Sue Grafton (1940-2017)

Sue Grafton in 2009. (Creative Commons photo). 

I know there are people who get really upset when pop stars die, but although I miss David Bowie, too, and Tom Petty, and all of the other musicians we've lost, I am particularly sad when a favorite writer dies.

Mystery writer Sue Grafton died Thursday, and my wife is taking it the same way I took the 2013 death of Iain M. Banks and the 2007 death of Robert Anton Wilson — not very well.

It seems to me that a favorite author speaks to you more directly than any other kind of artist.

My wife met Grafton at a mystery convention. I actually never met Wilson or Banks. I got to know them through their books.

New online reading groups for 2018

Bobby Campbell's illustration for the Illuminatus! online reading group

Since its inception several years ago, this blog has sponsored several online reading groups that went through and commented on works by Robert Anton Wilson. All of these are archived on this website, and you can read (or re-read) any of the works we've covered, read the comments, and perhaps add new ones of your own. There were groups for Illuminatus!, Email to the Universe, Cosmic Trigger, Coincidance, Quantum Psychology and Masks of the Illuminati.

For 2018, let's try something different -- discussions of books not written by Robert Anton Wilson. As previously announced, we'll have an online discussion group, led by me, for Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, that will begin in about two weeks.

And then later in the year, RAW scholar and serious Beethoven buff Eric Wagner has volunteered to lead an online discussion group of Joseph Kerman's The Beethoven Quartets. This will allow a deeper exploration of a composer who was important to RAW and is important to many of us.

With the caveat that Eric will lead his discussion any way he sees fit, the format should be the same as in the past. A reasonable number of pages will be assigned each week, the person leading the discussion will post a blog post, and then anyone else who would like can contribute in the comments. I plan to try to cover the Nabokov in 12 weeks of posts, with an additional "reminder" post the week before and perhaps an additional post at the end. Eric would like 18 weeks for his reading group.

There is a RAW connection to Pale Fire -- according to Eric, the book helped inspire RAW's use of footnotes in The Widow's Son. I don't know how many other Nabokov novels RAW read.

How about if we begin the Pale Fire discussion group on Jan. 15? That gives everyone a chance to hunt up a copy. It is still in print, available as an ebook and is widely considered one of the major novels of the last century, so it should be pretty easy to simply find a library copy.

I've been reading Nabokov for years, but I don't pretend to be an "expert." I am currently reading The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer, a biography which has a chapter on Pale Fire (which I haven't gotten to yet.). It's a delightful book. I also plan to get a copy of Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd's book on the work. 

This does not mean an end to discussion groups about RAW's works. Hilaritas Press will reprint many more classics soon, giving us a good excuse to tackle them.

An article on Illuminatus!

Tin House, a literary magazine, has placed an essay from its latest issue online. "On Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy" is by John Fischer, a writer in Brooklyn who has published articles in various literary magazines.

Despite the fact that Illuminatus! plainly comes out of the Sixties, the work also applies to current times, Fischer argues:

If the lunatics are now truly running the asylum, then Shea and Wilson have been warning us for a great many years not just of their potential rise, but of how effective their fantasies of persecution would prove to the ruling class. When every conspiracy is true, anyone is entitled to be a victim. There is little practical difference between cries of “fake news” and the possibility of a lost Nazi battalion hibernating beneath the fictitious Lake Totenkopf. Paranoia claims no political allegiance, only emotional expediency; if Obama is a secret Muslim, then so much the better to distract from the calamity of a lost job or a shuttered factory or a staggering medical bill. In the meantime, our leaders continue to bomb the Middle East with automated flying robots and monitor citizens through glossy thousand-dollar mobile phones, and The Illuminatus! Trilogy seems to understand this, even some forty years after its publication. As it turns out, the conspiracy that runs deepest is the one that we can all plainly see.

Two new books about Timothy Leary

The New York Times runs a review of The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon, and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis. The reviewer, John Williams, apparently not a Leary fan, writes, "It’s fine for many of the more well-known historical events here to serve as understated commentary on today’s world, but the present-tense immersion in the proceedings means that complex social and political issues mostly pass by as background blur. What’s left is a chase in which we end up half-rooting for the escapee to get caught. Much like Leary himself, the book is plenty of zany fun right until it’s not." The book comes out on Jan. 9.

Meanwhile, The Timothy Leary Project: Inside the Great Counterculture Experiment, edited by Jennifer Ulrich, will be out on April 17 next year and has material from the Leary archive at the New York Public Library.

Here is the publisher's description: "The first collection of Timothy Leary’s (1920–1996) selected papers and correspondence opens a window on the ideas that inspired the counterculture of the 1960s and the fascination with LSD that continues to the present. The man who coined the phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out,” Leary cultivated interests that ranged across experimentation with hallucinogens, social change and legal reform, and mysticism and spirituality, with a passion to determine what lies beyond our consciousness. Through Leary’s papers, the reader meets such key figures as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Marshall McLuhan, Aldous Huxley, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Carl Sagan. Author Jennifer Ulrich organizes this rich material into an annotated narrative of Leary’s adventurous life, an epic quest that had a lasting impact on American culture."

I'm thinking I might be more interested in the Ulrich book.

Wednesday links

December Eris of the month.

Occult manuscripts to be digitized, thanks to Dan Brown. 

Setting the record straight on the Emperor Norton obits. 

Ovid's exile revoked. 

Tyler Cowen's favorite jazz from 2017.

Jesse Walker triple feature

Clifford Irving. Source: Official website.

(1) Jesse Walker notes the death on Dec. 19 of Clifford Irving, the author of Fake: the story of Elmyr de Hory: the greatest art forger of our time and also of a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes, and also posts the complete video of Orson Welles "F is for Fake" for Reason magazine's Friday A/V Club. As Jesse notes, Robert Anton Wilson wrote about the movie in Cosmic Trigger 3. Jesse writes, " As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the best movies anyone has ever made, and I can't think of a better way to bid Irving farewell than to watch it." He also notes, "People keep saying we live in a "Post-Truth Era," but I have yet to find any evidence of this Truth Era we've supposedly left behind."

(2) If you have a gift certificate you got for Christmas burning a hole in your pocket, you can read the Reason Magazine 2017 gift guide edited by Jesse for ideas on how to spend it. The contributors are in alphabetical order by last name, so Jesse's contribution runs last, and his last sentence may make you smile.

(3) Scott Santens lists the top 10 basic income articles of 2017, and a piece by Jesse makes the list.

Jesse also is doing his annual "best movies" lists. 

A Discordian Christmas

Adam Gorightly has assembled several Christmas items from the Discordian Archives, including a Cinema Rio Christmas card (pictured.)

Merry Christmas and/or Season's Greetings to everyone.

Season's Greetings from RAW

From Martin Wagner, who says this is Robert Anton Wilson's Season's Greetings to Timothy Leary.

"No date given, but the text on the backside is the summarized message of Leary's Starseed Transmissions from CT, which was written and published 1977," Martin says.

Thanks and Fröhliche Weihnachten to Martin. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Happy Winter Solstice to all of the readers who take time to read this blog.

The FINAL secret of the Illuminati: They like tacos!

My favorite television commercials these days are the Taco Bell spots featuring the Illuminati, the powerful secret society that enjoys American style Mexican food. Lots of jokes, including George Washington making a pyramid with his hands. No idea whether the folks at the ad agency are RAW fans or just have a sense of humor.

There's a couple of different spots. I've posted my favorite, but the other one is pretty good, too, available by searching "Belluminati" on YouTube. Seems like a lot of Illuminatus! lore is referenced in a couple of brief spots for cheap fast food.

Discordian double feature

His royal highness, Emperor Norton. 

A couple of different Discordian items:

(1) An "Emperor Norton's 200th Birthday Bash" has been scheduled for Feb. 7 in San Francisco.

"Tonight we’re going to party like its 1859! Join us for cake and a glass of bubbly to celebrate the 200th birthday of Joshua Abraham Norton, the San Francisco businessman who one day in 1859 proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States and (in 1862) Protector of Mexico ... This event is part of Emperor Norton at 200, a series of exhibits, talks, toasts and other special events organized by The Emperor's Bridge Campaign, in partnership with Bay Area institutions, to mark the bicentennial of Emperor Norton's birth. To learn about other events in the series, please visit http://www.EmperorNortonat200.org."

More here.

(2)  Digging deep into the Discordian archives, Adam Gorightly tells us about a hitherto obscure Discordian figure in his latest Historia Discordia posting, "Love is Alive and Well: The Stan Jamison Files."

You'll just have to read the article, which is a bit difficult to summarize; somehow, we get to nude models who were supposed to wear body paint dedicated to a language provided by a "little green spaceman."

Another 'new' look

A few days ago, I unveiled a new look for the blog. After some tweaking, I was pleased with the new, more contemporary appearance.

Unfortunately, I discovered via emails that (1) People using Adblocker could not see the site and (2) A lot of you use Adblocker. I don't understand why Google would use a template that drives away so many people. But then, there's a lot of things about Google I don't get. At this point, I feel locked in to Blogger — moving the blog would require a lot of work — but while there are aspects of Blogger I like, there are downsides, too.

If hardcore readers of the blog who knew me well were emailing me to complain, I had to assume that people who did not know me and might not have my email address handy also might be having problems. That could be a lot of people. So I felt I had to make a change, again.

I want everyone to have access to the blog, so I've gone to yet another layout, one that's rather similar to what I had before. It will require some further tweaking, but from what I can tell so far, everyone can access it.

I apologize both to the folks who enjoyed my new look and will miss it, and to those who were inadvertently locked out by the new design. Regular blogging will resume soon.

Wilson and Shea in Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal, one of the largest circulation national newspapers in the U.S., had a reference to Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson in the Wall Street Journal Monday.

Here is the first paragraph of "The Google-Facebook Duopoly Threatens Diversity of Thought" by Mark Epstein, published on the editorial page Monday:

"A monopoly on the means of communication," Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson wrote in "Leviathan," their 1975 novel, "may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of 'monopoly in the means of production'." Bear that in mind when you hear this next statistic: In 2017 Google and Facebook have accounted for 84 percent of all digital advertising outside China, including 96 percent of its growth, according to an industry forecast this month, from Zenith, Magna and GroupM.

The rest of the piece develops Epstein's argument that the duopoly threatens freedom of communications. Michael Johnson's 2011 censorship hassles from Google suggest there is something to Epstein's complaint.

Here is a book review which explains more of Epstein's views.

Hat tip, @advantardeodus on Twitter.

Flying Lasagna Enterprises launches

The RAW Trust has launched Flying Lasagna Enterprises, an emporium to sell Robert Anton Wilson related merchandise. Check it out. 

There are T-shirts, coffee mugs, candles and so on, but the signature product highlighted in the announcement about the site are pendants that replicate Robert Anton Wilson's spiral ring. (See illustration above.)  From Rasa's announcement:

"The sterling silver pendants are beautifully crafted and include all of Bob's original 'karmic impressions.' Each unique pendant is hand-stamped on the back with the word "maybe" and the number of the pendant – 1 through 100. The price is $123 – including Free USPS Priority Flat Rate domestic and international shipping. The pendants will be sold in sequential order. In the future, after we sell these pendants, we look forward to making more pendants and replicas of Bob's ring itself. We'll keep you posted on our progress!"

There is also a mascot of sorts for the RAW Trust — Lumi, based on a drawing by Robert Anton Wilson. Rasa asked his panel of advisors for a name for the drawing, and the winner was a suggestion from Michael Johnson, who wrote, "Hey look everyone! It’s Lumi, the Friendly All-Seeing Eye of the Illuminati! Hi Lumi! Don’t tell Lumi what you think: he already knows!"