Penguicon snapshots

Cory Doctorow and Ada Palmer

Penguicon has been a fine convention experience, although as with the other Penguicon I attended, in 2012, I have had the experience of attending a convention where I don't know anyone very well. (When I lived in Oklahoma for years, going to conventions meant seeing old friends again).

Penguicon is reliably a very interesting convention. I went to lots of programming, particularly events featuring Cory Doctorow or Amanda Palmer, and also got to speak for a couple of minutes with another author I like, Leonard Richardson.

Ada Palmer, nominated for the Hugo Award for her excellent book Too Like the Lightning, shortly after the end of the opening ceremony. 

Ada Palmer let the audience examine a 450-year-old book at one of her events,  letting us pass it from hand to hand. She explained that books in those days were much sturdier, and it would be fine so long as we used reasonable care. This is the title page.

I wore a Boing Boing "FNORD" t-shirt all day Saturday and wore a badge with RAWIllumination.net on it, but nobody has said anything about either, as of Sunday morning. I guess there aren't a lot of RAW fans here. I did see a guy Friday wearing a T-shirt that seemed to have Discordian elements.

Ada Palmer's new novel Seven Surrenders has a chapter set in Ingolstadt, with the sentence "The Earth sill shake." That's not a RAW reference, she said. The chapter is set in Ingolstadt because that's where Frankenstein is from. She has a copy of the Illuminatus! trilogy in her library but hasn't gotten around to reading it.

Scene from the Libertarian Futurist Society (and Friends of Armed and Dangerous) party. Eric Raymond is gesturing on the left. I don't know the name of the dude on the right, but he taught me you can make a pretty good dip from avocado, cream cheese (softened to room temperature), salt and garlic. 

Not available in any store!

Adam Gorightly has commissioned the manufacture of some Discordian patches, based upon a design from Greg Hill.

You can't buy the patch, but you can attempt to earn it from Adam. Details here.

Greg Arnott to lead 'Email to the Universe' discussion

Gregory Arnott. (Photo courtesy Mr. Arnott) 

The Email to the Universe online reading group will begin soon, on May 15. It will resemble past online reading groups (archived at the right side of this page). There will be a blog posting, and everyone else will be invited to post comments.

Greg Arnott has volunteered to serve as a guest blogger and lead the discussion. Mr. Arnott has handed over the first post to me. He'll handle all (or most) of the rest of the postings, setting the pace, inviting guest bloggers if he sees fit. He can  deal with it however he lives, and I'll post in the comments along with everyone else (reserving the right to do separate blog posts if there's something I want to talk about.)

I've enjoyed Greg's posted comments to this blog and have corresponded with him. He's a serious student of literature and has wide-ranging interests, and I'm sure you'll find him an interesting guide. He attends West Virginia University in Morgantown, W.Va., pursuing a graduate degree.

I've asked Greg to say a little bit about himself, and he obliged:

"I was born and raised in the Mid-Ohio Valley. After undergrad I ended up drifting across the States before settling in Colorado for a spell. I returned home to pursue my MA.

"The summer that I graduated high school I was gifted a copy of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Over the next week I couldn't put it down; I would sneak away from working the register at the family pharmacy to go read it in the basement. The book dazzled me: I laughed, grew frustrated, learned to question everything, I think I was even frightened a few times. I would soon devour Masks of the Illuminati and Cosmic Trigger. Wilson serves as a touchstone and aspirational point.

"I spend my free time reading, babbling back and forth with my daughter, gardening, kayaking, or playing with my cat.

"I think reading the poem/essays in groups of three, occasionally altering that pace so we don't cross the separate Parts during the same week, would be a reasonable pace."

A couple of news items

Rehearsal for Cosmic Trigger play, via Instagram. The goddess with the red hair is actress Kay Alderton, as Arlen Wilson. Over her right shoulder is Oliver Senton (RAW, Joseph Malik, Barney Muldoon)  Tickets. 

New Cosmic Trigger play Instagram account. Via Claudia Boulton's reliably interesting Twitter account.  

Nick Sand, who made Orange Sunshine LSD, has died. Good article here. 

PQ on returning to Waywords and Meansigns

Waywords and Meansigns, the project to put James Joyce's Finnegans Wake to music, is putting out a third edition, and PQ is taking part again, joined by members of the Finnegans Wake reading group in Austin, Texas.

Here's a quote from PQ:

"It gives me great satisfaction and hope for humanity to know that so many people all around the world (contributors come from 15 different countries) have been immersing themselves in Joyce's great cosmic love letter, puzzling through the psychedelic dream opera and working to capture its inspired essence through music. The more people spending time reading and enjoying Finnegans Wake on this planet, the better. Its power of upliftment and enlightening humor is nuclear."

You can read my 2015 interview with PQ and Steve "Fly" Pratt on their contributions to the first edition.

Tuesday links

Check out the poster available from Britain's National Theatre.

Jack Sarfatti on "post-quantum computers that operate both forwards and backwards in time."

April Eris of the Month.

Upcoming event in Liverpool.

Most terrorism doesn't come from Muslims.  

Libertarianism should be more realistic. 

Mookychick writeup on Cosmic Trigger play. 

'Secret Transmissions' podcast

Jeff Wolfe 

I downloaded the Occulture podcast interview with Jeff Wolfe of Secret Transmissions and enjoyed it immensely.

Jeff talks about his exploration of Ohio burial mounds, how he became interested in the occult, why he went from zine publishing to starting up a blog, his favorite horror movies and how Robert Anton Wilson influences much of what he does. Ryan Peverly is the interviewer and has good rapport with Jeff.

It's pretty long, about 90 minutes. Should be available for the various podcast phone apps. Some of the other Occulture podcasts look interesting, too.

Your April 23rd news

A couple of things from Daisy Campbell on Twitter. Her majesty looks oddly familiar.

Update on moderation policy

I've been relying on Google to email me when a comment needs to be moderated. Apparently this process is not infallible, and I need to check comments folders in Blogger periodically to make sure I haven't missed anyone. If you have posted a comment and you haven't seen it approved in a reasonable time, you can email me. The address is listed under "About" on this page.

I missed a comment from someone I admire and he felt slighted, which I feel badly about.  I didn't want to go to moderation, but I don't know how else to keep out the spam. I value everyone's comments and appreciate the folks who take the time to leave one.

Kinks guitarist is a RAW fan

Dave Davies on Dutch TV in 1967 (Creative Commons 3.0 photo via Wikipedia)

If you are a certain age — OK, if you're old like me — you'll know that the British Invasion wasn't just The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but also included many other fine groups, such as the Kinks, known for hits such as "You Really Got Me" and "Lola." The main songwriter, Ray Davies, is the best-known member, but his brother, Dave Davies, is the group's lead guitar player and an important part of the band's sound.

Via Jesse Walker (a Kinks fan), I learned that the Daily Express, a British newspaper, has a recurring feature in which a celebrity is asked to name six favorite books. Dave Davies was interviewed on April 19, and the six he mentioned include Right Where You Are Sitting Now by Robert Anton Wilson: "Wilson had a very interesting take on the way the world functions. His ideas were a breath of fresh air. Everybody’s vision of reality is different. He talks of understanding the differences and how we should be compassionate about what others think."

Davies' favorites also include Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick.

But wait! There's more! (as the old TV commercials used to say). If you follow the link to the Daily Express, notice the headline under "Related Articles": The Kink's legend's shock claim: I had a message from aliens. 

He said: “You have an experience with a UFO, and you keep those feelings, and then it gets into your subconscious and super-conscious.

“When I investigated what those feelings could be, when I got really into ufology, I could’ve sworn I was having connections with the Dog Star, with Sirius.”

Maybe this guy should do a musical collaboration with R.U. Sirius.

Here is Butterfly Language's take on alien contacts with Robert Anton Wilson, Philip K. Dick and Timothy Leary. 

Lovecraft takes another posthumous hit

H.P. Lovecraft, a character in Illuminatus! and a literary influence on Robert Anton Wilson, has taken another posthumous blow to his reputation. The World Fantasy Convention has stopped putting his likeness on pins given to nominees for the World Fantasy Award. Previously, the event had stopped using a bust of Lovecraft for its actual award. News via Supergee, who does a great job of keeping up with news of fandom.

It's hard to see how the folks at World Fantasy Con could have done anything else, or even why they waited so long after years of controversy. 

But it's a little more difficult for me to see why there's so much focus on a guy who died in 1937 and who apparently made most of his objectionable statements in private. It seems worse to me when the modern Whacko Puppies guy makes racist and sexist statements in public.

I don't know what to think about the allegations against Arthur C. Clarke (for whom a major award is named in Britain) but there seems to be little doubt that Isaac Asimov spent years groping women at science fiction conventions.  Why isn't there anything negative in Asimov's Wikipedia bio?

Off to Penguicon soon

Ada Palmer

It's so exciting to get to go to a science fiction convention! I still manage it periodically, and the weekend of April 28-30 I will be at the latest Penguicon, in the Detroit area. 

Penguicon is billed as a "non-profit, open-source science fiction convention" and it promotes a great deal of open source culture, such as Linux, and in general has a lot of connections to the modern counterculture; at the last Penguicon I was able to attend, in 2012, I went to a presentation on varieties of tarot cards and listened to Creative Commons hip-hop music from the Scrub Club record label as well as attending more usual offerings on science fiction authors and lore. 

I was delighted to see that this year's Penguicon will have Ada Palmer. Another of my favorites, Cory Doctorow will be there, too. There aren't as many SF authors as at the bigger literary conventions, but there will be other notable writers there, such as John Scalzi, and a guy named Ferrett Steinmetz, who is from the Cleveland area and active on Twitter. I'll be promoting the Libertarian Futurist Society and will likely try to promote this blog a bit, too. 

I never got to see Robert Anton Wilson at a SF convention (or anywhere else), but as I've mentioned before, I met Robert Shea at a worldcon in Boston in 1989, a big thrill.

Tuesday links

The Nixon Quantum Hangover. From Butterfly Language. Trump is often compared to Nixon, and Illuminatus! was written during the Nixon presidency.

The Great Letter and the Infinite Process of Self-Embedding. From PQ. Finnegans Wake as a hologram of the universe.

First novels that were the author's best. Via Supergee, who tactfully doesn't add that some would mention Illuminatus!

Two weeks away from the Cosmic Trigger play. 

Adam Gorightly Tweet.