Time-binding and the modern novel: Wilson agitates from beyond the grave!

from Time Magazine Online:

In commercials for Domino’s Pizza, the chain’s employees wage a never ending battle against the Noid, a gremlin who delays deliveries and carries a gun that can turn a pizza ice cold. Many viewers are amused by the Noid, Domino’s says, but one of them took the advertising campaign personally. Last week Kenneth Noid, 22, walked into a Domino’s Pizza shop in Chamblee, Ga., with a .357 Magnum revolver and took two employees hostage. When police arrived, he demanded $100,000 in cash, a getaway car and a copy of The Widow’s Son, a 1985 novel about secret societies in an 18th century Parisian prison.

All Noid got was the pizza he ordered. After a five-hour siege, the two employees slipped away and Noid gave himself up. According to police, Noid has “psychological problems” and believes that he has an “ongoing dispute with Tom Monaghan,” the head of the Detroit-based Domino’s chain.

 

Immortality Through Silicon.

As most of you know, Dr Robert Jastrow of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies is a sober, sensible scientist; he is not a science fiction writer or a wild-eyed Futurist (like me.) Nonetheless, Dr Jastrow’s new book, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe (Simon and Schuster, 1981) concludes that it is our destiny to achieve immortality by becoming computers.

Jastrow points out that some computers have already learned to decipher a few of the brain’s signals, and can tell if a human is excited or elated, or even distinguish if he / she is looking at a circle or a square. Eventually, Jastrow says, computers will be able to contain a human mind: “…a bold scientist will be able to tap the contents of his mind and transfer them into the metallic lattices of a computer. Because mind is the essence of being, it can be said that this scientist has entered the computer, and that he now dwells in it.”

Jastrow summarizes: “The union of mind and machine has created a new form of existence, as well designed for life in the future as man is designed for life on the African savanna. It seems to me this must be the mature form of intelligent life in the Universe. Housed in indestructible lattices of silicon, and no longer constrained by the life and death cycle of a biological organism, such a kind of life could live forever.”

from Robert Anton Wilson’s Trajectories Newsletter, March 1982.

 

dossier: Kurt Saxon

Kurt Saxon is the author of The Poor Man’s James Bond, a manual that tells you everything you could ever want to know about practical techniques of murder and mayhem, The Survivor, a four-volume extension of the same libretto, telling where to acquire any possible type of weapon, Root Rot, a diatribe against Alex Haley for implying that slavery was unfair to Black people, and several similar books. Mr. Saxon does not get reviewed in the Liberal magazines that decide which authors are important, but he has a wide readership among the Apocalyptical sects of the right-wing end of the political spectrum.

Mr. Saxon wrote in the 1970s that the United States would be destroyed almost totally by 1982. This is because the government has driven the “competents” out of business by excessive taxation and has subsidized 30 million “incompetents” on Welfare and another 30 million “incompetents” on Social Security. This country has thus become, Saxon says, “a Disneyland for
dummies.”

By 1982, Saxon said, the whole economy would collapse. “Millions of taxpayers will be unemployed… Millions who are now on Valium or other tranquilizers will go insane when they cannot get more. Drug addicts (will) swarm over pharmacies looking for dope, ruining everything they don’t steal…” We will be helpless against Russian attack because “our politicians have so devoted themselves to nurturing…incompetent dependents that further industrialization to put our nation on a war footing will be unaffordable. Even if it were not, our present unionspoiled and demanding work force cannot be expected to perform the way our parents did in the war plants of the late 1930s and early 1940s.” The only solution, Saxon informs us, is to buy farms, order his books on how to kill people efficiently, and stockpile every type of weaponry, to fight off the “drooling imbeciles and parasites” who will flee the doomed cities and try to steal your crops.

Mr. Saxon believed that these are objective predictions based on hard “laws” of sociology and economics which he learned from the writings of Ms. Ayn Rand. He did not believe that this apocalyptical reality tunnel in which he lives is in any way an artistic creation expressing his own emotional anxieties and hostilities.

– Wilson, Prometheus Rising.

I’ve had feelings of insecurity about food for as long as I can remember. It was my jerky dad’s fault. He left our valley and our wonderful peasant heritage to join the wretched ranks of the proletariat. — Kurt Saxon’s Bio on

KurtSaxon.com

 

Aleister Crowley: “awfully funny.”

 

boingboing: Bob Shea Interview

excerpts from: Cleveland Okie’s Interview with Mike Shea, son of Robert Shea, science fiction author and co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy.

The appendix to “Illuminatus” says that eight appendices were “censored.” Are they still around, and are there any plans to publish them?

I’ve never heard of them. The whole thing was written long before computers so it’s not likely they’re still around. If I could get ahold of them, I’d publish them in a second.

The appendix refers to a sequel, “The Homing Pigeons.” Was there any work actually done on an ILLUMINATUS sequel?

There was a joint work on a book called “Bride of Illuminatus” that was due to be released. Unfortunately the publishers didn’t think it would do very well since Wilson had already written a bunch of post-Illuminatus books that didn’t do very well (Gods bless the publishing industry…). I don’t know if there’s an outline or a copy of the work anywhere. My father died before they could get started. I remember the first scene started with a sex scene between two gods.

 

The Poet as Defense Early Warning Radar System.

Kaddish and Other Poems
Allen Ginsberg
City Light Books, 1961 (100 pages)

from Coincidance : A Head Test by Robert Anton Wilson.

Forty years ago, Ezra Pound made his celebrated boast of the social function of art: “The artist is the antenna of the race, the barometer and voltmeter.” Allen Ginsberg is nothing if not contemporary. He brings the boast up to date with a stunning effectiveness:

I am the Defense Early Warning Radar System
I see nothing but bombs

These lines are typical of Ginsberg’s unpolished-looking verse. He seems to work in poetry the way Rouault worked in paint: hacking his way savagely, with crude and sweeping strokes, toward an image of maximum ferocity. Look at Rouault’s “Three Judges,” those faces of moronic evil plastered on the canvas as if in rage and colored with the darkest, smeariest blacks and browns this side of downtown Passaic; this is the typical “feel” of a Ginsberg poem. Actually, of course, neither Rouault nor Ginsberg work in a frothing frenzy. Ginsberg in particular probably spends as much effort sounding “uncivilized” as Henry James ever spent in sounding “civilized.”

 

How To Wash Brains

from Neuropolitique.
by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson.

The fight for Patty Hearst’s mind is symptomatic of the world-wide battle for
the control of consciousness.

 

William S. Burroughs

If you do decide to move to San Francisco I know a few people there and in Berkeley. Bob Wilson is there an old friend and fan who used to work for Playboy now involved in Leary’s spaceship.
………. William S. Burroughs in a letter to his son. From the book Cursed from Birth by William S. Burroughs Jr.

 

Angel Tech

The Robert Anton Wilson Preface Spectacular continues with another all-time favorite…

from Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman’s Guide To Reality Selection by Antero Alli:

Herein are all the great neurological scripts of the past synthesized and modernized for our day: the Tarot. Cabala. The Hindu Chakra System. Alchemy. And here, too - praise be to the Sun Absolute! — is a refreshing absence of the cant, the pomposity and the deliberate mystification that makes most books on those subjects virtually unreadable.

Some, who like to talk of things “mystical” but have no first-hand knowledge, may find Antero’s realism a bit disconcerting. A look at my Prometheus Rising and Cosmic Trigger (Falcon Press) might help lead the reader into that set of no bovine excreta. It might do these folks some good to remember that Sufism begins with ritual dances (to gain control over the involuntary nervous system) and yoga with body-relaxation techniques. They might even ponder a bit on the traditional Christian teaching that the body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit. They might further ponder Gopi Krishna’s assertion that rebirth is a matter of moving energies properly through the spinal cord, or Da Free John’s correlation of various levels of consciousness with the sympathetic, autonomic and central nervous systems. (But remember these are all models and like models they age.)

 

Sex and Rockets

(Yes, our Robert Anton Wilson Introduction Extravaganza continues with the Introduction to Sex and Rockets:
The Occult World of Jack Parsons by John Carter.)

A Marvel Walked Among Us

I seem to be living in a nation that simply does not know what freedom is.
……….. John Whiteside Parsons(1)

This book tells the life story of a very strange, very brilliant, very funny, very tormented man who had at least three major occupations (or vocations); he also had no less than four names. He acted as scientist, as occultist, as political dissident and often as a simple damned eejit (just like you and me).

Scientists, aware of his tremendous contributions to space science, generally call him John Parsons, and they’ve even named a crater on the moon after him. Those occultists who know of his work in their very specialized arts call him Jack Parsons, the name he himself preferred; in
some magick lodges they consider him second only to Aleister Crowley as a progenitor of the New Aeon. His best-known book, Freedom Is A Two-Edged Sword, which increasingly influences the libertarian and anarchist movements, gives his name as John Whiteside Parsons on the cover and title page. And, as the present biography documents, this odd bird actually had the legal name Marvel Whiteside Parsons imposed on him at birth.

Oh, well, if my parents had named me “Marvel,” I would have changed my name, too, perhaps as often as Parsons did.