly explains the name. Read the Wikipedia article for the various colorful nonsense associated with the castle's history. You can also read about the alchemist Johann Conrad Dippel, who may have inspired some of the Frankenstein story.

Robert Anton Wilson had many different interests, and this particular section of the book shows how he wrote for students for magick, for libertarians and for readers interested in literature.

For students of magick: "Magick is just the art of changing the focus of consciousness at will." (Page 200).

For libertarians: Page 209: "I already begin to understand your ideas about free thought and free markets. By comparison with the general condition of Spain, our own Napoli seems rich beyond measure; what I thought was the abyss of abject poverty at home is the norm in Spain. And, correspondingly, the Inquisition is stronger and intolerance more entrenched."

For literary folk: Aunt Violetta's discussion of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. The Wikipedia entry says it is generally recognized as the first Gothic novel, and that the first edition claimed to be the translation based on an old manuscript from Naples.

I am intrigued Wilson took the time to mention the book; I might read the Project Gutenberg edition, or listen to the free Librivox recording. 

Good interview from 1987

Sy Safransky, editor and founder of The Sun Magazine. 

Thanks to a tip from our Austrian bureau chief, Martin Wagner, I've read "Dreams Without End: An Interview With Robert Anton Wilson" by Sy Safransky, published in 1987 in The Sun Magazine, based in Chapel Hill, N.C., (and the boss, Mr. Safransky, is still there.)

Safransky doesn't agree with all of Wilson's ideas, but the pushback at times make the interview more interesting. (Wilson, although generally more or less "left," doesn't embrace all current wisdom. Some things never change.) Here is one good bit:

SUN: Many people — not just so-called new age types — have been critical of space colonies. Lewis Mumford said, “Space colonies are technological disguises for infantile fantasies.”

WILSON: Mumford talks about infantile fantasies; I think he’s being childish. It’s not an infantile fantasy to think of getting solar energy from outer space to solve the energy problems of this planet. It may or may not be the best solution. That can be argued on a level of practical things — how much do you get with the dollars you put into it, how long will it take to get the return, is it better than solar power collectors on the planet? Those are practical things about which we can disagree. But the idea of getting a lot of solar energy on a planet which is running out of fossil fuels is not an infantile fantasy. Mumford just hasn’t thought about the idea. He’s had a conditioned reaction. It’s outside his reality, so he wants to banish it, like a Marxist says “bourgeois” when he wants to banish a thought, and a fundamentalist says “satanic.” There’s nothing infantile about the idea of a new frontier. The opening of the Americas to Europe, whatever tragedy it was for the native Americans, unleashed tremendous creative energies which had a feedback effect in Europe. They probably never would have had democracy in France and England if the New World hadn’t opened up and the U.S. hadn’t created an arena in which new, utopian social ideas could be tried out. It’s how we got the Bill of Rights and everything that’s good about this country. And that fed back to Europe. And I think space colonization will feed back radical ideas to the earth in the same way. I don’t think that’s an infantile fantasy.

SUN: Ken Kesey said, “A lot of people want to get into space who never got into the earth.”

WILSON: That’s probably true. A lot of people do things for the wrong reasons. But how far do you have to get into the earth to satisfy Kesey? I was a farmer for two years in Ohio and one year in northern California. Does Kesey say I’ve got to go back and do three more years of farming before I have the right to support space colonies? Fuck you, Kesey! I don’t tell him what he should do. He can stay on his bloody farm in Oregon. I’m not trying to drag him into space.

Blogger's note: On the subject of "infantile fantasies," Dr. Geoffrey Landis, a NASA scientist and science fiction writer who lives in Berea, Ohio, where I live, has proposed a scheme for obtaining solar power from outer space. Landis was part of the team responsible for the Mars rovers, holds nine patents mostly in solar cells, etc.

Saturday links

Image of the Sacred Chao. Source. 

13 books that every hippie owned. 

Butterfly Language's five favorite weird, strange and esoteric books.

Psychedelic Salon podcast on RAW. (Also on iTunes).

"Weed Week" at Reason. 

Bryan Caplan roundup on Governing Least by Dan Moller, a new book of libertarian philosophy. 

How to get free movies and TV shows if you can't afford cable or just want to save money.

I am still (mostly) a technological optimist, but that's not the received wisdom these days.