Books read 2016

Every year, I publish a list of the books I've read in the previous year. I don't know why I have only 44 this year, a down year by comparison with other years, although one reason might be that The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity is a pretty big volume,  1,296 pages in paperback, although as it happens I read it as a Kindle. I haven't tried to differentiate between books I actually read, and books I listened to as an audiobook.

1. Belisarius, the Last Roman General, Ian Hughes.
2. The Turing Exception, William Hertling.
3. A Borrowed Man, Gene Wolfe.
4. The Just City, Jo Walton.
5. Red Rising, Pierce Brown.
6. Joe Steele, Harry Turtledove.
7. Golden Son, Pierce Brown.
8. The Annihilation Score, Charles Stross.
9. Apex, Ramez Naam.
10. Luna, New Moon, Ian McDonald.
11. After the First Death, Lawrence Block.
12. Disasters of Ohio's Lake Erie Islands, Wendy Koile.
13. Deep Shaker, Les Roberts.
14. The Chocolate Falcon Fraud, JoAnna Carl.
15. Ancillary Mercy, Ann Leckie.
16. Cockpit Confidential, Patrick Smith.
17. Death of a Liar, M.C. Beaton.
18. The Sword of Damascus, Richard Blake.
19. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates.
20. The Core of the Sun, Johanna Sinisalo.
21. I'll Give You the Sun, Jandy Nelson.
22. Morning Star, Pierce Brown.
23. To Live Forever, Jack Vance.
24. The Way of Zen, Alan Watts.
25. Timothy Leary's Trip Through Time, R.U. Sirius.
26. The Player of Games, Iain M. Banks.
27. The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, Justin Pollard.
28. Written in Fire, Marcus Sakey.
29. Swing Set, Janice Weber.
30. The Yearbook, Carol Masciola.
31. The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, Andrew Roberts.
32. Love Wins, Debbie Cenziper and Jim Obergefell.
33. The Sun, the Moon & the Rolling Stones, Rich Cohen.
34. Discordian Problems, N. Nash Cage.
35. The Network, Scott Woolley.
36. Arkwright, Allen Steele.
37. What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff.
38. Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America, Jesse Walker.
39. Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art, Virginia Heffernan.
30.  The Ghosts of Athens, Richard Blake.
31. 1920: The Year That Made the Decade Roar, Eric Burns.
32. Medieval Russia: 980-1584,Janet Martin.
33. The Investment Club, Doug Cooper.
34. Cosmic Trigger 1, Robert Anton Wilson.
35. Travel Writing, Peter Ferry.
36. The Other Wes Moore, Wes Moore.
37. The Beetle, Richard Marsh.
38. A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933, Eric Barnouw.
39. Exit Right, Daniel Oppenheimer.
40. The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, Scott Johnson.
41. Speculator, Douglas R. Casey.
42. The Secret War, Max Hastings.
43. Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut, Paul Krassner.
44. Panacea, F. Paul Wilson.

Friday links

Tyler Cowen

December 2016 Eris of the Month. 

Facebook discussion on RAW as a libertarian.

Good short interview with Tyler Cowen.

Argument against universal basic income.  But Josh Barro's alternatives aren't very impressive.

Top posts of 2016

Nick Offerman

One of my favorite blogs, Marginal Revolution, recently had a piece on the "Top Posts of 2016," i.e, the posts that drew the most traffic, and that made me curious what my top posts were.

I can't figure out how to get the kind of detailed information out of Blogger, that Marginal Revolution commands,  but when I look at the posts at my site with the most all-time page views, I find two that were posted in 2016: " 'Lost' RAW book to appear soon," about the RAW Starseed Signals book that Adam Gorightly unearthed and edited and which apparently will be out in 2017, and "Nick Offerman's dream movie role," about the actor's New York Times interview, in which he revealed that he'd love to play Hagbard Celine in a movie version of Illuminatus! 

This reinforces my opinion that the most interesting posts on the blog are the news items. Of course, there isn't enough real Robert Anton Wilson news to generate a blog post every day, but if you have a news tip, send it to me!

Listening to Starseed

Starseed performing at Tara's Refuge, Mt Shasta, California

Renaissance man Richard Rasa is in charge of Hilaritas Press, is a web designer and knows a lot about computers, but he also plays sitar in a band called Starseed.  I have always liked the sound of the sitar, and the chance to explore Starseed's music (and figure out which albums I want to add to my permanent collection) was one of the reasons I decided to take advantage of Spotify's current sale for people who aren't subscribers, three months of downloadable and ad-free music for $10. (The sale ends when 2016 ends, so if  you want to take advantage of it, you'd best hurry).

About Starseed, Robert Anton Wilson said, "Intricate  yet melodic as Bach, austere as a Zen shrine, sensory as a massage." I celebrated my new subscription by listening to the Live in Mount Shasta album.

Wilson's new conspiracy novel

F. Paul Wilson

And so now I've just finished a novel by Dr. Wilson about two conspiracies, each centuries old, battling each other on multiple continents.

No, not that Wilson. I'm talking about F. Paul Wilson, and his new novel, Panacea, which is about a medical cure jealously guarded by pagans. Their enemies are a fanatical Christian sect called 536.

I'm struck by the fact that more than one science fiction writer named Wilson likes to write about secret histories and conspiracies. In form, F. Paul Wilson's latest novel (and his other novels) are more like Robert Shea than Robert Anton Wilson. They are straightforward, carefully plotted thrillers, and as Panacea shows, F. Paul Wilson has gotten quite good at it.

Incidentally, both Wilsons are influenced by H.P. Lovecraft. One of the protagonists in Panacea fears that Earth is being manipulated by an advanced alien civilization, and that the cure-all substance that defies scientific explanation was supplied by the aliens.

A few words about encryption

I've been interested in encryption for awhile, and back in 2014 I reprinted a ProPublica article on "Protecting Your Privacy Online."

Most of the advice there is probably still not bad, but if you want to encrypt your files so that the Trump administration or just nosy people can't read them, you need to know that TrueCrypt has security flaws and has been discontinued.

A person named Sophie Hunt has written me and called my attention to an article which lists free alternatives to TrueCrypt. 

A couple of other encryption notes: If you want to send secure text messages via smartphone, use Signal. (This article says it's for iPhone, but it's also available now for Android phones, too.) If you want to encrypt your email with PGP, the Mailvelope browser tool works well and is easy to use.

Another option for people who don't want to become encryption experts is to use ProtonMail, a secure webmail service which is available in a free version. Here is a review. My email address there is tomjackson@protonmail.ch. Here is a Wired review.

Even if you don't use encryption, enable two factor authentication for your webmail to avoid being hacked.

Christmas (and holiday) links

See first link for source. 

From an artist in Cleveland.

Sean Gabb's Christmas message. 

Christmas at Marginal Revolution. 

Christmas greeting for readers. 

Setting up the new computer or smartphone you got for Christmas.

What you can buy with your iTunes gift card. 

Google encourages spam

If you read this blog regularly, you can see that once again I am being harassed by spam in the comments, apparently from Indonesians. What makes this particularly bothersome is that the spam is coming from Google accounts. In other words, Google knows that its accounts are being used to spam other accounts, but won't do anything about it. Google is careful not to allow human beings to complain to other human beings at Google, but if you happen to know someone in Mountain View, could you bring it up? I'm spending a lot of time trying to battle this stuff.

Adam Gorightly on James Shelby Downard

If the name "James Shelby Downard" sounds at least vague familiar, perhaps it is because Robert Anton Wilson mentions him in Cosmic Trigger as helping to come up with "the most absurd, the most incredible, the most ridiculous Illuminati theory of them all." This is the theory that ties together (quoting CT again) "The assassination of John F. Kennedy at 33° of latitude, to fulfill the alchemical ritual of 'the killing of the divine king' " with other important events or places on the same latitude. (From the "Leary emerges from darkness and Sirius rises again" chapter. )

Adam Gorightly — and who else? — explains more about Downard in a new blog posting, "When Downard Met Discordia."  Adam has come into possession of a "lost" unpublished Downard manuscript on microfiche which can't easily be scanned using OCR. So he needs volunteer typists to help in getting a usable manuscript typed up. In return, you get "a sneak peak at a portion of Downard’s missing magnum opus—not to mention a gratis copy after it’s published!"

Promoted from the comments: Michael Johnson on Blake Williams

Overweening Generalist art by Bobby Campbell. 

Michael Johnson's comment on yesterday's post (about Blake Williams the "mansplainer") is so interesting, I just want to make sure everyone sees it. 

More Michael Johnson here. 

"Promoted from the comments" is an occasional feature I "stole" from Tyler Cowen. Merry Christmas  (or whatever) to Tyler and Michael and Prof. Eric Wagner (cited in the posting) and everyone else. 

Here is Michael's comment: 

In the omnibus (3-in-1) ed of the SCT, we meet Blake Williams on pp.28-29, as the stage magician Cagliostro gives his initials from the stage and it's a lot of RAW's biographical stuff: polio, working on quantum psychology, space travel, and being haunted by seeing Reich's books burned at the Vandivoort incinerator. The narrator (or Justin Case) calls Blake "that unbearable bore."

Next, pp. 46-47, Blake is that "intolerable bore lecturing on the Birth of Cosmic Humanity to anyone who would listen," and very soon after that, "that lard-assed bore Blake Williams..." P.48 the "windy old baritone sax" Blake Williams is mansplaining at the classic RAW cocktail party scene about how "terrestrial life is embryonic in the evolutionary sense."

It goes on. In a certain sense RAW seems to be lampooning himself, but that's too simple.

For anyone who wants to study Blake Williams's character in the omnibus ed of SCT:
pp. 28-29; 46-54; 57; 68-69; 71-73; 98-100; 112-113; 201-207; 211-213; 235-236; 241-244; 249-251; 265; 267; 274-275; 280; 285; 293-296 (causality); 332; 341; 358; 410-414; 419-422; 424-425; 476; 484-494 (interjecting and present during Cotex's presentation); 504-510; 512; 516; 536-538.

In a different universe, Williams "knew that Value was the Schrodinger's Cat in every equation."

Among other publications, Blake Williams wrote How To Tell Your Friends From the Apes and was the "neuroanthropologist" who helped RAW write the quiz on p.10 of Illuminati Papers.He also appears on numerous pages of RWYASN.

Prof. Eric Wagner writes, "The character Blake Williams' name derives from that of poet and painter William Blake, whose line about discovering 'infinity in a grain of sand' Wilson frequently quotes. (Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson, p.164)

William Carlos Williams also seemed to see grand significance in small, mundane things. In Mitch Horowitz's book Occult America he covers an American occultist named Benjamin Williams on pp.215-220, but I think Wagner's right: RAW had seen and used Wm Blake as a signifier of intellectual poetic wonder, a strong poet in the use of metaphors, an anti-authoritarian and master of world-construction who would rather make his own "reality" rather than live in the system of some other man's. There's a certain view of poetic "madness" associated with Wm. Blake for RAW (and many of us). Wm Blake in Wilson's work seems to be seen as a liberator from stringent, stultifying, body-denying xtianity, replaced with a "God" that seems isomorphic with "poetic imagination."

The "problem" of Blake Williams articulating many of RAW's favorite intellectual riffs while at the same time often being seen as a mansplaining "bore" is an interesting one to me.

Ted Hand on RAW and 'mansplaining'

From Wikipedia: Mansplaining is a portmanteau of the words man and explaining, defined as "to explain something to someone, typically a man to woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing."[1][2] Lily Rothman of The Atlantic defines it as "explaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, often done by a man to a woman",[3] and feminist author and essayist Rebecca Solnit ascribes the phenomenon to a combination of "overconfidence and cluelessness."

On Facebook and on Twitter, Ted Hand argues that Robert Anton Wilson's work can shed light on the phenomena: "Mansplaining is a useful term because there are gender dynamics involved in the specific form of patronizing or condescending it describes. Failure to recognize these dynamics strikes me as a classic failure of what Bob Wilson called an intelligence test. Bob himself had no problem accepting this basic element of primate dominance dynamics and dramatized mansplaining in several scenes of his novels (see for example the Blake Williams stuff in SC trilogy.)"

On Twitter, Ted adds, "Reread the Blake Williams mansplaining to his female student stuff and you'll see what I mean. There is plenty of expose of sexism in illuminatus! as well, see for example Mavis."

Interview with David Lynch

David Lynch. Creative Commons photo by Sasha Kargaltsev. 

I'm sharing this because quite a few RAW fans seem to be "Twin Peaks" fans: Mitch Horowitz recently interviewed David Lynch for public radio, and you can read a transcript of the uncut interview.  Brief excerpt:

Mitch Horowitz: Describe for us, your perfect day.

David Lynch: Perfect day? Lots of ideas, energy to realize the ideas, tools to get the ideas done. And some very, very good coffee along the way.

In other words, Mr. Lynch wants a "damn fine cup of coffee."

Reading Nabokov

Detail of the cover for one of the editions of Ada. 

I haven't read any Nabokov in awhile, so I am treating myself this holiday season to reading Ada. I have a list of favorite authors in my head, and from time to time I read another book by one of my favorites.

Eric Wagner has told me the footnotes in Pale Fire provided some of the inspiration for the footnotes in The Widow's Son. Wagner does not remember RAW discussing any of Nabokov's other work; if anyone has any information, please chip in.

I started reading Nabokov in high school, when I was actually assigned Despair in my creative writing class, and loved it. The other Nabokov books I've read are Pale Fire (my favorite so far, and I've read it more than once); Lolita; King, Queen, Knave; Glory; Laughter in the Dark and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Obviously, I have quite a few other books left to read.

Ada Online has very detailed annotations of Ada (Nabokov's longest novel) by Brian Boyd, his chief biographer. I am doing my best to ignore the site while I actually read the book. But I wanted to share that April 23 is one of the motifs in the book, and Boyd says that the date is Nabokov's birthday. Click "Motifs" at the site and scroll down to "April 23."

Synchronicity of the day: Eric, an English teacher in California, subscribes by email to a "Word of the Day." Minutes after I first posted this, he forwarded today's "Word," which is "cordate," with the subject line, "Check out the first citation." I looked, and the first citation is the obit for Vladimir Nabokov published in the New York Times: "He also wrote at 15, his first poem after seeing a raindrop cause a cordate leaf to flutter." (Cordate means heart shaped, as with a shell, or a leaf.)