Natural Law: Celebrity endorsements!

"Absolutely essential and fun!" -- RAW Semantics

"The gateway drug!" -- @amoebadesign

"My new favorite in the Wilson essay collection genre!" -- Chad Nelson

I am hoping that some of you will be persuaded to join the reading group for Natural Law Or Don't Put A Rubber on Your Willy And Other Writings From A Natural Outlaw from Hilaritas Press that I announced a schedule for on Monday.  (Starts Nov. 28).

Although the title essay was published in a journal called New Libertarian and consists of an argument Wilson made with several prominent libertarians, I would argue that it's not a "libertarian book" or a "libertarian RAW book." As Chad Nelson explains in this interview, the book's theme is really about model agnosticism. (To be clear, a "RAW libertarian book" would be fine with me, some other time. But that doesn't really describe Natural Law, in my opinion, or Chad's). 

Still not convinced? Here are a couple of "celebrity endorsements" from the world of RAW fandom.

Brian Dean, who writes the RAW Semantics blog, is decidedly not a libertarian, as far as I can tell from reading his Twitter account. 

Here is his review of Natural Law on Twitter: " I grok RAW best thru his *BOOKS*, & I found NL absolutely essential (& fun). Take a weekend & read it properly."

The cover artist, Scott McPherson, also is not a libertarian. Brian Dean and I both liked the cover, which as Rasa points out, references a RAW quote,  "Every perception is a gamble, in which we see part, not all, (to see all requires omniscience) and 'fill in' or project a convincing hologram out of minimal clues. We all intuitively know the obvious and correct answer to the Zen koan, 'Who is the Master who makes the grass green?' "

When we discussed the quote on Twitter, Scott said that he liked the book so much he made a departure from his previous covers: "Aye, this one is aimed at the general public and wellness mob ;)  it's meant to look like an appealing  book you would see in the Sunday papers.... it's a trojan horse design ;)  meant to suck you in.....

"Going for the non RAW fans with this one  .... the gateway drug I call it."

Chad endorses the book, too, of course, but some people might question whether he is totally objective, as he edited the book. Rasa likes the book, too!

New Hilaritas podcast: Marshall McLuhan

The latest Hilaritas Press podcast is about another RAW influence, Marshall McLuhan, and features McLuhan's grandson, Andrew McLuhan. As per usual, there are links at the official site for those who want to go more in depth. 

The next episode, to be released on Nov. 23, will focus on Claude Shannon. This is another episode I am particularly looking forward to. Mike Gathers will interview the co-authors of A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age.

Proposed 'Natural Law' reading group schedule

When I read Natural Law Or Don't Put A Rubber on Your Willy And Other Writings From A Natural Outlaw from Hilaritas Press before it came out early this year (I was a volunteer proofreader), I thought it was really a good book. I hope that the new online reading group I announced a few weeks ago will serve to bring the book to the attention of more readers. I really do feel the book deserves a good reception, and the reading group is one of my efforts to aid the title. 

My proposal is to start the Natural Law reading group on Nov. 28, more than a month from now, and to cover the book in 18 weekly installments each Monday. 

The book consists of the original long Natural Law essay, once published separately as a long essay but a short book from Loompanics, and 12 additional pieces selected by Chad Nelson, the editor of the book. Although the 12 comprise most of the book, none are as long as the title essay. At the front of the book is a reprint of John Higgs' piece on Maybe Day, originally published in the Guardian newspaper in Britain on July 23, 2009, and Chad's introduction. 

Chad has agreed to write something  to kick off the reading group, and then I will take over, although I'm certainly open to guest bloggers.

So my proposal is to start Nov. 28 with something from Chad, then on Dec. 5 do a weekly post on the Higgs and Nelson pieces in the front. I think the long essay ought to be covered over three weeks,  with weekly blog posts from then on for each additional piece in the book. The last item in the book, "I OPENING," seems pretty significant to me, so I want to cover it with two blog posts, one from me and one from Chad, who has told me he also wants to write about it. 

If I am counting right, that comes out to  18 blog entries for a book that's 230 pages long in print -- a reasonable schedule, I think. I may not follow the schedule rigidly -- I reserve the right to make changes as we go along if the need arises -- but that's the plan. I'm certainly willing to listen to feedback.

A note on the availability of the text: For previous reading groups, readers have often been able to track down a library book, or to find a cheap used book of an older edition from New Falcon.

For Natural Law, I'm thinking these do not seem like options;  I doubt many public libraries carry the book. I can't find any evidence that it's in a library in Ohio, where I live, and Ohio is a big state that funds its public libraries more generously than any of the other 49 states. 

So you'll likely have to buy the book. It's $23 on Amazon and there is still no Kindle yet. 

As for the usual ebooks offered by Hilaritas, well it's complicated. There's no Kindle and Hilaritas has been working for months to straighten out a problem with Amazon on the matter.

There is an ebook for about $9 from Barnes and Noble, but that's a problem, too. I don't know how the file looks  on a Nook tablet, but on the Nook app on a smartphone, it's terrible, with lots of spaces that mess up the ability to read it normally. I have verified, however, that buying the ebook means you can read it on the Barnes and Noble website. Rasa has been trying to fix this, too. 

So unless you are OK with reading the book on  your computer, you may have to buy the actual paper book. If the Kindle or Nook situation gets fixed, I'll let you know. 

For more on the book, please see my interview with Chad Nelson and my shorter interview with Rasa. And thank you to Rasa for the book group graphic. 

R.U. Sirius channels Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary (Creative Commons photo by Philip H. Bailey.)

Timothy Leary, born on Oct. 22, 1920, was 75 when he died in Los Angeles in 1996.

He would have been 102 on Saturday, and to mark the occasion, author, publisher, musician etc. R.U. Sirius penned a tribute, "I Channeled Timothy Leary for his 102 Birthday (Happy birthday Tim)." Sirius knew Leary well, completed Leary's book Design for Dying and penned a biography of Leary, Timothy Leary's Trip Through Time.

Excerpt from the new piece:

“So what’s hell like, Timmy?”

“It’s not so much hot as boring. I mean, Lawrence Welk is in hell and Brian Jones is in heaven. Got that? It’s like one giant Church of the Subgenius prank just to mindfuck little Timmy. And all those French philosophers are in hell. Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard. Droning on and on. ‘Tim can I read you my essay about the post-dialectical dialectics of the isness of not being and gendered demonologies in hell?” Fuck no! Get out of here! I’d rather listen to Eldridge go on and on about how cool Kim il Sung is.”

 

Isaac Bonewits on RAW's 1976 Exopsychology class

 

Prop Anon has been posting a lot of documents at his Chapel Perilous website. The latest is another clipping from the Berkeley Barb, by the noted occult writer Isaac Bonewits, about a 1976 class on Exopsychology taught by Robert Anton Wilson, which had many of the same ideas and themes from Prometheus Rising and Cosmic Trigger. There is quite a bit of discussion of the Eight Circuit Model.

At one point in the class, Bonewits relates, "Wilson played a tape-recording designed to induce a "fifth circuit" experience (similar in many ways to a really good grass high). Everybody floated home after this and returned the next day, noticeably more relaxed." I wonder what the recording was? 

Will marijuana legalization continue?

The states in blue have legalized marijuana; green states have medical marijuana. Creative Commons graphic; more information here. 

Robert Anton Wilson used to write a lot about the "war on some drugs." 

With certain exceptions, political trends in the U.S. on regulation of drugs has generally gone in a direction Wilson would support, particularly the trend of legalization of marijuana. Since Wilson's death in 2007, many states have legalized the use of cannabis by all adults; the first were Colorado and Washington, in 2012.

Recreational cannabis currently is legal in 19 of the 50 states, and in the District of Columbia. As a practical matter, except for the Deep South/former Confederacy, many Americans are within driving distance of legal pot, although it remains illegal to bring pot from a state where it's legal to a state where it's not. The legal states are Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.  (My former state, Oklahoma, is a weird outlier. Technically, it only has medical marijuana, but the laws are so liberal that in effect marijuana is legal there; anyone who wants a medical marijuana license can obtain one, and marijuana shops are everywhere. There are other nuances I don't have the time and space to go into; for example, Delta 8 THC is legally available in many states that still ban pot. And of course there are still many illegal and semi-illegal markets, including California, where taxes and regulations have made legal marijuana expensive.) 

This fall offers a test of whether this trend will continue. Voters in five states are considering marijuana legalization (North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri, Arkansas and Maryland), while Colorado may legalize some psychedelics, including magic mushrooms. The details of the proposals vary; see this roundup. 

Prop Anon launches podcast

 Prop Anon has launched a podcast channel. "The Prop Anon Podcast explores the life and work of American novelist, Robert Anton Wilson through interviews and discussions with some of the most cutting-edge artists and thinkers around today.

"The Prop Anon Podcast presents interviews with Artists, Journalists, Comedians Comic Book Writers, Scientists, Community Activists, and Musicians as we think of ways to make existence, in the words of Bill Hicks, "a better ride" for everyone on Spaceship Planet Earth!"

The first episode is an interview with Joseph Matheny. It's the same interview I wrote about last year, "remixed for the podcast format and the message is still vital," Prop says. 

Article on Timothy Leary writing to RAW

 

Over at his Chapel Perilous website, Prop Anon posts a clipping from the Berkeley Barb from 1975, about Timothy Leary breaking his silence by writing a letter to Robert Anton Wilson. 

One wonders what the Barb's readers made of sentences such as "In the letter to Wilson, Leary also expresses his continuing concerns with escaping from the planet and achieving immortality...Wilson, like Leary, alleges to have received telepathic communications from what Leary calls 'Higher Intelligences' located somewhere in our galaxy." 

I had to convert Prop's document into a jpg file to post it here; I also found the clipping easier to read when I converted it into a PDF. 

Grant Morrison (and Bobby Campbell) on magick

Grant Morrison has a Substack newsletter, Xanaduum, which in the usual Substack fashion has a mixture of free issues and ones that only can be read by paid subscribers.

Many of the postings are about magick, including the latest piece,  "16/10 BEYOND THE WORD AND THE FOOL Pt3," which is one of the ones that everyone can read. 

There are four comments (typically with Substack, only paid subscribers may post comments), and two are from Bobby Campbell. Part of Bobby's comments:

"I fell down that most illustrious POP MAGIC rabbit hole way back in 2002, with unbelievably awesome results, and can maybe share some insight on this specific journey.

"First off, the only problem with magic is that it works!

"(At least from the practitioner's point of view.)"

"So basically, be prepared for success and be careful what you wish for."

Bobby also talks about that (and Grant Morrison) in the recent podcast I posted about earlier. 

RAW movie lists!

Scene from Intolerance, the D.W. Griffith epic. (Public domain image). 

My recent post on Bride of Frankenstein has inspired several comments which you should go back and read, but I want to highlight two RAW-related movie lists.

Spookah has begun putting together "Sombunall RAWlated Films," which he explains is "A work-in-progress list of sombunall films mentioned by Robert Anton Wilson throughout his books and elsewhere. Hopefully, the list will eventually tends towards mosbunall films." He has come up with 69 so far. It's a work in progress. 

In response, Jesse Walker has pointed to my 2014 blog post on "RAW's 100 favorite movies," which comes from a list that Jesse supplied to me. 

It looks like I have a lot of watching to do. 

JustWatch is a useful site for finding places to stream movies, including apps and websites where they can be streamed for free. 

RAW on the attempted Ku Klux Klan revival

Martin Wagner unearths yet another Robert Anton Wilson article, "The Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan," about attempts to revive and rebrand the violent, racist organization. The feeling that the Klan is yesterday's news hangs over the article and is made explicit toward the end:

The final word seems to come from a former insider. Bill Hendrix, an ex-Grand Dragon of the Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was an active Kluxer for 15 years. Then, in 1960, he resigned as Grand Dragon and persuaded his members to dissolve the Southern Knights entirely. “I cannot agree to such things as bombings and burning schools,” he told newspapermen at the time. “But that is what the Klan is going to have to turn to unless it agrees to go along with the laws. I see no way to stop racial integration, and it looks to me like the best thing to do is accept it.” Interviewed in 1964, Mr. Hendrix said he still feels the same way, and emphasized that it was “criminal elements” within his own Klan that led him to dissolve it. “The same elements are taking over Shelton’s Klan right now,” he said. “There is no way of keeping them out. You can’t watch every member all the time.”

The piece was published in Fact magazine in 1964. 

'Bride of Frankenstein'

Theatrical release poster for 'Bride of Frankenstein' (public domain image). 

For Halloween, I'm trying to watch some of the movies on Jesse Walker's top ten best  horror movies list, and last night I watched Bride of Frankenstein (it's available free on Tubi). I particularly enjoyed the sets, which in many scenes looked like a particularly well designed haunted house. I am too ignorant to have heard of any of the cast except for Boris Karloff, but I admired how one of the actresses, Elsa Lanchester, played dual roles as Mary Shelley and as the title character. I was curious about the actress who played Henry Frankenstein's wife, Valerie Hobson, so I looked her up and discovered that one of her husbands was John Profumo, famous for a 1963 British sex scandal. 

Robert Anton Wilson's abortive sequel to Illuminatus! had the working title of Bride of Illuminatus. (If you are curious, the small bit he completed -- it doesn't blow me away -- is reprinted in Beyond Chaos and Beyond, the interesting compilation of RAW writings edited and published by D. Scott Apel.) I'm assuming RAW's title is a reference to the movie Jesse recommended; please correct me if I'm wrong. 

Bonus: Jesse's review of the movie:

"A young scientist named Frankenstein feels torn between a conventional marriage and a same-sex liason with his mentor, an old queen named Pretorius. The latter persuades the protagonist to reproduce with him through unnatural means. Upon succeeding, Pretorius proclaims himself "the bride of Frankenstein." Careless viewers assume he's referring to the couple's creation." (Source). 

What to recommend to the RAW newbie?

On Twitter, RAW Semantics: "Although relatively few, I see a steady flow of people *new* to #RobertAntonWilson, curiously inquiring. Can I gently suggest you read his BOOKS first? Here's a catalog of them (from @TheRAWTrust). I predict you'll be very glad you took this suggestion! https://hilaritaspress.com/catalog/."

I asked, "Do they ask you what to try first? If so, what do you tell them?"

Brian replied, "Generally Prometheus Rising, as that was the first RAW non-fiction book I read (and it made a big impression)."

My own tentative suggestion is Masks of the Illuminati, although I wonder if The Widow's Son might be better for someone who prefers fiction. (I'm pretty sure Apuleius Charlton told me he reads it again every year, and Mike Gathers described it in a podcast as the first RAW book he finished, if I understood him correctly. The Widow's Son is a favorite of Bobby Campbell).  I also think Cosmic Trigger 2 might be a good introduction, and I think it's an underrated RAW book. 

UPDATE: Brian loves Cosmic Trigger 2, too!