RAW's recommended books, any advice?

Robert Anton Wilson did a 20-book recommended books listed, posted on his official website.  RAW wrote, ""Not the 'best' or even my favorites, exactly: Just the bare minimum of what everybody needs to chew and digest before they can converse intelligently about the 21st Century." That website is down for a little while for renovations,  but I have a blog post from 2010 that lists the 20 books. 

Chad Nelson writes, "Going to grab a few of the books on this list for Xmas. I don't think I'm ready for Joyce or Pound...the abstruseness of their writing is a hurdle I can't get over. 

"Any strong recommendations? Right now, the two that seem most interesting to me are Reich and Demeo. Would love to hear other RAWIllumination readers thoughts if you're looking for a post!"

I told Chad that I've been able to read Ulysses a couple of times and plan to read it again. Does anyone else want to weigh in? 

Things that made Mark happy and made me happy

Alexander Mosolov 

This has largely been a year of loss and things we could not do; my wife and I did not take a big vacation trip this year, for example.

Accentuating the positive, the writer, artist, Boing Boing founder and RAW fan Mark Frauenfelder has published a list of things that made him happy during the year. 

All of us have a duty to try to stay safe and stay happy while we wait for our turn at getting the vaccine and resuming a more-or-less normal life.

Here is my list of things that made me happy this year; feel free to post your list in the comments:

1. Unexpected new books from writers I like, including Piranesi from Susanna Clarke and The Starseed Signals by Robert Anton Wilson.  

2. Launching my new music blog, Russian Futurism. A rough go at first, but I'm finally starting to get a few readers. 

3. Related to #2, I am interested in Russian avant-garde classical music of the 1920s era, and one of the composers I like, Alexander Mosolov, is undergoing a surprising revival; a new album of some of his "lost" music has been issued and there is even a movie about him in the works, see my music blog.

4. I discovered I could could cook more Szechuan recipes at home, making up for not being able to go to my favorite restaurant.

5. I finally watched the third season of Twin Peaks that originally aired on Showtime in 2017 and was relieved to discover it was really good. My binge watching also included rewatching the first two seasons of the show and the movie, Fire Walk With Me. 

6. I learned the local library would let me use the Naxos Music Library, so I signed up. I now use three different library streaming music services, which gives me so much music I don't even need a paid service such as Spotify. 

7. My friendships, including ones made through this blog, helped sustain me during the isolation of the pandemic. 

8. I got to talk to some interesting people in my day job as a newspaper reporter, including Chris Frantz of Talking Heads (he published a memoir). I was nervous about interviewing him, but he was quite nice. (You never know if celebrities are going to be the way you picture them.)

Mark BTW also joined the Substack movement and is publishing a newsletter, The Magnet. I have a paid subscription, but many free issues can be sampled if you want to decide whether to sign up. 

New Scott Apel book

 

I missed this title from longtime Robert Anton Wilson collaborator D. Scott Apel when it came out earlier this year so I'll mention it now: He has a Silicon Valley memoir called NO PLAN B: The Adventures of a Carbon Unit in Silicon Valley, or How I Made a Million Dollars in Hi-Tech Startups Basically by Just Showing Up (Don’t Try This at Home). It's $14.99 in paperback and just 99 cents for Kindle and offers a look at the area where RAW lived for many years. 

Scott has a number of other books, including movie reviews and fiction. The RAW fan on your gift list would likely enjoy Beyond Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories, Vol. II, a large assemblage of uncollected Robert Anton Wilson writings plus Scott's candid, long biographical essay about RAW,  “BOB AND ME: A Record of a 30 Year Friendship.” $19.95 paper, $4.99 Kindle. Here is my review and the feedback from other RAW fans has been good. 

Science Fiction: An Oral History is 99 cents  for Kindle and has very good interviews with RAW,  C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny and Norman Spinrad, but please note the particularly good RAW interview also is reprinted in Beyond Chaos and Beyond.  The latest edition of the book has a bonus Gene Roddenberry interview. 

Why you should love Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney in 2003, playing the same guitar he used for recording "Yesterday." Photo by Chris Floyd, used by permission. 

Robert Anton Wilson was not much of a Beatles fan (or even a pop music fan), but Robert Shea certainly was.  And certainly there are RAW fans who are huge Beatles fans, such as John Higgs and myself. (Here is John's Paul McCartney playlist, and mine.)

While we wait for the new McCartney III album to come out in a few days, I thought I would direct your attention to Ian Leslie's piece, "64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney." I think it may be the best piece of music criticism I've ever read; I hope Ian Leslie, whom I never heard of until yesterday, turns it into a book. Even the links in the article are good, such as Leslie's "deep cuts" playlist on Spotify. 

Here is my reaction to couple of Leslie's statements:

I’ve always wondered what I would say if I saw him in the street around there. [Leslie's a Brit, so he gets to walk by MPL Communications every so often, and brag about it a little -- Tom]. I think about which obscure song or album I would pick to tell him was my favourite, just so he knew I wasn’t some casual fan. 

I have a recurring fantasy that I somehow find myself in an elevator with McCartney, and I start softly singing "Did We Meet Somewhere Before?," a McCartney tune that as I far as I know has still not officially released. 

McCartney’s reputation has never fully recovered from the shredding it took when The Beatles broke up. He is still compared unfavourably to his most important creative partner. Lennon is soulful, deep, and radical; McCartney is shallow, trivial and bourgeois. That dualism, which took hold in 1970 and was reinforced by Lennon’s horribly premature death, still holds sway. Probably if you asked most people who know a little about The Beatles to say who they found most interesting, John would be the most common answer. If you surveyed Beatles nerds I suspect they would be more likely to say Paul, since the more you learn about the band you more stunned you are by what he brought to it.

[This is not a "reaction," as I wrote it in April as a letter of comment to William Breiding's fanzine, "Portable Storage,"  but notice that as a "Beatles nerd," I am thinking along the same lines, just as Leslie suggested. This is in response to a discussion in William's zine about favorite Beatles:]

But I wonder how many people are like me. I have not a fixed favorite Beatle all of my life; my choice has changed over the years. As a teen, my favorite was George. He seemed to be kind of an underdog, only allowed a couple of songs per album, and "All Things Must Pass" was the first really good solo album. Then, too, the organized the charity concert for Bangla Desh, which coaxed a great live performance out of Bob Dylan.

Then John Lennon was a favorite for awhile -- he seemed like the intellectual of the bunch, the one who seemed the most interesting, and the one whose songwriting seemed to hold up the best after the Beatles broke up.

But as I aged, I decided Paul was my favorite. In many ways, he seems the most adult of the Beatles, the one who valued children and treated them well, the one who was loyal to women and seemed to treat them well, too, and the one who always seemed to be working hard at his art. He has been the one who has regularly toured, allowing fans to see him, and who has worked all the time on new recording projects, and gone out of his way to challenge himself with different approaches -- he even made electronic music albums that no one  noticed for a long time. I finally got to see him live in Cleveland a couple of years ago. 

New meme, and some news

 

New Starseed meme from Rasa. 

Also, if you read the comments on the posting a couple of days ago about Fact, note that Quackenbush has been adding RAW pieces from Fact to the "Essays" section of RAWilsonfans.org. 

I've been listening to Zelenka

The Zelenka: Trio Sonatas Nos. 1-6 on the ECM record label, considered "essential" by the Zelanka fanatics at the Discover Zelenka website. More than 150 CDs have been recorded of Zelenka's music. 

Well-known composers such as J.S. Bach, Handel and Vivaldi were not the only good composers of the Baroque period. As I blogged earlier, Robert Anton Wilson in some of his works sought to call attention to Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745), a Czech composer. Much of his vocal and instrumental music survives, and much of it has been recorded in recent years as part of a Zelenka revival.

I recently ran across the Discover Zelenka fan site, which is particularly useful for the "Must Hear Works" and "Recommended CDs" sections. Much of this is available on the various streaming service and YouTube, and I have used the recommendations to bookmark recordings at public library streaming music sites such as Hoopla Digital and Freegal. As there is no confirmed portrait of Zelenka avaialable, I've illustrated this blog posted with a well-reviewed recording of Dismas' trio sonatas, a 2-CD set from ECM that I've been listening to this week on Hoopla. 

Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, Week Nine

 

By Eric Wagner
Special guest blogger

On Monday, November 23, 2020, birthday of both Harpo Marx and Boris Karloff, I went to the emergency room. I had had sharp pains in my lower left signs two days before and again that morning. I suspected I that had had an attack of diverticulitis. I had one once before over ten years ago. (Bobby Campbell told me at the time that Bucky Fuller also suffered from diverticulitis.) On my way to the hospital listening to Elliott Carter (my favorite music for the chaos of 2020), it struck me that this might prove a good chance to try an exercise from Prometheus Rising. I would view this visit to the ER as a party, and I would imagine myself as handsome, irresistible, and witty. I figured this would at least get some endorphins flowing to help with my healing. I did in fact talk with more people in person that day than I had since the pandemic shut-down started in March. 

I had on a t-shirt with a bunch of DC characters on it. While in the waiting room the security guard commented on my cool t-shirt. I mentioned that my wife had gotten it for me at Target and that it came from a 1980’s TV show. An older couple came over to take a look at the t-shirt (maintaining social distance, of course). They also liked the shirt. The man, leaning over his walker, said, “Yup, that’s from the 80’s. I’m an expert on cartoons from the 50’s and 60’s.” I had only ever gotten one comment on the shirt before (from a security guard at Walmart – I haven’t talked with many people this year). I don’t know if this interest in the shirt came from my metaprogramming exercise, but I’ve never talked so much with strangers at the emergency room (and I have spent a lot of time in ER’s with my family).

Update as of December 5, 2020: yes, I had diverticulitis, and all goes well.

RAW in FACT Magazine

Robert Anton Wilson biographer Prop Anon points out an avenue of research on Twitter.

Prop writes, "Robert Anton Wilson wrote for FACT magazine in the early 1960s, long before Illuminatus! This website has ALL the issues of Fact up and its free to peruse."

The magazine was edited and published by Ralph Ginsburg; the first issue at the website has a piece about the drug experiences of "advertising man" Ronald Weston, a pen name that RAW used. 

The magazine lasted for three years, 1964 to 1967; Wikipedia has a short article. 

Another cool @amoebadesign video, and there's music

 

@amoebadesign on Twitter (i.e. Scott McPherson, the guy who does all of the wonderful covers for the Hilaritas Press editions of RAW's books) just put up another Illuminatus! inspired video on Twitter.  Be sure to watch it. 

He's set up a small record label  where "there's two Illuminatus themed albums and two dubby deep ambient mumbly ones." He explains, "The non Illuminatus electronic albums are soundtracks to live my live AV performances i do, so they are mellow, dubby, ambidubstrial drify things with field recordings from Russia with soft kicks and hats etc, techno to drift away to ;)"

See this video, too. 

New John Higgs book on Blake out soon

John Higgs has revealed the cover for his Blake book and announced a publication date (for the United Kingdom.)

Above is the cover for John Blake vs. the World. John says, 

"I won't lie - as a book it's quite something. It is less a biography or a critique - although it has those elements - and more an attempt to grasp what Blake was trying to tell us. If your reality tunnel has taken a battering these past few years, you'll find this to be good medicine.

"I like that the cover is a return to the pink and yellow of the KLF book. More importantly, it's pink with yellow circles - if you're going to dive into Blake, it's important to do so in the style of Mr Blobby.

"It's out on 27 May 2021, and to pre-order it is an act of unspeakable kindness that would earn my eternal gratitude. You can do so from all the usual suspects like Amazon  and Waterstones  (Hive and Bookshop UK are yet to list pre-orders, sadly, but your local independent bookshop can take care of you).

"More on this to come, of course!"

No word yet on U.S. publication, according to John, although of course American readers can buy it anyway online. 

Feeling anxious?

 

Yes, we are living in the age of COVID-19, but the 1990s had some anxious moments, too. At RAW Semantics, Brian Dean writes about his old zine, Anxiety Culture, and the letter and audio commentary he got from Robert Anton Wilson when he sent RAW a copy of the zine. 

New Italian edition of 'Sex, Drugs & Magick' published

 

Rasa at the RAW Trust reports that the Hilaritas Press edition of Sex, Drugs & Magick: A Journey Beyond Limits is "nearly ready to be released."

And that's not Rasa's only news. RAW fans who can read Italian may read the new Italian language edition of the book, put out by the Italian publisher Spazio Interiore.

"John Higgs has worked with Stefano Bollani, who wrote the preface for this new Italian edition. John says he’s quite a good guy and a huge RAW fan," Rasa reports. (Mr. Bollani is an Italian musician and composer who has done pop music, jazz, classical music and soundtracks and worked with a very long list of musicians in different genres; he has also published several books, has a cartoon character based upon him and is an "Honorary member of the Italian Institute of 'Pataphysics." He also has written and hosted radio and TV shows and performed in theater.  And 43 solo music albums so far. )

"Giovanni Picozza, at Spazio Interiore, said the book's subtitle, 'A Journey Beyond Limits' didn't really work if translated literally. They are using 'I sentieri proibiti della trascendenza' that in English would be something like: 'The forbidden paths of transcendence'." 

More here.  

The translator is Elisa Manisco. Elisa Manisco (if it's the same person) is an Italian journalist and the author of the book PJ Harvey La sirena del Rock. 

Update on planned 'Illuminatus!' TV show

Prop Anon interviews Brian Taylor, showrunner for the planned 'Illuminatus!' TV series.  The interview is posted on the Mondo2000 website. 

Some of the news: "We are still in a stage where we’re looking for a partner. We need a network. We need somebody who is willing to take a chance on this thing." And plans also call for bringing the show into the present, rather than leaving it back in the original 1970s setting. Taylor says encouraging things about capturing the complicated tone and texture of the original. 

Taylor also vows that if he gets to make it, the show will not water down the original material. "It’s better not to make it at all than to make the compromised version with no teeth. If we’re going to make it, it would have to be something that would make Robert proud. It has to be something that strives to have that type of impact and embraces the spirit of the material. If it can’t be that then I really believe it’s not worth the time to do it. Let the book stand. The book is always going to be great."