New documentary on James Joyce's 'Ulysses'

A new documentary from the BBC, "James Joyce's 'Ulysses' ", is being screened at various film festivals. Here is a review praising the film from the New York Sun.  It was directed by Adam Low. "Mr. Low has assembled a murderer’s row of Anglo-Irish authors —   Salman Rushdie, Colm Tóibín, Howard Jacobson, Eimear McBride, and Paul Muldoon all hold forth on Joyce’s genius."

People in the UK can watch the movie here. I haven't been able to figure out yet how people can watch it in the U.S. 

Of course, Robert Anton Wilson read the novel over and over again and often referenced it. 

Books about RAW, some suggestions

I got an email recently from a fellow named Stefan Ciric, who reads the blog and who mentioned that he has had trouble finding books about Robert Anton Wilson, and did I have any suggestions. Here were my suggestions (lightly edited):

An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson, Eric Wagner, is a book of criticism and discussion by Eric Wagner, who knew RAW well. I keep a Kindle version of it on my phone for ready reference. If you buy it, be sure you buy the second edition, which is updated.

Beyond Chaos and Beyond edited by Scott Apel is a collection of RAW's writings for a newsletter RAW and Apel put out, but it also has a long biographical essay on RAW by Apel. I don't know if you are into ebooks or prefer paper, but the Kindle is not very expensive.

High Weirdness by Erik Davis is a three-part book, on Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick, focuses on weird experiences each of the three had in the 1970s. This is a really well done book.

The KLF by John Higgs is an offbeat book about a band that was heavily influenced by RAW, and it is the Higgs book which discusses RAW directly (RAW claimed to have never heard of the band, which is pretty odd.) If you read it,  you might want to read the updated hardcover that came out this year. 

Fly On The Tale Of The Tribe: A Rollercoaster Ride With Robert Anton Wilson by Steven Pratt focuses on the book that RAW outlined at the end of TSOG but apparently never actually wrote. Pratt knows a lot about both RAW and writers such as James Joyce. 

As far as upcoming books, Eric Wagner has completed and is revising Straight Outta Dublin, which focuses on James Joyce and RAW, but has not announced a publisher. I am hoping for some news in the near future. The Gabriel Kennedy biography of RAW, Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson, is scheduled to be issued in August by Strange Attractor Press. In a related vein, I am currently editing a collection of short pieces by Robert Shea, which I think will shed some light on Illuminatus!.

Since I wrote back to Stefan with the above, I have thought of a couple of other books not about RAW at all, but explore topics he was interested in. How the Hippies Saved Physics is all about the physicist friends RAW mentions in Cosmic Trigger, such as Nick Herbert. Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford is a good biography that pays attention to Beethoven's connections to the Illuminati. Any biography of Timothy Leary would provide information about a key influence. Inventor of the Future by Alec Nevala-Lee is the definitive biography of Buckminster Fuller, another influence on RAW.  If you read James Joyce you will notice how Joyce influenced RAW. 

For most of these, I have not given a link; you can Google the titles, and also search the website, as I wrote about most of these. 

What have I forgotten? RAW obviously had a lot of interests. [UPDATE: See Spookah's comment, below, for books by Adam Gorightly and Timothy Leary that I have blogged about here but forgot to mention.]

I asked Stefan to tell me a little about himself, he wrote (in part), "I'm a 30 something year old man, interested in many things, and for some years I've been also interested in reading, mostly about philosophy, psychology, religion or spirituality and things of that kind. I can't remember where exactly Wilson came under the radar, but I know I was hooked on his work pretty much immediately, his humor, humility, general style and attitude really got me."

A good 1986 interview with Arlen and Robert Wilson

The above is an excellent interview, dating to 1986 in Ireland but only posted a few weeks ago on YouTube, apparently by Martin Wagner. It is noteworthy for including Arlen Wilson, and is  nicely timed for the release of the Hilaritas Press edition of Chaos and Beyond, which has some of Arlen Wilson's writing.

The video was called to my attention by Oz Fritz, who writes, "I saw this amazing video with RAW and Arlen shot in their home in Ireland in 1986. It's the first footage I've ever seen of Arlen and it reveals a dynamic with their marriage. In some ways she's the opposite of RAW. It's mostly her for the first 20 minutes then RAW joins in. Lots of great stuff - he talks about what's behind Prometheus Rising; they talk about Bob Geldolf and Live Aid, E.J. Gold and much more. The interviewer, Faustin Bray (a friend of a friend) asks some really good questions toward the end."

There are also a couple of nice bits that shed light on Illuminatus! And Arlen says that she stopped reading RAW's books in manuscript and waits for them to be published because he is sensitive to feedback. And you also hear discussion about a quote from one of RAW's books that offended Arlen, although RAW defends it. 

New book on Wilhelm Reich

A new book which takes a fresh look at Wilhelm Reich will be released in the spring: Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers: An American Tragedy, by James Reich. (The author is no relation of his subject.) Here is part of the book blurb:

"The convenient myth of Wilhelm Reich is that he 'lost his mind' in the early 1950s, if not before, and that the last seven years of his life and work — the orgone and radiation experiments, the cloudbuster, and flying saucer intrigues — present an embarrassment. Even the counterculture that embraced Reich, not least William S. Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, tended to distort his theory. The psychosis attached to Reich by his detractors was the culmination of decades of scapegoating by psychoanalysts, Nazis, communists, and conservatives. But Reich’s environmental and Cold War preoccupations and his slow-burning fascination with UFO phenomena were not signs of a madness incipient since his break with Sigmund Freud. They anticipated and reflected much in the American psyche."

More here.

Hat tip: Joseph Matheny on X. 

At least four more RAW books coming from Hilaritas

Hilaritas Press apparently is working on at least four new Robert Anton Wilson titles.

The small press publishing imprint of the Robert Anton Wilson Trust already has issued a title this year, the new edition of Chaos and Beyond. 

And Rasa recently provided me an update on two books that are pretty far along, a new edition of RAW's Reality Is What You Can Get Away With and a reprint of Timothy Leary's Terra II: The Starseed Transmission.

During the recent podcast featuring Scott Apel, timed to promote the new release of Chaos and Beyond, the podcast host, Mike Gathers, discussed two more RAW collections that are in the works, one focused on politics and one on magick.

At about two minutes into the podcast, Mike explains that Rasa deserves the credit for what Hilaritas has done, then mentions that he himself did play a role in putting together last year's Lion of Light. 

"We're working on a new one now," Mike says. "Cuz there's no shortage of stuff that we can pull out of magazines and put into print. We're looking at a politics book and a magick book and there's probably a  half dozen good ideas."

I don't know anything else yet about the "half dozen good ideas," although there's apparently been some discussion about a book that consists entirely of interviews, see below. 

There's a good discussion in the podcast about RAW's failure to maintain copies of many of his short pieces, forcing RAW fans such as Mike (who founded RAWilsonfans.org) and Martin Wagner to collect such material. 

It's also known that Hilaritas is looking to reprint The Sex Magicians; see for example my interview with Rasa last year. From that interview:

About the reports on planned new titles, Rasa wrote, "Yes, we are working on a few ideas. The 'RAW Politics' book (working title) has been picking up speed with Mike Gathers, Chad Nelson and Jesse Walker all working to get a collection of RAW articles together."

About other possible books that haven't been announced yet, Rasa wrote, "Two books that we’ve been thinking about for a while are also on my mind recently: Playboy’s Book of Forbidden Words, and The Sex Magicians. I just last week scanned Forbidden Words. RAW obtained the copyright for that book when he left Playboy. 

"Mike Gathers had a couple ideas for compilations of RAW essays for a few other books: RAW on Magick and RAW Interviews are in that list. We’re still thinking about those."

If you look at the Hilaritas Press home page, you can see that the initial plan was to put out new editions of many of RAW's titles. Despite the fact that everything on that list has been published except for Reality Is What You Can Get Away With, it doesn't look like the well will run dry anytime soon. 

Natural Law Or Don’t Put A Rubber On Your Willy And Other Writings From A Natural Outlaw originally was conceived as a "politics book" but eventually went into a different direction, see this interview with Chad Nelson, e.g., "We shelved several of the more overtly political tracts and focused exclusively on Wilson's writings on model agnosticism. The project really became fun when we made that pivot explicit. Wilson scholars know how much model agnosticism underlies his worldview, so the idea that there would be a newly published book of essays and interviews spanning five decades where we get to see him riff on that theme very directly, over and over again, in a variety of different ways, was one of the coolest moments for me."

A bit of news on the new RAW biography

Robert Anton Wilson (from the RAW Experimental website)

Prop Anon reveals a new detail about his new RAW biography: "The bibliography for Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson is currently 32 pages long."

This is a good example of why I am excited about the new biography: Everything I have learned suggests that a great deal of research went into the upcoming book, scheduled to come out August 6 this year. See this website for available details and preorder information.

No cover reveal yet (I checked). I'll provide updates as they become available. 

Writer Ben Graham releases fiction

Ben Graham (photo from Substack)

Writer Ben Graham  has put out a new issue of his newsletter, The Urban Spaceman, and he announces that he's issuing part one of  his upcoming five-part novel as a new short book:

"I have a new book out that you can buy. Electric Tibet is the first volume of American Underground, my projected 180,000-word psychedelic odyssey through the twentieth century’s magical counterculture. It’s written in the form of five interconnected novellas, and I’ve decided to self-publish the first as a kind of white label ‘underground edition’ to raise interest, generate critical feedback, and hopefully give me a bit of financial help while I finish the project.

"As I’ve written on the back cover blurb, Electric Tibet is an occult reimagining of the January 1967 Human Be-In in San Francisco that gave birth to the Summer of Love. It's available as a paperback or ebook and is roughly 34,000 words long. I’d love to hear what you think of it. You can get both versions exclusively from my Big Cartel site. More information on American Underground can be found here."

Ben has more at his newsletter, including a link to his recent piece on a classic Donovan album. 

More information about Ben here. 

Hilaritas releases Scott Apel podcast

The Hilaritas podcast this month features writer D. Scott Apel, Robert Anton Wilson's old friend. Apel was also the person who handled the actual publishing behind RAW's "Trajectories" newsletter. Here's the blurb: "In this episode, Mike Gathers chats with Scott Apel – writer, movie lover, and long time friend of RAW. Scott was the original editor and publisher of the new Hilaritas Press release of Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories. Scott also created Beyond Chaos and Beyond, which Scott describes in this episode."

I plan to listen to this today. 

The Hugo Awards are dealing with a big scandal

The Hugo Award is the oldest and the most prestigious award in the literary subculture of science fiction. But the awards given out at the last year's Worldcon, held in Chengdu, China,  have come under a cloud. 

R.F. Kuang's Babel, which won the Nebula Award and the Locus Award and which seemed to be an obvious front runner for the Hugo, was not even a finalist. And now it has emerged that the book was not a finalist, not because it failed to get enough nominations, but because it was ruled "not eligible." No explanation has been provided for the ruling.

Best fan writer nominee Paul Weimer also was ruled "not eligible," and Xiran Jay Zhao, a nominee for the Astounding Award (i.e., best new writer) also got the "not eligible" treatment, also without any explanation. The Kuang controversy is getting the most attention, but these are also important awards. 

Here's John Scalzi's blog post about the mess. He has links for those who want more. And  here is the report on File 770, a blog which covers science fiction news. In the latter article, note the shameful non-answer given by  Dave McCarty, identified as "a Chengdu Worldcon vice-chair and co-head of the Hugo Awards Selection Executive Division," when File 770's Mike Glyer asked for an explanation. 

There was a long delay in releasing the actual Hugo numbers, which doesn't exactly feel like transparency, either. Since there's been no explanation for what happened, we can't immediately assume Chinese Communist censorship, but the situation doesn't look good. (Scalzi: "I will note that at this point everything is at the 'what the hell?!?' stage, and the rumors and speculation are just that, rumor and speculation. With that said, something sure seems hinky here, and no one is very happy about it.")

There have been other controversies involving the Hugo Awards in the past, but this already feels like the worst ever. 

R.F. Kuang has posted a statement, and she says, "I wish to clarify that no reason for Babel's ineligibility was given to me or my team. I did not decline a nomination, as no nomination was offered." And here is Paul Weimer's response. 

People who want to read Dave McCarty being an jerk and refusing to answer questions ("Folks asking for more are not going to get it from me") can look at his Facebook post.  (This is his "explanation": "After reviewing the Constitution and the rules we must follow, the administration team determined those works/persons were not eligible.")

For the record, McCarty denies Chinese officials were involved: "Nobody has ordered me to do anything. Nobody is changing decisions I have made. Folks can ask Helen how well I take orders and if she thinks I would have stayed on if such were happening.

There was no communication between the Hugo administration team and the Chinese government in any official manner."

The ManKind Project

My brother-in-law, Kevin, died suddenly on Nov. 28. He was a great guy, the death was very sudden and unexpected, and I am still trying to make sense of what happened.

For some weeks before he died, Kevin had mentioned that he was involved with a group called The ManKind Project. It apparently involved going off  on retreats. I didn't really get a clear sense of what the group was about.

I have been reading Lion of Light, the new RAW book on Aleister Crowley that Hilaritas published last year, following along with the online reading group at the Jechidah blog. As I was close to the end, I recently went ahead and finished the book, reading the R. Michael Johnson piece, and then read Rasa's bit about the cover and the biographies at the back of the book about the contributors.

I noticed this sentence in the Mike Gathers bio: "He currently works coaching men in creating a meaningful life while volunteering as a leader and administrator in the ManKind Project."

This spurred me to do a bit more research, and I discovered there's a Wikipedia article about the group. 

If you look at the article, there's a section called "New Warrior Training Adventure," which purports to describe the retreats that the group holds. It says, 

"MKP states:

The New Warrior Training Adventure is a modern male initiation and self-examination. [...] It is the "hero's journey" of classical literature and myth that has nearly disappeared in modern culture.

"MKP states that those who undertake this journey pass through three phases characteristic to virtually all historic forms of male initiation: descent, ordeal and return."

There's also a graphical representation of the hero's journey, a public domain image, which I reproduce at the top of this blog post.

To my surprise, the details of the initiation process and the hero's journey sounded very familiar to me, through reading the works of Robert Anton Wilson, who spends quite a bit of time describing initiation processes, both inside masonic organizations and outside them.

To be clear, I still don't know much about The Mankind Project, and I express no opinion about the group. But I have become curious about it. 

Watch the Cosmic Trigger play slideshow

 A slideshow of images from Daisy Campbell's Cosmic Trigger play, while the "Eight Circuits Song" is sung. See the YouTube link for full credits, but a couple of snippets:

"All images are from the Cosmic Trigger Play and supporting events at Camp & Furnace in Liverpool and The Lost Theatre, London in November 2014 and The Cockpit Theatre in 2017."

"Music: Eight Circuits Song from the play (prison scene with RAW visiting Tim Leary), performed by Occult Hardware Labs ft Jethro Skinner & Oliver Senton (written by Rob Burnham, Fayann Smith and Daisy Campbell)"

The video was made to promote the Hilaritas Press book that published Daisy's play. Everyone should buy it and read it! Here is my review. 

Big sale at Peakrill Press

 This just in: Peakrill Press, mentioned in yesterday's blog post, is holding a January sale. Prices are 20% off when you buy two or more books or zines.

Or use MYC10 for a 10% discount at the Peakrill Press shop. 

Dan Sumption is literally snowed in, so you can cheer him up if you buy something. 

I can certainly recommend the Mycelium Parish News 2023. James Burt kindly sent me a copy. It's a handsome zine with a great deal of information about Discordian news, events, publications, podcasts and music. As John Higgs wrote, "It’s a yearly compendium of books, events, podcasts, interviews, music etc that originated from, or is of interest to, the Discordian-adjacent counterculture. If you’ve missed any great stuff, basically, you’ll find it listed here." It's £2.30. but if you grab it now, you can take advantage of the discount.

One  nice feature of the Mycelium Parish News 2023, and an example of the care that Sumption and Burt put into the publication: For each of the items that is online, the URL is listed, but the zine also lists an easy to type URL using the URL shortener eris.oribific.com. This blog, for example, is available at https://eris.orbific.com/09. "RAWIllumination.net" is not really a very long URL, but in many cases, this is a real convenience.

I like to think I cover a lot of ground this blog, but when I finish this post, I'll be signing up for a couple of email newsletters I've missed. There's quite a bit in the zine I did not know about; the Discordian/RAW fandom movement is doing a lot. 

Check out Peakrill Press

King Arthur and Merlin bravely confront a terrifying kitten. 

Here is a publisher worth checking out: Peakrill Press, which puts out Discordian books and books that in general would be of interest to RAW fans; please check out the website, where you can get more information about publications such as Mycelium Parish News 2023 and The Lost Doctor Annual. There's an upcoming project called True Clown Stories.  It is by James Burt, and it is "a collection of abhorrent short stories about the real lives of clowns." 

Peakrill Press is owned and run by Dan Sumption, about whom I can provide this: "Dan Sumption is a writer, publisher and rambler based on a remote moor in the far North of England. Dan runs Peakrill Press, and his interests include everything."

Mr. Sumption has a nice piece up at his publishing site about some of the 80 books he read last year, including works by John Higgs and Robert K.G. Temple, and he also has a Substack newsletter, Mycoleum Mind.

I have mentioned some of Peakrill Press' publications on this blog, but this one was new to me: King Arthur vs. Devil Kitty, "a whimsical illustrated retelling of a 12th Century tale in which King Arthur battles a giant kitten."