RAW cites Mezz Mezzrow

Mezz Mezzrow in 1946 (public domain photo)

Chapter Four of Starseed Signals, "Beyond the Conditioned Reflex," had some surprises for me, among them a reference to jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow:

"An example of sensory consciousness can be found in jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow's Really the Blues, in which he tells of a fire in a building where he and some friends were smoking the weed. While everybody else fled, the pot-heads calmly discussed the beauty of the spectacle, the humerous rush of the non-stoned people, and the details of when they should make their own exit. (They did get out alive ....)"

Mezz Mezzrow (1899-1972), apparently not well-remembered these days, was an interesting character.  A white jazz musician, he (according to Wikipedia) decided from the moment he heard jazz he "was going to be a Negro musician, hipping [teaching] the world about the blues the way only Negroes can." He married a black woman, moved to Harlem and, when he was jailed for marijuana possession with intent to distribute he insisted on being moved to the section of the jail housing black prisoners. He was well known for selling marijuana and Louis Armstrong was one of his customers.

Mezzrow was devoted to Dixieland style traditional jazz (he apparently did not embrace later developments such as bebop) and made many recordings, although apparently opinion is divided about his merits as a clarinet player. Some of his recordings are available on Freegal, the library music streaming service, and I have been listening to some of the tracks, and they sound OK to me. 

RAW's implied endorsement of his memoir, Really the Blues, co-written with Bernard Wolfe, makes me want to read it; it seems interesting, judging from the reviews I've seen. 

Later in Starseed, Wilson writes, "The first pot-smoker I ever knew was a black jazz musician who was my friend in the late 1950s" and shares an anecdote from the musician about what smoking pot is like. Whenever I see RAW mentioning his black jazz musician friend, I always wonder if it's a name I would recognize. 

Bonus hipster cultural note 

Diane di Prima in 2004 (Creative Commons photo)

Poet Diane di Prima, a poet originally associated with the Beats, has died; you can read the New York Times obituary or the Washington Post obit.

While I cannot prove that Robert Anton Wilson knew or read di Prima, they overlap culturally in all sorts of ways. RAW certainly was familiar with Beat writers. Di Prima lived for awhile at Timothy Leary's establishment at Millbrook. She also spent much of her life in San Francisco, which in fact is where she died. 

And still, the name nagged at me. Where else had I seen it?

Another synchronicity: After I spilled tea Friday night, my wife gave me something that had been sitting for months on a kitchen chair. It was a holiday card sent to me by Christian Greer, and it had this poem by di Prima:

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #51

As soon as we submit
to a system based on causality, linear time
we submit, again, to the old values, plunge again
into slavery. Be strong. We have the right to make
the universe we dream. No need to fear "science"
                                                                   grovelling
apology for things as they are, ALL POWER
TO JOY, which will remake the world. 

Prop Anon talks to Grant Morrison about 'Illuminatus' (and other RAW topics)

Grant Morrison (Creative Commons photo)

Prop Anon interviews Grant Morrison for Mondo 2000, so you likely will want to read the whole thing, but I will highlight a Q and A about the planned Illuminatus! TV series (if anyone has an update on it, please advise): 

In December 2019, Deadline announced that your partner on Happy! Brian Taylor was going to be the showrunner for Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’ Illuminatus! as a TV show.

There seem to all these great stories of my youth now being made into television shows.

GRANT MORRISON: I think there’s a bunch of challenging stuff coming out and these shows add to that. I think people are looking for new myths to help us make sense of the curious times we’re in. I think you need those kinds of stories and works that are coming at our problems from all angles. Think of the opening of Illuminatus! and it’s though the eyes of a squirrel and through George Dorn and a bunch of other characters. There’s a multi-prismatic viewpoint of the world. And I think the minute they can start capturing that sort of thing in TV, showing it through the eyes of all kinds of different characters with different viewpoints and different world view and reality tunnels, it will be pretty interesting.

It’s the fractalization of the media — that’s what made it all possible. There was a time you just couldn’t get away with any of this. I remember a time I was pitching Doom Patrol to Warner’s and their response was that this is ‘wackadoodle’ and now it’s one of their best and most successful shows. And it’s totally based off the stuff that me and Richard Case did with that comic 30 years ago. Stuff people told me would never be adapted, could never be adapted. I think that the success of things like Doom Patrol, or Umbrella Academy or The Boys shows the way that people’s imaginations have been expanded by more fantastic or quirky shows, opening the doors to wilder and more personal stuff.

[There is more discussion about RAW at the above link -- The Management.]

New Daisy Campbell news

Daisy is talking to you. 

 Lots of news from Daisy Campbell, including a new "Get Your Show Written" online class for those of you who missed the first class and various shows, events, books and more from her circle; click the link and sign up for her newsletter. "Rural Gothic Samhain Surprise" is on Halloween so obviously it's coming up fast, and it features "Obscure Devon Witchcraft Cases" and "Viking Zombies." 

More 'Starseeds Signals' notes

1. On Twitter, Charles Faris (who has contributed to this blog, and helped copyedit Starseed Signals) spots something interesting:  A recent article at Far Out describes the day that Bob Dylan met the Beatles. This encounter involved Dylan turning the Beatles on to marijuana, and after getting stoned, Paul McCartney asked for a pencil and paper to write down his resulting deep thoughts. The next day, Paul read what he wrote: "There are seven levels."

This is amusing, because Starseed Signals in Chapter 3 talks about Leary's "7-dimensional game model" and Chapter Four  has a detailed table Leary's "seven levels of energy consciousness." 

In addition, Leary's Eight Circuit model was originally seven circuits, and Chapter Six of Starseed Signals does into detail outlining the seven. 

2. John Higgs' introduction to Starseed Signals mentions the efforts of Elon Musk to make some of Leary's ideas a reality and says it would be interesting to know if Musk read Leary. 

When I interviewed R.U. Sirius back in 2015, I brought up Musk, and he responded with a suggestion I still think is a good idea: 

RAWIllumination.net: You mentioned Leary and RAW's interest in space migration and life extension. It seems to me that Peter Thiel and Elon Musk deserve credit for trying to make these things happen, but I wondered what your take was.

SIRIUS: They do deserve credit. It would be wonderful if there was enough wealth flowing through society at all levels so that some of these things could be crowdfunded — owned and controlled by groups of people from all walks of life (SpaceX works with NASA, so in a sense that is happening via taxes). Thiel and Musk are visionaries (Musk, particularly, strikes me as a well-balanced altruistic entrepreneur) and we’re lucky they’re reaching towards these goals. But it’s also worth noting that there are lots of brilliant visionaries and we need to liberate the potentials of greater numbers of people to make this stuff happen faster.  Post scarcity could lead to crowdsourcing at an undreamt of scale.

An early review of 'The Starseed Signals' at RAW Semantics

I have stuck to my plan to read The Starseed Signals one chapter at a time, so it will be a little while before I finish the book. Brian Dean at RAW Semantics, however, has already read the whole book and has written a blog post discussing some of the highlights of the book. 

He picks out many highlights. I am having trouble extracting a nut graph that summarizes his review, but perhaps his most significant sentence is this: "I intended reading only part of ‘Starseed’ over the weekend, but I read it all." 

It's not a perfect book so far for me, but it is an interesting one that is giving me a lot to think about and which has many wonderful passages that are finally seeing the light of day after being hidden for decades. So I'll just send you over to Brian's review as I continue to read the book myself. 

Prometheus Rising discussion and exercise group, Week Three

[In addition to this blog post, Eric sent me a link to this article, which might help those who, like me are struggling to find a quarter. -- The Management.]

By Eric Wagner, special guest blogger 

Bob designed the exercises in Prometheus Rising to weaken the existing imprints and to help the experimenter become a self-metaprogrammer, reimprinting the nervous system as each individual sees fit.   Originally when I bought the book in 1985 I read up to the end of Chapter 1.  I decided to stop until I had done the Chapter 1 exercises for six months.  Yeah, right.  After some brief attempts to find a quarter, I broke down and read the rest of the book.  I couldn’t bear to let an unread Wilson book sit on my shelf.  I felt like Snoopy in an old Peanuts cartoon where Charlie Brown left Snoopy two bowls of food.  Charlie Brown told Snoopy his family planned to take a trip so he brought Snoopy food for tomorrow.  After Charlie Brown left Snoopy struggled with himself and finally snarfed down both bowls thinking, “I’d hate myself if tomorrow never came.” 

Well, I gluttonously devoured the rest of Prometheus Rising.  Incidentally, this led to the formation of my first Finnegans Wake study group.  I had purchased a copy of the Wake on Joyce’s birthday the previous year (2/2/1984), but I had had very little success reading it.  Reading Bob mention his own Finnegans Wake study group in Prometheus Rising led me to start my own.

I graduated from ASU June 1985 and then flew to the Ezra Pound Centennial at the University of Maine, Orono, meeting Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Hugh Kenner, etc. Next I flew to Europe, visiting Ingolstadt, Bavaria, on July 23.  I had kept up my half-hearted search for quarters, but I put it on hiatus while away from the USA.  (It seems reasonable for those not living in the USA to look for a local coin instead, as Damian Lee suggested.)

I did many of the exercises in PR over the next three years.  Then in the summer of 1988 I decided to try to finish sombunal the exercises I hadn’t done yet.  Around that time I also began to associate the days of the month with the chapters of Prometheus Rising.  On the first of the month I’d try to do some exercises from Chapter 1, on the second Chapter 2, etc., up until the 19th.  On the first of the next month I’d start again.  I even wrote a long poem as a sequel to Prometheus Rising called Big Trouble in Little Blandings (Reggie Theus Rising) with sections numbered 20 to 31.  The poem dealt with a poetry contest held on a space colony.  (Obsessed with basketball at the time, I published a poetry/basketball zine called noon blue apples.  Reggie Theus played for the Atlanta Hawks, conjuring images of Horus.  I also found it significant that the NBA had 23 teams at the time.)

I sometimes feel a little like Kinbote in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. I spent decades obsessed with the writings of Robert Anton Wilson, and even after Wilson’s death I keep writing myself into his story.

I wonder why Bob told us to look for quarters. Perhaps he wanted us to notice how much trouble we had sticking to the exercise. This month I’ve noticed that I know that I only look for quarters intermittently when I go to the store. I think about it from time to time, but shopping, woolgathering, and social distancing often dominate my thoughts. I wonder how many quarters on the ground I have missed over the last month. Over the last 35 years?

Prometheus Rising begins with

DEDICATED

                                                           To

                                                            Timothy Leary

                                                            &

                                                            William S. Burroughs

                                                            dove sta memoria

The last three words come from Guido Cavalcanti’s Canzone “Donna Mi Priegha”. “Dove sta memoria” means “where memory liveth”. In the poem a lady asks Cavalcanti about the nature of love. In his discussion Cavalacanti says, in Ezra Pound’s translation:

            Where memory liveth,

                        it takes its state

We often think of love as residing in the heart, but Cavalcanti sees love taking its state in the memory. This makes me think of Marcel Proust and his ideas about memory.

 

Sunday links

Early review of Starseed by RAW biographer Prop Anon: "I read this book.  It's classic RAW material. For those of you fiending some RAW, this is a good read." 

Oral history of Timothy Leary. 

A new Chinese bookstore. 

Skeptic James Randi has died. 

New afterword for The Future Starts Here by John Higgs.  (For the just released paperback). 

What Section 230 really says.

Timothy Leary comic book posted online

All sorts of events happened online Thursday during the centennial of Timothy Leary's birth and I mentioned some of them here, including of course the publication of The Starseed Signals, but there was one more opportunity which I thought I should mention.

Rene Walter posted an entire Timothy Leary comic book online, Neurocomics. After I read the posting at iO9, I went to the flickr site where the comic is posted.  An ad popped up in the way when I tried to read the comic online, but fortunately the whole thing can be downloaded and saved, and that's what I did before safely storing it and then reading the whole thing Friday night. It's all about the Eight Circuit model, space migration, etc., so it's topical to the release of Starseed. Art by Pete Von Sholly, script by Leary, Von Sholly and George DiCaprio (Leonardo's dad, apparently.)

A few notes on 'Starseed Signals'

 Rasa (I assume) checking out The Starseed Signals. Note the sitar on the wall, which Rasa plays for his band, Starseed. 

The centennial of Timothy Leary's birthday yesterday was marked in all kinds of ways (thanks again, Eric, for that piece) but for many of us the big news was the official announcement of the publication of The Starseed Signals -- Link Between Worlds: A RAW Perspective on Timothy Leary PhD. 

A few notes:

1. Given that the book would have been lost otherwise (RAW did a terrible job of taking care of his papers) we all owe a debt of gratitude to the people who preserved it and other documents in the Discordian archives: Greg Hill, Dr. Bob Newhart and, in particular, the current keeper and custodian, Adam Gorightly. It was Adam who discovered The Starseed Signals and brought it to light. I want to be sure and thank Adam. 

2. Rasa and his helpers worked hard to prepare the book from RAW's manuscript, and there are lots of nice extras, including Rasa's "A note from the publisher" piece at the beginning on the history of the manuscript, John Higgs' typically thoughtful introduction, two interviews of Leary by RAW and correspondence between RAW and Gregory Hill.  (Careful readers of this blog probably knew before almost anyone else that Higgs wrote the introduction for the book, see this interview, third answer.)

I don't know all of the details yet, but I know a lot of work was put into preparing the book, including working with amoeba on the cover, copyediting done by Charles Faris and Iain Spence, gracious assistance from Adam Gorightly (who did not, after all, get the chance to bring out his own edition of the work), even help on a point of physics from Nick Herbert.

3. For further background on the history of Starseed, see Adam Gorightly's "lost" forward to the "lost" edition of the "lost" book. 

4. As with many of the official announcements from Hilaritas, perhaps the best part is Christina Pearson's latest RAW memoir. This time, we get a great Leary anecdote and some candid information about the Wilson family at the time the book was written. So check out the announcement, if you haven't seen it yet, and sign up for the Hilaritas Press mailing list. 

5. In his introduction, Higgs says of the book (and the time it was written), "This was not Leary's finest hour, and neither was it Robert Anton Wilson's." Probably best not to raise expectations too high for a book that RAW himself did not attempt very vigorously to sell to a publisher, but the writing comes from probably my favorite period of RAW's writing life, the middle period, and I am very excited to have it. Don't look for a review from me anytime soon, however; I plan to read it slowly, probably a chapter a day. (I read Chapter One Thursday night and enjoyed it.)

Breaking news -- 'Starseed Signals' is out

 

More Friday, but here is the official announcement from Hilaritas Press.

Eric Wagner on Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary in custody in 1972 (public domain government photo)

Timothy Leary, October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996

By Eric Wagner, special guest blogger

Tim Leary had a profound influence on Robert Anton Wilson. Recently I read a bit from his early book Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality and from his late book Surfing the Conscious Net. Man did he go through some changes. I also read a bit from Robert Greenfield’s rather hostile biography. I glanced at some relatively recent articles about Leary online. I don’t think any of them captured the unique intelligence I have gathered from Leary’s books. My favorite take on Leary comes from Bob Wilson in the piece “Lighting Out for the Territory” in Beyond Chaos and Beyond. I remember loving that piece when it first appeared in Trajectories in 1996 shortly after Tim’s death.

I heard Tim speak seven times, and I got to talk with him a few times. We never hit it off, but he still had a great effect on me.

“He told me that when they put him solitary confinement, ‘I realized it was either going to be hell or a learning experience. So I set out to make it a learning experience.’” – Robert Anton Wilson, Beyond Chaos and Beyond. This reminds me of my attitude towards social isolation in 2020.

Boing Boing also is marking today's centennial of Timothy Leary's birth. This 1995 photo of Leary with Carla Sinclair and Mark Fraunfelder is from one of the posts.

RAW in Gallery magazine

Hugh Crane (Twitter account here) sent me some photographs of the first issue of Gallery magazine, a Playboy imitator, and there are some interesting RAW features.

Table of contents. Notice contributions from both Robert Anton Wilson and Simon Moon.

The RAW story in the issue, "I Opening." Here is my information about the story: "I Opening is all the Hugh Crane/Cagliostro content from Schrodinger’s Cat condensed into a short story. RAW changed the story a little for the book, including a different ending where Crane’s death is a mystery." You can read the text of the story. 

Page with RAW's contributor's biography. It says, "Wilson, who plots the life and death of a Reichian rebel in his story I Opening presents us with the following when asked for a 'biographical paragraph.' 'Robert Anton Wilson was born in Hong Kong and majored in electrical engineering at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. More interested in non-Euclidean geometries and Cabalistic numerology, he never practiced as an engineer but has worked as hospital orderly, laboratory technician, salesman, advertising copywriter, astrology columnist, mentalist in a carnival and editor of a variety of magazines. His first novel Illuminatus or Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus Inc. will soon be published by Dell. 'My writing,' he says, 'Is based on my obsessive concern with one fact: if I don't have more money by Tuesday, they'll turn off the heat. I can't say if my stories are realism or fantasy. To me, they're logical developments of such great American institutions as the Put On, the Whooper Cushion, the Joy Buzzer, or the Hot Foot."

The masthead; I did not see names that were familiar to me. 

Related: Supergee on the connection between men's magazines and Wilson and Shea. 

RAW's favorite president

John Adams, who in Nature's God defends Captain Preston in a trial over the Boston Massacre. "Adams had won, then, because he sincerely believed Captain Preston had acted in self-defense and that the cause of the Colonies must not depart one jot from pure justice as he understood it." (From Chapter Six). 

Here is a trivia question appropriate for a looming presidential election: Can you name Robert Anton Wilson's favorite U.S. president?

After I posted a link to the article on how Reason magazine staffers will vote, Jesse Walker realized he had never told me about a couple of Reason pieces that Wilson contributed a few sentences to. One was an "Iraq progress report" roundup dating to 2006, and the other, a 2004 survey on which presidential candidate Reason staffers and other prominent libertarians planned to vote for, similar to the piece I linked to last week. 

In the latter, participants such as RAW answer four questions, including favorite president, and here's Wilson's answer on that one: "John Adams, because he didn't trust anybody in politics, including himself."