Hilaritas wants to publish Leary book

Timothy Leary (Creative Commons photo)

Rasa reports that Hilaritas Press is trying to obtain the rights to republish Timothy Leary's book, Terra II: A Way Out. The 1973-74 book, about efforts to leave Earth and go into space to contact higher intelligence, would aside from its intrinsic interest also serve as a companion to Robert Anton Wilson's The Starseed Signals: A RAW Perspective on Timothy Leary, the "lost" RAW book Hilaritas published in October 2020. 

Rasa mentioned Terra II in a comment on Facebook and confirmed the interest of Hilaritas, publishing imprint of the RAW Trust, in an email to me. 

"In fact, we are talking with both the Leary and Harcourt Smith estates about republishing Terra II," he wrote. (The book is listed as having four authors: Leary, Joanna Harcourt Smith, Lynn Wayne Benner and "Guanine.")

I asked Rasa about whether Hilaritas is interested in the two Leary titles which list Robert Anton Wilson as a co-author, Neuropolitics and The Game of Life. Maybe, Rasa replied.

"I’ve been thinking about the RAW/Leary books, but we’ve been kinda busy with other stuff, so not a lot of hard thinking about it, however, I did have a really nice conversation the other day with Donna Scott, the new trustee for the Leary estate," he told me. 

Hilaritas podcast on Korzybski is well done

I finally caught up with the Hilaritas Press podcast on Alfred Korzybski and it's worth a listen. The show (about one hour, forty minutes) consists of an interview with Dom Heffer, a trustee with the Institute of General Semantics and art editor of the group's publication, Etc. 

Heffer turned out to be an excellent choice. He actually got interested in Korzybski by reading Prometheus Rising, so he's well informed about Robert Anton Wilson's writings about Korzybski, and with his position at the Institute of General Semantics he knows how Korzybski's ideas are faring. (The Institute has an Alfred Korzbyski Memorial Lecture each year, often featuring a big name guest, and RAW gave the memorial lecture in 1997. The podcast opens with a a clip of RAW from that lecture.)

Mike Gathers serves as the host for the podcast, which also features Gregory Arnott and Eric Wagner. All of these guys do well, with Gregory getting in many good, pointed questions. 

The second podcast is about Wilhelm Reich. The podcast is available at Podbean, Spotify, Google and TuneIn; I still think it ought to be searchable from any podcasting app. That's the standard for podcasts that aspire to a large audience. I just checked, and it's still not available at the Podkicker app; I had to download Podbean to listen to it in my car. 

News from Joseph Matheny

Joseph Matheny's latest email newsletter has an announcement that will be of interest to Robert Anton Wilson fans:

"I submitted an introduction to the Hilaritas Press re-issue of Robert Anton Wilson's Reality is What You Can Get Away With. 

"I won't ruin it by telling you too much, but I think you'll enjoy the very personal connection that I have with that work and my stories about hanging out with RAW during the period of that book's first release. 

"Because that work references significant media properties, I expect it may take the folks at Hilaritas a while to secure all the necessary clearance. I have faith that they will, in the end, ensure all the rights and re-release this classic work soon."

Rasa confirms, "He wrote a really good intro. We are still working on the tricky rights to the images, so that book keeps getting put behind others on our list. We’re working on it, however."

Matheny also is offering free ebooks through Thursday:

"I have decided to make the following ebooks downloadable free of charge for five days. 

"Liminal by Cameron (Kindle)

"Xen: The Zen of the Other (Kindle)

"Also, the always free, newly updated, final, authorized version of Ong's Hat: The Beginning is available as a PDF and an EPUB.

 "The Kindle books will be free to download starting Sunday, October 31, 2021, until  Thursday, November 4, 2021."

The actual main item in his email is the release of the audio drama version of Xen: The Zen of the Other. For more information and still more Joseph Matheny news, please read the whole thing. You can also sign up for the newsletter 

Prometheus Rising Exercise and Discussion Group, Episode 54

Unsplash photo by Ben White 

Notes on Chapter 8

A stimulating and interesting chapter. 

• I'm not sure about Wilson's thesis that being gay or having particular sexual fetishes are all imprinted at adolescence. Don't most gay people realize their orientation much earlier? And don't many sexual fetishes develop over time? But his theory that rite of passage ceremonies are meant to help impose a particular mortality does make sense to me. 

• After publishing charts where Wilson relates the first four circuits of the eight circuit system to various other systems, including Freud, Jung, tarot, the classical four elements, etc., Wilson writes, "A mass made of people who have intense curiosity about why Beethoven went in for string quartets after the Ninth Symphony ... " Is is just a coincidence that the Beethoven-obsessed Wilson  brings up string quartets in a chapter about the four circuits? And if not, what instruments relate to which circuit? I would say the cello is Circuit One, viola Circuit Two and the two violins circuits Three and Four. Maybe Eric will weigh in on whether this is nuts or whether it makes any sense. 

• I like the idea of politics being analyzed in terms of the Wrong Address problem. ("Why did Adlai Stevenson lost to Ike Eisenhower, George McGovern to Tricky Dicky Nixon, etc.") It seems to me that particularly now, liberals, conservatives and liberals don't understand each other because their ideologies don't address the same needs.

• "Are traditional schools very much like mini-prisons? Do they stifle imagination, cramp the child physically and mentally, and run on various forms of overt or covert terrorism?" I have noted that many libertarians particularly dislike public schools, or had particularly bad experiences with K-12 school. In fact, I suspect that's how many of them encountered "authority" and developed their political orientation. 

John Higgs on Claudia Boulton

The latest John Higgs newsletter just dropped and it includes John's tribute to Claudia Boulton.

Like many, I was hit hard this week by news of the death of Claudia Boulton. Claudia played Eris the Goddess of Chaos and Discord in the play of Cosmic Trigger - and pretty much in real life, also ....

All emotions are mixed, even something like grief. For all its weight, it is mixed up with the awareness that you had that person in your life, so it can never be 100% dark. The huge outpouring of love for Claudia I've been seeing these past days is a reminder of how much someone can impact on people, simply by being resolutely and unshakeably themselves. It's also been an illustration of how loss, just like life, is a communal experience. Much love to all who knew her. She taught us all that, when you get the cosmic joke, it never stops being funny.

Much more here, including more on Claudia, more on the new Higgs book about the Beatles and James Bond, and quite a bit on a new documentary about the KLF. 

Check out this rap group's album cover

 

The Cult of the Damned is a rap music collective in the UK. The album cover for The Church Of is suggestive, no? (The cover art is credited to an artist named James Neilson.) 

Hat tip: Nick Helweg-Larsen. 

Christopher James Stone on RAW's calendars

Christopher James Stone (promotional image)

In an article at Splice Today, Anno Lumina, Year of Light​​​​​​​, Christopher James Stone argues that Daylight Saving Time makes little sense, then shifts to writing about how some features of the calendar are quite arbitrary. He writes,

"There have been attempts to reform the calendar system over the years. One of the most significant was by Robert Anton Wilson who wrote an article called How to Live Eleven Days in 24 Hours. Unfortunately—and ironically—it’s undated, so I can’t tell you when it was written.

"He first started thinking about the calendar, he tells us, when he was writing the Illuminatus! Trilogy with Robert Shea. Between them they devised a new system, which they called Anno Lumina, Year of Light. Historical dates are strung out along a single timeline, starting in 4000 BC with the birth of Hung Mung, an ancient Chinese philosopher who answered all questions by shouting loudly “I don’t know! I don’t know!” Thus 4000 BC is year one A.L. and all dates follow on from that; today, for example, is the year 6021 A.L.

"After that Wilson realized that all calendars, even his own Illuminati one, are an attempt to impose a single structure on a complex universe, and instead adopted a multi-faceted approach, in which he gave the date in a variety of different formats. A Robert Anton Wilson article might be dated in any combination of 11 different calendar formats, included the French Revolutionary, Hebrew, Thelemic, Mayan, or Chinese."

Stone is a British author, sometimes mentioned in John Higgs' writings. One of Stone's books is co-written with Arthur Uther Pendragon, a "self-declared reincarnation of King Arthur," according to Wikipedia. 

Hat tip, Nick Helweg-Larsen.

New Bodge released

 

I'm a bit late in mentioning this because of other news, but Bodge No. 10 has been released by the Liverpool Arts Lab.  As usual, paper copies are available, but PDFs are free. 

Claudia Boulton has died [UPDATE]

I am sorry to have to report that our British friends on Twitter are reporting the death of Claudia Boulton, environmental activist and Eris in the Cosmic Trigger Play. Here is one report. And here is another. You can listen to her on a podcast. Above image is from Bobby Campbell. 

UPDATE: The planned Sunday Halloween RAW event in London, which Claudia had planned to participate in, will go forward. See this Twitter thread.

Claudia Boulton is ill

Claudia Boulton, Eris in the Cosmic Trigger play and heavily involved in the play in other ways, is gravely ill, Daisy Eris Campbell reports on Twitter.  I am sorry to see this news. 

RAW book event in London to be streamed for free

The Prometheus Rising discussion group will return soon. In the meantime, I have some news.

As previously announced, there will be a Halloween event at 7 p.m. Oct. 31, Halloween, at The Cockpit in London to mark the Hilaritas Press republication of Robert Anton Wilson's Sex, Drugs & Magick: A Journey Beyond Limits. The event is featuring Daisy Campbell, Andrew O'Neill and others. 

In the latest Mycellium news update, Michelle Olley has announced that the event will be streamed for free for those who cannot attend in person. Details at the link. 

New Hilaritas podcast

 

Episode Two of the new Hilaritas Press Podcast has been released. The topic this time is Wilhelm Reich. 

"In this episode, we chat with Dan Lowe about the life, work and ideas of Wilhelm Reich. Dan works as a counsellor, therapist and educator in London. He has been studying Reich since discovering him through Robert Anton Wilson over 25 years ago while at university. Dan’s clinical work as a therapist is heavily informed by relational therapy and Reich’s somatic therapy."

A couple of comments: The RSS feed doesn't work. Also, it would be nice if the podcast was searchable by any podcasting app (as many podcasts are.) I finally gave up trying to figure out how to make it work for my main podcasting app, Podkicker, and downloaded Podbean, one of the four apps the producers use. (The other options are Google, Spotify and TuneIn.) I have to admit Podbean looks pretty good in the early going, although I don't like being pushed to sign up for right wing podcasts. Let me choose, please. 

'Crawdaddy' is excommunicated

The famous but no longer existing rock music magazine Crawdaddy, founded by Paul Williams, was excommunicated in 1975 in a letter to the editor from the "Wrong Rev. Mordecai Malignatus," probably Robert Anton Wilson. The text of the letter is here, via Martin Wagner. It's a fairly recent Tweet I guess, as Twitter is telling me it was posted 23 hours ago.

Paul Williams, who died in 2013, also was Philip K. Dick's literary executor. I met him once years ago at a Readercon and was pleased when I spoke to him to find out he was a big fan of The Beatles' song, "Things We Said Today."  His final years were very sad, due to a brain injury suffered in a bicycle accident, but his life was interesting.