Richard Powers has a composer obsession, too

I have been reading the new Richard Powers novel, Playground, and I'm on page 141. Johann Sebastian Bach hasn't put in an appearance yet. 

I remarked once again yesterday about the role of Beethoven in RAW's works, and then I realized that Bach plays a similar role in Powers' works. This is most obvious in The Gold Bug Variations, which has a lot about Bach's Goldberg Variations (one of the main characters listens to Glenn Gould's famous 1950s recordings) but Bach is mentioned in many of Powers' other books. 

An interest in classical music also is a theme in Powers' books, most obviously in Orfeo. Here is my interview with Powers about that book. The official Richard Powers website has links to music mentioned in Orfeo. 

Of course, an interest in classical music pervades RAW's "Historical Illuminatus" books, and Mozart even appears as a minor character. 

I've read other works of fiction that mention classical music and specific composers, but when I tried to think of another modern writer who focuses in much of his/her work on one particular composer, I came up dry.

If it isn't obvious, I'm a huge Powers fan. I've read 11 of his 14 novels so far. Powers has won a National Book Award, a Pulitzer, a MacArthur "genius" grant, etc., so he's a good example of a writer embraced by the literary establishment, as opposed to RAW, who spent his life being pretty much ignored by it. I guess the issue is that RAW wasn't published as a "mainstream" writer, but it seems a shame he never got discovered by one of the major literary review magazines, got a lot of press in major newspapers or came up for any of the major literary awards. (Playground was listed as a nominee for the Booker Award even before it came out!)

Footnote: Classical music doesn't loom large in the works of Robert Shea (most of his novels are set in the Middle Ages, preceding such music) but from what I can tell reading his nonfiction bits, he had a particular interest in Mozart. 

Beethoven in 'Cosmic Trigger 2'

Alfred Brendel. (Photo  from official website). 

My fascination with Beethoven continues. I decided a few days ago to listen to all of Beethoven 32 piano sonatas again, in order. I have made it through #5 so far, so obviously I have a ways to go. I am mostly listening to renditions by Alfred Brendel, but for certain performances I am switching to Sviatoslav Richter and Angela Hewitt. (Richter is my favorite piano player, but he never recorded a set of all of Beethoven's sonatas, a good example of how Richter was a maverick and would not do what he was "supposed" to do.)

Robert Anton Wilson's books are peppered with references to Beethoven. My search of the text of Cosmic Trigger 2 (I also have a paper copy, but a Kindle is useful for searches) shows four references to him. For example, in the "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" chapter, RAW writes, "A movie theatre is the best place to learn the true meaning of Plato's parable of the prisoners in the cave, who accept shadows as reality. Every artist who moves us, from a movie maker to Beethoven or Shakespeare, is a bit of a hypnotist."

I am intrigued by another of the references to Beethoven. In the "Attack of the Dog-Faced Demons" chapter, RAW writes, "In a farm in Mendocino, 1972, I was preparing for the Mass of the Phoenix, a ritual designed by Aleister Crowley in which the magician attempts to activate his "True Will." I had taken 250 micrograms of Acid, played some Beethoven, and, when I felt ready, I went to my makeshift Altar and began the invocation."

Why would RAW play Beethoven as part of his preparation? Does anyone want to comment? 

Ralph Abraham has died

Ralph Abraham. Photo posted on X.com by the Mondo 2000 account. 

Ralph Abraham, a California math professor interested in hip culture, has died at age  88. He wrote books on mathematics and philosophy and was interested in psychedelics and lectured on chaos theroy. Many people in the Robert Anton Wilson community have been mourning his death,  here are quotes taken from X.com:

R.U. Sirius: "Ralph Abraham RIP ... the brilliant mathematician and friend to Mondo 2000 et. al. (my recollection is that he wrote for Reality Hackers) master of chaos theory in performance, music, collabs w Terence McKenna he left us at 70. In my limited experience, he was exceptionally kind."

Bobby Campbell: "Ralph Abraham - Dove Sta Memoria. He was the coolest and nicest mathematical genius imaginable. He always answered my silly questions in such an uplifting way that broadened my horizons. May the trialogues never end :)))"

Ted Hand: "RIP Ralph Abraham. I had the pleasure of getting lunch with him, William Sarill, and the late Juan Acosta-Urquidi in Santa Cruz a decade or so back. He told us about a book club he had going with Terence McKenna reading PKD novels. I had been meaning to interview him about that."

Joseph Matheny: "RIP Ralph Abraham. One of my most influential mentors and friends...I worked with Raph on several projects, including going to the Ross School in 2000 and showing students how to author a then-emerging tech video format, DVD. I also often invoked his books (especially "Chaos, Gaia, Eros," a formative book for me) and his concept of The Spiral Curriculum, embodied in his creation for The Ross Academy." (Follow the link thread for a photo and caption and a link to a video).

Here is Professor Abraham's official website. 

Re-reading 'Cosmic Trigger 2': A net of jewels

Cosmic Trigger 2: Down to Earth is one of my favorite Robert Anton Wilson books, and I re-read it every few years. I have just completed my latest re-read.   I've mentioned for years that it's one of my favorites, and in fact I was allowed to write a "Foreword" for the Hilaritas Press edition.

Here is  one recurring motif I noticed this time. As the book describes, when Wilson was in his twenties, he had two great frustrations. He had trouble getting his writing career going, and he was frustrated in his search for a romantic companion. 

Both of these problems had a "happy ending" of course, and I found passages in the book that link together Wilson's two great partnerships, one that largely launched his writing career and one that gave him a happy personal and family life. 

I noticed in the latest re-read that there's a lot in the book about networking; for example, Wilson talks about the John S. Bell's Theorem and how it apparently "showed that the universe was non-locally 'connected' or perhaps more precisely, non-locally correlated."  

This can be read as a metaphor for connections between people, and the book references two important connections Wilson made. One is the one with Robert Shea that resulted in Illuminatus!, which largely launched the book writing career for both men. The story of Illuminatus! is covered in the first book of the series, Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati, and Wilson does not repeat the story in CT2. But there is a scene in the book which describes Wilson and Shea participating in an antiwar demonstration together and then taking refuge in a Chicago tavern.

In the Shea scene,  Wilson records that in the bar, "I looked at the silvery mirrors with me and Shea and a room full of strangers in them: a net of jewels, each of which reflects and is reflected in each of the others." (Page 30)

Toward the end of the book, Wilson describes meeting Arlen Riley, a writer and New York intellectual, and the storyline in those chapters concludes  with a description of their marriage.

At the wedding, the officiating Buddhist priest asks Wilson and his bride to repeat the traditional triple vow, used in all schools of Buddhism, to rely upon the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha; at the time, Wilson did not know what the Sangha was (it's  the community of Buddhists). The chapter then offers various definitions of the Sangha after Wilson had read up on the subject, and the jewels recur in his favorite description: "I prefer to consider it an unbounded net of jewels each of which reflects and contains the reflection of each of the others."

With your indulgence, I may have other blog posts about other features of the book. 

'Tales of Illuminatus' paper copies are shipping

In his latest Substack newsletter, Bobby Campbell offers another update to the online version of Tales of Illuminatus and provides a report on the shipping of paper copies:

"Orders have been placed and print/shipping files have been provided for our KS fulfillment of Tales of Illuminatus! #1 :)))

"North American orders are being printed and shipped by https://ka-blam.com/

"Who estimate orders should arrive by October 14th, though they also note that they are currently being hit by a hurricane, so we might have to give them a day or two of grace.

"European orders are being printed and shipped by https://mixam.co.uk/

"Who haven't provided a solid date yet, but mostly because they're shipping to darn near every country on the continent, so the shipping prices are still being worked out."

Please read the whole thing for Steve "Fly" Pratt music news and for other news. 

Wednesday links

 

Email from Paul Krasser quoting Robert Anton Wilson on RAW's byline. Posted on Facebook by Rasa, who explains, "Looking through my old emails, I found this email that Paul Krassner sent to Robert Anton Wilson…RAW then sent it out to his Group Mind, which is how I got it. May 21, 2006" (Posted on Facebook)

"The lost 1970s documentary exposing the Illuminati." Via Grouchogandhi, KSP on X.com. 

Movie recommendation from Jeffrey Talanian: "Fellow H.P. Lovecraft fans, if you have not seen it already, I highly recommend you watch the adaptation of "The Whisperer in Darkness," by the HPL Historical Society. It is available for free on Tubi. This classic tale of the Mi-Go hidden in the hills of Vermont is a cornerstone of HPL's fiction, and a personal favorite of mine. This movie, like HPLHS's other film works, is filmed in the style of 1930s—dramatic, with inner monologues, and a brilliant score. Very well done."

Boy kidnapped at age six found alive more than seven decades later. 

Ohio's governor on the truth about Springfield. Good for him. 

New book news: R.U. Sirius, Richard Kaczynski

Announcement from R.U. Sirius: "R.U.  Sirius & Shira Chess are pleased (and a little frightened) to  announce that we have contracted with Strange Attractor Press to publish  Freaks in the Machine: Mondo 2000 in Late 20th Century Tech Culture.  With a forward by Grant Morrison."

More information here. 

Richard Kaczynski, meanwhile, has a new book out: Friendship in Doubt: Aleister Crowley, J.F.C. Fuller, Victor B. Neuburg and British Agnosticism. Watch a YouTube interview by Maevius Lynn. 

Hilaritas podcast features Gregory Peters

 The new Hilaritas Press podcast, released today, features Gregory Peters. 

Here is the blurb for the show:

"Host Mike Gathers discusses the Divine Feminine with Gregory Peters.

"Gregory Peters is a researcher and explorer of nondual tantra, consciousness and the intersection of East-West spiritual practices. As a long time meditator, Dzogchen practitioner, tantrika, and senior adept of western esotericism. his writings explore the rich magical and energetic display of experience."

John Higgs: Cover reveal, book recommendations

 

The new John Higgs newsletter has a cover reveal for his new Dr. Who book, which can now be preordered. 

There are also recommendations for three new books being released in October, including the new Alan Moore novel, a rant about social media and news on interviews and personal appearances.

Here are the Alan Moore comments: 

"First up is the opening book in Alan Moore’s Long London fantasy series, The Great When. It’s funny and very approachable - think Terry Pratchett writing one of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London novels - but still unmistakeably Alan. This has ‘massive hit’ written all over it, and it’s out on Tuesday."

Scott Alexander, RAW fan and RAW critic

Thomas Bayes, although apparently there's a high probability this isn't him. See here. 

Scott Alexander is a popular Internet pundit. He formerly had a blog called Slate Star Codex; he currently has a popular Substack newsletter called Astral Codex Ten. 

He is both a fan of Robert Anton Wilson's writing, and a critic of treating RAW as a one-stop-shop guru for people interested in mysticism and occult practices.

First, let me address a recent reference.

I always look forward to Alexander's monthly "Links" column, which never fails to include many interesting items. The latest one for September had this item:

"4: List Of Groups Who Protested The Democratic Convention (also continued on second tweet). This is real, but it reminds me of those multi-page shaggy-dog-joke lists of fictional bands or fictional conspiracies or something in Robert Anton Wilson books."'

This is is double reference to Illuminatus!, as Scott is referencing the bands attending the music festival and also referencing the demonstrations at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention that feature in the work (Wilson and Shea both participated in peace demonstrations). 

The same "Links" piece also has this phrase: "Indeed do many things come to pass." (Item 43). 

All of that made me wonder if Scott is currently re-reading Illuminatus!, and he answered when I fired off an email: "Nah, but I did enjoy it quite a lot last time I read it a few years ago."

This leads me into my second link, "Against Anton-Wilsonism," a 2013 piece which argues that you can't really know mysticism, or occultism, or any other practice by reading even as skillful a writer as Robert Anton Wilson, you have to actively master the subject. I don't think RAW would disagree. Here is an excerpt:

"There are certain fields where it’s really obvious to everyone that learning about the field is different from learning the field. There are probably historians of music who have never picked up an instrument, and they don’t fancy themselves musicians. And political scientists don’t delude themselves into thinking they would make great politicians.

"Mysticism is not one of these fields (rationality isn’t either, but that’s a different blog article). Because so much of mysticism revolves around the idea of the gnosis, a specific kind of knowledge, it’s easy to mistake knowledge of mysticism for the knowledge that mysticism tries to produce."

You really need to read the whole thing. 

Another point pops up in the comments. BenSix writes, "I love Anton Wilson’s writings but the agnosticism that he promoted can become a dogma itself. One can grow too comfortable in answering truth claims with 'maybe', and avoid the difficult business of working out whether it would be more appropriate to say 'yes' or ]no'." Scott responds, "I reread some of Robert Anton Wilson a year or so ago, and it all just looked like “Look at me, I don’t understand Bayesian probability, I’m going to pretend that 1% chance of truth is equivalent to 99% chance of truth and totally drive off an epistemological cliff!' ”

St. Rev responds, "It’s fair to criticize Wilson for not grasping Bayes’ theorem, though my impression is that Bayesianism has only risen to prominence among schools of null-A logics in the last 10-20-odd years, and most of RAW’s important work was done in the 70s and 80s. (It would be fairer to criticize him for garbling Shannon!) But he was quite good at applying Korzybski, and your 99%-1% characterization is unfair. What RAW did say explicitly, in various contexts, was that he rated likelihood of propositions on a scale of 1 to 9, and if he found himself at 0 or 10 he’d look for a counterargument until he reached 1 or 9 again. RAW didn’t have our analytic foundation for probabilistic thinking, but he wasn’t a nihilist and it’s absurd to say so."

Perhaps this can be related to Michael Huemer's criticism, mentioned a few days ago, that Wilson apparently isn't actually totally familiar with Aristotle,  or to the oddity, which I've mentioned before, that Wilson writes a great deal about skepticism but (as far as I can remember) never mentions Pyrrho and Pyrrhonism. 

At the start of the piece, Alexander writes that "Back when I was in college, I loved stuff by Robert Anton Wilson." And in the comments in the piece, he writes, "I love Robert Anton Wilson as an author for the same reason I love Carl Sagan as a science personality. This post was in no way meant to say he was a bad author, role model, or source of fascinating ideas."

Podcast, with Joseph Matheny, focuses on Art Bell

Art Bell 

Art Bell (1945-2018) was an American radio broadcaster, featured on many radio stations across the U.S., who focused on paranormal topics. Here is audio of him interviewing Robert Anton Wilson. 

On a podcast called The Computer Room, a newly-posted episode focuses on Bell:

"In this episode of The Computer Room, Katherine and friends talk about Art Bell's legacy. We meet Leah Prime, who's writing a book about Art Bell, John Steiger who on a mission to hand transcribe every single episode of Coast to Coast AM, and Joseph Matheny, the mind behind Ong's Hat."

Via Matheny's Substack, which provides free email subscriptions.

'Tales of Illuminatus' digital copies now on sale

If you didn't purchase the first issue of Tales of Illuminatus by pledging to the Kickstarter, you can now buy a copy online, Bobby Campbell announces in the latest Tales newsletter: 

"KS backers got theirs on Saturday night, but now you can too! Digital downloads of Tales of Illuminatus! #1 'The Hidden Light' are now available for $5 cheap!

"I would recommend getting the digital PDF version from the Weirdoverse Etsy Shop. It’s a much higher resolution version, with no DRM, and the royalty rate is much more favorable.

"Though the Amazon/Comixology version is no slouch either!"

Paper copies of the issue for those who pledged at Kickstarter will be mailed out soon; if you didn't give Bobby your mailing address, please take care of it now. 

More Tales news here. 

Is this a real RAW quote? If so, from where?

“Not every quote you read on the Internet is true.” – Abraham Lincoln

Various quote compilations online have this quote (or purported quote) from Robert Anton Wilson:

The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct.

Rasa, the guy who runs Hilaritas Press, has been asking RAW fans for the source of the quote, or even a quote that comes close. We have been searching our Kindles, poring through books, etc. So far, nothing.

There isn't even a consensus about whether RAW said it. Some RAW fans think it sounds familiar, some have doubts. One noted that the quote sites don't provide a citation, "which is partly the reason why these days Carl Jung is making statements about the law of attraction and Albert Einstein is spouting New Age nostrums."

Can anyone confirm the purported RAW quote, and provide a citation?