Hilaritas podcast with Joseph Matheny, 'Reality Is What You Can Get Away With' released [IMPORTANT UPDATE]

The Hilaritas Press edition of Reality Is What You Can Get Away With has been released (I would expect the usual official announcement to arrive soon) and Joseph Matheny is the interview subject for the latest Hilaritas Press podcast, released today on the 23rd as per usual. (Hilaritas has not yet sent out the official publication announcement, but that should arrive soon, and of course I will cover it  here.) Update: Don't buy the paperback yet, see announcement below. 

Mr.  Matheny also has released a Substack newsletter issue with the news, so you may as well take a moment to subscribe to the newsletter if you haven't already. "I recently sat down with Mike Gathers for the Hilaritas Press Podcast to discuss the newest reissue of Robert Anton Wilson's book Reality Is What You Can Get Away With and why I have a personal connection to it," he explains. 

More soon, but I've already bought the book and I have the podcast posted above for your convenience, although it should be available wherever you get your podcasts. 

[UPDATE] Rasa says that while the ebook is fine, he suggests that people hold off buying the paperback for a few days. (I bought the Kindle, so apparently I'm fine). When Rasa says it is safe to buy the paperback, I will let you know here. 

Here is Rasa's statement:

Just a note about our new edition of Reality Is What You Can Get Away With…

Currently the ebook, Kindle at Amazon, Nook at Barnes and Noble, Apple books, etc – these versions of the book are available and look great. The print edition is a different story. We were really hoping to get it ready before our podcast with Joe Matheny, but we ran into a bit of a snag that should be worked out in a few days, but we'd love people to not buy the paperback book from Amazon until the bug is worked out. 

Hilaritas Press uses Amazon's KDP to produce books for sale on Amazon, and we use Ingram to print books for all other outlets, including all brick and mortar stores. This book has a lot of dark graphics, and the proofs we got from Amazon's KDP just did not look good enough for us. The Ingram versions look fine, but as part of the process, Amazon puts up the book for sale even before we can view a proof! We decided that we didn't like the KDP versions of the book, and so we have deleted that book from our KDP account. Sadly, the Amazon page may still sell the KDP version for the next day or two before they switch over to the Ingram version. 

If you want the ebook, buy it now. It's fine. If you want the print edition, I'd say wait a few days until we are sure Amazon is selling our Ingram version. 

So sorry about this! We were going to get this together sooner, but Ingram made a mistake in one of the proof printings, and that kind of delayed the whole process. Usually we don't have these issues, but as I say, this book has a lot of graphics, and we really wanted to be sure that people were getting the best version that we could make! Our official announcements of new books come in our newsletter. As soon as you get the newsletter, you can be assured that the Ingram books are for sale on Amazon. 

If you want to sign up for the Robert Anton Wilson Trust Newsletter, just fill out the form at one of our websites. This one’s fun to visit: http://rawtrust.com/

FBI says it has no file on Robert Shea

A 1977 photo of Robert Shea, right, and Robert Anton Wilson in London. 

On March 8, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request, asking the FBI if it has any files on author Robert Shea. I figured if he was an anarchist active in the antiwar movement, who hung around with dodgy characters such as Paul Krassner, Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary, there might be something in the FBI files.

I've received a letter from the FBI pertaining to my Robert Joseph Shea inquiry, dated March 14. The relevant sentences say, "Based on the information you provided, we conducted a main entity record search of the Central Records System (CRS) per our standard search policy. However, we were unable to identify records subject to the FOIPA [Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts] that are responsive to your request. Therefore, your request is being closed." 

If I had additional information, I could submit a new request. I'll notify Robert Shea's son, Mike, about the response, but unless he or anyone else can think of something, I don't plan to make another request.

Footnote: Based on my experiences submitting Freedom of Information Act requests as a newspaper report, I figured a response would not arrive for months, if I got anything at all. When the FBI letter showed up in the mail yesterday, it did not occur to me it was a response to my request, and my worried wife asked why I was getting a letter from the FBI. Apparently, Ann doesn't realize I'm even more harmless than Robert Shea. 

Peakrill Press begins Kickstarter for 'True Clown Stories'

The folks at Peakrill Press have begun a Kickstarter for True Clown Stories, featuring stories by James Burt and others. As usual with Kickstarter, supporters can pledge various amounts of money and get various rewards. 

James Burt says, "My clown stories are about people who want to be entertaining. They want to bring people some innocent joy, but reality has thwarted them. These are stories about people who've devoted themselves to red noses and giant shoes but struggle to survive.

"I've been writing clown stories for years. These pieces are strange and intense, and I'm proud to share them. They might be about grubby, angry performers, but they are also about the world we all live in."

More here. 

Here is the website for Peakrill. 

Details about the new Alan Moore and Steve Moore book

 

In a blog post on Feb. 17, I covered the announcement of  The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore and Steve  Moore, out on Oct. 15, hardcover $50 in the U.S. The book is the revival of a book project from years ago that went into limbo for awhile after Steve Moore's death. 

If  you use the link to go back to that post, you'll get a lot of information about the book. But now I have belatedly learned that artist  John Coulthart did a blog post on Feb. 19 on both his involvement in the book and more details about it.

Lots of information in Coulthart's post, too. Here is an interesting bit: 

"I was surprised to discover that the pair first began talking about magic after Steve introduced Alan to the Illuminatus! trilogy in the 1970s; Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s books also stoked my own interest in magic at the same time, this being a subject I was already curious about thanks to my Dennis Wheatley-reading mother. Alan and Steve didn’t formalise any of their occult preoccupations until the early 1990s but the Illuminatus! connection makes me feel that the Bumper Book might be seen as one of the long-tail artefacts generated by Shea and Wilson’s trilogy."

Via the new John Higgs newsletter, which has lots of event news and announcements. It's John's 50th newsletter. 

Why fentanyl busts cause drug deaths to go up

                                                      Dr. Jeffrey Singer

Huge numbers of people die from drug overdoses in the U.S., but somehow drug warriors still get to set policy. 

In a new piece, "Fentanyl Police Busts Actually Make the Overdose Problem Much Worse," David J. Bier and Jeffrey Singer explain why the law enforcement in what RAW called "the war on some drugs" actually makes overdose deaths more likely. Excerpt:

"Start with the short term. When local law enforcement conducts major drug busts, they do temporarily disrupt the market for street drugs, but people who use and have grown dependent on drugs do not simply give up drugs and live clean. Instead, they search out new, unfamiliar dealers who might sell them drugs with different ingredients and potency, which can lead to more deaths.

"Now, it’s true that it might take days or weeks for drug users to connect with a new dealer, and this might seem to 'save lives.' But this often backfires, because by the time they find a new source, users’ tolerance has waned, making them more susceptible to a fatal overdose if they consume their usual dose."

Singer is a reliable source of good information on the war on drugs. (I suspect Bier is, too, but Singer is the person I am more familiar with.)

Archived issues of Mondo 2000

Cover of issue 14 of Mondo 2000.

 Mondo 2000, the cyberculture magazine co-founded and edited by R.U. Sirius, featured contributions from the likes of Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary and Rudy Rucker. It came out in the 1980s and 1990s.

Every issue of the magazine is now available for download. Find all of the issues here. 

I downloaded the first issue, and it includes a piece by Robert Anton Wilson, "Cyber Evolution: Montage." 

James Burt Nirvana story, and Kickstarter

 

Copyrighted free use photo, credit Paul Fritz Surachit, details here. 

"Hidden Tracks," a short story by James Burt about Nirvana fans, is both touching and funny. Two of the characters save up to visit Aberdeen in the state of Washington in the U.S.

"(Our friend Emily thought that Nirvana came from Aberdeen in Scotland, and couldn’t figure out why it was taking Henry so long to save up. When we realised, we took the piss. But Emily got a first in her degree and I was a long way from that)." 

"Taking the piss" means to mock somebody; my wife and I watch a lot of British mysteries, so we had heard the expression.

James sends out emails of short stories, none of them longer than about 700 words. Sign up here. 

James also has announced a Kickstarter for a new book:

"I’ve been chatting with Dan from Peakrill Press, and we’ve set a date for launching the True Clown Stories kickstarter: March 21st. We’ve uploaded a preview page where you can sign up to be notified on launch.

"The clowns in this book are not the creepy ones from horror stories. Rather, these are talented people who’ve found themselves in a world that doesn’t value their skills. These are stories about how they fight back against that disappointment.

"This book has been far too long in the works and I’m excited about launching the kickstarter. Nervous too - it’s so much harder to promote things online these days. But we’ll see what happens."

As I mentioned in an earlier post, James Burt worked on the Mycelium Parish News 2023. 

Jesse Walker reviews 'Tripping on Utopia'

Jesse Walker's comments on Benjamin Breen's book, Tripping on Utopia, attracted some discussion in the comments for my recent blog post.  Jesse's review of the book has now become available at the Reason magazine website. 

I don't think the sole focus should be on Jesse's review, particularly as he is kinder about Tim Leary than other reviewers. Charlotte Shane's review for the New York Times is available here.   The book also was reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books. (The headline for that review is "Timothy Leary Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.") Publisher's Weekly also reviewed it. 

Was the RAW gorilla story 'too good to check'?

 At the Boing Boing website, RAW fan Mark Frauenfelder mentions that he has been reading RAW's Cosmic Trigger 3 and decided to track down an anecdote in the book about a prankster in Uganda who tranquilized gorillas and then dressed them up in clown suits. Mark tries to track down the story and can't find any confirmation and finally decides that it might have been "too good to check." 

In the comments section, this remark from the current Fortean Times news editor might be relevant: "I can confirm that it is indeed from us, via the Coventry Telegraph. It is definitely one of the more unlikely stories we’ve run, but we are as much about the strangeness of the media as the strangeness of the world, so do run tales like this without going deeply into verification, but provide the source for those who feel motivated to follow up."

"Without going deeply into verification" is a good description for a great deal of Fortean material, apparently; see this discussion of The New Inquisition. 

Thursday links

Martin Rev and Alan Vega of the band Suicide. Creative Commons photo. 

Prop Anon interviews Martin Rev, from the band Suicide.   One of my favorite bands, The Cars, tried to help the duo back in the day. 

Podcast on Joseph Matheny's Ong's Hat. 

James Burt watches all of the Oscar "Best Picture" nominees and posts brief reviews. I must admit, I liked the "heavy handed literary satire" in American Fiction. 

Nabokov's literary judgments. 

The New York Times bestseller list is fake. The paper simply excludes books it doesn't like. 

Joe Biden's marijuana record. As in, he's done little. 

Interesting new article on James Joyce

A 1922 photograph of James Joyce by Man Ray. (Public domain photo). 

 "James Joyce Was a Complicated Man" by Henry Oliver, an article posted at The Fitzwilliam, starts out by zeroing in on the date James Joyce chose for Ulysses: 

"After Nora Barnacle masturbated James Joyce under a bridge, she became his muse. It was their first date, and Nora thought it a way of keeping her ardent admirer at bay. The glove that Nora had removed, Joyce kept by him in bed as a young man. But this was more than infatuation. That day became the centre of Joyce’s imaginative work, the day on which Ulysses was set. 

"A few years earlier, Joyce had been seduced by a prostitute, down by the River Liffey, an encounter which began his retreat from religion and religious authority. Now Nora was bringing him towards his central idea: the role of love in human affairs, and the notion that, as Richard Ellmann put it, the ordinary is the extraordinary; Joyce’s novel is the 'justification of the commonplace.' What happened between him and Nora that day wasn’t crude or immoral or disgusting: it was life. And it became the foundation of Ulysses."

Lots of other interesting observations in the article, too. This passage, for example, could be read as a restatement of how Ulysses influenced Illuminatus!: "Consciousness is fragmentary and so, to depict consciousness, novels must become fragmentary too. As T.S. Eliot said, 'the number of aspects' in Ulysses 'is indefinite'.” This seems like a restatement of RAW's comment that Ulysses does not have one objective point of view. 

The author, Henry Oliver, has his own Substack. 

Bobby Campbell's big comics collection

Omnibus 777 is a digital comics bundle that has been put together by Bobby Campbell. $5 for hundreds of pages of comics that can be downloaded individually, or as one big bundle. Available here. 

"OMNIBUS 777 - Your Passport to the Weirdoverse! A digital comix bundle collecting together 12 comix and 4 zines from Bobby Campbell and his amazing friends :)))

"Featuring: Weird Comix #0, Weird Comix #1, Weird Comix #2, Agnosis! #1, Agnosis! #2, BUDDHAFART #1, BUDDHAFART #2, Daze of Future Pastime, REJECTED, Psychonaut Comix #1, Psychonaut Comix #2, EITHER/OR, New Trajectories #1, New Trajectories #2, Maybe..., and Meet the Others.

"Bundle comes with access to PDF versions of all 16 releases, with CBR, Mobi (Kindle), and Web versions of all 12 comix. Download them individually or as a .zip file collection from the OMNIBUS 777 PDF guidebook."

"The idea is to make Omnibus 777 both the cheapest & best way to access my work," Bobby told me. 

Michael Johnson recommends three books on cannabis

[If you look at this blog, I hope you have noticed that the comments have been really interesting lately. Most of them should not really be taken out of context, but Michael's three book recommendations, as part of other comments for the March 7 blog post, seems to stand alone, and I decided to turn them into a blog post to make them easy to access, not least to remind me to read them. The Management.]

Three good books about cannabis

By R. Michael Johnson 

Peter Grinspoon's book from 2023, Seeing Through The Smoke: A Cannabis Specialist Untangles The Truth About Marijuana is to be recommended.

On the neurobiology of cannabis and the endocannabinoid system that is probably the master regulatory system in the body: see Cheryl Pellerin's Healing With Cannabis: The Evolution of the Endocannabinoid System and How Cannabinoids Help Relieve PTSD, Pain, MS, Anxiety, and More: it's quite readable for the intelligent layperson.

For cannabis and philosophy, I have a heavy bias toward Sebastian Marincolo's Elevated: Cannabis As A Tool For Mind Enhancement, put out by Hilaritas, with an Intro by some jackass*, but Marincolo's book is da bomb.

Read all three, digest what they have to say, then settle back with a few hits of a hybrid and try not to ponder the amount of BS that the government and industries that felt threatened by weed got far too many people to believe. The data/info/knowledge in those books couldda been common by the 1960s if there was no concerted disinformation program against this plant. (AKA Stanford professor Robert Proctor's term: agnotology: the business of creating un-knowledge) This is no small point: tens of thousands of people have done heavy time in prison for small amounts of what grandma is now scoring from her local dispensary, 'cuz it helps with her arthritis and the side effects are negligible.

Do that for a few minutes, then drop it - cannabis helps you easily to drop this kinda of anger - and just enjoy music, poetry, or movies. Or art, food and sex. Just a thought.

* [Foreword by R. Michael Johnson]