Neil Peart has died

Neil Peart (Creative Commons photo)

Rush drummer and lyricist Neal Peart has died. His lyrics were influenced by Ayn Rand, and he enjoyed a significant following among libertarians, although anyone who was into music could appreciate his drumming.

Mike Grossberg has penned a tribute at the Prometheus Awards blog. 

The New York Times ran an obituary  and also ran a separate article on ten of his best performances.  Rolling Stone's article also is available.

What book influenced your life?

From the New York Times:

What book — new or old, fiction or nonfiction — has influenced how you think, act or look at the world? Tell us how it did, in no more than 200 words. The deadline is Wednesday, Jan. 15, at 10 a.m., Eastern time.

Email: letters@nytimes.com

Please include your name, city and phone number, and put “books” in the subject line.

Via Chad Nelson. I have already written the Times to describe how Illuminatus! changed my life. Chad says, " I will probably cite Quantum Psychology."

News from a Colorado mushroom farm

Can you tell Joshua Hallenbeck is a RAW fan? He has officially launched two products from his organic mushroom farm in Colorado. His brand is Sirius Mushroom Extracts. The two products are Lion's Mane (a nervous system extract) and Turkey Tail (an antioxidant).

I tried photographing the two bottles he sent me, but I'm apparently not very good at photographing small objects up close, so I've published, above, the photo he sent me with his announcement. He doesn't have a website yet (I'll update this when the information becomes available) and the product at present is being sold locally in Colorado, but the extracts also are available by contacting Joshua. (See Facebook for his Sirius Shroomery page.)

Here is a piece on the health benefits of Lion's Mane mushrooms. You can also read about Turkey Tail mushroom benefits.  

Adam Gorightly on Thomas the Gnostic

Tim and Mary Wheeler, via Historia Discordia. There's a great photo of the Wheelers on William F. Buckley's yacht that I thought I saw on Adam's website, but I can't seem to find it. 

There's quite a bit of RAW material in Adam Gorightly's latest post on Discordian history, "The Epistles of Thomas the Gnostic." 

The post is about Tom McNamara, a relatively obscure early Discordian, but quite a bit of Robert Anton Wilson information crops up in the interactions between McNamara and other Discordians. For example, Adam quotes a letter from Greg Hill describing a Chicago get together that included Wilson, Robert Shea, Tim Wheeler from National Review ("Harold Randomfactor") and Mary Wheeler ("Hope Springs"); Wilson and Wheeler apparently got into a political argument. Randomfactor is mentioned in Illuminatus!

Adam's post links to "The Secret History of Immanentizing the Eschaton: The Mary Wheeler Interview" which gives quite a bit of background on Discordianism at William F. Buckley's "National Review" magazine and has a nice anecdote about Wilson.

Adam's post also includes McNamara's review of Illuminatus!, published in the Berkeley Barb. Martin Wagner points out there's also a Tom McNamara review available of Wilson's Sex and Drugs. 

Discordianism plays a big role in the Illuminatus! trilogy. If it and Wilson's other writings survive in the literary canon, as I expect and hope will be the case, Adam's hard work exploring Discordian documents in his books and blog will be a major resource for scholars for centuries to come.

More on Adam Gorightly and his books.

The Silent Majority

The above from Martin Wagner's Twitter account, Robert Anton Wilson Archives. 

Martin says, "Playboy Forum Letter from Hugh Crane (mosprobably Robert Anton Wilson)
PLAYBOY, May 1970."

In an email, he adds, "Hugh Crane is a Schrödinger's Cat character which may or may not be Next Door Universe's Hagbard Celine."

The Robert Anton Wilson's 'Days Between'

Robert Anton Wilson (Creative Commons photo)

An email from Eric Wagner: "I plan to listen to some Beethoven on 1/11 and on 1/18 to commemorate Bob Wilson’s death and birth. Deadheads refer to the period between 8/1 (Jerry Garcia’s birthday) and 8/8 (the day of his passing) as 'The Days Between'."

Wilson was born Jan. 18, 1932, in Brooklyn, N.Y., on the East Coast, and died Jan. 11, 2007, in Capitola, Calif., on the West Coast.

Podcast recommendations

Lorenzo Hagerty from the "Psychedelic Salon."

I've linked to websites, but if you have a decent podcasting app on your phone, you should be able to find these.

The Psychedelic Salon, "RAW's Politics." A recording of Robert Anton Wilson at a 1987 Libertarian gathering. Sound quality is not the best. Very funny much of the time, but mostly what  you have heard before. RAW repeats the joke, "You know how dumb the average guy is? Half of them are dumber than that," so he's apparently not quite clear on the difference between the average and the median.

The Jai Dev Show, "Oz Fritz, the Wizard of Sound." A good introduction to Oz' interest in the Kabbalah and other topics.  I posted about the podcast earlier and finally managed to actually listen to it.

Eric Weinstein's The Portal, "Tyler Cowen - The Revolution Will Not Be Marginalized."  The first part of the podcast discusses the consumer price index and was hard for me to follow, but there's a good discussion of conspiracy theories in which Eric does better than Tyler. Then there's a good music discussion, and it turns out Tyler is very good at talking about the Beatles.

Time to stop fighting Asian wars

Andrew Bacevich

By Andrew Bacevich

“The game has changed.” So announced Secretary of Defense Mark Esper in warning that the Trump administration would take preemptive action to prevent further attacks on American personnel and facilities in Iraq. The killing of Gen. Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Iranian Quds Force, by U.S. drone strikes at Baghdad‘s international airport shows that Esper is as good as his word.

Yet, except in a nominal sense of enlarging the target set, the game remains unchanged, even if violence escalates further in the days ahead. It’s a game that the United States has been playing — and losing — for close to a generation.

The purported objective of the game, which dates to the enunciation of the Carter Doctrine way back in 1979, is this: the use or threatened use of U.S. military might to impose order on the Persian Gulf and its environs. Ideally, that order would include respect for the values that Americans profess to cherish, among them democracy and regard for human rights. Minimally, it would permit the free flow of gulf oil to nations that rely on it to fuel their economies (our own not among them, given recent increases in U.S. domestic oil and gas production).

Yet since 9/11, U.S. military exertions in the region have destroyed what little order once existed there. In place of order, today there is anarchy: civil wars, failed states and terrorist organizations that did not even exist when the American “Global War on Terrorism” commenced nearly two decades ago. Iraq itself, today host to pro-Iranian militias and targeted by U.S. airstrikes, embodies that failure nearly 17 years after its supposed liberation.

As candidate for president and repeatedly since his election, Donald Trump has denounced this project as the height of folly, vowing to extricate the United States from the mess that it has done so much to create. Yet, as is so often the case, the gap between the rhetorical position Trump stakes out and the results he actually achieves is enormous.

With the Suleimani killing, Trump has effectively thrown in the towel. The wars he promised to end will continue. America’s enemies list never gets smaller; the body count grows ever larger.

They will do so in no small part because the Congress is pusillanimous and supine, having long since forfeited its constitutionally prescribed authority regarding war. The Democratic members of the Senate and House who whine about not having been consulted or at least notified in advance of the drone attack that took out the Quds commander deserve not a respectful hearing but contempt. Their behavior over the past decade and more in giving presidents a free hand to wage war however they see fit cannot be described as anything but cowardly. It was, after all, President Obama who pioneered the role of assassin-in-chief to which Trump has now laid claim.

More importantly, the U.S.’ Middle East wars will continue due to the intellectual bankruptcy of the foreign policy establishment, which remains wedded to a highly militarized conception of “American global leadership.”

Within that establishment, forgetting takes precedence over learning. Note, for example, how quickly Washington has moved on after last month’s publication of the Afghanistan Papers, with their astonishing revelations of pervasive waste, incompetence and blatant dishonesty in the conduct of America’s longest war. The impact of those revelations in policy circles, never more than minimal, has already all but vanished. But rest assured that the Pentagon will receive more than $780 billion in the year ahead to keep doing what it did last year and for many years before that, with few questions asked.

This is an election year. In a serious democracy, the casting of ballots is preceded by a thorough public vetting of the vital issues of the day. The worsening crisis in U.S.-Iranian relations certainly qualifies as one such issue. Yet far surpassing that issue in importance are even larger questions pertaining to the misuse of American military power in the Middle East and to the normalization of war.

Secretary Esper demands that the Iraqi authorities “get left of the problem” to prevent further attacks on U.S. forces and “get the Iranian influence out of the government.” My own demand, however futile, is that Washington will exert itself to “get left of the problem” of war and rid the U.S. government of the militarists and their lackeys, even as we find ourselves thrust into yet another escalating conflict.

This op-ed was previously published in the LA Times and reprinted at the Quincy Institute website. Andrew J. Bacevich is the President of the Quincy Institute.  More information here about the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. 

The Widow's Son reading group, Week Twenty

 Joseph Warren rethinking his refusal of a General’s commission 

Week Twenty (pg. 325-337 Hilaritas edition, Chapter 11&12 all editions) 

By Gregory Arnott
Special guest blogger 

Chapter 11 serves as another zoom out shot of what is happening in Sigismundo’s world while he is imprisoned, while Chapter 12 is a zoom into Sigismundo’s mind as he languishes in the Bastille.

The Committee of Correspondence is precisely what RAW describes it as, though there is plenty more interesting historical information about the Committees here. These Committees served as the first Continental network of Revolutionary sentiment in the years building up to the spring of ‘75. Given that the purpose of the first Committee was explicitly spelled out as to “state the rights of the colonists,” I don’t think the “radicals” Samuel Adams and Dr. Warren were trying hard to fool anybody.

Dr. Joseph Warren was a physician who served along with Revere on his Midnight Ride to warn the countryside, fought at Lexington and Concord, and denied his General’s commission to fight at Bunker Hill as a private which proved to be a noble decision, if not entirely the best one. Dr. Warren’s martyrdom was preserved by John Trumbull’s painting that served as powerful propaganda for the American Experiment. Samuel Adams was, of course, a famous brewer who pioneered overcharging customers for mass-produced mediocre beer by claiming it was “craft beer.”

Weishaupt was, by many accounts, outwardly a pretty mellow guy. He was a deep one.

As someone who sat through enough Music Appreciation classes in grade school to have seen Amadeus at least three times, I can attest based on the most solid of historical information that Mozart’s relationship with his dad was, indeed, quite fraught.

This is an accurate description of one of the many scandals in the life of de Sade. The four prostitutes that he procured that afternoon would perhaps serve as an inspiration for the four prostitutes who inspired the sexual depravities in the beginning of 120 Days of Sodom. (The prostitutes were considerably more jaded and enthusiastic about sexual excess in de Sade’s fucked up masterpiece- go figure.) Cantharides, also known as Spanish Fly, is a classic aphrodisiac which is derived from beetle excretions and inflamed the urethra which I guess is what some people felt they needed to perform. Today it ranks up there with famously mysterious accoutrements such as Horny Goat Weed and those tablets behind the counter at gas stations as an essential part of any witches’ apothecary.

What RAW leaves out of the account of de Sade’s debauchery in the south of France is that he was sentenced to death for sodomy with his manservant during the same orgy he had with the four prostitutes. He, the manservant, and the seduced sister of his wife were the ones who made the initial escape. They would be captured shortly after this only to escape again and be rejoined by his wife at a later date. I guess Renee de Sade would adopt an attitude of “if you can’t beat ‘em” for a few years before finally divorcing the Divine Marquis.

Jean Jacques Jeder reminds us again of the quotidian facts of existence in the 18th century as he experiences meager prosperity. Sartines, who evidently trusts the free market as much as the infallibility of the Roman See and the benevolence of governments, has taken control of some parts of the Parisian economy, freezing inflation.

And finally we come to Sigismundo, slowly succumbing to despair and fearing that he is succumbing to madness.

Richard St. Victor was a Scottish theologian and one of the Mystics of the Catholic Church. The other philosophers that Sigismundo quotes in his journal are all pretty well known. Sigismundo is dithering, understandably so as it seems his luck has run out for the time being and all that he has ahead of him is confined within the walls of the Bastille. Between Sigismundo’s entries RAW’s footnotes provide a scaffolding of conspiracies so that the reader shares in Sigismundo’s inability to take much comfort from the philosophical fragments that he records. The anxiety of Oglesby’s War and the sinister machinations of Hanfkopf and the Vatican seep through time to infect the already tenuous situation in 1772.

Like Sir John Babcock (Crowley’s student not Maria’s husband), as Sigismundo is spinning out he uses formulas and equations to calm his mind. This reminds both men of the non-subjective “facts” of reality and that there is something very solid outside their own, relatively uncomfortable, existences.

Finally something happens to free Sigismundo from his depressing musings. He finds himself stuck on the roof of his cell.

From Eric Wagner: “This section of the novel enters 1772 and mentions Mozart’s Symphony 21, so that seemed an obvious choice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3md8zc7Ernc .”

'Speaking mutely against grids of all kinds'

"The Anti-Millennial bash was in full swing as the clock passed eleven and everybody looked forward to the non-millennium in less than an hour. Simon had even redecorated his pad, adding a reproduction of Dali’s Persistence of Memory to the seawall, melting clocks speaking mutely against grids of all kinds."

Happy new year!

Another Martin Wagner rediscovery, "Dali's Clocks."

Review: By the Forces of Gravity

Book review:

By The Forces of Gravity – a Memoir,  Rebecca Fish Ewan

By Iain Spence
Special guest blogger 

Some time back RAWIllumination had a short description of By the Forces of Gravity along with a link to buy it. I waited to see a review of the book on this same site, but none appeared. As we start into 2020 I thought I’d write one myself as it’s a marvelous book and worthy of some good mention here on Illumination.

Gravity covers an intense friendship which occurred between the author Rebecca Fish Ewan and Luna, Robert Anton Wilson’s daughter who many will remember from Cosmic Trigger. I was lent Cosmic Trigger to read many years back in my early twenties. The friend who lent it to me told me not to leaf through any of the last pages. He told me to read it properly from start to finish. As I came towards the end I asked my friend, ‘What is this strange energy which is building up in the book…?’ It was a bad feeling but I couldn’t put my finger on it: I’d never encountered severe grief before. My friend smiled sadly and told me to continue.

Luna Wilson’s life was so short (15) that most of us thought we’d never hear of her again.
Her delightful antics described in Cosmic Trigger were a tiny window into her life. Any other memories were a private affair, only for her family and friends. Then, just recently a part biography of Luna was written and drawn by one of her friends, Rebecca Fish Ewan. The book is a sequential art biography of the author’s deep friendship with Luna told in a very distinct manner. The whole book (all 492 pages) is profusely illustrated with roughly half of the book being text and the other half art.

What makes the book especially strange however is the manner in which the biography is told. Ms Fish Ewan doesn’t just tell of her childhood with Luna, instead she inhabits herself at that age (12 to 15) in order to tell her story. This is not just a new concept in sequential art, it also makes for an unsettling read. The reason for this is that Rebecca is a victim of sexual abuse.

By the time she’s performing oral sex with a dirty tramp in a hippie pad for a bowl of soup, we’re entering into the darker side of hippie culture. None of the other hippies bother to stop the abuse or help her out. They practically walk past her on the floor while the abuse is taking place. If such accounts of her lonely life were to be retold by Ms Fish Ewan from the perspective of an adult, one might expect some moralising, anger or reflection of how to stop such abuse from happening in present times. Instead we are made to face the story of the abuse from the point of view of the hapless child herself. Perhaps most saddest of all is the manner in which the ‘Me Then’ narrator accepts her unhappy emotional void as being normal.

For your average church-going conservative, the lack of moral judgement combined with the
illustrations would likely lead to outrage and disgust against the permissive Sixties and
even against the book itself. However it could be said that sexual abuse and emotional
neglect happen in all cultures in society and not just sub-cultures. We even have a current president who was exposed for making 'jokes' about sexually assaulting women.

So respect to Ms Fish Ewan for bringing some candid honesty to the grim side of the hippie world. If she had turned to adult narration with a moral clipboard the biography wouldn’t have had the same raw impact.

There are plenty of happy memories in Rebecca’s book too. There is a ray of sunshine in the young lady’s life – a gentle friend by the name of Lina Wilson. It is shortly after the previous hellish low that Lina and Rebecca decide to rename themselves in a special private ceremony in which Lina becomes Luna and Rebecca becomes Becky Star Fish: 'soul friends forever'.
Perhaps the most memorable scene in the book:

She picks Luna
So actually she’s only swapping one letter
For another letter
I for U
Which says a lot about her
Since she always thinks of other people
Before she thinks of herself

Later in the book Rebecca sums up the quiet love felt between these two best of friends as they hung out, just being together:

We used to talk to each other without words
We’d roam around Berkeley
Just me and Luna at all hours

Recognising her increasing vulnerability to abuse, the Wilson family invite Rebecca to stay at their house. But space is tight there (The Wilsons had 4 children) and so she eventually moves on. A school teacher also helps to put her on firmer ground and so she finally becomes grounded in a less aimless life.

In time the girls lose touch with each other, with Rebecca suffering the most. Luna Wilson is not as emotionally needy as Becky Star Fish. After one to two years of barely seeing each other Luna reaches out to Rebecca with a heart warming letter asking to renew their friendship.

In one of the last touching scenes they meet up at last in a clothing store where Luna works – both rather nervous and shy. Luna offers Becky Star Fish a gift; a choice of anything in the store. Rebecca chooses a bright yellow garment. When she leaves the shop clutching her precious parcel close to her chest, we get the impression that both of the young women are floating on cloud nine. But will they be able to renew the intense closeness of their friendship after such a long absence? The answer might just reduce you to tears…

By the Forces of Gravity is (much like Cosmic Trigger) a remarkable book. I hope it becomes more popular in time. It also deserves a larger audience beyond the world of R.A. Wilson’s fans. In stands proud in its own right as a special and moving account of Rebecca Fish Ewan and her intense friendship with Luna Wilson. If you haven’t read it yet I suggest you put it on your reading list for 2020.

***

Editor's Note: After Iain kindly offered me this review, I asked him to share a little bit about himself, and he obliged: "I first read Illuminatus! in my teens having discovered it in a dark little 2nd hand book shop in Inverness. I'm now in my mid 50s. By the late 1980s I became fascinated by a couple of parts of Prometheus Rising. As a result of this I went on write The Sekhmet Hypothesis, which then became revised and re-titled as The Hare Hypothesis in the early 2000s. I'll re-price it and the companion volume for free this Friday & Saturday in-case you might want a digital copy from Amazon.

"I'm not sure where you live in America - I hope it's not too hot. [Cleveland, Ohio, not terribly hot in the winter -- The Management.] I live in Scotland on the Isle of Mull. I seem to remember commenting on your site somewhere how we used to order several copies of Falcon Press books to share among ourselves here in the UK in the late 1980s. Thank goodness for eBay and Paypal!

"I just listened to the Gabriel Kennedy interview on your site with your friend, a gent called Greg someone [Gregory Arnott, my trusty Widow's Son blogger -- The Management] ...I was worried that a biography of RAW might end up reveling in gossip and the like, but he seems like a respectful man who's been in touch with the family. The Greenfield bio of Leary was (I think) truly awful...I only skipped through it. In contrast Mr Kennedy seems to be sympathetic & genuinely fascinated in his subject."

How RAW helped launch the Prometheus Awards

F. Paul Wilson, author of The Keep and other books. 

I have often written about the Prometheus Award, both because I'm involved in it and because the award intersects in several ways with the world of Robert Anton Wilson, not lease the fact that he won the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Illuminatus!

But I did not realize until the other day that RAW had played a role in launching the award. When the first award was given in 1979, it went to Wheels Within Wheels by F. Paul Wilson, and Robert Anton Wilson was the presenter. From the Libertarian Futurist Society blog, quoting a contemporary account:

“The first-ever Prometheus Award was presented for the best libertarian science fiction novel of 1978. The finalists were Poul Anderson’s The Avatar, James P. Hogan’s The Genesis Machine and F. Paul Wilson’s Wheels within Wheels. Robert Anton Wilson did the honors, on behalf of the Prometheus Award Committee (an independent group of libertarian sf fans, who contributed the award), presenting the $2,500 in gold to (no relation) F. Paul Wilson. The prize (which has already increased significantly in value) is the largest award for science fiction given anywhere in the world.”

More here. 

F. Paul Wilson's official site.

Eleven favorite books I read in 2019

I meant to do ten favorite books but could not find any among these to leave out.

These are not all books that were published in 2019, but many of them were, and I've mostly called attention to books that are at least recent:

Kingdom of the Wicked, Book One: Rules, Helen Dale. (2017) Alternate world novels have become a staple in science fiction, but Helen Dale’s work about a Roman Empire that has gone through an industrial revolution is fascinating and provocative. Published a couple of years ago, but hasn’t gotten the attention it deserved.

Gnomon, Nick Harkaway (2017). An ambitious literary science fiction novel about a high surveillance society. This is one I intend to re-read. See this blog posting.

Dreaming the Beatles, Rob Sheffield (2017). A good examination of my favorite band. At one point Sheffield proclaims Revolver is the greatest Beatles album (I agree) and notes that is another way of saying it’s the greatest rock music album ever.

Come With Me, Helen Schulman (2018). Life is a matter of making choices, and some choices, made in an instant, have consequences that last a lifetime. A fine novel by a writer I had never encountered before but plan to seek out.

Beyond Chaos and Beyond, Robert Anton Wilson (2019). Scott Apel obviously worked hard putting together this new compendium of RAW material. There’s a lot of strong essays and interviews on a variety of topics, and also a long biographical essay, “Bob and Me: A Record of a 30 Year Friendship.” See my longer review.

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero, Tyler Cowen (2019). A contrarian argument about a segment of American life which Cowen says is underrated. Largely convincing. Cowen is my favorite living "think for yourself libertarian."

Fall, or Dodge in Hell, Neal Stephenson (2019). Not always a compulsive page turner, but a philosophical and interesting book about the possibility of digital immortality. References Milton's Paradise Lost, which I guess I ought to read, having only read excerpts in college quite a while ago.

The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson (2017). The authors argue that many of our actions are not done for the reasons that we claim. One of the better nonfiction books I’ve come across in recent memory.

Somnium, Steve Moore (2011). I hesitate to call this a fantasy novel, as that often means "the same old shit you've read 100 times before, only slightly different." But this is a fantasy novel, and in fact it's very good. Longer review. 

Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction, Judith Grisel (2019). I’ve read several books about addiction, and this is probably the best. Grisel is a neuroscientist and a recovered addict, so her book is both personal and based upon science.

A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration, Kenn Kaufman (2019). Northern Ohio where I live is an important bird migration area. I learned something new and interesting on practically every page. Kaufman is a nationally-known birder who happens to live near where I work.  Like the Grisel, his book is both science-based and personal.

Note: I have gotten pretty good at selecting books for myself -- I seldom read something I really dislike unless it's something I'm forced to read as a Prometheus Award judge -- so these are not the only good books I read in 2019.

Apologies if I left out someone's favorite from yesterday's list of all of the books I read in 2019. For example, High Weirdness by Erik Davis, about Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick,  also is very good. I am not an expert on McKenna or Dick, but the RAW chapters are interesting and insightful.  The Eric Wagner Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson is left out of the top eleven because it was a re-read,  but is also highly recommended,  and I know the new edition, out soon I hope, will be even better. The Martha Wells "Murderbot" short novels are a don't-miss for SF fans. The Margaret Atwood is a classic, even better than I recalled. (I haven't read the sequel yet.)  Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism is my favorite book on dealing with digital overload, and I adopted some of his recommended practices. And so on.