"In CIA jargon, a 'useful idiot' means somebody who is working for them but doesn't know it. My involvements with controversial politics have left me with one lasting legacy. Whenever I suspect that I am taking myself or my theories too seriously, I stop and ask myself, 'Have I become a useful idiot yet?'"1

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Provocative title? Also: maybe bullshit. Loaded term? Yea, probably. Let me explain.

Obligatory prologue-use of quote to attempt to cast a hypnotic spell on the reader:

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"Espionage, political intrigue, and the occult tend to come together in secret societies." - Richard B. Spencer, Prof. of History at U. of Idaho

It seems most people associate the term "useful idiot" with Lenin, or Republican writers in the US using it as an epithet to work in the formula: not a Republican = supporter of the Democrats = probably a socialist = communist = an enemy of the US; must be stopped! As if their own assumed position is the unquestionably correct one, and all others must be explained as stupid. A flagrant violation of the sociology of knowledge. Or: non-Republicans have been tricked into it! They're a useful idiot for the Bad Guys!1

I think of Jane Fonda's visit with the Viet Cong as Useful Idiocy, very public, but also: my biased point of view and that Jane actually had thought it out on her own, so how idiotic was it? Not at all? Very? I kinda wonder sometimes. And besides, I always had the hots for her, so my relationship with Jane Fonda? It's complicated. But that's the tricky part, isn't it? This definition of Useful Idiot seems epistemologically difficult. "Stupid fucking asshole sides with the wrong party!": no use arguing. "Poor dipshit actually thinks the rich ought to be taxed at a higher level! They've been duped!": you seem to care. Aren't you sweet? They've been led astray and it's a sad shame. We all make mistakes. The mistaken dupe is: a Useful Idiot! and unknowingly playing into the hands of the ominous and notorious Big Equality. (cue: Dragnet theme music)

(The maker of this documentary seems to think Ruth Paine was a Useful Idiot in the whole JFK thing. Paine died 14 months ago not far from where I currently live and she stuck with her position that Oswald acted alone; she seemed like a really nice lady to me.)

In Ian McEwan's 2025 novel, What We Can Know a character is a "useful idiot" who plays a part in a novel as a slotted, predictable role vis a vis another character.

Another semantic use: In reading books on how intelligence operations work in the field, the definition takes on a different meaning. You know how when you approach the TSA getting ready for your flight and you hear, "Did you pack your own suitcase?" Yes, some terrorist might have slipped into your house and planted a bomb in your overnight bag, then slipped out undetected, but this is also how intelligence agents - an acquaintance or friend of a friend, seems like a nice lady - could get you to do some work for them, all the while you're thinking you've only agreed to deliver a small envelope or book to an office building near your destination in Athens/London/Bueno Aires/Bucharest. Yes, you packed your friend of a friend's book, but what of it? I'm doing them a favor. It's nothing! Best to not even mention it. You're so oblivious that, why, you're the perfect mark, not having any idea you're passing military secrets (they're in code, on p.237 of Travel Tips For Romania) to some other intelligence agent whose mail drop is an antique store near where you're staying. Please give this to Kiki, and tell them I said hi. What? Oh just a book I borrowed and needed to give back. I bet Kiki will buy you dinner; that's just the kinda guy he is. Here's a little map of sites you really must see while in Bucharest, it's so charming! Me 'n Kiki? We go way back. Do you know your neighbor's father's friend Charles Smith? No? Great guy. Lived in the community for a hundred years. Glad I happened to hear you were going to Bucharest from a fellow at the last Friends of the Library meeting in our quaint little town here. When you get back, let's do lunch.

Once you board that flight with that book, smile, friend: you're a Useful Idiot. Sorry to break it to ya.

A stranger pops into your local bar, seemingly harmless, friendly, maybe buys a round of drinks while talking about sports or local news items. At one point they make a point about some person that's just wrong or mistaken, so a number of you and your friends correct him with the facts. In this way, sources don't know they're sources. In a sense, a large percentage of intelligence sources are Useful Idiots. Saying something wrong gets people to correct you; they get to feel smart and you get some possibly useful intel. Do you know anyone who seems to do this a lot? They make their erroneous statements so innocently! (Yea, but are they always doing that? Are they just that ill-informed? Probably no reason to get paranoid. They're probably Garden Variety Idiots, or, as Brother Theodore said, "Just Plain Folks"…)

How do you know the OG isn't a planted intel asset?2

Was Ruth Paine, who befriended Marina Oswald and let the Oswalds sleep in their Dallas-area house, a Useful Idiot? Paine was only interested Russian culture. How about Joanna Harcourt -Smith? How about Ted Kaczynski? Frank Olson? James Jesus Angleton?3

After World War I, the US disbanded international intelligence gathering; Henry Stimson, big-time Yankee influence, famously said "Gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail." Then, when the Nazis went on the march: Oops! The OSS, in concert with the Brits, scrambled to train new spies for hardcore field work. One tried 'n true way to inculcate the spy mindset: read espionage novels, mostly by old Brits: Assignment In Brittany, by Helen MacInness (1942); Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household (1939), and John Buchan's The Thirty Nine Steps (1915). Teachers had to constantly remind recruits that "spies don't act like spies." That's part of why the Useful Idiot game works so well: these people don't even know they're assets or spies! Much of the public nowadays thinks of James Bond or Jason Bourne as how spies look/act like. But the truth is more 180 degrees from that: Super-spy bookworm Joseph Curtiss quoted CIA director William Colby circa 1970: the ideal spy is the kind of person who "has a hard time catching the eye of a waiter." That would also be, quite often, any one of us Useful Idiots.4

Have you ever caught yourself saying something only to think, Hold on…why do I think that? Do I actually believe it or did I just hear it said a lot by people who seemed to know the truth about this? This seems to me Useful Idiot-adjacent. Relax. We've all been there.

I seek to blur the worlds of useful idiots and the espionage game, secret societies, writers as spies, counter-espionage games and the different levels of such, ideology, the occult, drugs, academia, white collar crime, the multiform nature of "intelligence", the sociology of knowledge, and irony. Why? Because this shit desperately needs to be blurred in order to see it all more clearly.

I just watched Suburban Fury (2024 Robinson Devor), a stylish documentary about Sara Jane Moore, who took a shot at Gerald Ford in September 1975, three weeks after Mansonoid Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme tried to off Ford. They are the only two females who tried to assassinate the POTUS, and they did it 17 days apart, in Sacramento, and San Francisco, respectively. Moore appears as herself in the doc and she's quite the unreliable narrator about her own life. An FBI informant, Moore also seems to have had delusions that if she knocked off Ford people would finally think her Leftist sympathies were honest, Nelson Rockefeller would become POTUS, and suddenly the American people would realize: hey, we didn't elect Ford or Rockefeller; this is all a sham. And why were we in 'Nam? Let's overthrow the government!

(Sara Jane Moore as she appears in Suburban Fury.)

Here's Moore: hanging out with the Panthers in Oakland, and…while at the same time working with the Hearst family trying to get Patty freed. She was friends with Randolph Hearst at the same time she was friends with prison union organizer Wilbert "Popeye Jackson, and they were apparently both informing for the FBI while not telling each other they were. So Sara Jane Moore, a white, educated woman recently divorced from a doctor and owning a spacious home in conservative Danville in the East Bay area near San Francisco, appears to have been a double agent.

However, her background gives me significant pause, and the documentary - which seems heavily influenced by Errol Morris's style - is well worth watching, even though it pretty much glosses over Moore's drama queen fugue states, amnesiac fits, fainting outside the White House, hospitalization at Walter Reed, charges by an ex-husband5 (she was married five times) that she was a "nymphomaniac", her lax relationship with the truth about her own background, her sort of schizotypal-ish-seeming personality (to my eyes): ya gotta wonder. At some point, while she was at Walter Reed, I can easily see some intel asset marking her chart with "possible useful idiot." At any rate, she seems to have been a Useful Idiot in the style of many January 6th traitors.6 Only Moore did 32 years before being released. She could have had a decent, comfortable middle class life, but she never really got a life. Suburbia can do that to ya. My, how times change: she gets 32 years while the January 6ers? Nevermind…Did the FBI use Moore and it eventually got out of hand, kinda like some micro version of the CIA and LSD? I don't know. What's the value to elite monied interests if 47% of the American public already believe we've been invaded by aliens from another planet?7 I don't know. It feels ominous, but I don't know.

A brief note on suburbia and this mindset. Idle hands and devil's playground and all that, but the stultifying conformity of much of suburban life in general reminds me here of a passage from Warren Hinckle of Ramparts, when they decided to go after the Warren Commission Report, and then the news room at Ramparts in San Francisco began to see suburban housewives who were deeply into the JFK hit. One thinks of Mae Brussell, aye, but Hinckle doesn't name names:

With Turner on deck, I went looking for a rope long enough to string up Earl Warren. Some of the people who crashed our lynching party left me with ambivalent feelings about the sanity of our cause. There was a sudden input of bodies from a distaff circle of humanity known as the "sleuths" - volunteers who came out of the woodwork of society to finish the detective work the Warren Commission had left undone. They wrote an odd lot by any standard of measurement. Some were charlatans or publicity hounds, but most were honest and subdued; the typical "sleuth" was more the concerned suburban housewife than the big city hustler. Some were more paranoid than others, but all shared, to some degree, the paranoia which was the state of nature of their enterprise.8

I currently see the most interesting aspect around the admittedly loaded term "Useful Idiot" as that which is epistemological: how do we know we are acting in our own interests and not doing someone else's bidding? It's this question that Robert Anton Wilson had asked in his own self-interrogations. But, as we'll see: other counterculture figures wondered similarly about this, including Allen Ginsberg and Paul Krassner.

No doubt some non-Republicans have engaged in this too. I just can't name any off the top of my head. But safe bet: hardcore Democratic party apparatchiks. All my labels attached to large groups of people here are necessarily fuzzy.

RAW said he wouldn't deny being a CIA agent. Once someone suspects you, if paranoid enough, everything you do or say just further confirms the truth, and you're caught in a Strange Loop. Of course I'd deny it! And if I say I'm denying because it's the "truth" would you suspect me of lying?

I'll discuss these interesting figures at much more length in some future OG-spew.

Espionage novels that inculcated the spycraft game and quote about not being able to catch the eye of a waiter: Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham, pp. 40-45; 56-57. Interestingly, Thomas Pynchon, in the Introduction to his short stories, Slow Learner, said he read all these books in the local public library growing up around Oyster Bay and Glen Cove, New York. A further side-note: this bookish spy Joseph Curtiss, who Graham describes as a shy Yale professor who temporarily wound up running America's espionage bureau in Istanbul - which kept reminding me of the duplicitous world of Eric Ambler's Journey Into Fear and the 1943 RKO film of the same name, with Orson Welles as Colonel Haki - was an interesting writer. Curtiss's PhD thesis was on the 17th century esoteric figure William Lilly, who was a wealthy astrologer/detective/espionage artist. Aside from writing and imaginative literature, links between these other worlds still hold, I think, and among them: 1.) The desire to control what happens by gaining knowledge of the future; 2.) A fascination with reading personalities in order to better predict future actions; 3.) A reliance on special knowledges of initiation techniques and esoteric modes of acquisition of knowledge, and 4.) The use of ciphers and codes.

It appears this husband was John O. Aalberg, who was Head of Sound at RKO in the 1940s and who worked on Citizen Kane, and was nominated for ten Oscars.

Clearly, this is some other level of definition of "Useful Idiot": While it seems clear to me that committed racists and fascists were not what I'd call Useful Idiots on Jan 6, I've read too many stories about those - mostly white suburbanites whose families have money - who had no lives and who radicalized themselves by marinating in talk radio, Fox News and right wing chatrooms for years; they were used by the Trump Regime on Jan 6th. Of those brought up on charges and penalized, most expressed remorse, then recanted. Trump pardoned all traitors, and many have gone on to commit other crimes. A very small handful rejected pardons and expressed remorse, or denounced Trump…all of which is neither here not there vis a vis this topic. Once you've been exposed as a Useful Idiot quite publicly, you're now in some sort of club where it's cool to be a fascist traitor. It's really common to double down. Especially if now you're all in. In this I see quite a lot of overlap with cult psychology. I get the feeling Moore never really had a coherent politics, but seemed to understand that Vietnam was a huge mistake.

I got this from a YouGov poll published 11 months ago HERE. The ideas about Moore's schizotypy: that's merely my impression of her, based on others I've known who were educated people who seemed like compulsive liars born our of living in a fantasy-like dream world of their own making. It was impressionistic, and yet I've been wondering a lot about links between schizotypals, unreliable narrators, masterful con artists, and useful idiots in espionage. I have a hard time breaking away from the idea that these lost, suburban losers never developed a creative outlet, and, as "lost" as they were mentally, they stayed in circuits 1-4. You wanna weigh in here? After watching Suburban Fury I was surprised at the paucity of erudite conspiracy writing about Sara Jane Moore online, and by far the best thing I glommed onto was a long piece by "Lena Ajit" (an anagram?) HERE. Lena Ajit has a Brussell Sprout style: she/he/they remind me of Mae Brussell, Dave Emory, John Judge and maybe a few others: fantastic at connecting dots, even dots that might not be there. For Pynchon fans, especially of the California Trilogy, there's some links to shadowy northern California radical "counterculture" hippie groups that could also have been FBI or even CIA counterintelligence ops, but who knows. Sara Jane Moore was involved with these groups, too. I have yet to read Geri Spieler's Housewife Assassin (2023), which appears to be a retitling of her 2009 book Taking Aim At the President? Spieler had befriended Moore and communicated with her for a long time, and it was the basis of Suburban Fury.

If You Have A Lemon, Make Lemonade, Warren Hickle, p.208. It's with this quote that I must hedge my take on who Sara Jane Moore was, as I grew up in suburbia and knew that it just simply drove some women nuts at little bit, and the sexism of the culture can have a Medea-like effect on some suburban housewives. Not that they killed all their kids and their husbands' girlfriends, but still. Let's just say that neuroticism can assume many forms. Possibly the archetype on film is Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under The Influence (1974 John Cassavettes)?

[The OG used, for aid in writing this piece:

AI: No! I promised y'all: never

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Cannabis: X, or Yes!, or "Si, señor!" or "always!"]

I recently re-read Nabokov's Pale Fire and it led to an extravaganza of Mnemosyne's boon: childhood synesthetic memories and visions, vital quivering qualia, seven pages of notes on the quest for the limits of knowledge, and other sundries.

As the narrator describes the devious escape of the King of Zembla1, he moves through underground passageways and takes a hidden staircase and surreptitiously moves through a dense forest by night, a mad rush picaresque of feverishly poetic prose and visual tableaux I never cease to marvel upon. The secret passageways I mentally link to Nabokov's love of Arabian Nights2, though at the moment I can't cite for ya one specific, save for "Open Sesame", or as we said when kids, "Open, sez me!" A hidden treasure, Ali Baba or Baba Yaga, yadda, yadda yadda I'm really tired today…

But deceptive physical books. Right: I don't remember when I first encountered a book which had been hallowed out to contain a gun, drugs, money, jewels, a treasure map, or cryptic messages that would ultimately yield the answer to, ya know, who shot the sheriff, or Bobby McGee. But it was probably while reading a kid's book (long since renamed "YA"). I was one of those eight year olds who read 200 books in a school year, and the teachers found me both a marvel and a pain in the ass, or so my mother told me many years later.

Why was I so enchanted by this "secret compartment" idea at age nine or whenever it was? Possibly because I saw books like the theme song to "Gumby" described Gumby's own relation to books: "He could walk into any book…"3 They were an escape into another world. A world of imagination. I was blissfully unaware as s child that my parents were unhappy, my dad alcoholic, my mother struggling with mental issues. They effectively kept this from me. But was there some part of me that knew? For some reason, the very idea creeps me out.

Now here was another "secret" inside a magical item (a book) inside a literally palpable magical item (a book). That's my best layperson's guess. That there were nested mysteries in the world, and you just had to keep looking and they would give up their secrets…only to lead to further mysteries in an endlessly enchanting world that tries to look dull and mundane to adults, but us kids have a skeleton key, see? This seems to have formed my adult theory of knowledge, which I've already written about ad nauseum and still have much more to say. Suffice: it's paradigms, paradigms, paradigms, all the way down. And knowledge goes far beyond rational logic, mathematical formalisms, and fer crissakes: algorithms. It could be that knowledge merely begins with that formal-symbolic world, but I cannabinologically digress. Again.

I like to think of possible neo-Freudian theories too: the hidden compartment or hallowed-out book cathexis is a symbol for the interiority of a book represented in the unconscious by the womb, where I was at one time safe and swimming in warm amniotic fluids - not only an opiate image, but a species memory of all of us as fish 375 million years ago that eventually evolved to walk on land? - and my libidinal currents, arc-sparking even as a child and long before puberty, presaged my desire to get back to that Sacred Spot: the vagina, as soon as DNA cued RNA for me to grow hair where it hadn't been, voice lowered (slightly), the strong desire to best male companions in basketball, the burgeoning interest in the annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition, a heady woozy vague euphoria and fear when a girl approached me with the question: Do you like so-and-so? - her friend - and I didn't know what to do with myself or even what was nice or permissible to say, etc. "Yes"? Okay, then what?

I mean: who the fuck knows, okay? I did come up with this notion just now, but only after I reclined on a spartan black couch and used an interior monologue while looking at the ceiling and the imagined Reader (you), were sitting behind me, at your desk of dense brown mahogany and African tchotchkes of unknown provenance, and indecipherable old thick volumes with German titles piled in one corner of said desk. I got a million of 'em, it seems. You charge $385 for one 50 minute hour, by the way, which I just hafta say is outrageous. Glad I got it off my chest.

Aye, and I am of Foxy Grandpa4 age now and I confess I still get that frisson of the secret passageway, the latch that turns what looked like a mere bookcase into the doorway to a hidden lair, an occult second layer of space in smart luggage that will effectively conceal the codes to save the day, etc. And if all this means to you that I'm terminally adolescent, well, that's just something I'm gonna have to live with, isn't it?

Nabokov doesn't write "hidden staircase"; he writes l'escalier dérobé. He said he'd been a normal child in a mansion with 5000 books and in which the family was "trilingual": his parents spoke to each other in Russian, but when it suited them, they code-switched to French or English, or sometimes German. He'd had French and English governesses, that old story. You got the do-re-mi cash to pay for governesses to immerse your kid in other languages, you do it. It's just a smart move by mom and dad.

In a section of Speak, Memory, in which Nabokov describes his own synesthesia, he tells us of the ways in which his synesthetic mom influenced his own strong visual synesthesia:

My mother did everything to encourage the general sensitiveness I had to visual stimulation. How many were the aquarelles she painted for me; what a revelation it was when she showed me the lilac tree that grows out of mixed blue and red! Sometimes, in our St. Petersburg house, from a secret compartment in the wall of her dressing room (and my birth room), she would produce a mass of jewelry for my bedtime amusement. I was very small then, and those flashing tiaras and chokers and rings seemed to me hardly inferior in mystery and enchantment to the illumination in the city during imperial fétes, when, in the padded stillness of a frosty night, giant monograms, crowns, and other armorial designs, made of colored electric bulbs - sapphire, emerald, ruby - glowed with a kind of charmed constraint above snow-lined cornices on housefronts along residential streets.5

"Housefronts" seems influenced by Joyce, Nabokov's dazzling fireworks-synesthesia is on display here, but did you notice? Mom kept her jewels in a secret compartment in the wall! So frikkin' cool.

I'm far from alone in this childish and childlike obsession with hallowed-out books. John Barth tells us he once hallowed out a copy of 365 Bedtime Stories in order to hide a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes.6 Santa Fe, New Mexico kids hid their weed in a hallowed out copy of Stephen King's It.7 In Wilson and Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy, left wing rock journalist George Dorn travels from New York to Mad Dog, Texas to investigate a possible Illuminati connection to the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, George Lincoln Rockwell, and even "Nixon": he stashed his weed in a copy of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here: big mistake!8 In one of the Matrix films, Neo keeps discs hidden inside Baudrillard's Simulacrum and Simulation. In Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, some weed was retrieved from a hollowed out medical book.

The Bible has been used to conceal guns in a Disney film about The Three Musketeers and Alan Moore's V For Vendetta. I recall a funny article many years ago that advocated keeping your sex toys and lube hidden in hollowed out copies of books by Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly.9

A scathing review in The Baffler of James Patterson's novel with Bill Clinton, The President Is Missing says it's so hollow and fat you could carve it out and hide drugs in it…figuratively.10 Which might not be a bad idea for those of you who presently live in dorms and have roommates who raid your stash: who would pick up a James Patterson there? Or would a fat Patterson look like a conspicuous dead giveaway amid your Terence McKenna, Philip K. Dick and Sasha Shulgin books? Hey, it's up to you, kiddo. You're an adult now, ready to make your own decisions and obtain lifelong crippling student loan debt.

But the connection between hallowed out books and right wing paranoia and violence and religious nuts seems to make me a strange bedfellow. It's something I've had to come to grips and square with, and I confess it feeds my lifelong Walter Mitty Syndrome.

Let's just say that every time I'm cycling through a leafy suburban neighborhood and stop at a Little Free Library (or, hell: the Salvation Army) and spy a Catcher In The Rye, Stranger In A Strange Land, 1984, or, say, The Urantia Book, I like to imagine those have hollowed-out compartments the owners "forgot" about or never knew about in the first place: therein: some moldy psilocybin mushrooms, a dagger, or "French" postcards from the fin de siecle…You never know until you look. I usually look. They are deceptive, those Salvation Army/Little Free Library people: you rarely detect a thing in a battered old Celestine Prophecy, The Lost Symbol, Teach Yourself C++, or Make Your Own Home Meth Lab For Dummies. But as my Mitty-ish researches here document, that stuff is out there. Or rather…in there.

(from a DIY article on this topic)

Of course hallowed out books have been used to smuggle drugs and weapons into prisons. In The Shawshank Redemption, a small rock hammer is concealed in a Bible; the journey of a few tunneled thousand feet starts with one little rock hammer. And in general, the use of "doctored" books used in deceptive practice would fall, often, into the category of steganography: hiding something in plain sight. It's easy to find a real-looking book made of wood, with hinges, and something like Uncle Tom's Cabin on the "spine" so that one can hide drugs, cash, love letters, etc, amid many other actual books on your shelves. I have a couple of these. One I hide small amounts of pizza-delivery money in; the other assorted lighters for my inveterate weed smoking. I will never, it seems, grow up.

Anecdotal evidence has it that people like to stash their mad money in something like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, which, to me, lacks wit and is a tad too on the nose. But if you're ever at a bad party and spy a copy of Smith's 1776 tome, I give it 50/50 that this book is hiding moolah. Try to maintain a modicum of decorum and not check; you were an invited guest and, to paraphrase Henry Stimson out of context, "Gentlemen don't open other gentlemen's library books looking for cash or weed."

Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, concealed a bomb in a copy of The Ice Brothers, a 517 page novel by Sloan Wilson about the Coast Guard near Greenland in WWII, and sent it to Percy Wood, who had been president of United Airlines. When Wood opened the book, the bomb detonated, causing burns and cuts over most of his body. We note here that Ted didn't use the same sort of wit that many others have, and which seems part of this concealment game: the irony of using some book linked in the public mind with deception or darkness or clandestinity itself. In 1980, when Percy Wood opened the copy of Sloan Wilson, who knew who Sloan Wilson was? Ted did: Wilson had written a best-seller about what happens to the mind when someone is caught up in a materialistic technocratic world and its stultifying yes-men conformity: The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit (1955). So Ted went the extra nine for his little joke. He always did. How utterly devious, mad, brutal and gruesome!

Phillip Markoff, the "Craigslist Killer" and a summa cum laude medical student, had hidden his gun inside a copy of Gray's Anatomy. Sometimes even nonfiction serves as accessory to murder.11

A .22 pistol is hidden in a hollowed-out copy of Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language in Robert Ludlum's The Janson Directive. If I were looking at your walls of shelves and you challenged me to find the book with the gun in it only by dint of titles, I think Johnson would be way down the list. Even better would be numbing titles like NBA Stars of 1975 or the third volume of The Complete Guide To Stamp Collecting. I have yet to read about someone stashing explosives or cocaine in The Anarchist's Cookbook, but give it time. There was a handgun found in a copy of Robert Stone's Outerbridge Reach, that had been donated to the public library.12 That title doesn't give me pause.

Idaho Neo-Nazi and sexually confused Frank Spisak, executed in 2011 for murdering a black man of God in a restroom, and another person because he thought they "might be Jewish", had concealed a gun in Mein Kampf, which further suggests how little he had on the ball. No imagination! His last meal: spaghetti, a salad, chocolate cake and coffee. He did a "Heil Hitler!" and read from the go-to whack-job Book Of Revelation before the State offed him. He had given up wanting to be a woman and decided on being Hitler instead. Talk about his struggle!13 And do Islamic jihadists often use a hollowed-out copy of the Qu'ran to hide bombs? What do you think?14

There are well-paid, very stylish and educated losers who traffic in this sort of thing, and I'm not just talking about myself here. Take, for example, the chief man in charge of MK-Ultra at the CIA, Sidney Gottlieb. He had style, as we see in Steven Kinzer's Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. He kept special weapons and and guns in a secret compartment behind a bookcase at home, as shown by his teenaged son to his girlfriend when mom and dad were at the store to buy food for dinner. Later, son to girlfriend: "Don't tell anyone you were in there, and don't ever tell anyone you know that my father kills people."15

Okay, I'm calling a halt to today's documentation of book-weirdness. Want me to do another one on invisible ink? Just say the word; I can't help myself when it comes to this kinda stuff.

My takeaway for you here, today: never judge a book by its cover.

Maybe. The status of the King of Zembla, Charles the Beloved, is quite unsure. We certainly hear a lot about him, but from the most unreliable narrator in the history of fiction? Was Kinbote, really Prof Bodkin? Did Shade make up Kinbote? I'm not sure I'll ever suss it out, which is fine by me, and, after another re-read of Pale Fire, I consider it among a class of books Robert Anton Wilson called "puzzles to worked on," which are superior to novels which are puzzles that can be definitively solved.

Or, his mom's extensive jewelry collection, about which read on.

listen here at the 23 second mark I love how the opening arpeggiates on the always-weird augmented triad, perfect for evoking an alternative world. Danny Elfman used augmented chords and their scale-cousins, the whole-tone, in his theme music for The Simpsons.

Here I frankly embarrass myself.

My non-hallowed-out copy of the 1967 edition of Speak, Memory, Vintage ed, p.36.

The Friday Book, Barth, p.77

Now see HERE, my good madam!

Dorn was gonna get popped by the Sheriff one way or another; probably weed was a mere pretext. The omnibus edition of Illuminatus!, p.30. I will spare us all the connection to cannabis and masturbation and rebellious adolescence and obsessions with privacy and secrecy and these hallowed-out books for your stash. It's too easy. And it did happen here, anyway.

JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy now holds the ribbed condoms, vibrating dildos and blotter acid for scores of progressive kids, the leaders of tomorrow. Or so I'd like to think.

Baffler review here.

Craigslist Killer and Gray's Anatomy here.

Gun inside Outerbridge Reach by Stone.

more info than you'd ever wanna know about Frank Spisak HERE. Speaking of Nazis, check out this kinda thing, which I suspect is really common around fascist idolatry.

Qu'ran, hollowed-out, bombs, HERE.

Poisoner In Chief, Kinzer, p.201, from Kinzer's interview, many years later, with "Elizabeth."

I recently happened upon an article1 about the Chinese classic (or favorite), Six Records Of A Life Adrift, by Shen Fu (1763-c. 1803).2 Shen Fu was a dropout scholar who partied and scraped by with his much beloved and devoted (and possibly lesbian?) wife, Chen Yun. He never lost his keen eye for the beauty in simple things. The book was never published in Shen Fu's life, and we're not even sure when he died or where he's buried, The manuscript was found in a secondhand bookstore stall maybe 70 years after Shen Fu died, and there were only four chapters, or "records." Possibly he never got around to writing the other two chapters, or they, too, were lost, and there have been "found" some versions of the lost chapters, probably of dubious origin. It's one of contemporary China's favorite love stories: Shen Fu and Chen Yun. You never know what some of those dusty items in your favorite used bookstores really are until you - or someone else - gives a good look.

Since my teens stories of lost books have fascinated me. There must be many such books out there, now.

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Larry McMurtry, a bookstore owner in addition to being a successful novelist, wrote about "the silent migration of books" in his Books: A Memoir. It's kind of weird how some of his own self-inscribed books from before he was a famous person made their way back into his hands. His discussions with other booksellers yielded similar strange stories of books that found their way "back home": "I know a collector in Virginia who claims he lost one volume of Douglas Carruthers's two-volume Unknown Mongolia while traveling in the Gobi Desert, only to reacquire the lost volume several years later at Estate Book Sales in Washington, DC."3 As I happen upon such anecdotes about books in other books, it taxes my ability to think probabilistically. Some rare, expensive books that have become unaccounted for would seem to travel amid antiquarians, and so a limited number of book-experts, and thus their reappearance would seem not as marvelous as it did on first sight. But others?

Eugenia Zuroski, an English professor at McMaster University had a copy of Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the 18th Century, by Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace. She often lent it to students and always got it back. Until she didn't. One day she went to lend it out and couldn't find it. I know the feeling: did someone steal it? I probably misplaced it. You search for it for a month or so then come up with some hypothesis about why you can't find some book you knew you had owned. What happened to it? Who had been in my own private library? Who that would actually steal a book? I could think of no one. My guitar students seemed kinda put off by all the books lining the walls. (I often imagined: "Hey, this guy's weird, but he's a good teacher, so…") After five years, Prof Zuroski simply went to Amazon and picked the cheapest used copy available, from multiple copies being purveyed by used book dealers, and, as you probably guessed, it was her missing copy. She had written her name on the title page. "I had to put it down on the desk and pick it back up to make sure I wasn't hallucinating," she said.4

Has this kinda of thing ever happened to you? No? Okay then, how about a friend-of-a-friend? How many people actually buy these books and then read them? It seems the number is small, but there still seems something unheimlich about this.

I don't know what the actual F happened here. I can't explain it. Can you? Aldous Huxley is on his cancer deathbed, on November 22, 1963. His wife Laura did as he had requested: she gave him a massive dose of LSD to help him in transit through the Bardos after bodily death. As Aldous tripped and slipped into thermodynamic equilibrium, Laura read from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, into his ear. Not long after Aldous's death, Laura engaged the medium Keith Rinehart. She wanted to know if there was a way to "contact" Aldous in the death realm. After some time, Rinehart announced he'd gotten a signal, and that Laura should go into Aldous's study, where she'd rarely been, and take off of a certain shelf the fifth book and look at page 17, line 23. It was a Spanish language book titled Coloquio de Buenos Aires, a collection of essays on modern writers published by PEN Club of Argentina.

On page 17, line 23, Laura read, "Aldous Huxley does not surprise us in this admirable communication in which paradox and erudition in the poetic sense and the sense of humor are interlaced in such an efficacious form." She had never read this book. My debunking self suspects Rinehart stole his way into Aldous's study when Laura didn't see him, and found this line.5

I'm not sure this observation by a critic is all that remarkable about Aldous Huxley. Almost every critic said similar things about his work. The first time I read this account, I admit I thought it pretty damned Weird. But what happened a few days later, to me, at work, was even weirder: I was working in a library in the wealthy suburb of Palos Verdes, near Los Angeles, re-shelving books, and gabbing with my brilliant gay friend, also shelving books. We were talking about books that we encountered on the floor, as if a patron had dropped the book there, or one fell or got knocked off a shelf accidentally, and we were coming up with very fanciful and laughable scenarios, most of them completely ridiculous and involving quantum mechanics, elves, mind control experiments, and an FBI cut-out group. I didn't mention the Aldous and Laura Huxley story I'd recently read. A few minutes later we were in the Fiction section and I found a book in the carpeted aisle. It was Those Barren Leaves, a novel by Aldous Huxley. Instantly, I was "gone": that state of mind in which you are so stunned, the world seems to stop. I admit I thought my friend had played a trick on me, but had I even mentioned Aldous Huxley to him? I don't think I had. I'd remembered that he said his brother loved Aldous Huxley, but this was a few months earlier. I probably responded I that I loved Huxley too. Did he remember? We talked about literally hundreds of books and writers. That's my only "explanation": that he had remembered me saying I liked Aldous Huxley, and since we had been talking about books that showed up on the floor, he had dropped it there when I wasn't looking. But he didn't know I had just been kinda weirded-out by the Laura Huxley and Keith Rinehart "contact" with Aldous thing.

Hey: Aldous was prolific; there are lots of his books on shelves all over the world, and if a book were to get knocked off a shelf, or dropped there accidentally by someone, possibly carrying too many books to check out? Of all the authors to have books knocked off a shelf, he's got a lot of them as candidates…I don't know. I didn't even mention this to my friend, who didn't notice I had suddenly gone into an altered state. I felt like saying to the ceiling, "Am I on Candid Camera?" Aldous had been my favorite writer for years, and at that point in my life, Robert Anton Wilson was sort of taking over with me. To this day, these two writers have been more influential in my life than anyone else. Did my mind somehow get that novel onto the floor? Some sort of unconscious psychokinesis? Preposterous!

This was over 30 years ago, and as I recount this, I'm feeling a bit of a flashback. I think I thought, at this time, that if I mentioned to my co-worker/friend what had just happened it would come off as fake, too implausible, like I was being a drama queen and inventing marvelous tales. On the face of it, this event feels bogus. But it happened. I admit that it sounds hokey. There really is and was the palpable feeling that the universe is testing me to see how fragile I really was. Which sounds nuts, I know. I knew my friend would have been open-minded about it if I talked about what had just happened. He was a poet-intellectual then heavily in the throes of T.S. Eliot and Wm. S. Burroughs. He loved the marvelous and unexplained too. But I was too weirded-out to mention what had occurred. Possibly, if I had said, "Nice Aldous Huxley joke you pulled there" he might have giggled a little and copped to a prank. As I recall I might have suspected I was having some sort of psychotic break. I was not, but…WTF was going on? This kind of thing just didn't happen to me. But now it did. Can I actually explain it as a coincidence, and feel satisfied? It turns out I could not, but to this day, I'm not sure what was going on. I never got up the nerve to ask my friend, and I'm not sure why.

At some point you read these stories about books and bizarre events around them and just wonder. An author submitted a manuscript to a publisher, then waited for a response. Some time later the manuscript ended up in his garden. Angrily the writer called the publisher and demanded to know what was going on. The publisher said she was impressed with the work, but it had been stolen the previous night from her car, along with other items, while she was eating in a restaurant. The publisher guessed that the thief or thieves hadn't been as impressed as she was and had simply thrown it over a nearby garden fence. I wonder if the thieves felt bad and spied an address of the author and found his house and threw it into the garden. I don't know. Artist-friendly intellectual-property-sensitive thieves.

A poet named Simon Armitage found his own book of poetry thrown in the trash bin outside a thrift store. Inside the book was his inscription, "To Mum and Dad." This story was included in the book, Mortification: Writers' Stories of Their Public Shame.6

There are books that appear in wild anecdotes and you just wonder - or, speak for myself, I wonder - whatever happened to the book. Ramparts editor Warren Hinckle writes about the CIA adrenaline junky pilot they hired to go to the Russian embassy in Mexico City to circulate, it seems, the Jim Garrison story about JFK's hit and see where it goes, and also: to ask the Russians what they have on Oswald and related people. This guy is only called "Hill" and who knows what his real name was. Hinckle didn't know. At some point "Hill" made himself so conspicuous he noticed he was being followed. He noticed that his tail had a tail. That old trick.7 "Hill quite understandably gave thought to the damage possible to his CIA meal ticket, or his person, lest the word get back to Langley, Virginia, that one of their pilots was fraternizing with the enemy. But the lure of rubbing noses with the KGB eventually overshadowed any cautionary reserves in his nature." Eventually a Russian approached "Hill" and asked for the camera around his neck, promising to give it back, which he did, and it was "in better working order than when I gave it to him." Hill talked for two hours with the Russian, and "Hill" explained the Garrison thesis. The Russian nodded, especially when the CIA was mentioned. "Hill" asked politely for "sanitized information the Russians had on Oswald" and others. A few days later the Russian told "Hill": "What you request is not impossible. But it is not necessary that it will happen. The only way that it could possibly occur is in a way that would be most unexpected, and untraceable to its source. Something might be left in your hands, for instance, by a visitor to your country. That is all for now." That old spiel.

The Russian smiled, extended his hand, and asked, "Do you like books?" "Hill" said he did. The Russian gave him a few books on how the East and West might better understand each other in the future. "Hill" had come unprepared for a book exchange, but remembered he had something in his knapsack: an R. Crumb comic book. He gave it to the Russian, who was appreciative, but admitted he was unfamiliar with the idiomatic phrase, "gimme some reds," and that he would have it translated.8 I often wonder about that R. Crumb comic book, and how it might have influenced the Cold War…

Here's one we need to explain away with all alacrity: In 1972 the very great actor Anthony Hopkins was in London to buy a copy of George Feifer's novel The Girl From Petrovka because he was going to be in a film based on that novel. None of the bookstores in London had it, so he went home empty-handed, and entered the underground to catch the train at Leicester Square. He noticed an abandoned book on a bench. Of course it was The Girl From Petrovka. Probably just a coincidence. We all know that feeling of not being able to find a book and then it just shows up in public, unattended. By which I mean: no one knows this feeling, are you fucking kidding me? It gets better.

Hopkins begins flipping through the pages and it has marginalia, like how to change English spellings to American English, like from "labour" to "labor," etc. Months go by and Hopkins is filming the movie. George Feifer is on the set, and Hopkins mentions the weird story about finding the copy in the underground. Feifer asks to see the copy. It had been his own. He was the one who had made the marginalia, in preparation for a possible American-made version of the film. One of Feifer's friends had borrowed the book and lost it near Baywater, Central London.

I read this anecdote in Annie Jacobsen's book9 on the US government's long stealthy search into ESP and everything lumped under psychic phenomena. She heard the story of The Girl From Petrovka on the radio in a car. It was explained away as mathematically common, and subject to the Law of Large Numbers. This kind of thing happens all the time. It could explain me finding Those Barren Leaves by Aldous Huxley in the library aisle, on the floor. Our minds don't find such things intuitive at all. Rather the opposite: they seem incredibly uncanny. Almost unexplainable. And here I was, reading Jabobsen at the end of her 527 page book on the CIA investing in remote viewing (and finding some people can do it?), etc. She wondered: okay, it's all explainable by the mathematics of large numbers…so why were these CIA types - Ivy Leaguers, often - so completely in thrall to PSI phenomena? Don't they have a massive squad of mathematicians, too? Are they not listening to the Law of Large Numbers? Why?

I leave off with one of my faves: the case of the locked-up copy of Illuminatus! When Robert Anton Wilson was in Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he learned there had been some blotter acid with the eye in the pyramid on it, and it was competing with Gorby acid: Gorbachev's face on a hit. He also had read about a German hacker who had died mysteriously, had hacked into the Pentagon and such. He had been completely in thrall to Illuminatus!, it turned out. An article about the hacker (who was named Karl Koch, but in Cosmic Trigger vol II RAW thinks he's "Klaus") showed a picture of Koch's computer, with a copy of Illuminatus! on top; Koch had written articles for the anarchist press in Germany under the nym "Hagbard Celine." RAW surmised - I think, no doubt correctly - that had the CIA not already read Illuminatus! very closely, they must do so now. RAW notes they'd add this analysis to the already "thick dossier" he imagined they had on him. RAW heard rumors the KGB and the CIA had tried to recruit Karl Koch.

Then RAW went to a dinner given by the punk rock group The Klingons and met a young man who had escaped East Germany and told him a story of a weird copy of Illuminatus!: in Leipzig, there was a public library that wasn't open to the public, but housed heretical books. RAW wondered why they didn't burn them and guessed maybe the members of the E. German communist party liked to read dangerous books themselves?

My young informant told me he decided to burglarize the library. With patience and observation, he found a way to get in at night and grab a few books now and then. He always returned them, to avoid arousing suspicion, after reading their Heretical Ideas. When he made his escape to the West, he brought only one of those forbidden books with him.

He put it on the table. It was Illuminatus! "would you please autograph it?" he asked.

I was overwhelmed. The thought of my book locked in a sealed library by Communist officials who did not want to burn it outright was dramatic enough, but having the book stolen and offered to me for an autograph was so weird I wondered if anyone would ever believe this story.

I opened the book to sign it and found on the inside front cover the words RAJNEESH INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY.

Is (or was) the Rajneesh International Library in Poona, India, at his original Ashram, or in his later Oregon ashram? How the hell did the book get from either India or Oregon to the hands of a Communist official in East Germany, who decided to preserve it in a sealed library?10

RAW considered this phenomena from a Jungian synchronicity perspective, and also from the POV of the acceleration of acceleration of information in our world, and chaos mathematics, a fractal process of in-form-ation. I think humans who are attracted to the book-world have a quality of sociality that would seem to encourage odd travels of books and a noticing when certain copies - which we often mark as distinctly our own - turn up in odd places. But I will not dogmatize at this moment.

With perspective of almost 40 years since RAW's trip to Europe and Germany, that world feels like Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm or Goodnight Moon to me, in the US of 2026.

"Shun Fu: Floating Life In A Fallen Realm," by Jeremiah Jenne, a UC Davis-trained Sinologist.

Lin Yu-Tang's English translation goes under Six Chapters Of A Floating Life, while the version from Chiang Su-Hui and Leonard Pratt used the title Six Records Of A Floating Life. I find natural affinity with those living the floating life, having done much floating in my days and nights.

Books: A Memoir, McMurtry, p.238

Her copy had been bought in Providence, then she took it with her to Haverford, PA, to Fayetteville, AK, then on to Hamilton, Ontario, then it was lost. Now see HERE, you!

I first read about this account in Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger, vol. 1, pp.72-73. His source was Laura Archera Huxley's memoir, This Timeless Moment, p.236. I can't even come close to explaining my own synchronicity with a book here, aside from a fortuitous prank by my friend, made weirder by the fact I'd recently read about Aldous's supposed contact with his wife from the realm of the dead. Neal Wilgus reports a long string of "bibliographical synchronicity" events that seemed to ensue after his own encounter with RAW's Cosmic Trigger, vol 1; see Wilgus's The Illuminoids: Secret Societies and Political Paranoia, pp.254-257. The idea is if you immerse yourself in arcane knowledge, strange subrosa machinations and the occult in general, then you invite this sort of weirdness upon yourself, but hardly anyone is sufficiently prepared to deal with it. The "rationalist" take would be it's all a coincidence, and you're preparing your mind to "notice" what was always there, but because of the sets and settings you'd gotten yourself into, it's all too freaky and unexplainable. RAW himself coined the term "coincidance" to counter this Nothing-But mode of overly "rational" thinking. You have to figure this stuff out for yourself, or so I've convinced myself over the years. No one can do it for you. That's part of the Initiation.

The manuscript found in the garden and the poetry book in the trash bin are items I found in Beyond Coincidence, by Plimmer and King, p. 118 and p.127, respectively. The poet's book to "Mum and Dad" was by the celebrated poet Simon Armitage, and Robin Robertson was the author of Mortification. Robertson wrote a smashingly good book on Los Angeles history and film noir, The Long Take, which I'll be writing about here at the OG at some point, or so I hope.

If you're paranoid and think you might have someone following you, you then notice they made a turn and are no longer following you, so you relax. It was ll your imagination. That's when the tail's tail picks you up and tracks you. Why would anyone be tailing you, though, Dear Reader?

If You Have A Lemon, Make Lemonade, Warren Hinckle, pp.247-250.

Phenomena: The Secret History of the US Government's Investigation Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis, Annie Jacobsen, pp.421-422.

Cosmic Trigger vol II, p. 244-245, or the Hilaritas Press ed. See the short piece, "Gorby Acid…and the Fall of the Berlin Wall" in other editions, pagination slightly different in those. There's a German feature film about Koch (23, 1998, Hans Christian Schmid) that I saw in Los Angeles not long after it premiered. RAW was in it, wanted to see it, but I don't know if he ever did. He seemed miffed that I had seen it while he missed it. It was "this year's German films" fest in LA, that I recall. I remember a huge billboard on the 110 freeway on the way there for the California lottery: now at $23 million. Koch was found dead on May 23, 1989, supposedly a suicide, though it's easy to see why the CIA, the KGB and any number of other alphabet soup groups would want the guy dusted.

What's So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You), Naomi Kanakia, Princeton U. Press, 2026, 262 pages.

At one point in her text, Kanakia writes that she had long been a sucker for books about the Great Books, the canon, etc: Jacques Barzun, Alex Beam, Allan Bloom,1 et.al. I felt a comrade here in that I had read those same books (also: Mortimer Adler's Philosopher At Large, Robert Maynard Hutchins's The Learning Society, David Denby's Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World, and a few others I can't recall right now), but this is neither here not there: it's a sort of meta-reading: reading about reading, books about the Great Books, "canon wars", etc. I suspect there's a glimpse of someone like me and this sort of thing in the new DSM-V (or is it VI already?, whatever…).

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I know we all reject Identity Politics, but one of the main reasons I read and greatly enjoyed Kanakia: finally, here was an outsider writing on this topic. Yes, the OG is an old white "cis" dude, but I have always felt alienated, weird, and it's…complicated. Kanakia, raised in the US by parents with PhDs, is a trans woman who transitioned in adulthood. She's a big presence on Substack. In the book she writes of a personal history in which she had no friends, wanted to be thought of as "great" writer and "orator", was alcoholic, did LSD "every weekend" in college and never studied much, much less read the Great Books. It's not difficult to think this had to do at least in part with gender dysphoria. I'm happy for her that she transitioned. She's driven, really smart, has sharp opinions, is thoughtful, knowledgeable and outspoken and I find her strange enough to be endearing. I'm glad she's on the scene.

As she published What's So Great? she'd been reading the Great Books for 15 years, and it seems like they helped her find herself. She doesn't address this aspect so much outright, but it's there. What I love is that she's a trans woman defending the Canon, which has largely been claimed by conservatives, Christian fascists, homophobes and trans-haters, and other repellent Identity Politics jagoffs on the Right. I have had to answer for my 52-volume set of the Great Books of the Western World on my shelves: why do you have these? There's no women. There's no one of color. They're all old books, and what relevance could they possibly have for today's world? Most of these guys were racist or had really bad politics, etc. Yes, yes, yes, but…Kanakia keeps an even keel and discusses this issue, at length, in a way I truly admire. Her wife (a medical researcher at UC San Francisco, among other things specializing in T-cell exhaustion) even wondered: why do you read all these people who hate us or the supposed fans of these books are the sorts who don't think we should exist. Why? Kanakia says a lot on this issue, but one thing I agree with is: it's really much more complicated than you think: first of all, we need to read those we disagree with, but secondly: even the "racists" have fascinating things to say, and there really are good reasons why these books meet the criteria of "Great" and deserve to be in the canon.

Kanakia's favorite book by far among the books-about-the-great books is Clifton Fadiman's The Lifetime Reading Plan, which has been updated by John S. Major.2 This is one I have so far missed. It includes a few African and Asian works, which my 52-volume set doesn't have, but Tales of Genji, The Mahabarata and Epic of Gilgamesh are easily found in the public library. Kanakia makes an interesting point about "remote" areas and cultures of the world that have mostly been excised from the Great Books discussion: at some bygone historical juncture, everything is exotic and remote. And she illustrates with an example from Old English, you know, like the unreadable first few pages in "Oxen Of The Sun" from Ulysses. And it's truly like reading something from Nembla or Uranus. This was English? Riiiight. Chaucer's Middle English looks like Dan Brown in comparison. At a certain historical point, everything's fucking weird as hell. Point well taken, Kanakia.

She has used Fadiman-Major as a guide in her 15 years-and-counting immersion in the Canon. She says she prefers to power through the books mostly without secondary sources, while I am the opposite, having found the serendipity of searching out secondary and tertiary sources to track down allusions and other arcana to be one of the chief spices in my readings of "the classics." Her way gets more books finished and under the belt. The way I see it: it's all, like, ya know, process, man. And it's truly fun, indeed. Books as Drugs: my perennial topic.

Kanakia grew up a hardcore science fiction fan, and she still loves SF. She's also written YA books for kids who feel on the outs. I never thought I'd see a trans woman write an entire university press book defending the Canon, but here we are, and thank Goddess for Kanakia. She does it well, walks the walk, etc. One of my favorite sections is where she discusses a sort of lost utopia, which could possibly be regained, even though I don't think it ever "took" the first time around: here is a place - the Canon - where the democratic middle class could have had a large body of texts to discuss, where a large segment of the population could find solidarity across racial and sexual lines.3

There are very minor faults here and there. For example, she gets Sapir-Whorf wrong: hardly anyone extolls the linguistic determinism of the old Hard Whorfian stance; it's Soft Whorfianism that has carried the day, rightfully so. Hard Whorfianism would seem to put one in the fast lane to paranoia and just egregious errors in general. The structure of our language influences our thinking; it doesn't determine it. But that's a cavil in an otherwise fascinating book. I love her oddness in, say, being preoccupied with learning Old English, or her slightly scattered (okay, diffuse) take on the overall topic. There seems to be a few arguments for Great Books here, but when Kanakia has a point to make she follows through elegantly and lucidly, with examples. She's articulate in her defense of these books as a trans woman, of being Indian, of having been depressed and alcoholic, lonely, and trying online dating, etc. Here's something I never read in Barzun/Denby/Beam/Hutchins/Bloom/Adler:

Of course, there's an empirical side: I have access to different data. I know what it's like to be trans, so I understand that it's natural and biological. I've also sought out information about trans identities throughout history, so I know we are not some trendy fad. But one doesn't need personal experience of gender dysphoria to understand that Ron DeSantis is pursuing a bigoted agenda. Many non-trans people understand, even without the aid of the Great Books, that trans people don't deserve to be persecuted.4

Indeed.

There are numerous books that address questions of whether Socrates himself was a Sophist (I don't think so, and neither, it seems, does Kanakia, mostly 'cuz of how Socrates went down), but she's articulate and entertaining on this. Same with, say, the long lost-found-lost-found stories around Plato's and Aristotle's texts. The medieval Churchmen thought Plato a "pagan" whereas Arry (as Ezra Pound called him, when it wasn't "Harry's Bottle") addressed "science" so he was not as suspect. There seems to be a tacit yet barbed criticism for the demise of the Humanities on campus. (Sorry Theorists, but the chilluns done need to read the classics, and now look at you.) Kanakia reminds us that all the shallow claimants to the great tradition of the West and its supposed superiority isn't so easy: how superior was the West when Islam conquered much of the known world, and Europe was a backwater? It's easy but this kind of thing needs to be repeated…

The idea that the Great Books might "destroy you" is wicked fun: they can, indeed, set off something in yourself you didn't know was there. Something about the density of this reading, and you, sitting alone for hours, not playing video games or watching TV or doomscrolling, but grappling with unwieldy near-impenetrable text until it scrambles or unscrambles something and…who knows what you'll do next? Hopefully nothing to land ya in the hoosegow. But also: your old "self" can be destroyed; you can possibly find a better version of yourself in your commitment to reading truly epochal lit. This seems to be how these books functioned for Kanakia. What's So Great? then, might be one of the brainier books ever on reading as therapy. So be it.

But longtime readers of the OG know my attraction to "dangerous" books is something dark and eldritch within the very core of mine own being, and They All Laffed When I Sat Down To Read The Turner Diaries or Machiavelli or The Anarchist Cookbook or Catcher In The Rye, or The Eighteenth Brumaire, etc, alas…

What lurks within Kanakia's text is the simple idea of actually reading dense, heavy, "difficult" books as something anyone can do in order to save themselves and lead richer lives, which I think is what these books did for her. She also says of course you're going to not like some of these. She powered through Kant, admirably, but she will take a break and read current writers, as we all will and should. All in all, it was very exciting to read this defense, given her background. She's made herself into an elite reader and writer of cultural criticism, and largely it's been through an immersion in the Canon. Bless her.

I was taking classes at Citrus College in my hometown of Glendora, California, and renting a room in a condominium from one of my classmate's parents. Within two months, the step-dad of my classmate was abandoned by his wife (my friend's mom), and both my classmate and her sister. They all moved out to live with their boyfriends, leaving just myself upstairs in the rented room in this rather large condo, and the man, downstairs. He didn't come upstairs because both lower legs had been amputated at the knee due to diabetes. He sat in a wheelchair in a small room off the kitchen watching Christian TV through coke bottle glasses and it was incredibly depressing to witness. He'd been an expert in building with marble, and I heard many versions of how he did the marble in Aaron Spelling's house. At least twice I found him in a diabetic shock and had to call 911. He hit on any girlfriend I bought over, which was amusing in a garish sort of way.5

Anyway, he had the 52-volume set on a shelf, and I doubt they'd ever been read. I could picture him cracking The Republic for maybe 20 minutes. I offered him $100 (all I had, with some help from my dad), and he said yea, okay. I remember hauling the set upstairs and just piling them up on the floor and opening them at random, like they were treasure and promise and enigmatic and somehow slightly embarrassing, though I couldn't put my finger on why. This set of books was overwhelming. Homer was the first volume, but who the fuck was Apollonius of Perga? Newton's Principia is in there: you open it and instantly realize you'll never really hang in a thousand years of math study. So why?…I didn't even know who Montesquieu was at the time. Galen? I'd heard of him: ancient medicine? Yea, well that's why they put him in the same volume with Hippocrates. Open Hippocrates…ah! an entire essay on Hemorrhoids. Talk about timeless! The William James 1890 textbook Principles of Psychology remains one of my favorite books, as does Montaigne's Essays. And I unexpectedly found Lucretius a major turn-on. I really liked Boswell's Life of Johnson, too. What a character!

Say what you will about this set, but the 2-volume Syntopicon appended to this collection had a massive influence on me: the very idea that you could select "the great ideas" (there are 102?) with subheadings for aspects of the ideas, with exact page for every book in the set: a weird, but wonderful idea in itself. An idea about "One and Many" might include some paragraphs or passages from Homer, Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Laurence Sterne, and then…Freud. They all address some particular aspect of the idea "One and Many." What a work of indexing! In Mortimer Adler's Philosopher At Large he goes into great detail about how the Syntopicon was accomplished by an army of geek-readers recruited from in and around Chicago and St. John's College in Annapolis to index the Great Ideas. It's frankly astonishing. The 2-volume Syntopicon is quite a work of crowd-sourced scholarship! When you think like this you begin to reify in a slight way ideas that you think are significant, then, in your reading of current books or Weird Shit, poetry, novels, highbrow comic books, whatever, you see these ideas discussed, "syntopically." You learn to read for ideas. Or at least I did. I still do.6

For those connoisseurs of a good index like yers trooly - you might have read Dennis Duncan's recent Index, A History of the as soon as it came out - the Syntopicon is a marvelous beast of an index. And while Adler's notion of how to divide Ideas up into 102 reflects his odd Thomism, it's still worth checking out if you've never seen how it works. Here's Adler's humblebrag in this…ehhh…idea:

Thousands upon thousands of indices have been constructed, either by the writers of books, by their editors, or by collaborators assigned this special task. But never had anyone attempted indexing the work of two or more authors by reference to a single set of terms or categories. Here we were going to deal with 74 authors and 443 distinct works. In addition, Great Books of the Western World would include poetry and imaginative literature, as well as great works of history, and not just philosophical and theological treatises, and mathematical and scientific expositions. To my knowledge, no one had ever before attempted to index the intellectual or ideational content of epic and dramatic poetry, of novels and plays, or of historical narratives; and doing it in a way that would relate the indexed passages in such works to comparable passages in expository treatises.7

In the wake of Thomas Pynchon's arrival on the scene, much was written about "maximalist" "encyclopedic" novels.8 The 52-volume Britannica set drifts off for novels at Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (War and Peace and Brothers Karamozov), so no Proust or Musil or Woolf, no Ulysses,9 and of course no Gravity's Rainbow or Illuminatus!, but it does include those ur-encyclopedic novels Don Quixote, Moby Dick, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Gulliver's Travels, Tristram Shandy, Tom Jones, and Goethe's Faust. And the ideas are indexed!

So, since 1987 I've been reading in and around this set of Great Books. A lot of them were a rough slog. Some are still unread. (I haven't gotten to Lavoisier's Elements of Chemistry, although I recently re-read Nicomachus of Gerasa's Introduction to Arithmetic, which I found trippy AF.)10

I have some choice spewage about Robert Anton Wilson and Mortimer Adler, which must wait for some other day, as I sat down to write a short review of Naomi Kanakia, and I once again feel like I'm letting the topic go on too long for one article. You're all invited back next week to this locality to have a heapin' helpin' of the weird ol' OG.

House of Intellect; A Great Idea At The Time: The Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books; The Closing of the American Mind. As a 21st c. trans woman, she never mentions the reactionary problem with NeoCon Allan Bloom, who hated rock 'n roll, the "Sixties" and Nietzsche, and may have died of AIDS. She's really above all that. I am not. I found myself wondering if Kanakia had read Saul Bellow's Ravelstein yet. While she's candid about how many Great Books she hasn't yet read (she includes a list at the end, and Montaigne is on there as not having read yet, but I see that recently she's gotten to him), she really does seem very well-read for a youngster of 39. It truly is a "lifetime" of reading here. When you commit, you're in it for the Long Haul. I get it. I really do.

You find the updated version as The New Lifetime Reading Plan, which, if you knew nothing about the pro-Western Canon movement, you might be excused for assuming it's linked to some extremist religion, just by dint of the title.

see pp. 167-173. Britannica, which published the Great Books of the Western World, did a survey to find out who their audience was. It was mostly lonely weirdo male tech-geeks who wanted to be more well-rounded, possibly get chicks. My, how Things seem to have changed. As for the utopian riff on solidarity: TV intervened. The acceleration accelerated; much of the middle class fell into what John Dewey and Kenneth Burke called "occupational psychosis." Etc.

pp.83-92, this quote merely an excerpt from Kanakia's effective rhetoric about how the Great Books are for everyone.

At least once one of them let themselves in and encountered him in his room, near the front door, oiling his stump, as if that might be some sort of turn-on. O! The Things I've seen!

For background on the Syntopicon index to the 52-volume set, see Mortimer Adler's Philosopher At Large, pp.237-252. As an intellectual idea it's almost absurd and clearly audacious. And those are just the A's: "Later, when I had sent Bill Benton (of Britannica-OG) a list of the great ideas, he did not get past the A's, from Angel through Astronomy, without expostulating, 'But where's Adultery?' When I told him he would find a topic about adultery under the idea of Family, he asked, 'What's it doing there?'" (p.243)

Philosopher At Large, M. Adler, p.244.

See Edward Mendelson's "Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante To Pynchon," from 1976, HERE.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was included in a revised, 60-volume set which appeared 38 years later, in 1990, after enough haranguing by the chattering classes of readers who wanted more from the 19th and 20th century. To The Lighthouse was added.

Nicomachus (who lived probably just a smidge later than 100 CE) reminds me of when I listen to the 1936 recordings of Robert Johnson's Mississippi Delta Blues stuff: it sounds like the ultimate source-code for much of my musical life as a rock guitarist, enamored with Van Halen, Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Clapton, et.al: it's all there in utero in Johnson. Nicomachus gives a very clear picture of Platonic Idealism, which was heavily influenced by the cult of numbers and Pythagoras: the eternal idea that 1 is something while 2 is twice that and quite something else, that multiples and many are not unity, and the One, but they're unchanging, eternal truths that must emanate from a Higher Realm, unlike our debased world of multiplicity and changing Forms, etc. It's difficult to overestimate the lasting influence of this sort of thought, which we see baked into ideas all over our own world, right where you are sitting now. Yes, RAW called it Idealized Platonic Horseshit in Natural Law, but he was pursuing a different point…

Charles Percy was running for the Senate in Illinois. It was September 18, 1966. He was a few points behind in at least one poll. That night someone murdered his 21 year old daughter in their house, in her bed. The case has never been solved, although when anyone reads about it they will notice a quite different American justice system. The Illinois police followed up on over 1300 leads, interviewed over 14,000 people, and spent $300,000 trying to find the murderer(s). Percy suspended his campaign for two weeks, then beat the Democrat in the election.

The cops zeroed in on two guys linked to the Mob, who specialized in breaking and entering and stealing from wealthy homes, having stolen over $3 million in jewels and cash from homes. One of the two guys allegedly confessed to friends and acquaintances that he murdered the girl because she woke up. Nothing was stolen from the Percy household that night and no physical evidence linked the two suspects to the crime, so they skated. But Valerie Percy, the Senator's daughter, was dead.

Percy was for the Vietnam War, and when Nixon declared the War On Drugs in 1968, Percy was one of the point men for Nixon. In 1994, Nixon's domestic policy man, John Ehrlichman, told journalist Dan Baum that the War On Drugs was a war on the two groups that opposed them most visibly: the Blacks and the Anti-War Left. Nixon declared the most dangerous man in America to be…Timothy Leary.

(Senator Percy, Republican from Illinois, 1967-1985)

Ehrlichman in 1994:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.1

New Senator Percy chimed in for Nixon and other Republicans, suddenly in the news everywhere making up numbers and diverting attention from what was looking like a disastrous war, which would go on for another six years. The conservative think tank The Hudson Institute claimed there were a quarter of a million heroin addicts in New York City alone, and they were responsible for $1.7 billion in crime, worth more than the total amount of crime in the entire US. Senator Percy claimed, "The total cost of drug-related crime in the US today is around $10 billion to $15 billion."2

Percy stayed in the Senate until 1985, when he was defeated by Paul Simon. Many sources link Percy's defeat to AIPAC: he'd been a little too outspoken about Israel. While in office he ended the practice of nominating Federal judges from the political machine in Chicago, instead consulting with legal experts, including the ABA. One of the judges that came out of this was John Paul Stevens, who later served as one of the last male adults on the SCOTUS. Percy once said that The Autobiography of Malcolm X was a book that moved him greatly, and he thought more white people should read it. Based on his enquiries about health effects of Agent Orange and other defoliants sprayed on US troops in 'Nam, he played a part in getting the US government to stop spraying paraquat on the Mexican cannabis crop.3

In 1968, as Percy found his stride in the Senate, Robert Anton Wilson was living in Chicago and working with his friend Robert Shea at Playboy, answering questions for the Playboy Advisor, with humor and in the intellectual libertarianism they shared with Hefner. He was also writing under pseudonyms for anarchist magazines, like the Spark and the Chicago Seed.

In 1971 RAW wrote a letter to his Senator, Charles Percy, telling him the CIA was involved in the opium trade in Laos. RAW got this from his colleague Allen Ginsberg, who…had his sources. RAW sent Percy clippings from the Chicago Daily News, about Ginsberg's claim. He also sent elaborated information about this topic from the the Spark, and cited Joel Fort's very recent book The Pleasure Seekers, which also contained information on the topic, and wrote that the latest issue of Ramparts magazine would have even more information. RAW:

If the fundamental facts in these stories are true, the heroin that is killing our children in America today is being brought here partly due to our government's attempts to preserve corrupt dictatorships. It seems that not only is our government willing to kill our young men when they reach 18, but is also willing to expose them to heroin in their own neighborhoods, just to protect whatever interests it has, or imagines it has, in the Far East.4

Subsequent findings proved RAW's info from Ginsberg not only accurate, but the tip of the iceberg. Alfred W. McCoy would blow the lid off this whole thing with one of the greatest exposes in history, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, in 1972. One wonders what the young Senator and Drug Warrior from Illinois, Charles Percy, made of all these radicals asserting such stuff. Was he "in" on what Ehrlichman said, that of course the war on drugs was a war on the enemies of Nixon? Or was Percy what the CIA calls "a Useful Idiot"?

In Berkeley, CA, Wilson's teenaged daughter Luna, beloved free spirit, was murdered by a troubled man in the back of a clothing store on Telegraph Ave. Another botched burglary. He tied her up and bashed her head in with a credit card machine.5 This case, unlike Senator Percy's daughter's murder, was solved.6

Suddenly, Wilson had a fellow in grief: Republican Senator Charles Percy. In a letter dated January 1, 1978, 14 months after Luna's murder, RAW writes his friend Timothy Leary:

Senator Percy said once that his whole family suffered emotional problems for over a year after the murder of his daughter, and I can fully appreciate what he meant by that.7

Early in the first volume of RAW's Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy of novels, The Universe Next Door, there's a very Wilson-ish character, a columnist named Benny "Eggs" Benedict, whose mother went out for a walk, got mugged and stabbed several times with a Boy Scout knife, and died, murdered. He saw her body. The doctors gave him tranquilizers, as they did RAW after Luna's murder.

Benny was crippled psychologically in a way he could not perfectly understand. After all, having reached the fifth decade of his life,8 he was well acquainted with grief: in the past ten years he had experienced the deaths of his father, his older brother, and three close friends. But murder is not just another form of grief: it is a metaphysical message, like Fate knocking on the door at the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth.9

Benny begins to see the sadistic murderer everywhere, and worse, he's always grinning. I think the idea of the grinning sadistic murderer gained a lot of valence in the wake of the Manson murders, of which…maybe later.

Then, one day looking through the old files in the newspaper morgue, Benny found an interview with Senator Charles Percy, given in 1970, two years after the murder of his own daughter. "For the first year after the murder," Senator Percy said, "my whole family lived in terror." Benny felt a sudden sense of relief. This must be normal, he thought; it happens to everybody who's had a murder close to them. And it lasts only a year.10

Very soon after this, the year marker passes and Benny isn't getting any better, his doctor ups his Valium dosage, and Benny is invited to give a talk, when some wild-eyed hippie type comes at him at the podium, Benny "sees" the Grinning Sadist with a knife, but…it's a pie. He gets hit in the face with a pie. This too actually happened to Wilson: the person who hit him with a pie loudly called Wilson a "materialist!" as he launched the pie. For some reason, this episode reminds me of the rumble in the bowling alley parking lot in The Big Lebowski, where the opposition are a bunch of "nihilists."

Wilson received a strange offer just after Luna's murder. In an interview only four months later:

Q: Your 15 year old daughter, Luna was murdered four months ago. Can you describe what happened?

RAW: Luna was beaten to death in the course of a burglary at a store where she was working. Right after Luna's death I got a call from Paul Segal, who'd just got his PhD for research in stopping the aging process in rats three different ways. He acknowledges me as one of the people who helped him in his work. I didn't do any of the research but he felt I'd contributed a lot to his work. Paul said he knew I didn't have the money to to pay for cryogenic suspension, but he said we could get it done voluntarily and funds for the upkeep could be raised later. It turns out a lot of people in the immortalist movement were chipping in to help out and so on. So we had Luna preserved. All the work was done by the Bay Area Cryonic Society voluntarily as an expression of gratitude for the publicity I'd been giving their work. It's probably the most deeply moving thing that has happened in my whole life.11

I've often wondered about the quality and lastingness of comfort of the Cryonics people and Senator Percy. I don't know. Wilson discusses the lasting grief in the short vignette, "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee," in Cosmic Trigger vol 2: Down To Earth, writing that, given enough time, it seemed "mathematically certain" that Luna's genetic material could be reanimated and that "science could give Luna a chance to live again." But he would suddenly break into uncontrollable weeping. 12 In his journal of those years, Wilson's friend, the UFO phenomenologist Jacques Vallee chalked up Luna's death to the craziness of "Berkeley" and "drugs" at that time in history.13

RAW was always interested in causality and physics. Take any incident in your own life: how your parents met, the day a friend died in an accident, anything: what were all the possible events that led up to this and what little thing could have entirely changed the course of events? Much of the quantum theory that Wilson philosophizes with in the Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy has this as its basis. RAW calls the short piece about his grief over Luna in 1977 "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" thus because:

The murderer was a Sioux Indian and an alcoholic, who had been at Wounded Knee when, according to eye witnesses, the FBI opened fire on unarmed Native American demonstrators and killed several. I could not think of him without seeing him as the resultant of all the horrors and atrocities committed against the Native Americans since we whites first arrived here. My rage went through him and past him to include the whole structure of Christian bigotry, white racism and Capitalist greed that had made the genocide of the Native Americans inevitable - and made the high alcoholism and violence rate of the survivors equally inevitable.14

This was why, should the death penalty have been in play for LeBeau, RAW and his wife Arlen would have been against it.

In Ed Sanders's book on the Manson murder cult, The Family, there's a bit about the paranoid aftermath that was teeming, all over the US, but especially in the hills above Hollywood. The magickian-Sufi E.J. Gold had had a "cult of evil" (that really wasn't), but it certainly cause creeped-out spooks to look into other Thelemites and Crowley-like adepts and writers about Crowley. This may have fed some of RAW's paranoia around this, though the story of his "paranoia" can be the subject of your own 10,000 word essay. Arlen was asked about RAW going to antiwar meetings in which it was assumed at least half the members were spies for the local police, or allied with the FBI or any other group: she said he was the least paranoid person she'd ever known. As RAW often wrote: paranoia is a losing script. Nevertheless: the Manson murders seven years earlier had certainly made people in the counterculture more wary.

There's a very interesting passage in RAW's novel Masks of the Illuminati, where George Cecil Jones, a Crowley adept, is teaching the Probationer Sir John Babcock about magick via the Golden Dawn system. A news story about a "mangler" murderer near Loch Ness on the loose appears in the newspaper, and then the idea that other papers will pick this story up and it's going to be big news. Babcock asks, Is that bad or good? Jones replies:

"It's the very worst thing that can happen," he said with grinding patience. "You should understand by now that human belief-systems determine human experience. Why do you think the Invisible College remains Invisible? Why do you suppose we don't perform miracles on every street corner and convert the multitudes? Don't you realize that the philosophy of materialism is the best thing that ever happened to Europe?"

"You are talking in paradoxes," Sir John complained, noticing that the fog outside was beginning to thicken.

Jones points out that once a haunted house story appears in the papers, people experience haunted houses everywhere. Jones asks Babcock, "Why do you think the Buddha said, 'All that we are is the result of all that we have thought.'?"

Jones says that stories like this "mangler" murderer on the loose creates its own reality, and opens up more people to fear, paranoia, copycat killers, more murder, but the the simple uneducated people have Faith that they will be protected, while the "educated" - the "equally automated morons turned out in platoons by the universities have a simple skepticism, which also protects them." But the true Adept realizes that phenomenon such as a scare creates the possibility of alternations between Faith and Skepticism, which lead to true enlightenment. Crowley himself had once explained this endless series gnomically thus: "?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!…"15

It's not difficult to do some research and find some group of sickos who committed some atrocity because they were influenced by the Manson family murders. And how did they find out about these atrocities? We create reality and yet do we have agency over what we pay attention and lend weight to?

As for causality, there's no end, but I re-read Pynchon's Vineland yet again not too long ago. For those who know, Frenesi Gates gets turned in the Drug War Snitch Culture, and gets involved in a plot to get rid of a very popular psychedelics-using Math Professor. And Pynchon addresses this very much as RAW did when thinking of the infiniteness of causality. Was Weed Atman's Bardo Adventure and murder easy to limn? No: Rex shot Weed, with Frenesi instigating, but Brock Vond got Frenesi to "turn", and why were those drugs illegal in the first place? What kind of value system gives rise to such persecution?, etc: who's fault? In our Western system of Law, we forget all this and mostly only concern ourselves with the final actions. Some people get busted for being a part of the crime in some capacity. There are limits to culpability that seem human, all-too human in their legalistic reasoning and precedent cases, etc. And yet: nothing in our lives - how you happen to be reading this, for example - has one simple cause. And I don't think we can account for it. We tend to find the idea ludicrous, for….reasons. "Not practical," even if true. I get it.

RIP Valerie Percy, died September 18, 1966

RIP Patricia Luna Wilson, died October 3, 1976

Take a gander HERE.

"Treatment Or Jail: Is This Really A Choice?, Preston Peet, Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies, ed. Russ Kick, pp.145-150. The Percy quote is on p.146. Percy's quote of $15 billion in 1968 must be factored in: $100 in 1968 is roughly equal to $962 today. Could Percy have actually believed this at the time?

Seeing Through The Smoke: A Cannabis Specialist Untangles the Truth About Marijuana, Peter Grinspoon, pp. 85-86.

letter dated May 6, 1971. RAW sent copies of this letter to Senator Fulbright, Jack Anderson and Mike Royko of the Daily News, and I.F. Stone. This letter was found and retrieved from the Ed Sanders Archive at Princeton, by Bobby Campbell. Ginsberg was at the same DC cocktail party as CIA Director Richard Helms, and said out loud that he could prove that the CIA was involved in heroin smuggling, and they made a bet right there in front of everyone. I wonder if Helms, "The Man Who Kept The Secrets", ever paid up.

RAW wrote about this very soon after it happened. His now-famous underground classic Cosmic Trigger vol 1 was published in 1977. For relevant pages on Luna, see pp.78; 81, 135-136. For pages on Luna's last days and the aftermath, see. 237-244. Luna appears to have been an extraordinarily intuitive kid with a crazy amount of charisma. So much so that eight years ago a poetic graphic novel was written by one of her childhood friends in 1970s Berkeley, Rebecca Fish Ewan. See her By The Forces Of Gravity: A Memoir of Loving Luna. (2018)

RAW's biographer, Gabriel Kennedy, did a follow-up investigation on Alex N. Lebeau, HERE. As far as I know, RAW never wrote LeBeau's name, at least in his books and articles extant. That LeBeau got a mere five years for this!

RAW letter to Leary 1/1/78 from the Leary Archives at the NY Public Library.

RAW was 44 when Luna was murdered. "Benny" is a character who could have been RAW, but here he is in another quantum universe.

Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy, omnibus ed, p.19.

SCT, p.20. Percy's daughter was murdered in 1966, not 1968, but this is a different universe in which some things are in "our" universe, while other things are wildly and significantly different, although in September 2026 things are looking somewhat like the universe of The Universe Next Door…which…doesn't end well, does it?

Luna was the first person to have her brain preserved by the American Cryonics Society, which was then called the Bay Area Cryonics Society. Interview: Weird Trips, 1977.

Cosmic Trigger vol 2: Down To Earth, pp.81-83, New Falcon ed.

Forbidden Science 2, Vallee, p.371. Vallee really does come off as a straight guy through all his work. He had friends like Anton LaVey, a wonderful weirdo also pretty straight vis a vis drugs. As the discussion of causality builds later, I think it far too facile to cite "drugs" and "Berkeley" as the proximate cause of Luna's death.

Cosmic Trigger vol 2: Down To Earth, p.82. We recognize this thinking about suffering and our place in the planet as Buddhist, and RAW was something of a Boddhisattva.

I often frame this as Hume pragmatized. Yes, skepticism. But not knee-jerk skepticism, as there more things in heaven and earth, etc. Tentative belief that something marvelous might be true: what are the consequences of such thinking? Then: skepticism again. We tentatively arrive at a "model" of certain phenomena that we favor more than others, but there's always that skepticism, if for only the glaring idea: how likely is it that we hold the entire Truth about some phenomenon, right now? Not bloody likely! Not at all! Keep an open mind, but know it's your instrument - your nervous system - that's doing the recording. RAW called this system writ large: Model Agnosticism. I think it makes us smarter, funnier and happier. As of this date…

First, I must refer the Reader to Ted Gioia's referrals to hyperbolic/non-hyperbolic1 claims made by AI gurus from the past 24-30 hours, as I write this. Getta load. AI will probably kill us all or most of us, or there's some unthinkable percentage of chance the planet is doomed, etc. As I say, get a load, then come back to me. Or not.

If it's true, this writing I'm doing right now will be rendered moot soon. Your thinking about your children? Sorry! This is what "the best" capitalists have brought us. It confirms, for the nth time in my life, that the richest and most powerful people in the world are just fucking trash.

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I know this goes against the majority thinking from my entire life: people with hundreds of millions or billions are "better" because…why, again? One really smart snarky person was quoted in Adam Becker's More Everything Forever this syndrome of "I'm really smart: look how much money I have."

When confronted with such a stupefying existential scenario, my tendency is to fall back on grand, meta-narratives. So, AI ruins all of human history, like, next Tuesday after lunch. What was that AI shit for? What was it supposed to do for humans, again? Did we even work that out before building this Shit? Of course we didn't. We were given narratives, but our best and brightest rational-logical-numbers people.2

What's cosmically hilarious (I hope to be dead for this Colossal Scenario of Stupidity) is that, because we found we could extend our fists by making clubs, then swords: we did. Because we could extend our sword by making firearms…we did. Because Pavlovian fear is all-too easy to manipulate, and lots money could be made, everyone has an assault rifle now. Because we could split the atom and maneuver profound power of nuclear reactions, we "had to" build an atom bomb, then a hydrogen bomb, then…etcetera.3

Because those of extreme wealth tend to be fearful that icky Others who do not know their proper place in the grand Primate Status Game that is Humanity for the past 10,000 years, they found they could create a hazy, nebulizing series of documents and laws that pretend to allow for a better life for 99%, but it's mostly bullshit.

But: we have a separation of powers!

Do we? A crass, fatuous game show host was "elected" by the Electoral College and allowed to appoint enough fourth-rate little white supremacists to the SCOTUS. So that's over.4 A ruling by an earlier version of the same SCOTUS basically allowed for the Rich to buy Congress. So this separation of powers thing is over. The idea that we can discuss and communicate good ideas and create a better world was a good one. But the very rich have been allowed to buy up pretty much all Media, and they are actively putting forth ideas that only some people deserve to live any kind of decent life at all, but most people really should just die. We're supposed to look up to and admire these PsOS: Mottled Rump, Thiel, Musk, most of Congress, Bezos, etc. I wrote "etc" because I started to feel a little sick just writing their names.5

I don't have an answer for why the 99% have historically tolerated or even venerated these rich sociopaths. I consider it a mostly mysterious philosophically anthropological question. We never came to grips that we're primates with language and we'd better understand what that entails or we're fucked, just for starters. We did not understand. Not enough of us anyway.

Robert Anton Wilson once waxed philosophical about a line uttered by a very minor character, talking on a phone, in Spike Lee's film Jungle Fever: "Shit, motherfucker! I want my fucking money, motherfucker!" This line hit Wilson like a Joycean epiphany. It was one of those everyday utterances that, if you'd trained your mind to see the profundity in mundane things, speaks volumes:

In the feudal age, people once fought wars over Land, when Land served as the source of wealth. Those who had Land wanted more, on the usual addictive rule that we want more of what makes us feel very, very good. They also worried that others wanted to take their Land away. Then paper Money appeared, almost as abstract as pure information in communication theory. For over 400 years now the world has struggled over Money - working for, swindling and robbing for it, conspiring to monopolize it, going to war over it. Since less than one percent of Earthians owns 99 percent of the Money, the (approximately) six billion of the rest of us struggle evermore desperately over the one percent of the green magick not yet monopolized. We all feel like Spike Lee's guy on the cell-phone part of the time, do we not?6

The cruel joke is that We made up these systems. Something I've never been able to get away from: the schoolyard bully is effectively neutered, part of the time, by shunning him.7 Other wisdom says to punch him in the face. I suspect both approaches work okay, but are not a failsafe: the bully quite often finds stupid clods, goons who think he's cool - this primate game - and Bully-Boy has protection to go on and push others around. 'Cuz he can. Law of the jungle.8

We're collectively guilty of allowing the bullies to insulate themselves. They really don't have much interesting going on in their creative lives. Their thing is pushing their weighty egos around and accumulating More. Almost without exception, they are boring, fearful, loudmouthed, chest-thumping, clueless-to-their-own-humanity Losers, who ironically want the 99% to feel like Losers. And they pay well to get out the idea they're Real Smart. And enough people buy this. For which, I sink into my own existential tepid bath and laugh at a God I don't believe in, or wonder about the possible motives for the Mind in our local universe.

Since age 15 or so, I was thinking about these sorts of Big Qs, and I thought there probably were other advanced intelligences in the universe. But do they eventually get nukes, ability to divide and conquer, heat up their planet to unlivable levels 'cuz of stock portfolios that must not be infringed, build biochemical weapons and create Megadeath, create robots in the 1%'s image, and terminate all life? I thought they did. Probably all of 'em. And if any given advanced civilization woke up and solved this problem of Technological Stupidity, they passed through the Bottleneck of Forever and advanced to the next stage, with love and lack of want, art and real ethics, untold levels of lucidity and understanding, beauty and immortality, etc. I somehow came to the conclusion that most of the possible civilizations did not solve the Technological Stupidity Problem of If We Can, We Must Or Those of a Supposedly Opposite Ideology Will.9

For my long (short) life, I've pondered this. But maybe we'll see how the chips fall for this planet, sooner than later. I want/wanted us to be a success and make it through, because of course I'm horribly biased and in favor of the 99%, of which I am one.

If, in hindsight, this is all akin to Y2K-will-end-civilization - for sales reasons - I hereby personally suspend my anti-death penalty philosophy for all the biggest shakers here. Because seriously: how dare they? Some of us rabble are too sophisticated to take much more of this level of Moronicity.

Too bad the burgeoning rebirth of the Great Books thing didn't hit a decade or two sooner, but whattyagonnado?

Hitler's odious racism and white supremacy was seen as bad for Business by England, France, and the US: we have a better system under white supremacy and racism and a vicious, if invisible class structure, and this must be preserved. It was. Under the threat of nuclear annihilation of all living things on the planet. This is who We are. This is what a Naked Lunch looks like.

Fang: whatever happened to that planet they called Earth?

Kodos: Their most bellicose gene-pool alignment allowed a 6-3 majority for hatred and exclusion. One of 'em really liked beer.

Fang: Ah! That old story.

The utter banality of the thinking of these sociopaths further bewilders me. What is so difficult to understand about this? Apparently: a lot. To paraphrase HG Wells out of context (sorta): And thus we drift ever closer to catastrophe.

TSOG: Tsarist Occupation Government, Wilson, (Hilaritas ed), pp. 180-181. Originally published 25 years ago. This existential situation forms much of the backbone against which the Tale of the Tribe is told.

Let's face it: since patriarchy, it is a male.

Or, instead of jungle, Joyce's "jungerl," which makes you really think. Or should.

Hell, maybe we will somehow pull it out before the End Credits Roll. I hope so, if only for the hundreds of millions of sweet chilluns runnin' 'round the woild right as we speak. The "not" here no doubt links to my own biases and life experience, which I can know about but cannot evade. You have your own. Can you root out your own biases? It seems, as of this date, I personally cannot.

A seminal comic essay for me, first read many decades ago, was James Thurber's "The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty." Mitty has a managed middle-class life that can't compete with the fantasy worlds he continually slips into. The material fodder for his fantasies seems to be books, magazines, movies.1

It was a source of mirth for me, of course. But withal: it resonated with something inchoate within my own fantasy world (not dictated by a quasi-harpy, like Mitty's): how books, reading, knowledge, and a certain pursuit and serendipity in libraries, aided by librarians, was something I made into an exciting mysterium over time. The Mitty story, though "famous" and anthologized to the max, may be underrated simply due to the very fact that it can "turn on" someone to realize this is a thing, and now they're conscious of it, and can deed and curate it, make it grow and yet maybe we hope to keep it under control,2 though…there will be other stories when it got a little out of hand…

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I gradually realized I had this rich fantasy-world that I went into - what the phenomenological sociologists Berger and Luckmann called a "finite province of meaning" - every day.3 And it was ironic because I became so aware that I was entering this world, and adding to it, every day, kinda like a stamp collector who wakes up every day, on the hunt for a rare upside down double eagle from Lichtenstein, whatever. I know nothing of philately, faith. But I do know I have a bunch of questions about a whole welter of phenomena, and I wake up every day wanting to know more. Simply refining the questions is libidinal-erotic for me.

But - is this weird? and I don't care if you think it is - I kept making this world a little richer every day. Hell: I'm doing it now, as I write this. I had to laugh at myself, and truly, I did. Quite often, as a matter of fact. And the biological basis of my being tended to add sex and intrigue to my everyday forays into this finite province of meaning, because those two seem such golden things, amorphous, polyphiloprogenitive, and revelatory.

I suspect and expect there to be enough intersubjectivity between you 'n me so that you aren't reading this thinking Just What The Fuck Is This Guy Talking About?

Basic idea: all librarians are sexy, even the ones who clash with your own gender, are "old" or not "pretty." So stipulated: librarians: overworked, underpaid, misunderstood, and now "Information Specialists" and harried by fascist dipshits for no decent reason at all: are sexy heroes and heroines that deserve our deep respect and, with the advent of assholes like Mottled Rump and his lumpenproles, our protection.4

Basic idea: the hot "sexy" librarian in TV and movies do exist, as you know, but they are in the vast minority. Let us consider them an Archetype. The residue - or "aura" - of immersion in data and information retrieval, the radical open-mindedness that people need info for reasons we can't fathom and besides it's not our business why they need this info but I will try to get them what they need: hot. Sizzling, sexy stuff. All hail the Librarian! In a decent society they have more status than any CEO, and are better paid.

Basic idea: access to vast amounts of information is what fascists don't want for YOU; they only want it for themselves. Therefore: libraries and books gain evermore in value the more fascism (Mussolini's "corporate state" and other variants: hell: all of 'em) is in ascendancy. Thus, the hotter contested books and thinking and access to information (which we make into "knowledge") become, due to fascist pressure…uhh…the more valuable those things are. And librarians are right in the thick, constantly tryna keep their cool. Most of 'em manage quite well, seems to me.

Basic idea: librarians and independent booksellers stand at the nexus of information, which implies learning, vitality, growth, and change and is therefore sexy. All this lends the sexy aura to all librarians, even the ones ready for retirement who seem to have been phoning it in behind the reference desk for the last 20 years. I will go to the barricades on this.

Basic idea: secrecy, uncovering information, thinking, concealment, cracking codes, cracking books and reading them, gaining "intel", being in the surround of books and information retrieval: this is all massively intriguing and has all the elements of the espionage thriller. And you're paying just a small tax to participate in it if ya wanna. It's just right down the street, ya know, kinda near City Hall and/or the post office?5 All this is exciting! (Still with me?)

I think the kinky sexy librarian thing is hot, of course, but I've only personally known two that totally fit that stereotype in my entire life so far. Mostly, librarians6 seem ambiguous about the stereotype: it's better than the "schoolmarm" vibe but also: they don't wanna be accosted at work. Not even the gay dudes. (And there are a lot of gay dude librarians. They're Sexy-Guys very often but not part of the stereotype and I don't lust after them silently. But maybe you do.)

Last January the Czar of Noir, Eddie Muller, an autodidact-scholar of film noir and one of its great impresarios, discussed the sexy librarian types in classic noir. Betsy Drake (who was once married to Cary Grant) often played this type: sexy but pragmatic.7 Muller called her "a grown-up Nancy Drew." Indeed. Muller labeled the "saintly sensible sorority of noir": Barbara Bel Geddes, Phyllis Thaxter, and Mona Freeman. These are all Plain-Jane girls next door, as women, often wives trapped by some sociopathic husband who wants control of her, the board of directors, and the police. Thaxter as John Garfield's wife in The Breaking Point just kills. She's not a librarian, but she could be. Mostly they're "spinsters" or "eggheads" who wear glasses, with their hair up, cardigans, sensible shoes, and a haughty attitude. In other words: very hot and perfect for my own Mitty-like world.

Get a load of Dorothy Malone in The Big Sleep (1946 Howard Hawks), who runs the Acme Bookstore in downtown LA:

These days I run into a lot of nose-ringed hair-dyed-blue and tattooed reference librarians. They are beleaguered by suburban dipshit America, but they still kick ass. I love 'em, even if we are all tacitly advised to call them "they" instead of "she" these days.8 They are still at that nexus. They can't miss. Not for my tastes.

Lest I sound too sky-pie nerdy here, let's acknowledge the grittiness of American public libraries. They are a refuge for the, as they now say, "unhoused." And librarians often have to deal with these patrons and their oft-unsound minds, not to mention prim patrons who demand they do something about "the smell." One of the nuttiest writers I've ever read, James Ellroy9, writes autobiographically about his experience as a truly lost and fucked-up kid in the libraries of Los Angeles. Here he's a self-described homeless loser, 19 or 20, and it's 1967-1968:

I frequented the Hollywood Library. They stocked the Irving Wallace oeuvre. The Chapman Report featured a nympho named Naomi Shields. Claire Bloom played her in the movie. I synced her face to Wallace's prose and slammed the ham in the stacks. It was exhilarating and scary. Risk City all the way. I recalled the best Naomi parts and got off in .08 minutes. Riffraff passed through the library. Hippies lugged smelly sleeping bags and grimed up the washrooms. I met a freak named Harvey. We discussed drugs. I described my frustration. I loved amphetamines -- but lacked the social skills to procure them. Harvey told me about Benzedrex Inhalers.10

This confirms it: libraries are a place you can learn valuable things.

We all know this from Borges's perfect short piece, "The Library of Babel." If you have not read this, quit reading me and go read that. I've read it probably 20 times. And of course Borges is playing with our feelings of limitlessness, something that engulfs us: all those books! Forever. All that information and knowledge, so many possibilities!11 It's like the idea of "god." Umberto Eco, who had 30,000 books in his own private library and was very much influenced by Borges, thought that libraries functioned as labyrinths that disorient us and create or remind us of feelings of the infinite. This feeling bears a strong family resemblance to mystics' reports of their transcendent states. I know I've gotten that many times. Hence, this article.

If you are a fan of glossy photos of the world's great libraries (i.e, "library porn") you might know this.

We are all encouraged to go to the algorithms: check the catalogue for what you want, go get it, check it out, get out of there and go home after stopping off at your drug dealer's, then the dry-cleaners. But the hardcore analog of browsing among the material objects (books, CDs, DVDs, periodicals), allows for a serendipitous buzz: here's some thing I never thought I needed but it turns out I do. Don't get me wrong: the catalog is a great thing, but fer crissakes: browse every now and then. Live a little.

Korzybski was writing about the non-additive aspect of psychophysiology and how adding a little bit of cortex "involves most far-reaching differences of behavior…"; that is: 1+1= 2, but psychophysiologically it's probably more than 2; Korzybski then goes on illustrating the higher orders of combinations up from the protoplasmic levels therein. Then there is the English alphabet and trillions of pronounceable combinations of letters, possible words, plausible yet merely possible sentences which would be a set far larger than the possibly pronounceable words, possible books, possible libraries, and then: "the number of possible libraries is inconceivably large."12 But no one has modeled the aspect and promise of the feeling of infinitude better than Borges. Does this Abyss create panic? Is the welter of all books and their secrets too much to take? In Borges's infinite library, most of the books are in some language you've never even seen. Does this make you feel queasy?

A couple years ago Elyse Graham published Book and Dagger:How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II. Of course I ate it up. Here librarians were tapped for their skills in reading in every way possible. No kidding: they went to secret places in the woods where they were trained to use firearms, slip someone poison, to kill with their bare hands, etc. Few books fed into my long-tended Mitty garden so strongly: here the nerds helped bring down the Nazis.13

Of particular interest for me were the bits about Sherman Kent, a hard-ass historian-scholar and Antifa to the core. And it's kinda funny as a Robert Anton Wilson scholar of some sort: I'm reading about how the OSS would place key info in the open, like in an ad in a magazine. Wilson had talked about a lifetime of a reading jones that was "omnidirectional": not only did he read physics and Finnegans Wake, he'd parse labels on cereal boxes, anything that came his way. He bluntly called his love of reading print an "addiction." I think most of us know this addiction, eh? And as unlikely as it seemed, I saw a bit of RAW in Sherman Kent, the "father of intelligence analysis" at the OSS/CIA. Yale man Kent, writes Graham, was a historian, a "bibliographic detective" trained to assume that evidence must be everywhere. (Sherman Kent) "read seemingly everything that bore on his subject, and he talks in great detail about how to turn up evidence in different kinds of paper:

Books that exclusively focus on an era's politics, he says, are insufficient to understand that era's politics. Personal correspondence is a useful political resource. It's best to read historical accounts that have conflicting biases, which will make their respective limitations clear. A public figure's enemies often keep detailed records of their doings. The underground press may record granular numbers that the official press doesn't bother with. Memoirs are interesting, but untrustworthy, since most memoirs - which Kent calls, with a touch of ghoulish humor, "literary remains" - focus on huge political events, which means they ignore the tiny essentials, and also because they're written to shape the author's legacy: "Men cannot and will not tell the truth under these circumstances." Newspapers say more about the prevailing narratives of the time than what really happened. Compare the data in a minimum of three newspapers for accuracy. Read every part of a newspaper. Political coverage, market coverage, advertisements - it's all useful.14

RAW's source-material was often tabloids and nutty conspiracy stuff or paranoid religious tracts. Underground lit? He wrote a lot of it. While Kent was "inside" the Beast and a decorated scholar-spy, RAW was quite outside and of Karl Mannheim's freischwebende intelligenz, or from that "relatively classless stratum" of "free-floating intellectuals" with no commitments to any institution, and therefore freer to perceive more than usual intellectuals.15 On the Art Bell Show in 1997, RAW called the stock of information that he and Shea drew from for Illuminatus! - conspiracy kook mail sent into Playboy - "folklore."

Analysts of the history of intelligence and the CIA, Christopher Andrew and Dick Heuer, Jr, argue that intelligence failures are caused by "intelligence analysis," not by "failures of collection. Relevant information is discounted, misinterpreted, ignored, rejected, or overlooked, because it fails to fit a prevailing mental model or mind-set."16

It would make for very interesting reading to know the reasons why those who don't think or read like classic "Yankee" types that the CIA has always cultivated, were rejected. I tend to think there's a the "right class pin" aspect to the CIA and hence, its many egregious errors and downright crimes against humanity.

I took up your time trying to give you a glimpse of one weirdo's romantic imagination in the world of books, libraries, librarians, spies, and how SEX somehow worms its way into all of it. Do you see yourself at all here, or am I an even more peculiar cat than I suspected?

I've yet to see either of the two movies made from this, and I don't think I want to. It's MY Mitty, got it? Not whomever They got to show me Mitty: Danny Kaye and Ben Stiller, right? That's all I know. Too uninterested to look it up. It's MY Mitty, dammit.

To be fair, it's not all that clear to me that Mitty could control It. We, however, can control it, right? Right?

see The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, p.25: "Compared to the reality of everyday life, other realities appear as finite provinces of meaning, enclaves within the paramount reality marked by circumscribed meanings and modes of experience. The paramount reality envelopes them on all sides, as it were, and consciousness always returns to the paramount reality as from an excursion…" I'm sure I've quoted this in other writings you may have read by me, but that's only because I find it such a gem of an idea, and for myself: true AF. Berger and Luckmann give numerous examples of excursions, and we all know them, or know people who take those excursions. I'm saddened that some people go through life never really knowing they pass in and out of finite provinces of meaning all day, every day. Because when you know this, you can be more mindful of your little creative endeavors, and elaborate on each province seemingly ad infinitum until death or some other bummer takes on Paramount Reality.

I worked for ten years as a library clerk, page, and even as a branch librarian once when the very rich white people in the district refused to pay someone with a MLS degree, until smarter heads prevailed. I grew up in libraries, and 97% of the librarians I have known and worked with were the Salt of the Earth and weirdoes I couldn't help but love. I was constantly encouraged by them to go get the MLS degree because I seemed like the ideal type, but it's a long story why this never happened. Librarians have had an outsized influence on my approach to knowledge and politics. Which seems trite to write, but there 'tis. This subject is a big deal to me.

These are the merely mundane markers of entry into this world of intrigue. Metaphorically, you pass the Sav 'N Blow, then the police station, then approach the library…for which you pass, almost imperceptibly, through a murky veil of information promise and density, where colors are brighter and vast worlds await. As you enter that new dimension, many report hearing a fast harp glissando, followed by an A power chord that sounds like Edward Van Halen at the start of "Eruption." Metaphorically. Those of you who know, know. Bring your card.

One of the most influential librarians in my life was a heterosexual male with a mustache: very cool guy: Lanny Swallow of UCLA, who worked in the South Bay area of Los Angeles and is now retired and was not sexy-sexy but cool guy small-d- democracy sexy. He was witty, smart, and an antifascist.

See The Second Woman (1950, James V. Kern).

Shout out to the cool gay dudes, of course!

I still am not sure how much of Ellroy's public appearances are a put-on. He's difficult to get a line on for me. Some of it seems like an Andy Kauffman bit, but I'm not sure. If you know more about Ellroy than me, or think you do, lemme hear your opinion in the comments.

Destination: Morgue!, James Ellroy, p.124. Just my opinion, but I think "slam the ham" deserves to make a comeback. Or did it never leave? I run in too snooty and effete circles, possibly. My loss. "Slammed the ham in the stacks." See? You read poetry too!

And yet: before public libraries had scads of public access Internet terminals, where often you walk by and find some destitute-looking person actually looking at porn in the public library (I recall heated discussions around 1995 about free speech among librarians I knew: all of them couldn't find a good reason to prevent it: but how to keep it discreet?), there was always a hunt, mostly among boys, for pictures of naked women. Was I one at age 14? I was. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition was at one time the most stolen item from the public library. Maybe it still is. Matt Ruff had a funny bit in his novel Gas, Sewer and Electric about a conspiracy to make it difficult to find naked pictures in the library. (See pp. 68-70) How quaint things were in 1994! While I'm on the topic, see "The Sex Lit You Probably Haven't Read: Obscure and Expunged Material Dealing With Everyone's Favorite Activity," by the lamentably late Russ Kick, found in Everything You Know About Sex Is Wrong, pp. 266-267. Russ Kick was one of my guys. RIP.)

Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski, p.340. Korzybski seems under the spell of Cantor here, eh?

And not enough Americans learned. I know. Say no more.

Book and Dagger, Graham, pp. 175-176. A footnote to this passage adds that Kent's reading in the archives included "vital sources of intelligence: reports by the secret police, propaganda, seditious literature, documentation of underground organizations, and the less obvious intelligence sources, like atlases." Not only was Sherman Kent OSS and CIA, he was an OG. And Robert Anton Wilson was too: far better than I am at it, and never one to join the government on any job, though he was suspected of being CIA by some unbalanced Leftists at one point.

see Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction To The Sociology of Knowledge, Karl Mannheim, 1927. First translated into English in 1936 by Edward Shils, p.154ff. My edition is a Harvest Books paperback. I once read Chomsky denying that this class existed. I thought then and think now that he's dead wrong on this.

The Secret World: A History of Intelligence, Christopher Andrew, p.741. This section is from Heuer's "The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis," and a footnote links him to Sherman Kent. We must consider the incredible irony that, had the OSS or CIA had more readers like Robert Anton Wilson, there may have been far less intelligence failures. Even funnier is RAW's intense reading of Ezra Pound and how a fierce Pound champion/reader was James Jesus Angleton, formerly at Yale, who later headed CIA Counter-Intelligence with disastrous results, because of his paranoid overinterpretation of his reading of intel reports. Possibly it's all an interminable puzzle palace and we're all sitting here reading now, not having been consumed by nukes or biological weapons out of sheer luck.

One of my mythological assumptions is not unique and is derived from - as I currently understand it - the Judaic idea that we all have an infinity within, and while we're biologically more similar to each other at the larger scales of comparison, we are all inexorably different at the smallest levels, such as personal memory, imagination, and the effects of prior experience and learning.

While I am not Jewish and have never joined any church or even subscribed to any mainstream religion, ever, I have seen glimpses of this idea I ascribe to Judaism in many of the other world religions and philosophies I have studied. I simply tend to see this "infinity within" as a Jewish idea, but it's the idea that's important to me, not so much where it came from. I also tend to link this notion to my variant of universal humanism, and I see our species as beings in which the planetary environment and culture flows through us, and while I think individualism is a good and important idea, I think my local group, the Americans, have overdone individualism, and it's brought us to the brink. So this is no small thing.

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I got a lot of these ideas from reading histories.

Immersion in history - anything meaningful to you - allows for a quality of subjective depth and perspective about human nature, motives, and games that seems to provide a measure of prophylaxis against hype, bullshit, advertising. And I think there's something counterintuitive about this: advertising theory says we're all suckers for a Good Story. And History that we enjoy reading is a good story. But we have a distance from historical events, and therefore, perspective. At least ideally. With ads, they're here and now, as we know too well.1

The aforementioned cultural flow has become more like a firehose in the electronic era. We've always needed to arm ourselves for intellectual self-defense, but the electronically-mediated world has made this an urgent thing. How often do we forget? I think we've by and large fallen down, probably because of the acceleration of culture with electricity. We are still the same biological hominids who wandered in packs through tundra, jungle, desert, and plains, and most of us were caught off guard being born in these recent 160 or so years. It's like I just threw the I Ching: no blame.

We can name the onslaughts against our private interiorities, but for now I'm going to riff on Advertising, which deserves its mighty due in capitalization, for it has proven powerful and lo, is a Force. And of course we use intellectual self-defense. I copped that phrase, I think, from Chomsky, but I don't know or remember if he said who he got it from.

There seems to be a huge thorny question around this private interiority of "self" and our desires, wants, little stuff like that: how much has advertising influenced our, for lack of a better term, personalities? Clearly it has had some level of influence on us as consumers in a hypercapitalized society. But how much?

They are clueless idiots who have fallen for some consumer scheme; you are pretty smart but seem oddly oblivious about displaying your at-times bad taste, while I? Well, I practice "intellectual self-defense" and don't fall for ANY bullshit. Yea.

Yeah right. But in my own defense I must say when I look back at some of my more egregious errors in consumer-judgement, I must say I've gotten really good at lying to myself about motive. So there.

It's clear that even if we're a Toynbee or Braudel or some savant along that level, none of us can read and incorporate all of history in our private understandings and depthless, unfathomable interiorities (there must be time for bio-survival needs, masturbation, contemplation, doing the dishes, "being social," and worrying about foggy, amorphous things), so let us choose the histories we find most interesting, and let them furnish part of that vast space within us. Let's face it: there's a lot of good history books we still have yet to get to. These pieces of furniture will serve to attenuate - or so I aver - the possible ravishing effects of capital and its advertising people. I look at a 25 year old white male driving a pickup truck with cartoonishly ginormous wheels and a Trump sticker on the bumper and think: not a lot of furniture in there. Maybe that's just me. Let's hope he can replace that tattered beanbag reeking of cat-piss with a decent chair at some point. I, for one, have stopped holding my breath.

So: I don't really want you to read the same books as I do, but if we do happen to read something in common: cool. We can talk about it. But I really do want you to listen to that wise voice inside you that says, ya know, you really want and need to understand Ancient China. Or the Hanseatic League. Or the evolution of private life. Or how fossil fuels were discovered and mined and used and the upsides and downsides of all that. O! So many ways we can go to here!

But I wanted to say a few things about Advertising.

Professor Carlin has noted that there seem to be too many people active in their own degradation, who willingly buy clothing that has advertising on it, which they then wear as unpaid billboards:

I'm tired of being unable to buy clothing that doesn't have writing and printing all over it. Insipid sayings, pseudo-wisdom, cute slogans, team logos, designer names, brand trademarks, small-business ego trips; the marketing pigs and advertising swine have turned us all into walking billboards. You see some asshole walkin' by, and he's got on a fruity Dodger hat and a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt. Of course you can't see the shirt if he's wearing his hot-shit Chicago Bulls jacket. The one that only 50 million other jock-sniffers own. And since this cretinous sports fan/consumer zombie is completely for sale to anyone, he rounds out his ensemble with FedEx sneakers, ValuJet socks, Wall Street Journal sweatpants, a Starbucks jock strap, and a Microsoft condom with Bill Gates's head on the end of it. No one in this country owns his personal appearance anymore. America has become a nation of obedient consumers, actively participating in their own degradation.2

Comment: yea, but how are others gonna know what you consume? For verily, We consume, therefore we are…in this Neoliberal dispensation, anyway. Thus: yet another reason for public nudity, as if we needed more arguments.

-Nice to meet ya. Who are ya? I mean: what do you do?

-I support the Giants, Facebook, I mean Zuckerberg, I mean Meta, and the Democratic Party.

(Yikes)

Not long ago I was yakking it out with someone about ceremonial magick, and I could see I was in the interlocutionary space of someone who was talking about something they knew nothing about. I tried to explain it was all DIY brain-change stuff, ways to alter your consciousness so you can break out of fixed patterns, etc. They "knew" it was all "black magic" and therefore: bad people doin' bad things. This was going nowhere and we needed to change the subject, pronto, but not until I said "You wanna know what black magic really is? Look at advertising." There was no response, only a puzzled "you puttin' me on?" stare. We did move on.

I have a book on my shelf titled Elements of Eloquence, by Mark Forsyth. I will take it off the shelf, open randomly and read for a few minutes. It's interesting and yet, as you can see: it hasn't worked for me. (Yet?) Forsyth noted how brazen admen have been with pleonasms, that element of rhetoric or faulty logic that might be illustrated by "wet water." Admen know pleonasms are fucking stupid, yet they use 'em anyway, 'cuz they done work real good: the moolah flows. Hence, "free gift" "added bonus" "general public" and "progress forward." I add this - a free gift, just for you! - as an incitement to get yer dukes up and use intellectual self-defense.3

One of the best little passages against the "Captains of Consciousness" view of the use of Psychology by advertisers - endemic in the literature and of surpassing interest - that I've seen was Thaddeus Russell's argument for "consumer demand from below" to muddle this one-way-ishness of advertising. Nothing is that simple. A choice bit from Russell:

No less an authority than Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Film Manufacturing Company, spoke to the inability of Hollywood to control its audience. Testifying before a congressional committee in 1916 on the moral content of his films, Laemmle reported that he had sent a survey to twenty-two thousand theater owners titled, "What Do You Want?" The studio chief said that he expected 95 percent of the respondents to ask for clean and wholesome films, but "instead of finding 95 percent favoring clean pictures, I discovered that at least one-half, or possibly 60 percent, want pictures to be risqué, the French for smutty. . . They found their patrons were more willing to pay money to see and off-color than a decent one." Because "one after another [theater owner] said that it would be wise to listen to the public demand for vampire pictures." Laemmle argued that film producers could not be the "guardian of public morals."4

It's now trite in my circles to note the linkage between Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays, and William S. Burroughs and his uncle, Ivy Lee: was an actual thing. Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays were among the first great purveyors of International Black Magick, or, as it's politely termed, Public Relations.5

Regarding Burroughs: he has a bit analogizing advertising the the Mayan priests' secret calendar6; he also related a brief job in commerce, in which employer-employee relations were strained from the get-go, as Burroughs openly laughed at the company's market slogans that they didn't consider funny at all. EX: they marketed a high colonic enema they called The Cascade. Burroughs added the tag line: "Well done! Thou true and faithful servant!" This was right after he failed in interview with the OSS.

In order to render his modern day Odysseus - an ad canvaser in Dublin in 1904 - as accurately as possible, James Joyce annotated a copy of Howard Bridgewater's 1910 book, Advertising; Or the Art of Making Known: A Simple Exposition of the Principles of Advertising. NB Bridgewater repeats "advertising" twice in his the title, a simple principle of both advertising and magick: invoke often. Joyce was interested in how advertising went from simple arresting of attention to appealing to that which is beneath consciousness. Subsequently, systematic social science and psychology went "big" after the War To End All Wars (sic) and, then Goebbels learned everything he knew from the Americans, etc.7

David Foster Wallace noted in an interview that there seemed to be a disconnect between his generation and his professors'. He thought it weird that he grew up in a generation that was so totally immersed in selling and ads that they don't often realize there's humans behind it all; it's as if all of it comes from some sort of Platonic Realm. A recurring trope in the collection of interviews with DFW8 is that the "reality" his professors lived in was "natural", not man-made, and this was a main reason they rejected celebrity names or brand-names in fiction, but his use of pop-culture references reflected the reality of those born in the 1960s.

I realize that my heuristic - that the acceleration of craziness in modern American life really started to gain steam with the trumped-and ginned-up Spanish-American War - seems to work for me more often than not. 1898: William Randolph Hearst helps to "sell" the war to the public, and the US then becomes a world powerhouse, for which I apologize on behalf of the few sane ones here, to those of you living in Europe and…everywhere else. I really did grow up in an air conditioned nightmare, an armed madhouse, a country in which I grew up absurd.9

Sometimes, in my reading, I have to stop in awe at the implications on the page. Recently, in another re-reading of Mike Davis's City Of Quartz, still the best book on the history of my birthplace, Los Angeles, I noted that in the 1880 census, the city of Los Angeles had a population of just over 11,000. In 1883 and 1886 the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads reached LA. The railroads themselves bought up land and invested in the new "scientific farming" in order to grow citrus, and to market the place back East as a nice place to retire, with its "Mediterranean climate." Here's Davis:

To realize this vision, the railroads allied their immigration and advertising departments, their land agents and tourist bureaux, to local promotional forces. As the SP and Santa Fe began a rate-cutting war in 1886, Los Angeles - a mystery place to most Americans - suddenly became the urgent destination of around a hundred thousand land speculators and curious tourists. As the San Jose Times-Mercury complained, "The average Eastern mind [now] conceives of California as a small tract of country situated in and about Los Angeles."10

Los Angeles population in 1900: 102,000.

1910: 319,000.

1920: 576,000

1930: 1,238,000

And so it goes. It certainly didn't go down…

Defend that space between your ears, was all this spew was about. You tell me how you do it. 'Cuz I will falter at times, don't mind tellin' ya.

There's a passage in an early Platonic dialogue where young men are following Socrates through the agora and they get to the marketplace and Socrates says something like, "Oh! How many things there are that I do not want." I paraphrase from memory and 'cuz I'm too lazy to hunt the reference down. But it's the kind of thing that made me love Socrates.

Brain Droppings, G. Carlin, pp.6-7. See Richard Powers's wonderful novel The Gold Bug Variations, in which a minor character, "Keith", strays from academia into advertising and the "manufacture of needs," p.58.

Elements Of Eloquence, M. Forsyth, p.182. I hasten to add: Korzybski's General Semantics, once taught in high schools and colleges in the US after World War II, disappeared for complex reasons, but I think one of the reasons was politicians, advertisers, and churches didn't like what they saw. One sturdy admonition of General Semantics: with any assertion, look for the referent. So often, there ain't anything there. Like Make America Great Again. And so I urge you to check it out if you haven't already. On another level, I heard an ad for a musical instrument purveyor, in which they tell us "There's never been a better time to play music." Of which: no comment.

see A Renegade History of the United States, T. Russell, pp.225-228, for this and other arguments that markets also move from consumer demand "below" in addition to the manufacturing of desires from above. This, with regard to film in the US, didn't work: though the public wanted risqué, that got shut down by the Hayes Code and other imbecilities that infantilized the public along a cheesy minority's stick-up-the-ass morality. Here, too is a History worth delving into for some, no?

Wikis for Bernays and Ivy Lee. One of the more engrossing books on the history of public relations (I feel kinda icky just using the term) is Stuart Ewen's PR! A Social History of Spin. I'd say my favorite book to read on advertising is McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride. If anyone reading this also likes it, please chime in in the comments.

Mayan priest bit from WSB: see Word Virus, p.318. A bunch of Burroughs scholars contributed to William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up The Century, and anyone who has read Burroughs knew his extreme antipathy for Henry Luce, but I had no idea how extreme it was. WSB making fun of the colonic ad after failing to get in with the OSS: Word Virus, p.10.

Now see here, old chap: HERE.

Conversations With David Foster Wallace. See especially p.140.

Advertising really takes off just before the turn of the century. Have a gander at the "eyeball attention economy" which didn't begin with Facebook, but in 1895, when Edward Wheeler Scripture of Yale noted that Advertisers were ahead of Psychologists in the understanding of manipulation. HERE. Similarly, see "Is Man A Free Agent?: The Law of Suggestion," by Santanelli, 1902, HERE.

City Of Quartz, Davis, p.111.

(artwerk courtesy: Campbell)

When I was Amsterdam maybe 20 years ago I got high and went to the Van Gogh Museum and learned more about painting in two hours than I had in the previous 10 years of reading books about art. Yes, Robert Anton Wilson had advocated for this before I did it, but I would have anyway. We had a room within eyeshot of the Rijksmuseum, but they were closed for renovations that week. Just down the street: the Van Gogh. Of course I gotta do that.

Well…so what? You got high and had a good time. Why do you say you "learned"? This is where it gets interesting. Before this I could spot Van Gogh's style a from 50 yards, like you can. His mature style seems so distinctive1, he just jumps out at you. But until you stand in front of those paintings in real life and note how thick he dabbed on his paint, how he created space using colors in an optic mix…or so it seemed to me, very baked and completely blown away by this experience. Which may be the most notable aspect of "learned" here: gaining a new level of appreciation of an art-form, any way we pull it off, any method: 'tis well worthsomewhiles. I saw on some whole other level then and I would never go back. And I'm not alone.

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Paul Klee: Magic Squares, mentioned by Allen Ginsberg, below

Here's what I didn't experience: the politics of Art. Yes, the place was crowded, but I could evade the crowds and go where there were less people, waiting for certain areas to thin out. I thought of a passage in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, where there's a plant to repatriate artworks stolen by imperial powers and put in museums far from where the original impetus was, which was quite often Africa:

It's when we met at the University at the Art History class that we decided to do this. We vowed. We began to see that the Art instructor was speaking as if he didn't know we were in the room. We felt as if we were in church, stupid dull sculpture being blown up to be religious objects. Have you ever seen people line up outside a Van Gogh exhibit? When they get inside there are so many they can't even see the paintings, they just pass by like sheep or like mourners passing the tomb of a fallen hero, a bier, with the same solemnity. And the extent of their knowledge concerning Van Gogh is that he "cut off his ear." Man, it's religion they make it into. We decided that we would be their desecrators, that we would send their loot back to where it was stolen and await the rise of Shango, Shiva, and Quetzalcoatl…2

Though I was very high that day, the Museum had a limited number they allowed in. It was still crowded, but my feeling was that others were enchanted, too, though being that high may override the ability to perceive others as experiencing like "sheep or mourners." Probably we're prone to projecting the same wonder we're feeling onto others when our neurons are dealin' with a whole lotta exocannabinoids.

Retro-perception? I often "remember" seeing Vincent's Sunflowers as a child, pre-cannabis experience, and thinking this might be what it feels like to be on those "drugs" you hear about on TV or see in Life magazine.

The most wonderful thing about "learned" here: I had had a very brilliant poet-artist friend when I worked in a library. We were arranging books to be re-shelved and he spied a Kandinsky book and advised me to check it out, go home, get high and just page through it. So I did. Dude had never given me a bum steer. It worked.3 So I was prepared for Van Gogh, but NOT for being a few inches from the actual paintings, which…made me appreciate another hashish users's idea: about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, which had always seemed like one of the Great Stoned Ideas to me. An "aura" indeed!

What I want to say is that, subsequent Van Gogh Museum experience, this technique carried over to this day: I can still get quietly baked, go to my own shelves, and Leonardo, Kandinsky, Picasso, Bosch…it all works. It's reliably transcendent. I don't know why I don't hear more about this.

Wassily Kandinsky: Through-Going Line, 1923

Alexander Dumas, "highly" influenced by a childhood reading in the Arabian Nights, where hashish-eating beggars imagine their hovels as palaces, has put out the last serial installment of The Count of Monte Cristo. It's February, 1846. Paris is abuzz with this novel. Around the same time, a literary journal Revue des Deux Monds publishes an article by Theophile Gautier: "Le Club des Hachischins," written in a sly gothic style, and the narrative reads as fanciful fiction, but it was fact. In 1845 the painter Fernand Broissard wrote a letter to Gautier, inviting him to partake in hashish at the Hotel Pimodan on the Ile de St. Louis. Dr. Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours was interested in the psychological effects of hashish, and would be present. This hotel is still there, and I visited it while in Paris in 2003. It turns out a lot of artistic eminences enjoyed the Hashish Club in Paris: Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, Gerard de Nerval, Dumas, Flaubert, Delacroix. The place was a model of well-thought out Setting, decked with exotic effects: Oriental daggers, medieval poignards, satyrs chasing nymphs painted on the ceiling, ornate wood carvings, gilded paneling, etc. Upon your arrival you received your hashish in the form of dawamesc: mixed with dried fruit and honied pistachio nuts to offset bitterness, on a Japanese saucer. You could wash it down with Turkish coffee and there was a lavish feast already laid out, should you get peckish. The whole set-up seems to have functioned as a satire on the French Orientalist Silvestre de Sacy's fanciful ideas about the Assassins, published 35 years earlier. It was a very safe place to get High AF. Dr. Moreau had been interested in insights hash might give about the mentally ill and social alienation, but he was also keen to see what artists and intellectuals made of hashish, and he had used plenty himself before the Hashish Club got going, recording one fit of laughter and visions of his brother standing on the piano he was playing, among many others.4 It was his impression of the very high artists that they were so introspectively engaged that they for the most part neglected to speak and, contrary to ideas of drunkenness, they had more going on inside their heads than is normal. The Hashish Club members' writings probably constitute the first in the genre of first-hand drug experiences. There seems to be no doubt that how paintings were perceived, what painting could be…changed from that epicenter of Parisian culture.5

"Cannabis is a special case, since it changes the physical mechanism of vision by lowering the internal pressure of the eyeball. This is why it can be used as a treatment for glaucoma […] marijuana's direct influence on the eye may help explain why vision appears stretched and grainy to the pothead. It sometimes promotes an isolation of phenomena that the undrugged eye automatically integrates into a visual field. It problematizes seeing by estranging perceived objects from each other and the viewer. But the eye itself is not suspect. It still sees what it sees. In fact the pot smoker's vision might seem clearer, assessing objects one at a time and perceiving them as sharper and better defined (positive figure-ground distortions)."6

Similarly, in discussing the role of our endocannabinoids in the important process of forgetting, organic chemist and pioneer of endocannabinoids and receptors Raphael Mechoulam said, "Do you want to you remember all the faces you saw on the New York City subway this morning?", Michael Pollan reflects on this enhanced forgetting - inhibition of short-term memory - thus: "I would venture that, more than any other single quality, it is the relentless moment-by-moment forgetting, this draining of the pool of sense impression almost as quickly as it fills, that gives the experience of consciousness under marijuana its particular texture. It helps account for the sharpening of sensory perceptions, for the aura of profundity in which cannabis bathes the most ordinary insights, and, perhaps most important of all, for the sense that time has either slowed or even stopped. For it is only by forgetting that we that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours."7

While living in Jamaica, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers wanted to study a large lizard indigenous to that island, and these lizards liked to inhabit very tall trees. So Trivers paid two teenaged boys to capture a lizard for him. The boys first got stoned and then climbed a 60 foot tree to capture the lizard for Trivers. One of the boys told Trivers, "Ganja opens our eyes."8

Our mundane default perceptual habits might keep us from experiencing art, sex, food, and other joys in our lives in their entire suites of possibilities. Of course I'd say this, as a pothead. But maybe we know something? This aspect of slowed (slown!) perception and the apprehension of painting might also be part of the account I'd give of being high in the Van Gogh Museum. Again, I'm not the only one. Lemme quote from my favorite example of learning to perceive Art at an elevated level while getting high.

In a 1965 essay, "The Marijuana Hoax: First Manifesto to End the Bringdown":

Although most scientific authors who present their reputable evidence for the harmlessness of marijuana make no claim for its surpassing usefulness, I do make that claim:

Marijuana is a useful catalyst fir specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness. I first discovered how to see Klee's Magic Squares as the painter intended them (as optically 3-dimensional space structures) while high on marijuana. I perceived ("dug") for the first time Cézanne's "petit sensation" of space achieved on a 2-dimensional canvas (by means of advancing and receding colors, organization of triangles, cubes, etc, as the painter describes in his letters) while looking at the The Bathers high on marijuana. And I saw anew many of nature's panoramas and landscapes that I'd stared at blindly without even noticing before; thru the use of marijuana awe and detail were made conscious. These perceptions are permanent — any deep aesthetic experience leaves a trace, and as idea of what to look for that can be checked back later. I developed a taste for Crivelli's symmetry; and I saw Rembrandt's Polish Rider as a sublime youth on a deathly horse for the first time — saw myself in the rider's face, one might say — while walkig around the Frick Museum high on pot. These are not "hallucinations"; these are deepened perceptions that one might have catalyzed not by pot but by some other natural event (as natural as pot) that changes the mind, such as an intense love, a death in the family, a sudden clear dusk after rain, or the sight of the neon spectral reality of Times Square once sometimes has after leaving a strange movie. So it is all natural. 9

A 26 year old housewife in a small town in Ohio told independent cannabis researcher William Novak that, "I have come to have a greater appreciation of art in the same manner. Through looking at pictures while stoned, I have learned to see the detail, to look for the feelings in pictures. Colors stand out as more vivid, and slight variations in hues become more discernible. I have a small book of prints by Salvador Dali, which I enjoy looking at when I'm stoned. He paints schizophrenia and other intangible aberrations into visible, tangible, pictures."10

A successful commercial artist told sociologist Erich Goode:

My color sense is more vital and more flexible. I see and use colors I don't normally. This isn't a fantastic increase in enlightenment, but a slightly greater sensitivity to color and form. Marijuana makes me think more about the work, rather than just plunge right in, without thinking. It heightens my conceptual powers. I am able to trespass on a greater variety of media. I think of structures and concepts I might not think about normally. But the results are somewhat experimental. I'm usually satisfied with the experiment, although not always satisfied with the actual physical painting.11

With the virtual demise of physical mass-culture glossy magazines, we lost the palpable thrill of looking at the ads therein; nowhere was it more evident that surrealism grew and encompassed popular culture than in the ads in mass magazines, saturated with color and the juxtaposition of bizarre elements, completely absurd oftentimes, and so pervasive that we all just took these ads for granted.

But there are still many places to find incredible oddness, and one of my favorites is books that depict rock music album covers. Anything done by Hipgnosis will give a Magrittean buzz. I often resort to my own copy of Classic Rock Covers, edited by Michael Ochs for the art book publisher Taschen.

UFO's Force It, 1975. Art: Hipgnosis

There's a lot of talk about color in paintings, and I definitely concur, but I must add that when I watch 1940s film noir, I'm completely blown away by the cinematography and finely tuned German expressionistic lighting in black and white, and there are a large number of films I will watch over and over while high if they contain the work of cinematographers Nicholas Musuraca, Woody Bredell, Milton Krasner, Burnett Guffey, James Wong Howe, John F. Seitz, Harry J. Wild, Joseph LaShelle, Joseph P. Biroc, and the Paganini of noir cinematography, John Alton, whose book, Painting With Light, describes how psychological effects are obtained by certain camera lenses, angles, light filters, key lights, etc.

Here I've merely urged those few who read the OG and who don't already smoke cannabis for some sort of enhanced effects: maybe think about it. Here I've given a minor argument for enhanced art appreciation with cannabis. Tell me about your own experience!

It seems weird to say "mature style" as Van Gogh basically started painting in a serious way in 1881 after conferring with dudes like Gaugin who, it was agreed, the Impressionists seemed so yesterday. By 1889 Van Gogh had already done Sunflowers, Bedroom in Arles, and Starry Night. As a child he was quiet and liked to draw, but nothing indicated a talent like Sunflowers back then.

Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed, pp.101-102 of my old Avon ppbk. This is one of the smartest and funniest novels I've ever read and both Pynchon and RAW were admirers. Indeed, Mumbo Jumbo is often cited in diverse places when there's discussion of 1970s novels and secret societies.

Subjectively, a delightful synesthetic offshoot side-effect occurred with Kandinsky and cannabis and my own nervous system: I linked the time and place of Kandinsky and his theories of perception, and "point and line to plane" to Schoenberg's theories about dodecaphonism, and began to appreciate Schoenberg at a new level, too. I do prefer his two star pupils - Alban Berg and Anton Webern - over Schoenberg, but Schoenberg was the innovator, even though he said that Bach was the first twelve-tone composer.

One time Dr. Moreau got so baked on hash he had a sort of panic attack - "The limits of the possible and the measure of space and time become obliterated" - and another time, trippin' balls on hashs he eventually turned to look at a painted portrait, "which in my excited state seemed immediately to come to life. The head moved as if it would come off the canvas, and its entire physiognomy seemed to assume an expression that only life can impart; its eyes, above all, were alive. I saw them turn round in their sockets and follow all my movements, which made me so frightened that I exclaimed, 'Upon my sould, this is sorcery!.'" - found in Plant Intoxicants, by Baron Ernst von Bibra, 1855, Healing Arts Press, Rochester Vermont, p. 151. This hash seems to have had THC levels that we see in some of the sky-high stuff, 40% or higher, in dispensaries. You don't get the haunted house eyes-in-painting-following-you effect at normal dispensary levels. This seems way too high for me, but Dr. Jacques-Joseph Moreau was doin' it for science!

The literature on the Hashish Club is diffuse; but do see "Secrets of the Club de Hachischins," by one of our best drug writers, Mike Jay. It's collected in his Stranger Than Fiction, pp.211-221. A note on Delacroix, who was known for his "vivid imagination and his use of expressive colors, paving the way for expressionism. His famous painting, The Women of Algiers, depicts Algerian concubines smoking a water pipe used for opium and hashish, a painting much admired by another painter who used hashish, Pablo Picasso." - see What Hashish Did To Walter Benjamin, Sebastian Marincolo, p.16. Marincolo asserts that Gautier's painting after hashish experience revealed a strong perspectival change: see p.74, ibid.

I can't find a more apt description of what's going on "behind the scenes" when looking at paintings than what David Lenson describes here. See his On Drugs, p.65.

The Botany Of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, Michael Pollan, p.162. Pollan admits that the idea of drugs mutating culture occurred to him while reading Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, which was largely a popularization of Robert Trivers's ideas, and Dawkins indeed asked Trivers - a major pothead - to write the Introduction for the original 1976 edition. Trivers said he put it off for awhile, then got baked and wrote the Introduction. So pothead and Einstein of Evolutionary Biology Trivers influenced Dawkins, who influenced Pollan's idea in The Botany of Desire with the idea that cannabis, tulips, potatoes and apples seduced us humans to use them and make them better and more widespread across the globe! The British writer and researcher on drugs, Dave Nutt, coined the word "slown" for this perception of time under cannabis. This reminded me of an old joke: two guys are getting high in an abandoned building near Harlem. Suddenly, approaching sirens are heard. They both stop talking and listen to the sirens as they pass by and slowly begin to recede in volume, and one guy turns to the other and says, "Man, I thought they'd never leave!"

Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist, Robert Trivers, p.105-106.

found in Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952-1995, pp. 97-98. Ginzy was a tireless advocate for the decriminalization or legalization of weed, way ahead of his time. This same passage is found in Sociologist Erich Goode's The Marijuana Smokers, pp. 76-77.

High Culture: Marijuana In The Lives of Americans, William Novak, p.252

The Marijuana Smokers, Erich Goode, p.77

(artwerk: Bobby Campbell)

Dear Friends,

"Theater exists all around us and it is the purpose of formal theater to remind us this is so."- John Cage

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A week or so ago my best friend and I were talking about moments when we spontaneously "became someone else" in order to smooth some edge at work, or, in my case: avert possibly being a victim of a crime. She had temporarily assumed the body language and tone of a scary adult authoritarian in the face of a school kid (age 7) under her charge, who was becoming a nuisance to other kids, the property of the school, and the kid was totally out-of-control. She surprised herself in this, because she is not a scary authoritarian. Not even close. It had become a desperate situation. It worked, the kid looked scared, calmed down, and stopped harassing other kids. She and the kid returned to being on good-enough terms.

I told of the time, a few months ago, when I was on a long bicycle ride and got out in the middle of nowhere, and saw, up ahead 75 yards or so, four or five young men standing in the bike path, looking as up-to-no-goodedness as I myself was at their age. I felt like they might see me as an easy mark, and who knows what the old guy (me) has in that backpack? I did have a wallet with maybe $20 in it. Suddenly, I became my junior high school Physical Education "teacher" Coach Hyatt, whose style was that of a US Marine drill sergeant. As I approached the tough-looking teenagers, I rode upright, hands free, back stiff, jaw slightly jutted, and Hyatt-confident; I could handle any situation but wouldn't need to, feeling like a person who had worked in law enforcement my entire lifetime (nothing could be further from the truth). I looked at them, nodded my head and said, "Men?"…just like Coach Hyatt 50 years ago. Yes, we were all "Men" out there in the vast stretch of Sonoma County urban wilderness, and we expected nothing less of each other. They parted the path and let me by, silently. Not a word was said aside from my "Men", and I felt like I had dodged a bullet, metaphorically. Who knows, they were probably harmless. But there was no one else around. Not for at least a mile. And they could have easily robbed me, or worse.

We realized we all do this sort of thing, all the time. We code-switched in order to proceed in some situation. We had borrowed temporarily from Stanislavsky and did Method. The Nobel winning Ethologist Konrad Lorenz tried to embody the animals he was studying in order to "feel like" them, gain empathy or understanding.1 Sales people are trained to mirror the customer's body language, and repeat their words, etc.

It's interesting how widespread this game-like notion of action is, but it's also kinda taboo, isn't it? We don't talk about it much, and I suspect it's because talking openly about techniques we use to "get around" some tough situation can easily be seen as "this person admits they're inauthentic…I better watch it with this one…" As if they don't do similar things is certain situations. Linguists have found that everyone unconsciously code-switches - speaks in a slightly different register or tone or even vocabulary - depending on a given social situation. When I was a pre-teen I saw an episode of Leave It To Beaver in which the character of "Eddie Haskell," a smart-mouthed, shallow, sneaky kid when he's with other kids, instantly becomes the nauseatingly polite and well-mannered kid down the street when an adult appears. That's why this character was so funny: we know it's true.2

There is in this also a certain admiration for con-men3, as long as we're not their victim. Con-men use an array of sophisticated tricks in order to get what they want; we pride ourselves on "seeing through" the con and not falling for it. We call them con artists for a reason. And yet…there may be no end to all this. To quote a particularly paranoid lyric from Randy Newman:

It's a jungle out there/Disorder and confusion everywhere/No one seems to care/Well I do: Hey who's in charge here? and later in the song: You better pay attention/ Or this world we love so much/Might. Just. Kill. You./I could be wrong now/But I don't think so…

Do we really need to pay attention that way? I'm dubious. Hear me out.

Paranoid: everyone is, it's only a matter of degree and how much trouble it makes for oneself. And we evolved to recognize patterns in our environment, which was indeed a jungle, or savannah, slope, or clearing. I suspect the healthiest among us have worked out an effective method to keep paranoia at bay. When things get…weird, why there's merely some level of rational concern. All this seems to inform the "funny" aspects of hoaxes, pranks, jokes: what was expected is suddenly not so: why? What happened? How did…? Who's behind this and why? What was the motive? Are we all born detectives?

The why?, plaintively uttered, is always my favorite. The very marrow of life.

"Nature loves to conceal Herself." - Heraclitus.

What was the wildest party you'd ever been to? Do you recall your state of mind? Was there a sensory overload? How did you handle it? A large admixture of friends, acquaintances, and strangers, in a "safe" environment, probably with drugs (like alcohol and others), many dressed-up, playing up their sexiness. Everyone is performing for everyone else. We want to become known, make friends, solidify relationships, make business contacts, elevate ourselves in the eyes of others, get a laugh, score some points, get into someone's pants. It seems we must perform, and what of it? Many would insist they're not performing, only being their "authentic" selves. Yea, okay: what is that authenticity, really?

Again: this seems a taboo subject, don't it?

I read something not long ago that many of the real parties of the Jazz Age were more elaborate and garish than those depicted in Jazz Age novels like The Great Gatsby. Think of all the parties we've missed: they're fantastic, aren't they? In our imaginations, parties can really tax our wildest fantasies. I've found I can get a mild hangover from just reading about Scott and Zelda, not having actually touched a drop. Bukowski on a bender in San Pedro, Hemingway in Key West, Dylan Thomas anywhere, Clark Gable and Joan Crawford types in Beverly Hills on a Saturday night: makes me think, "I'll sleep well tonight!" I haven't had a drop.

It would seem that, ideally, the modern party that you or I might go to would be akin to the Bakhtinian/Rabelasian medieval carnivalesque, in which anyone can temporarily assume any social role, and play it out, with widespread social endorsement. And I think this is still done, on limited levels. Who today carries it off successfully though? Those with the status or reputation or wealth? Those with that eerie power of "charisma"? The truly "talented"? What the actual eff is charisma, anyway? But I'm getting off to the oblique angles now.

I know a lot of us are overwhelmed by parties. In her novel The Mind-Body Problem, Rebecca Goldstein, no doubt playing the the main character, a young intellectual operating around Princeton, finds herself at a party of academics. She hates parties because everyone…well, let her say it as she finally finds a good guy:

His eyes never left my own. I hate to speak to people who keep peering around all the time, as if always keeping an eye out for something more interesting than the conversation at hand. For this reason, I often find partying quite painful. People flit from one conversation to another, always convinced that the really interesting talk is going on elsewhere. I've found myself saying anything (I'd really like to forget some of the things) in such a situation in a desperate attempt to keep the Other's attraction on me.4

Certain parties are like this: too much single-tribe concentration. They're all intellectuals. Parties need a mix of tribes, I think.5 Other subcultural representatives. I always want cross-pollination 'cuz I seem to be wired that way, but we all know most parties are filled with the same people from roughly the same cohort, it's just the normal run of things.

But as you may see I have the Wittgensteinian problem here when he showed how plastic and malleable the term "game" is.6 Try to define games. Do they all relieve boredom, are they all fun, do they all improve skills, are they all competitive? Naw, you can find an example of some game that doesn't meet one of those requirements. Rather, games all have some sort of family resemblance. Same with my quest here to link the theatricality of mundane interpersonal transactions with others, parties, performance art, and Happenings. But I say to Sally: let us go forth!

I recently re-read Joseph Moncure March's The Wild Party, this time illustrated by Art Spiegelman. Written in the early 1920s and not published until 1928 because of salacity - it's a long noirish, hard-boiled jazz age sad tale - all in syncopated rhymes like some sort of demented Dr. Seuss - about a wild party peopled by Americans who had been through the wringer of The War To End All Wars. (cough) This is a party I'm glad to have not gone to: we must remember there are certain parties whose inhabitants are not the kinda folks we normally wanna be around. Okay, maybe some of 'em…It's great to read about though, and March knew his speakeasy society well. Oddly, he was The New Yorker's first editor, before it attained its status. Spiegelman ran into William S. Burroughs at a party:

The conversation didn't catch fire until, somehow, I asked if he'd ever heard of The Wild Party. Burroughs had first read the book in 1938, when he was a graduate student at Harvard. He hadn't seen it in over thirty years. "The Wild Party?," he mused. "…It's the book that made me want to be a writer." His eyes unfocused and he began to recite, in a twanging drawl:

Queenie was a blonde, and her age stood still,

And she danced twice a day in vaudeville.

He went on for quite a while, as if he could conjure up the whole poem from memory, all the way to the abrupt last lines:

The door sprang open

And the cops rushed in.

Ain't it the truth, though? Always: we'ze just havin' a grand ol' time-a-roo ya know 'n somethin' 'n all that and the frikkin' cops bust in. Time and again. I've had it up to here, fer crissakes. Total bringdown. Total. The more things change from that what did you call it? Wild Party? yea. The more they stay the same, man. Word.

It strikes me that the improvisatory nature of being in a raucous party taxes the Erving Goffmanian dramaturgical theory of the presentation of ourselves in everyday life, in which, given certain social situations, we know the script and how to proceed. Goffman gives many examples and I personally love his sociology. The taken-for-granted world of going to a diner: the waitress knows her role, you know yours. She goes "backstage" (the kitchen) and social reality there is different, they're all in this production together: how bad is the audience today?, etc; when she comes out to take your order she's back on stage performing the role of "Waitress", etc. These "all the world's a stage" scenarios are everywhere in our lives.

But a wild party, the very social nature of it, is information overload, too much improvisation by everyone, so it's personally destabilizing and mind-altering.

The quiet, dignified dinner party of between six and 13 friends may be my favorite performance setting, though.7

So here I am, trying to essay my way into some…bit that I hope you're finding provoking or edifying or at least not-boring.

(clears throat, looks a tad flop-sweaty)

I picked a topic and here I go! I'm improvising, with a lot of books piled up nearby as props. These props are like my cue-cards and have lines in them, in case I forget. They're called quotes, and I've already used Cage, Heraclitus, and Burroughs. Props. Hope to keep this dilapidated and dying show on the road!

(uneasy laff)

They say they're mad about me in Peoria. And I'm up here, naked. (Not literally: I write in long underwear and some ratty sweatshirt, often.) So…the Writer is onstage. You're all lookin' at me, seeing what he's gonna write next. Now…Uhhh…

(Whisper from the wings: Fucking DO something! You're losin' em, ya asshole! Get up there and perform!)

Okay.

I mentioned "All the world's a stage," earlier and how that seems to have been the great sociologist Erving Goffman's controlling metaphor. And that's, of course, from Shakespeare's As You Like It, Act II, scene vii. It starts off, as you'll remember from Mrs. McNulty's seminar on "The Elizabethans: Were They Putting Us On?":

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women are merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow.

Uhhh, etcetera. Guy's good, isn't he? Give him a hand! Mister William Shakespeare, ladies 'n germs!

[Applause]

Well, it seems in the 20th century a group of intellectual poets in France formed an avant garde group called Oulipo, short for something like works for potential in literature. To be brief, they used mathematical ideas as constraints in order to produce texts, and there's quite a large body of literature by them and about them. Maybe my favorite Ouilpean was the Italian named Calvino. But I digress. One notable idea they used was something called "N+7," where you take a known text and replace all the nouns with a noun that's found seven nouns later in the dictionary. There are many permutations of this idea and here…I…uhhh…I've taken the Shakespeare bit from above and used something like "N+5 pages later": when a noun occurs in Billy the Shakes above, I found it in my tattered old Webster's New Collegiate then thumbed- forward five pages, and when my eyes alighted on a noun, I replaced Da Bard's with mine and…so…what I came up with goes a little…something…like this:

All the xenia's a stripper

And all the metallurgy and wort merely podiums,

They have their extortions and their equivalences,

And one march in his toggle plays many pathologies,

His admixture being seven alchemies. At first, the inning,

Mewling and puking in the obstacle's aspect.

Then the whining scull, with his scarf

And shining mozzarella fang, creeping like a soda fountain

Unwillingly to scrum. And then the lyricist,

Sighing like gallow-glass, with a woeful bark beetle

Made to his mollusk's familiar

(No one claps. I can literally hear a pin drop near your digital device. Someone in the back yells, "You suck!" I think I hear the name "Gertrude Stein" muttered in the distance. I wish to exit this stage but notice there's a Sartre-an No Exit sign, in alarming bright blinking RED, and I feel like I'm in an Absurdist Play, so I begin hyperventilating. I would like to shrivel up and disappear. I cannot. I can't go on. I will go on. The show, as they say, must go on: and now a word from my sponsor: IKEA Mufflers! take it away, Bjorn!)

[Commercial]

Some time around 1971, pediatrician Martin Bax wrote Francis Crick asking permission to read his 1953 paper on the Double Helix, from Nature, to live jazz accompaniment. Francis wrote back: go ahead and have fun.

There is no evidence that Francis was there, but it sounds like it was a blast - as well as the DNA paper, Bax read out articles on viper venom and on the sensory processes of young children, accompanied by a five-piece group that included the bass player from Manfred Mann and the legendary jazz musician Henry Lowther on trumpet, flugelhorn, and violin. There are no traces of how the event was received, nor whether Bax's desire to 'wake up' the presentation of science 'so that non-scientists can appreciate it' was achieved.8

The Beats had been practicing reading their poetry to live jazz for 15 years. Hey, why not read a trippy paper like Crick's on nucleic acids and base-pairs with adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine swingin' their 8th notes in a phosphate substrate? When RNA polymerase begins to transcribe the message to make a protein and the flugelhorn takes off on a long solo, I bet it was quite something. But viper venom and a walking bass line that wouldn't quit: it's the tops, jack! How were there no traces of this event, when surely it was the bee's knees of shows in turbulent 1971?

What's actually going on at the most basic, physical, quantum level? And does it rock? Is it trippy? The physicist Carlo Rovelli seems to answer yes. And Rovelli has been candid about being "experienced" in the Hendrix sense:

This is the world described by quantum mechanics and particle theory. We have arrived very far from the mechanical world of Newton, where minute, cold stones eternally wandered on long, precise trajectories in geometrically immutable space. Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things, a continuous swarming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. A set of vibrations, as in a switched-on hippie world of the 1960s. A world of happenings, not of things.9

"Happenings." Yes, there were always weirdo performance artists, from Diogenes to Yoko Ono and beyond. But the artist-academic Allan Kaprow, who coined "Happenings" in 1958, was asked to define these events:

A Happening, unlike a stage play, may occur at a supermarket, driving along a highway, under a pile of rags, and in a friend's kitchen, either at once or sequentially. If sequential, time may extend to more than one year. The Happening is performed according to a plan without rehearsal, audience, or repetition.10

Okay, hold on just a second. Let's just sit with this: in a friend's kitchen? For more than a year? Driving down the highway? Talk about all the world's a stage! This is one of my favorite quotes from a well-known artist, and Kaprow is the guy on Happening-Theory. It's any scenario in which the situation is defined as a Happening (always capitalized, helps with the framing), by those playing within the frame, or so it seems. Very freeing, innit? Kostelanetz, also a heady vet in this area, wrote that Happenings "came to characterize any and every chaotic event, particularly if it wasn't immediately definable." Hell, you may be doin' it right now. I know I am. But back to science.

You tell me if this "is" an ordinary day at the museum, a performance piece, or a Happening: Lewis Thomas (of all people) wrote of an exhibit at a New York art gallery in which there were two million live army ants on loan from Central America, with food placed in certain areas. Manhattanites gather around like ants in their "carapaces" (winter coats), lined up in neat rows, gazing down at the ants. Thomas describes the crowd behavior as being ant-like.11 It's tempting to just let this scene pass by without comment. I think I will let this one go by.

As a young weirdo intellectual some of my first exposure to scenes like this was filtered through older intellectuals like Susan Sontag, as in her Against Interpretation, where she covers "Happenings: On Art of Radical Juxtaposition" from 1962. A wide-ranging enthusiast for ideas if there ever was one, soon after this discussion Sontag has her famous essay on "Camp" aesthetics. Camp is "the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater." And then in Nancy Kates's 2014 documentary, Regarding Susan Sontag, I felt seen when Wayne Koestenbaum says what a lot of us were thinking: Sontag's ongoing public performance as a Serious Intellectual was Camp itself. Not that she wasn't a major intellectual: she most definitely was. But she was quite aware of this, wanted it, loved performing the role, and was a bit…too much at times.

This whole ball of wax is ginormous and boundary-less, but I have to get in something on sex, as I think I know a little bit about my Audience. It had become abundantly clear to me as I read Aleister Crowley that creating a ritual and then performing it - for no audience at all sometimes - is an incredibly creative act. Similarly, in the West Coast Neo-Pagan movement led by folks like Aiden Kelly, I obtained a newfound appreciation of the art of concocting a ritual, discussing it with the initiates, then performing it.12 Similarly, the BDSM community, whose performances - like those of innumerable secret societies - are difficult to study. As written earlier: imagine all the wild parties you've missed.

I've been to a small number of S&M parties, and I always felt like a neophyte who wouldn't advance in the Order, not being able to cut the mustard for reasons that I think have to with myself being a Gnostic sexually, but not as extreme as many others in this regard. I can be exhibitionistic, but others totally wax me in this regard. My proclivities here remain far more one-to-one, in privacy, only "performing" for one other…and in this niche I dislike the idea of performance, preferring to think of it as simple enactment, or playful improvisation, but I've already quasi-tacitly argued that all the world's a stage, so whatever. Your own frame is the frame, until someone else breaks it, or you break it "accidentally"13 and you're forced to double back and come to grips with the new frame.14

The literature on performance within the realm of "kinky" sexual play - which I have long considered "normal" - is not abundant. If there's a lot on it, it's difficult for a non-academic to access. I will mention Gini Graham Scott's old book Erotic Power. Scott befriended and embedded herself with a BDSM group in the San Francisco Bay Area (no! really?) who all knew and trusted each other, and reported on closed parties with "scenes" that seem to bear a family resemblance to Happenings, but the discretion is quite notable. You don't just wander in and participate here.15

In her essay on an academic study of professional dominatrixes, Camille Paglia laments that it wasn't followed up as a performance art, and Paglia thinks there's a clear line connecting pro-dommes and what they perform, and what Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Eleanor Antin, David Bowie, all did…ya know, the area of the library concerned with "theatrical pursuits."16

You'd think that when wild man pianist Nam June Paik in 1960, in Cologne, sat down to fire off some Chopin only to abruptly stop, throw himself onto his piano, then run into the audience to cut off the clothes of audience members John Cage and David Tudor, then dumped shampoo on their heads, that it was some sort of apotheosis. But Nam June - who of course joined FLUXUS - was just getting started. Read about him if you dig all this performance art stuff.17 It's where Dali meets Cage meets McLuhan meets Orwell. Zhang Huan, at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco: stripped naked, smeared pureed hot dog and flour on himself, then allowed eight dogs to sniff him. One of the dogs bit him on the ass. The purpose of the piece? "To explore physical and psychological effects of violence in society." I could make a list of 20 Things that may or may not have been performance art pieces, and you'd be at sea if you aren't some sort of weirdo art major who was immersed in these worlds.18

This is one realm of life in which it seems fairly common to hear about performance and theater. If you're an American and didn't understand this before, say, 2015, you do now. I was amused when fascist blowhard and InfoWars grifter Alex Jones argued in court that he was a performance artist.19 If satire overlaps with performance art, and I think it does, here's where we are in 2026, where we have "a former game show host with the self-control of an incontinent hamster" and has "a uniquely demented brand of infantile performance art"20

There's a lot about citizens as performing politics, and it looks a lot like…"doing politics" to me, but seen in some 4-D mirror images, upside down and filtered through a kaleidoscope. I'm reminded of an anecdote that old Wobbly Kenneth Rexroth told. He was traveling with his girlfriend or wife just before Wall Street crashed.

Hitching through Montana in 1927, Rexroth and Andrée get a ride with a well-to-do man of the world with an unusually cynical opinion of politicians. Rexroth asks if he doesn't think there are a few honest exceptions, such as Robert La Follette and Burton Wheeler (radical reform senators from Wisconsin and Montana). The man answers by describing the backstop in a baseball field: "It catches the balls the catcher misses, and all the fouls that go off in that direction, so that nobody in the box seats gets hurt. That's the function of guys like La Follette and Wheeler, and believe me, they know it if you don't." The next day they find out that their companion is Senator Wheeler.21

Somehow I wrote all this crap and never addressed Marina Abramovic or Banksy or Warhol's gang or Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens, orCal-Arts or how Robert Anton Wilson said Illuminatus! was merely a part of a larger Art piece called Operation Mindfuck, or Pynchon's "Whole Sick Crew" or Pull My Daisy, or phenomenological sociology and the mechanisms of maintenance of subjective "reality" or that time when Cristo dropped a dress around J. Edgar Hoover's FBI building. Maybe in the late Autumn.

It is without any irony at all that I end by quoting Robert Blake, who, while playing Baretta, often said, "And dat's the name o' dat tune."

You're on in 10 seconds! Break a leg!

luv 'n rockets 'n shining mozzarella fangs,

-Michael AKA the OG

PS: say hi to Maxxie and Bud for me!

Shout-out to those of you who also knew Lorenz was also a Nazi. Hello!

The thing I guess I dig about the Haskell character is this: it's an actor, playing a part, but it's also an actor playing a particular sort of Stock Character, like an elemental role. A typification, and a well-known variant on one. The writers "know" this character and are somewhat unsure how they came to know him/her, but they do. We all know this character, and can make subconscious comparisons vis a vis who has done really good versions of this archetypal role.

Yes, women have proven to be virtuosos at cons. How about "con-entity"? Are we cool?

The Mind-Body Problem, Rebecca Goldstein, p. 225. I've been to a few parties around Berkeley in which I felt exactly like "Renee Feuer" here. She goes to parties in this novel and Saul Kripke will weigh in, people like that. She's a young intellectual pursuing philosophy around a lot of heavyweights, and she's married to a famous mathematician, but she has the hots for a physicist who's in Einstein's camp: God doesn't play dice, etc. In Berkeley everyone was a writer and the competitive fumes were toxic, often. I wished I was a writer. Still do.

Similarly: see the seemingly non-stop week's-long party at Jessie Pinkman's house in Breaking Bad, you know? when he's suddenly totally flushed with meth-money but he's strung out on the chick with the Bettie Page hair and all his friends trash his place and he doesn't care and he's not even there? Too much of the same tribe. And they are not neat freaks, let's just admit that. I already discussed the Altadena Zorthian party that Charlie Parker played at. That crowd I can dig and the same with Kesey's Acid Test parties at La Honda: a healthy mixture of writers, scientists, musicians, religious weirdos, Hell's Angels, and artists. You get in with that bunch and you're never the same after it. I suppose I would have enjoyed the Leary-Millbrook scene, too. But probably with both Kesey and Leary it would have suddenly felt like Las Vegas: it's sensory overload and fun, but then quite suddenly: get me the fuck outta here! If only to maintain modicums of sanity and/or equilibria.

Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein, see esp. #66-#76. He first talks about how different some games are, then switches to a leaf. I still remember reading this section 30 years ago and getting a giddy intellectual thrill at #76: "If someone were to draw a sharp boundary I could not acknowledge it as the one that I too always wanted to draw, or had drawn in my mind. For I did not want to draw one at all. His concept can then be said to be not the same as mine, but akin to it. The kinship is that of two pictures, one of which consists of colour patches with vague contours, and the other of patches similarly shaped and distributed, but with clear contours. The kinship is just as undeniable as the difference." At this point I had started to feel like this philosophical dead-end of Analytic Philosophy was falling apart. That whole story is cosmically hilarious to me: Wittgenstein started it with the Tractatus in 1922, and had thousands of philosophers under his sway while at the same time he had dropped out of philosophy and taught children. He sucked at it. But he reformulated his entire system and came back with this book in 1953, which makes so much sense to me, and seems like a pragmatic approach to language, where most of Analytic "language" philosophy had become ridiculous time-suck, an intellectual addiction for certain minds.

Hakim Bey reminded me of this setting as an art-form and performance - and indeed: A Temporary Autonomous Zone. In this he had been heavily influenced by The Science of Society, by Pearl Andrews. See Bey's T.A.Z, pp.140-141.

Crick: A Mind In Motion, Matthew Cobb, pp. 323-324.

Seven Brief Lessons On Physics, Carlo Rovelli, p.33. I can't help but hear Brian Wilson's use of the Theremin as accompaniment to Rovelli here.

see Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, Richard Kostelanetz, pp.273-274. Also see Kaprow's Essays On The Blurring of Art and Life (1993). When we read about performance art and Happenings, we will soon encounter a typical sentence such as "opening the space between art and life." As if Art and Life were ever separate and we have merely agreed it's too dangerous to admit this? 'Cuz…things…might get outta hand? Must there be clear signals we're entering an Art Zone? Invitations? Admission fees? Advertising?

Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas, pp. 64-65.

Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches, Aidan Kelly, pp.18-29.

It could be that Freud was right: there might be no accidents. At least when we bracket off natural disasters.

In these "play spaces" are found one of the vast minority of areas in which I feel some semblance of "conservative" or even "reserved," which is saying something, not sure what. Regarding "frames": at this point I'd like to note that when George Lakoff broke for radical good with Chomsky's entire program, he found an older Linguist at Berkeley, Charles Fillmore, who was aimed at what Lakoff always wanted from Chomsky's program but realized it wasn't gonna happen: a more compelling account of semantics. Fillmore was investigating semantic Frames, kinda in Erving Goffman's territory. And Wittgenstein's. Fillmore's frame semantics became a heavy influence on Lakoff's cognitive neurolinguistics.

Erotic Power: An Exploration of Dominance and Submission, Gini Graham Scott, pp.142-149. I would have loved to be part of any or all of the distinguished artist Annie Sprinkle's sex-performance pieces, including "Earth Sex," "Legend of the Ancient Prostitute," "Tits On The Head," and the "Ecosex Walking Tours," see Johns, Marks, Tricks, and Chickenhawks (ed. Sterry), pp. 340-343.

Free Women, Free Men, Camille Paglia, pp.204-205. This reminded me of all kinds of Yoko stuff we stumble on when reading tangentially. In Kembrew McLeod's wonderful book on Pranks: Making Mischief In the Modern World, p.29, we read about Yoko's "Alchemical Wedding" show, in which John Lennon remained inside a large bag the entire time. Once you go down the road and read about the FLUXUS group and all they did as performance, you have a new insight into the intricacies of "nothing new under the sun," and how you might have been a bit premature in buying into this timeless wisdom tidbit. I recently read Lili Anolik's book on Eve Babitz, Hollywood's Eve. Babitz, a quintessential Los Angeles figure, spent exactly one year in swingin' New York, circa 1967. She immediately landed a job at the East Village Other and was charged with organizing an April Fool's party. The Fugs played, and Yoko and FLUXUS were there: Babitz: "Some place on Bleeker… It was so packed I couldn't move. I was on acid." Were Warhol Factory folk there? What do you think?

John Cutler took a chainsaw and cut a grand piano in half as a performance. It had to be done, admit it. It was like exploratory surgery, in which Cutler (and presumably, his audience) was interested in the structure and sound of the piano. Try not to think of this when Baby Mae's upright piano still has months of payments due, and the kid refuses to practice anything other than "Volga Boatmen." By the way, to get a feel for FLUXUS and allied groups in chronological time, see J. Hoberman's recent book Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde - Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. A favorite scene occurs on the 9th day of USCO's New Festival, which featured a lot of psychedelic light shows, but just after 5PM the lights went dark: the great New York blackout. Hoberman: "Not a blown mind but a blown fuse in an Ontario power plant killed the electricity through the northeast. Thirty million people were suddenly without power just as the evening rush hour was underway." (p.192) It's that kind of thing that really engulfs the culture with Weirdness. I bet a lot at the festival thought it was part of the whole thing. "Whoa! Cool! Who thought of this one?" It becomes not-so-funny when the food goes bad.

Interesting insights on the arts and "exhaustion" and art Happenings in John Barth's The Friday Book, pp.62-63. Similarly, Harold Norse's The Beat Hotel, pp.68-70, on Gysin and Burroughs's cut-ups, 1950s-1960s Happenings, Leary and psychedelics, the acceptance of non-linearity of thought, DADA and surrealism going mainstream, the Theater of the Absurd, and earlier: the Theater of Cruelty as precursor to Happenings, thoughts and modes of mind as framed as habits like drug-use, and all these effects on "the self" in a hyper-social environment. Also get a load of Nicholas Slonimsky, on "Happenings" in his wonderful book Music Since 1900, p.1066.

On the exceedingly distasteful Jones. Or just google the shit out of Jones as performance artist; note well that when asking real performance artists if Jones was one too, the answer was Yes, usually. Think about any unstated but implied Game-Rules about what this means to "be" a performance artist?

Andy Borowitz, in the introduction to Zapped By The God Of Absurdity, a collection of writings by Paul Krassner, p.xi.

The Relevance of Rexroth, Ken Knabb, pp.52-53.

(artwerk by Bobby Campbell)

So yea: have expensive food delivered to your door, shop for wonderful clothes online that will be delivered to your doorstep in a few minutes. There's a lot of very exciting gambling to be done also, on your laptop. You could win big. And my gawd, just check out the cornucopia of free porn available now. Stuff's steaming you may have missed out on! Until now, that is: it's there, probably. And indulge in a personal relationship with an AI chatbot that lets you know how wonderful you are.

What? Still not happy? Still bored from overstimulation? Your interiority resembels the cover of the White Album? Maybe try all that stuff s'more. Double down. Go harder. You can do it.

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How come all that stuff doesn't bring actual fulfillment? You're still distracted from distraction by distraction? Why didn't They tell you this was gonna be this way?

I'm going to make an argument meant for one person. I don't know who that person is, but maybe they stumble upon this hidden backwoods of the Internet and become persuaded to put down the need to drown out outside voices and go inward. No, it's not meditation, but it seems close to it. Find something to read - an actual book-book that you can carry from room to room, leaf back a few pages to make sure you're keeping track, know the names of all these characters, etc. Make notes inspired by something in the book, grapple with something dense. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Tristram Shandy. Mason & Dixon. The Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy. The Red and the Black. No fear. Lose yourself in the vast wilderness of some great big fat book, ya know? The ones that everyone wants to have read but no one you know has?1 Or: pick something that's 96 pages but will kick your ass it's so weird and impenetrable. Today I got lost in a book I know I've read twice already, but it's been four years since my last time with it.

Here's a passage:

Santa Lucia: eyes jellied on a plate.

The thrust of serpentine was almost green

all through the mountains where the rock cropped out.

I like sundowns, dusks smelling of madrone,

the wildflowers, which were not beautiful,

force little wills rooting in the yellow

grass year after year, thirst in the roots,

mineral. That have intelligence of hunger.

-from "Santa Lucia," by Robert Hass. It's from a 68 page book of his poetry titled Praise. Poetry like this keeps me weird, and allows me to break with everyday life. Kinda like a psychoactive drug. Hell: it is a drug, this.

I was reading one of my favorite Fat Novels that I understand now, in the Academy, is commonly thought of as an indulgence in snootiness, part of the elitist canon for white men, privileged by some writer who felt entitled to write something "experimental" and thick, overflowing with allusion, the very emblem of Our Enemy, etc:

The young sparks, it is true, were as full of extravagancies as overgrown children: the words of their tumultuary discussions were difficultly understood and not often nice: their testiness and outrageous mots were such that his intellects resiled from: nor were they scrupulously sensible of the proprieties though their fund of strong animal spirits spoke in their behalf.

-from "Oxen of the Sun", Ulysses, Joyce, p.400 in the tattered clothbound Modern Library version I'm using.

Yea, so: WTF was that? It's Joyce, imitating the English prose style of Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, and the Earl of Chesterfield. He's been narrating a scene in a hospital where a woman is about to give birth and there are many young men in the waiting room, some drunk. The "mind" thinking these thoughts seems to be the hero, Leopold Bloom, but it's complicated. Joyce started this chapter mimicking his idea of the origins of English in Latin, and, by emulating the oldest styles - yea, like Beowulf - he's gradually building up his mimicry and parody of prose styles in English as they chronologically appeared in history, mirroring the gestation of the baby about to be born. Nine months with the entire history of English evolving as the story of one night in the hospital in Dublin on June 16, 1904 takes place. By gawd this is stunning virtuosity! And thanks to the gods of Joyce scholarship - with their notes and annotations - that have helped me get a grip on this stunning, ultra difficult section of the book. Now I barely need an annotation, but there was a time I did need 'em. And what of it?2

This is a dimension of Mind, reading dense, difficult, slow-going, obscure texts. When we read such stuff, we're closer to Champollion or the people who cracked the Enigma Code than were are to some beach reader enjoying, say, Dan Brown.3

106 years ago, The Wasteland, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and Ulysses were all published. These were never "popular" texts. But now there are nominally many times more "educated" people. Do they read this stuff? Naw, man…

To read difficult books: sustained attention, seriousness, cosmic good humor, honesty, sensitivity, rigor, ability to withstand the opaque…a way to understand the dizzying, withering speed of the world right now. Tim Parks and a few others argue this sort of reading is necessary to understand ourselves and others. You go under the surface, where hardly anyone seems to be going these days. It allows for a perspective in 2026 in a way that may be shocking.

And it has nothing to do with "optimizing" your life for quicker, easier…something…so you can get on to doing…something. Paradoxically, the daily immersion in opaque, weird, difficult texts will, I argue, make you understand what "optimizing" is all about. But you have to see for yourself; I can't do it for you. No one can.

One of Pynchon's old friends from Cornell, Jules Siegel, once asked him, Why all the difficulty? And Pynchon reportedly said, "Why should things be easy to understand?" A Pynchon scholar named Albert Rolls thought this could be further reformulated thus: Why must things be hard to understand? And Rolls proffers an answer: Working through difficulty facilitates one's ability to get past the shallow liberty afforded by easy pleasures and achieve genuine freedom.4

John Higgs wrote about difficulty in literary modernist text and argued that the very point of it was attention and alteration of consciousness in such books as Ulysses. I agree, having already compared dense, difficult texts to drugs above.5 Aleister Crowley's acolyte, Israel Regardie, wrote, "Obscurity has many purposes, one of which is the breaking of SET."6

Wilson, out of his own time, both a writer of fat dense encyclopedic novels that Northrop Frye called "anatomies," and a reader of such books, pointed to Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of information and the level of predictability in a text, from one moment to the next.7 No doubt LLMs are using this now. But where is the human experience? Where is the style? Where is the intrinsic weirdness of the writer of such books? If the LLMs come up with something that mimics this, it's only 'cuz it was trained on Borges, Pynchon, Joyce, Ashberry, Pound, Bolaño, Krasznahorkai, etc. RAW loved info-dense texts, and it's very difficult to not see this as something linked to his love of chemically altered states. He often called such things a "yoga." Here he is in a letter to Timothy Leary, who was concerned about using Aleister Crowley in their jointly-written text:

Crowley probably understood more than you realize. (He never - well, he hardly ever - said exactly what he knew. It was his pleasure to make his readers work to decipher him. If I hadn't been a Pound and Joyce fan for 20 years before discovering A.C. I wouldn't have had the chutzpah to set out the decode his codes!8

Gurdjieff, along this line of thinking, had his own scholars of such texts as Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson say that he was so intentionally confusing so it required deep study to understand what he was getting at. Gurdjieff: "I bury the bone so deep the dog has to scratch for it." This harmonizes oddly - in major and minor 7ths? - with Joyce's "I put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of ensuring one's immortality."

Jonathan Lethem writes about how stupid social media/Internet has made us with reading and hails the New York Review of Books re-issuing serious authors; praise for the Long Novel; Lethem speaks to me when he writes, "Consideration of books and writing has never before been so oppressed by the tyranny of 'Long Now' - or 'present shock', to steal a phrase from Douglas Rushkoff. Or at least it seems that way to me, permanent retrograde citizen of the out of print and out of fashion; I developed my passion for novels while working in used bookstores. I've spent my life since that time being baffled at how difficult it is to get a conversation started about noncanonical writing that's more than a few years old. Even the early novels of a towering figure among us, DeLillo, say, can seem too dwindled in the rear-view mirror. Wasn't this supposed to be the news that stayed news?"…which seems a nod to Ezra Pound's "literature is news that stays news", and RAW's inability to write a best-selling thriller.9

Pound scholar William Cookson discusses difficulty and the duration of reading required to crack the texts addressed here: it's like your a detective arriving at a crime scene.10

To quote Peter Sloterdijk: you must change your life. This is one way. I'm merely suggesting it. You know what to do.

Have I read all these books? No. Even the ones I've read cover-to-cover I haven't read. These texts are inexhaustible, a value in literature that seems, if not gone already, rapidly receding in the red-shift of Shallow, Idiot Culture. I will come back to them over and over. They each represent Worlds with vast mental spaces to stretch out in. It's kinda my thing to not be a part of Idiot Culture, so those of us - the sorts that read the OG - seem to be part of a cyclical monastic life of readers. There was once a time when there was no public education, and almost everyone was illiterate. And maybe you've heard this, but I'll go on anyway: There were weirdo monks though, reading and copying texts all day, every day. Their consciousnesses were markedly different and there eventually came a time when they told jokes about their superiors in the order, and sought drinking and women. Some of these readers concocted stuff like the Carmina Burana. I didn't learn this in school; I got it from reading texts like Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars of the Middle Ages, which I read about when Pynchon said he and his friends read it at Cornell.

I seem to be paraphrasing Twain's definition of a "classic." Or maybe it was Wilde?

On Ulysses as a snooty bullshit novel in March, 2022, Jessica Crispin. Pete Buttigieg and Jeremy Corbyn seemed to have lost points for saying they love Ulysses. This is the idiotic world we live in: vote for a loud racist moron-grifter whose never read a book and is only out to steal from you, cuz those people who actually read books just think they're so damned smart and dammit, I'm a lost, clueless, unhappy loser so I wanna take you down with me, ya damned book-readers.

Nothing against Dan Brown. If you're enjoying your text I'm in solidarity with you, but I hope you move on from him to someone who would have liked to write very similar texts and make that much money from them, but couldn't. A writer like Robert Anton Wilson, who actually DID write such texts and we should have little doubt Brown read RAW. But RAW, while trying to write a blockbuster, was incapable of writing something so light and page-turning. And it's 'cuz his reading did him in. Once you know Pound, Joyce, Crowley, Pynchon…you're fucked. You can't help but write for others more like you than a mass audience, and price your way out of best-sellerdom. Or at least that's what I think happened with RAW.

Thomas Pynchon: Demon In The Text, Albert Rolls, p112, footnote #38. An earlier working title for Gravity's Rainbow was Mindless Pleasures. Talk about irony!

see Stranger Than We Can Imagine, John Higgs, pp.44-51, for a more sustained argument on this topic.

Eye In The Triangle, Regardie, p.xviii

Information Theory seems, in these senses, related to Mark O'Connor's "The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels," from 2011: at times a baffled tedium overcomes us during very long novels, but then suddenly there'll occur a hilarious set-piece or a set of philosophical ideas that are so interesting they function like how a terrorist captures and holds prisoners: because he's not killing us, he's being nice to us…and after a spell, we love him for this. O'Connor's "tempted" to think of the readers dedicated to Finnegans Wake are the "Patty Hearsts of literature." O'Connor's is one of the funniest ideas about reading long fat dense books that I've seen. Along these lines, Prof. David Letzler's book The Cruft of Fiction analyzes our readings of "mega-novels" like Underworld, Finnegans Wake, Gravity's Rainbow, etc, and asserts that, like code-writers who accomplish their task but use excessive code that's unnecessary - "cruft" in the lingo - we can learn to navigate our info-dense worlds by learning to spot these sections in a novel and take them very lightly, maybe less seriously, or skip them altogether: see op.cit, pp.233-238: we get better at building cognitive hierarchies, via discernment of what's "important to pay attention to" vs. cruft. This situation in reading stuff like The Recognitions or The Man Without Qualities will serve us in our non-reading lives of info-overload, or so I understand Letzler's idea.

RAW letter to Leary, May 4, 1974, courtesy of the stash of Leary Archives and the good folks at the NY Public Library.

Originally in a 2015 essay in Book Forum, it's collected in Lethem's More Alive and Less Lonely, pp.61-63.

A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, pp.xx-xxi

A Wisconsin woman claims that last month she was taken aboard a space ship where aliens cleaned her teeth, fitted her with a diaphragm, and gave her a Valium prescription good for three refills. She also claims that while aboard the ship she was introduced to Richard Simmons. - -from George Carlin, Napalm and Silly Putty, p.21

This nugget from Prof. Carl…

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In the vast literature both by and about psychonauts, I find it notable that it seems rare that a writer returns to one particular drug experience often enough that we see how profound and influential that trip was. Here I will mention one drug experience that Wilson wrote about that he didn't return to (possibly due to societal taboo/potential for misunderstanding), and one that he did return to, many times, both in his fiction, in interviews, and nonfiction decades later.

To my knowledge the first and only time Wilson wrote about this was in Fact magazine's first issue, January-February 1964, "Of Transcendental Beauty and Crawling Horror."1 Fact was the latest project by renegade First Amendment publisher Ralph Ginzburg, and he gave RAW free reign to flex his intellectual chops, which must have been a relief after endless hack-work and strictly from hunger writing jobs.

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RAW, who wrote as "Ronald Weston" for reasons we might divine shortly, writes about a 1962 peyote trip while living on a farm in southern Ohio, near Yellow Springs. He tells us how the peyote was prepared and his prior knowledge of bad trips and numinous ones. When we read his book from 13 years later, Cosmic Trigger vol 1, we find out he knew a lot more about peyote than he was letting on here. This trip was at first scary, then became something gorgeous. It was transcendent, he fell in love with the christmas tree, there were bright colors and sexual excitement, and "The beauty of every object I turned to was now so great that I was in a continuous mood of childish awe and joy." Wilson draws from his anarchist knowledge, citing Bartolomeo Vanzetti's mystical experience when he looked at the night sky and felt his "soul go out from my body up," something we don't often link to hardcore materialist atheist anarchists.

RAW only started to come down from this "Magic World" 12 hours later, at 8AM, then he slept most of the day and into the night, then went to his regular office job, where people said he seemed happier than usual. But that's not the most interesting thing about this trip.

He said colors remained brighter than usual for "several weeks" and then the unexpected happened: "I fell in love, sexually, with a young boy." He never acted upon it, but he got an erection just driving past the boy's house. "The boy was definitely heterosexual and, I knew, would react to any advance with repugnance or fear. That realization alone - and no 'moral' consideration at all - kept me from making a pass at him."

Yes, this is the same heterosexual lover of women, married to a beautiful and intellectual feminist, same editor who later worked at Playboy, the same one who wrote for Playboy a book on female breasts. Wilson was never homophobic, but he did read like a very heterosexual man. Anyone who had read most of Wilson's work but not this article would be kinda shocked. I know I was when my colleagues first unearthed it. Because first of all: RAW had this experience as a fallout from a profound experience with a psychedelic drug, and this seems like luminous detailed data about what psychedelics can do. Secondly, he actually wrote about it, candidly, albeit under a pen name.

His feelings for the boy lasted about a month, then faded, and he never had a recurrence of homosexual lust. "I am very glad that I had this experience, though, for it has taught me to understand homosexuals a little better. It has also taught me why Freud was so fond of quoting an old proverb, "Nothing human is alien to me."

A recent study by Kruger, et.al, "Perceived Impact of Psychedelics on Sexual, Gender, and Intimate Relationship Dynamics"2 may shed some light on RAW's temporary extreme sexual openness after a powerful psychedelic trip. You'd think we should have known these things 50 years ago - we would have - but six years after RAW wrote his piece for Fact the US government basically shut down all psychedelic research, forcing the intrepid to carry on underground, with vastly limited funds. Here's an interesting line from the abstract from the Journal of Sex Research:

"~10% of participants reported that psychedelic experiences influenced their gender identity and/or expression, reporting increased authenticity, self-acceptance, openness, and freedom in self-expression, as well as altered experiences of sexuality and gender."

This dovetails with recent research by Gül Dolen's team at UC Berkeley: they found that all psychedelics, and ketamine (possibly others) re-open critical periods, and each drug seems to have a slightly different duration in which they keep these critical periods open for re-imprinting, or re-learning; these are things that had been long thought to be "fixed" after initial "accidental" imprints when critical periods were open. Some psychedelics, Dolen and associates think, stay open for up to six weeks, although there is still a massive amount of research to be done on this. The implications, though, are that 1.) we are all far more open, potentially, to perceiving the world in ways we thought was impossible, and 2.) we ought to be ultra-careful with our lives in the 2-6 weeks after a major psychedelic experience, lest we re-imprint something undesirous. My interpretation of RAW's 1962 homosexual openness was that, as he thought about it, it was strange and that he really did prefer women. So the critical period had opened, he began to take on an imprint that he recognized was not what he wanted, so his environment with his wife (Arlen Riley Wilson) reasserted itself. He mentions his homosexual lust for a boy lasted about a month. At that point the critical period was closing, probably. He discusses his newfound empathy with homosexuality and new learning from that one peyote experience.

It seems obvious that much more research on this is needed, and wanted. I've always wondered what it would be like to be truly bisexual, and the first thing that comes to mind is: be careful what you wish for, 'cuz: do I really want more added distractions about who's sexy and worth getting to know? Or, to paraphrase Woody Allen, heterosexuality is great and everything, but bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for getting a date for Saturday night. As I move closer to my dotage, do I need that aggravation?3 Do I need more dates? I do not. Ship: sailed.

In the very same "Of Transcendental Beauty and Crawling Horror" (see footnote #1) essay from Fact, 1964, RAW covers his belladonna trip, which must have occurred around 1962 also. Dale Pendell, one of the giants among drug-writers, tells us that psychedelic drugs (LSD, psilocybin, peyote, DMT) have long been called "hallucinogens" by the press and even by scholars. But the class of drugs that belladonna is in - the nightshade family, solanacea, tropane alkaloids that have the structure of a peculiar seven-carbon ring with a nitrogen bridge through the center - these drugs will make you hallucinate in ways that psychedelics don't. You're talking to someone and they just disappear. You see faces scowling at you through the window. Wilson on his very very no-good hellacious bad belladonna trip kept smoking and enjoying a cigarette that was not there. One of the worst things about these drugs - besides the fact that they're long lasting and at sufficient doses kill people, or leave them with psychotic behaviors for long periods - is that they wipe out memory, to a large degree.

In his Fact article, there's more than enough to scare any of us away from even thinking about trying these things. A few minutes after taking belladonna in a tea, having heard it was like the psychedelics4 he'd been reading about, a Hollywood monster came running at him from across the yard, then his arms and legs trembled uncontrollably, then his wife turned into a "malignant, cannibalistic ghoul." That's how the trip starts, and it gets much worse from there, and lasts all night. He went to sleep at dawn, then had more hallucinations in the ensuing days. It's quite the trip report, eh? I cannot begin to do it justice; read it for yourself.

There seems something paradoxical about drug writing: reading about Bad Trips often seems more interesting than reading about Good Trips. Hey, I want all of your trips to be good ones: emotional breakthroughs, sudden realizations that change your life for the better, the feeling of being connected with everyone, every living thing, the biosphere, and the universe, all that really Good Stuff. But it's at times not gripping reading. Bad trips very often, I find, make for a cracking good read. I read and I think of a line from DFW: well…here's a supposedly fun thing I'll never have to do. (He said "never do again" but ya know?)

One thing that I find striking about really bad trips is they seem revealing of the sort of mind that's on the massive bummer. RAW was such an intellectual that, while belladonna knocked out his ability to string a semantically meaningful thought together, he still attempted to lecture on Marxism, the Nuremberg Trials, and tried to refer to Burroughs's philosophy of cut-ups when a good friend mentioned RAW's strange utterances. One that apparently Arlen wrote down, because it reappeared in cut-up like passages in his work over the next 30 years was, "We must all drink more milk for the Kennedy Administration in outer space of the Nuremberg pickle that exploded." This was part of a sort of informal collection of memorable drug thoughts. The Russian mystic and Gurdjieff acolyte was high on nitrous oxide when he wrote down, "Think in other categories." This seems more insightful than the laughing gas thought William James reportedly had, "Overall there is a smell of fried onions." RAW liked a cut-up that Burroughs came up with, because it feels poetic and also like a drug-influenced line: "Goddamn floating whorehouse. Death is the navigator." Burroughs turned RAW on to the last words of Dutch Schultz, who, bleeding out and delirious, uttered a bunch of fantastic nonsense, apparently taken down by a stenographer in the hospital. Schultz's words read like cut-ups from one of the great OGs.5 There are many others, but perhaps that's for some other spew.

As you read the terrifying trip report in the Fact article, note that he kept running head-first into a wall. This seems common to nightshade bad trips. This is the stuff of nightmares.

We owe this account to intrepid RAW-archivist Martin Wagner, who found this next account of RAW's horrific belladonna trip in a 1966 issue of Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine.6 Here RAW links tales of medieval witches and these tropane alkaloids to his favorite locked-room mystery writer, John Dickson Carr. He also gets the number 15 million as the number of witches murdered by good Christians, while the actual number, historians think in the year 2026, was closer to 70,000. I think the 15 million was once a number floated around by anarchist intellectuals who were allied with feminists, which would be RAW in 1966. NB it's roughly two years later and now RAW seeks to extensionalize psychedelics drugs as something apart from narcotics. More books had appeared in the libraries, more articles had been published. He still saw cannabis as a psychedelic (and while, by the 1990s, this was thoroughly debunked, Yale psychiatrist Godfrey Pearlson, in his recent massive cannabis book, The Science of Weed, shows that many people still use cannabis for its psychedelic effects7), and RAW appears to still think of belladonna as some sort of psychedelic, because of the link between hallucinations. As the effects of this hellacious belladonna trip come on: blue lights, a Van Gogh night sky. Van Gogh had gone crazy. Yikes. In both this account and the prior one, he become aware he's in for a very long bad time, linking it with the drug getting into the bloodstream from the stomach. Wife and friends try to help him come down in both accounts. Still think you might wanna try belladonna tea?:

In between twitches, "bolts" of purely irrational terror shot through me. I know that "bolt of terror" is a cliché, but no other term quite describes this sensation. It was exactly like a flow of electricity, except that it was a flow of emotion-very unpleasant emotion. Nothing I did seemed able to stop it, and it grew more intense with each wave.

In this account, RAW bothers the neighbors, and tries to vomit his way out in their sink, to no avail. There are numerous differences between both accounts, but they're not major, and we can attribute the discrepancies to memory, being aware others may have read "Ronald Weston"'s account, and selective perception, or the need to tell a horrific true story well. A notable aspect of this account:

We were crawling through a tunnel, the dwarf and me. The tunnel led into a woods, and above the woods was a mountain. On top of the mountain was a castle. I recognized it at once: Dark Tower. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came." I was the Fisher King. I had to go through the Dark Tower to rescue the Holy Grail, but I kept banging my head in the tunnel. The dwarf encouraged me to go on.

This is a version of the Underground Journey, which RAW later in his life found showed up in all of his work, as a controlling metaphor. He thought it was interesting because he hadn't been consciously thinking about this metaphor, but he realized it kept being used by his poetic mind, over and over, with innumerable variations.

Near the end of this piece, the lasting thing from this nasty trip might have been that he was previously a scholarly introverted person, but his wife now saw an extraverted, dominant personality. Could it be that even this class of drugs re-opens up critical periods?

Here RAW links Plato's Crito with the speculation that it was some sort of nightshade trip that was at the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries. This topic seems far from settled, and for some other article, but suffice: it waxes and wanes. Right now it seems to be waxing again.8 He ends by linking psychedelic drugs to his own then-inchoate ideas about erotic panpsychism and the persecution of witches.

This book has gone through a few editions with different paginations, but suffice: RAW covers these types of drugs in chapter 2, "Horned Gods and Horny Potions."9 He's distanced himself enough from his epic belladonna trip only to tell us about mandrake, another solanacea drug, that…

With mandrake, what is seen tends to remain constant and to be believed, even if it's something as implausible as a polar bear in a black turtleneck sweater lounging in the corner of the room. (This was actually seen by Ronald Weston, an advertising executive, who experimented with belladonna, another drug in this family, and wrote about his experience for Fact magazine, vol.1, no.1, 1963.)"10

Immediately after this, RAW distances these drugs from psychedelics, if only because they are, unlike psychedelics, "quite toxic and it is easy to overdose and kill yourself."

This is where RAW appears at his most florid and jazzy-speculative intellectual self about these drugs, and displays a couple of quantum jumps in overall drug-savviness. He includes the time he asked Leary if he knew of any good trips on nightshade drugs and Leary says no, and the Burroughs anecdote about the time he got hold of some morphine that was "severely cut" with belladonna. After his fix:

(Burroughs) noticed he was out of cigarettes, and went to the window, sticking one leg out before a visiting friend asked him what the hell he was doing. "Going down for cigarettes," was the reply — and the friend grabbed him before he completed the trip out the window, which was on the third floor. The next day, typical of belladonna, Burroughs did not remember the experience and had to be told about it.11

This short story was the first thing I ever read by RAW. It opens up Right Where You Are Sitting Now,12 but was first published in Gallery, a Playboy imitator, in 1971, so maybe I should have placed it before Sex, Drugs and Magick. This is a story of incredible chaos, told by the now-busted sheriff of Mad Dog, Texas, who's a dim-bulb John Bircher with a UFO contact primed by paranoid conspiracy ideation about the Illuminati and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion ("Proctoscopes of the Elderly Zionists"), and who completely loses it when he has to deal with his wife's vibrator and all these new books coming out (c.1970): The Sensuous Woman, The Sensuous Man, The Sensuous Couple, and (my favorite and the kicker) The Sensuous Suburb. These books were sick! and corrupting good Americans, and he read them over and over. The Illuminatuses were behind it all and "that Kinsey fellow hadn't just been whistling."

Well, one day he realized he had to do something about his wife, so he tried to think of the "perfect crime" to deal with her, knowing from movies that there is no perfect crime, but anyway: he staged a scene so it looked to the town doctor like she maybe had a heart condition, then he spiked her tea with belladonna…but the kids from the local grammar school came over to drink tea with her…It's an insane spectacle, wrought be a right wing reactionary moron presently being grilled by authorities. He was worried he might have turned the kids into drug addicts, but a psychiatrist put his mind at ease:

He said a lot of hippies have tried belladonna for a trip but hardly any ever do it more than once. And it's probably not addicting, he said in a funny dry voice, because "death usually supervenes before an addictive pattern can be established." He also told me some folks in the ancient world used it in their religious rituals, and some of them never came home from church. That's how it got to be called deadly nightshade, he said.

I don't think RAW is distancing himself from his own experience, but drawing upon it for a quasi-Faulknerian corker of a short story.

In this, the first volume of Wilson's Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, set in Italy in the late 18th century, his young male protagonist, Sigismundo Celine, is captured by a secret society/radical political gang called The Rossi, and they pry open his mouth and drug him with belladonna in an effort to convince him that "You will join us someday, and you will do it of your own free will, because you come to understand our divine work in this world."13 The drug kicks in: "And the gorilla with testicles for eyes and a rotten leper's nose said, 'The clash of our cries for peace. Or say that stone is the speech. Do not murmur. Nor know. For the lions.'" These could be cut-ups mimicking Sigismundo's belladonna hallucinations, who knows. It's quite horrific, and here is RAW using his 1962 trip for a novel set in the Neapolitan 1760s. The length of the suffering from a Bad Trip is conveyed here in the novel, and Sigismundo is very fortunate to have his wise Uncle Pietro and and an even wiser alchemist-magician, named Abraham Orfali, to help his deal with the fallout of trip.

Sigismundo frowned. "They keep slipping away," he said. "My memory doesn't seem to work properly yet."

"That is typical of belladonna," Abraham said. "Tell me what you do remember."

Here Wilson's essay begins, "The four weirdest and scariest drug stories I know all involve belladonna, a chemical for which I how have the same sincere respect as I have for hungry tigers, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, the IRS and Dr. Hannibal Lecter."14 RAW tells these four gnarly belladonna trip-tales, his being the 3rd, the Burroughs one already mentioned (above) the 4th. Here's RAW 43 years later, on his own 1962 trip: "What can I say about why I did it? I hadn't heard the above stories yet, I was young, I was a damned eejit, and the guy who gave it to me said it was 'just like peyote.'" The Tin Woodman from the Wizard Of Oz show up in memory once again, along with other gruesome nightshade phantoms. The Bad Trip narrative coheres after 40 years.

A woman named "Ina" asks RAW, at around age 70:

Ina: Have you ever had a bad trip? What happened?

RAW: I tried belladonna, because a friend told me, "its just like peyote." In my experience, nothing like peyote happened. Blue and green curtains again, you know? It may have seemed like peyote to him, but it seemed like bloody hell to me. I would describe that awful night as 14 hours of paranoid schizophrenia. Demons and Nazis and monsters of all sorts. Even my wife grew fangs and turned into a vampire…I never tried belladonna again and never will; and I'd never recommend it to anyone — except George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. They deserve it.15

RAW and Leary's younger friend and colleague, R.U. Sirius apparently swallowed some Asthmador in 1968, which was - believe it or not - an OTC drug for asthma, where you smoke cigarettes that had belladonna in them. But when you broke them open and ate them, you got the Really Bad Trip. And is happened to Ken Goffman/R.U. Sirius in upstate New York.16He was amped to see the pre-rock star Ronnie James Dio. What a horrific trip.

Dennis McKenna had a major bummer on a drug from the same family, jimsom weed/datura, as captured in his Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, pp.152-156, "My Datura Misadventure."

Oliver Sacks relates scary and amusing hallucinations on the belladonna-related drug Artane, in his Hallucinations, pp.106-109. He hallucinated two friends coming over, so so he cooked them eggs, then was sure his parents were landing a private helicopter outside to visit, then he discussed Bertrand Russell with a "very intelligent spider."

Ken Kesey was given a boatload of different mind-drugs while at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration hospital. The drug Ditran, a synthetic version of belladonna, was the only one he didn't like. See The White Hand Society, Peter Conners, p.166.

Andrew Weil discusses bad nightshade trips in Russ Kick's Disinfo Book Of Lists, p.22

Probably the best thing I've ever read on these drugs is in Pharmako/Gnosis, by Dale Pendell, pp.243-264. Some very knowledgable pagans grow nightshade drugs and experiment with low (and sometimes, accidentally not-so) doses. There's anthropological data, chemistry, some reports of good trips, etc. It's marvelous stuff, Pendell's writing.

see "Of Transcendental Beauty and Crawling Horror" HERE. RAW's other writing for fact (technically, it showed up as lower case) were feature-length pieces on advertising, a free love cult, William Burroughs, Mad and National Enquirer magazines, atheism, and racism.

The Kruger study from 2025 in Journal of Sex Research: HERE. An interesting passage from Rachel Nuwer's coverage of this study for BBC online: "At first, Kruger was surprised by this finding. 'If you had asked me ahead of time, I would have said that sexual attraction is something that's mostly fixed in people,' he says. After more careful consideration, he realised that psychedelics probably were not rewriting fundamental aspects of who someone is, he says, but rather allowing them to 'gain insights on themselves and possibly be more open to feelings that they may not have previously considered socially acceptable'."

I will always be moving into or towards my dotage, but will never quite get there, because I suspect when I enter dotage-hood, I will be too much in my dotage to notice that I'm in my dotage then. Does that make any sense to you? If it does, can you explain it to me, please? On another level: see the comment by RAW's daughter Christina, decades later, about RAW's candor regarding his temporary homosexuality after peyote, as gleaned by Gabriel Kennedy in his Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson, p.55

This is an indictment of our Authoritarian Patriarchal Dipshit Society: even an intellectual like Wilson, at age 30, couldn't find enough information about mind-altering drugs to alert him to the idea that, no, the solanacea drugs are not like the serotonin-based classic psychedelics and probably he ought to stay away. Another of our great drug writers, Mike Jay, tells us the solanacea/nightshade drugs got lumped in with opium poppies because of the earliest herbal-books: they were all pretty plants, all had psychoactive effects. It took a very long time to distinguish that which was crucially different. See Jay's High Society, pp. 59-60.

In this case, Original Gangsta", not Overweening Generalist. One of my favorite reference books on my own shelves, Bloodletters and Badmen, by Jay Robert Nash, p. 553-555, gives us a rundown of the Dutchman's last words, as taken down by police stenographer FJ Long: Some of my favorites: "George, don't make no bull moves. What have you done with him? Oh. mama, mama, mama." "Oh, oh dog biscuits and when he is happy he doesn't get snappy…please, please to do this. Then Henry, Henry, Frankie you didn't meet him, you didn't even meet me. The glove will fit what I say." "Please help me up, Henry. Max come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone."

HERE's a link to this bad belladonna trip account, with RAW using another pseudonym, this time "Simon Moon." Wagner's RAW Archive site is found HERE. Martin thinks RAW was helping to edit this magazine at the time, too.

see Science of Weed, pp.176-178. "There were rare and more typically psychedelic-like reports of contact with divine beings, or experiencing feelings of unity and oneness with the universe, being part of God's overall plan of things, or becoming 'mystically one with the all-knowing.' Accompanying such experiences were reports of feeling a high degree of spiritual empathy with others present, stimulation of long-term interests in religion, or emotions of deep peace and joy. Other users experienced 'fantasy being as real as reality,' out-of-body experiences and seeing or experiencing other universes. Finally, there were reports of mystical sexual experiences such as the dramatic and palpable fusion of souls as well as that of bodies." On cannabis.

Just in the past calendar year, Profs Ascough and Mosurinjohn push back on the 1978 Hofmann/Ruck/Wasson hypothesis of psychedelics used at Eleusis; while a team of researchers think an LSD (ergot) precursor was used in the Mysteries. The aforementioned Rachel Nuwer on a psychedelic brew for Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. All from just this past year. Talk about a perennial topic!

Sex, Drugs & Magick: A Journey Beyond Limits was most recently published by Hilaritas Press in 2020. See chapter 2 of that edition, pp.106-128, for his thinking about nightshade/solanacea drugs. He's done much more research on all drugs, seven years after the last account from the Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine, and he seems downright scholarly by 1973.

Sex, Drugs & Magick (Hilaritas ed), p.108. I imagine writers get a kick out of citing themselves under other pen names. I know I do. NB: here RAW gets the year wrong. I suspect the bad trip occurred in 1962, he wrote it up for Fact in late 1963, just before the first issue was released, in 1964. Did he not say it was himself here because of the peyote-induced homosexual thing? Maybe.

ibid, p.124

Right Where You Are Sitting Now (Ronin), pp.13-25

The Earth Will Shake (Hilaritas ed), p.94, but see pp.90-123 for this whole extremely nasty belladonna trip to play out.

Email To The Universe and Other Alterations of Consciousness, first published in 2005 (RAW died in 2007), and reissued by Hilaritas Press in 2017. "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is on pp.142-144 of the Hilaritas ed that I have.

TSOG: Tsarist Occupation Government, first appeared in 2002; Hilaritas Press ed. 2022, which is the edition I cite from here, p.204.

R.U. Sirius's bad trip recounted HERE.

Radio has had its day in the sun and is passé, culturally, but it feels omnipresent in my life, a taken-for-granted medium that, when I actually think about it, has had a profound influence on my life. I still listen. Here I will merely glance at some aspects of radio, my own life as a radio listener ("user" in Internet parlance), and my own idiosyncracies with regard to these waves.

I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County and came of age in the 1970s. Of course radio was a Different Animal then, for many reasons, but if only one: there was no Internet. I recall walking to class at Citrus College and a friend was telling me about the idea of Internet, though it didn't have that name. This would have been around 1988. We would all have our own computers! And they'd be connected with each other and he had all this insider knowledge and it just seemed kinda ridiculous to me, but a cool idea. And he went on and I just responded with something like, "Do you ever read anything outside of science fiction?"

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The radio was the auditory wallpaper of our lives, me and my friends. There would be certain stations (93-KHJ) and it was all about music. AM pop radio format. Top 40. Amplitude Modulation. Somehow you would just always be familiar with the latest hits without ever really paying attention to them. They just were. They were played, over and over and we knew them through a kind of electromagnetic spectrum osmosis. This music was given and we accepted it and it became embedded with our memories of incidents while doing what I'll whimsically call "growing up." By and large, we were adolescents so therefore we had "our" music, which was required to be NOT our parents' music. The process of individuation: millions of teenagers all asserting their individuality, listening to the same rock bands and buying the same records. At some point we noted that some of us would make remarks about the aesthetics of some song or band. This was a new kind of talk. Then there were (dis) agreements and some inchoate ideas about "taste." I think notions about taste came from comparing one thing to another. How surprisingly difficult it suddenly seemed to make the slam-dunk case that one band or act was "better" than another. It was subjective, but we thought there was something wrong and all this must be objective. The Raspberries were cool, but the Beatles were still objectively better. But some guy said "Go All The Way"1 was better. This was confusing. We were 13. Of course!

(my first transistor radio looked a bit like this, but the edges were rounded)

At some point you note there are talkers amid the music, and they did things with their voices. They talked with some hipster patois that wasn't local to our native area, so was exotic and interesting. Some spoke really fast. Some just had these trippy aspects to their voice that…you couldn't put your finger on it…why does this person sound so interesting when they're only announcing the time and call number of the station? Were they born that way? Did they do some sort of yoga to get their voice to sound that intricate, nuanced, strange, resonant, bassy, funny? I never lost my fascination with these voices. With some of these voices, as I got older, I found out all kinds of new things about them. As a kid, I took Gary Owens as he was: very funny and his voice was amazing. As I got older, I realized he was part of this much older conspiracy of "hip"pop surrealism.2 It suggested…(cough) psychedelic drugs, or maybe that "pot" stuff, but who knew?

I'm maybe 14. A friend from down the street shows me how to manipulated a knob on my mom's old Magnavox console stereo (it had wheels and a separate compartment to store vinyl LPs) and suddenly everything changed. This was FM. In my memory, the effect of FM was like that first time you watched The Wizard of Oz and it goes from black and white to color. FM was color. How would I ever be able to go back to AM after this? It was like my first kiss. It was either KLOS-FM or KMET-FM, Los Angeles. Everything about it was a new world. The Allman Brothers, Queen, Aerosmith, Rolling Stones. I had heard these bands on AM, but I now realized they were made for FM. I had heard Pink Floyd's "Money" on AM Top 40 - they cut it to make it shorter? - but now here's "Breathe…breathe in the air/Don't be afraid to care…" Oh my frikkin' gawd!

Then, the FM deejays: this was some secret world of underground cool people! How did I not know this? They did NOT sound like Gary Owens, The Real Don Steele or Wolfman Jack. They all sounded like they had the best hashish delivered to them by exotic swarthy females. They probably used an elaborate and ornate hookah to smoke it, too. Yep: they got high on hash from a hookah just as soon as they put on "Street Fightin' Man" or "Whipping Post" they resumed their reading of William Blake. Although they never said anything about it, no doubt they had been against the Vietnam War, probably since 1965. These were The Cool People. In LA suburbia, this was momentous for me.

'Twas what he's doin' this Marshall McLuhan: "If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures…" "Radio, once a form of group listening that emptied churches, has reverted to private and individual uses since TV. The teenager withdraws from the TV group to his private radio."3

Well, some extraterrestrial named Nikola Tesla seems to have, like Prometheus giving Fire to mankind, bestowed the capture of electro-magnetic waves, upon us. And it was good. Sure, the history is muddled. Marconi was there and did his part. Before them Heinrich Hertz conclusively proved James Clerk Maxwell's prediction of invisible waves of energy that could possibly do things. The idea of "mental radio" which was basically the same as ESP or telepathy, was widely considered, even believed. Upton Sinclair's wife was supposedly psychic and he wrote a book titled Mental Radio that Einstein liked, and Einstein wrote an introduction for the German version.4 Before 1920 or so, radio was a fascination for physicists, amateur tinkerers, and dreamers imagining the occult forces of "wireless telegraphy."

I loved this bit from poet Ander Monson: "Like Cocteau's Orpheus we tune our radios low and wait for communication. When it was new the radio must have seemed like magic: from apparent nothingness, a voice, a song, deliverance. It seemed that way to me in cars at night driving through snowstorms, heading home, hoping to pick something up to give the transitory hour some meaning. Through its lighted dials I can understand how some believe in spirits, ghosts, faeries, God or something else: if we can communicate through air, who's to say there's nothing else?"5

"Visible light" here seems so lost in the crowd. Like Copernicus: we're orbiting the sun, not vice-versa. Like Darwin: we evolved from ape ancestors. Like Hubble: our galaxy is just one of trillions. How narrow the band of visible light! How do you negotiate this? Hey I kinda like the puny humility of it all: we need to get off our high horses, some much more than others, of course…

I think my alcoholic, troubled grandpa gave me my first transistor radio, a tiny hand-held off-green-plastic one that ran on a 9-volt battery. On school nights I'd listen to the Lakers and Chick Hearn or Vin Scully call Dodger games. These were endless summers and winters, timeless autumns and springtimes. Hearn and Scully were intimates (with lil old me!) and had an embarrassingly profound impact on my own powers of description. They painted pictures of these remote games in my mind, and having seen an adequate number of examples both live and on TV, I knew how to "make" those pictures vivid. At night I simply put the radio under my pillow and didn't bother anybody, and retreated into the world of radio and my teams.

I remember a Dodger game ending, then the post-game report, then some ads, then Scully signed off, told us the score of the game and when the next one was happening, and then…the Frost Report. Or maybe those were only after Lakers games, in the Winter and early Spring. Anyway…I grew up in a town in the San Gabriel Valley that was once the largest packer of citrus in the world. Or something like that. The town was all orange groves at one point. You see something very much like it in the scene in Chinatown, when Jakes Gittes (Jack Nicholson) looks for where the stolen water was going and some rednecks rough him up, but he gets in his licks, too. The Union-Pacific ran through, taking our oranges all over the world, or so I was told. By the 1970s, the groves had mostly been removed for tract housing, but I remember a grove in the middle of tract housing one block up from us. The Frost Report sounded local, and jarring after hearing Scully or Hearn, like a telephone call from some official. Then the station that carried the baseball games, KFI-640 (50,000 watts) played music that I didn't dig, so I turned to all-night radio call-in talk show, KABC-790. There were weird adults who were very opinionated and I got ideas about differences in politics and what an issue was. I vividly recall Ira Fistell, who was the first "know it all" guy I ever heard. A lot of the time a listener called in and wanted to show Ira they were smart too. Ira seemed tolerant. Ray Briem sounded smart too, but I got the feeling he wouldn't approve of my very long hair. I was 12 or 13.

Just today I wrote a fan letter to a local radio station, extolling the brassy healthy big sexy voice of an afternoon deejay at a local station. "Please tell her I love her voice!", was the basic message. My life with radio made me increasingly aware of the sounds of voices. I've found that voices can be extremely trippy, and they activate something endogenously yet mildly psychedelic in me. My own voice is airy, sort of high-pitched and nothing to be on the radio about. But every now and then some ordinary citizen will say something and I not only take in the content of what was said, but I might think, "Possibly a radio voice." What causes a radio voice? I suspect all the things that produce speech: lung capacity, structure of the throat (especially folds in the larynx) and mouth and sinuses, overall body-type, an attention to phonetic phenomena, and so much more. Those who study nonverbal communication have ascertained that only 10% of what we actually say is part of the message we're sending. Quite a lot is eye contact, body language, how far away you are from someone, appearance, whether there's any touching or objects involved in any way, and then there's my obsession: the "paralingual" aspect of prosody: that's what I'm talking about here. Apart from what is said meaning-wise, there's the sounds of voices. Darwin was also interested in this.

There's a fine writer named Sarah Vowel who's also done cartoon voices. Similarly, to me, is longtime NPR "Fresh Air" host Terry Gross. These are just two females with remarkable voices. To me. There are many others. So, for me, a voice can be of any kind, but of all these kinds there are types, and I make my own typifications and then assess: this voice here is a really good type of this sort of style of voice. I recently found out that the classical music DJ at WQXR in New York, Jeff Spurgeon, is retiring in September after 50 years of radio. He has a "Voice of God" type voice for me, and I'm going to miss him. I remember having a conversation with an intellectual when I worked in a library in Palos Verdes. He was going on about Freya Stark, who I confessed I'd never heard of. He was beside himself that I didn't know who Freya Stark was. So he told me, and later I read up on her: she traveled amongst the Arabs in the desert, one of the first non-Muslims, and a female to boot. She broadcasted over the BBC and was said to have the "voice that breathed over Eden" about her.6 I've long wondered about the deceptive qualities of great voices. Research has shown that charismatic speakers have the ability to alter the frequency of tones in their voice, an unnervingly strong influence that I file away as part of rhetoric.7 In The Age of Faith, Will Durant reports that one description of the Prophet Mohammed was that his "voice was hypnotically musical."8 I find this all very bothersome in its implications.

Dunn, a personality linked to Portland, was the author of the cult novel Geek Love, and was also a radio personality with a remarkable radio voice. Her own thinking about voices shows up in many places in that unforgettable novel. Here are some passages from the novel:

"Dr. Phyllis should have had a nice voice. It was cool and high and always controlled. She never ran off into the ragged edges of sharp like Lil or Iphy. But it still wasn't pleasant. It was monotonous as a sleepwalker. Her words came out cleanly, nipped off surgically with a slightly heavy breath where an r should be. She spoke Lil's old tongue, the long, smooth one from the right side of of the hill in Boston. Though, when Lil asked her, Dr. Phyllis said she'd never been there." (p.128)

Here's the voice of the main character, Olympia, an albino hunchback dwarf, who has a radio show just like Dunn. This, I take it, is about Dunn herself:

"But my voice can take me anywhere. I can be manicured silk receptionist, a bureaucrat of impenetrable authority, or an old college chum named Beth. I can be a pollster doing a survey of management techniques or a reporter for the daily paper doing a feature on how employees view their bosses." (p.150)

The sideshow family member "Arty", a grotesque manipulative mean-spirited man-boy with no arms or legs but who started a successful and lurid religious cult with himself as the leader had a plan to manipulate the attendees of his Aqua Boy "show" with an electric current that ran into the seats, so that whatever he said to them, they would feel it and make him even more persuasive. He's pitched this idea by an electrician that travels with the freak show:

"Sound is a vibration. It carries through matter. When you hear, it's not just with your ears. A sound actually affects every cell in your body, making it vibrate and pass that information to all your other cells. That's why they say a sound is 'piercing' or a scream 'goes right through you.' It does. It actually does. [...] "I was thinking, what if your voice wasn't just coming at 'em from the air but was vibrating up from the soles of their feet through their asses up their spines. I was thinking what it would be like if they felt what you had to say because the boards they were standing and sitting on were wired to carry the vibrations of your voice." (pp.174-175)

Olympia is talking with an Irish barkeep in Portland:

"You've a voice like mulled toddy, Miss O," grins Jimmy. "I cried like a busted banker at your story on the radio this morning." "Hush," grunts Oly, ducking. A peek into the empty darkness behind her. "The Story Lady at Station KBNK isn't supposed to be boozing at 10 A.M. Today's show was an old tape. I called in sick. Besides, McLarnin, I have the voice of a baritone kazoo and your real name is Nelson. You were born in Nebraska. Admit it." (p.343)

Here Olympia "sounds" like a voice out of Joyce, and indeed, Dunn moved to Dublin the 1970s before returning to Oregon. Rarely does a writer think as much about the effects of the speaking voice on an audience, and no wonder Dunn was obsessed with her voice. And others'.

I first heard McKenna before I ever read anything by him. Pacifica radio station KPFK in LA played talks by him after midnight on "Something's Happening", hosted by Roy Tuckman, AKA "Roy of Hollywood", from midnight to 6 AM. When I first heard McKenna I knew nothing about him, but was absolutely floored by his idiolect, his diction, his subject matter: psychedelic drugs, esoterica, and the effects of books and how ideas melded into one another. But it was his voice. If you've heard you know. Here's a passage I liked from his brother's book about his life with Terence, where they lived in a three-story communal house on Telegraph in Berkeley during the Summer of Love:

"The house was the epicenter of an eclectic scene of wild-eyed freaks, dealers, travelers, and other other characters in the Bay Area looking for fun, sex, drugs, and whatever else was to be had. Crashing in an open room, Tom and I were up for all that and more. Terence fit right into this scene. His room had become a sort of informal salon where people would show up to get loaded and stay to hear him rant. And he always had something to rant about. Unlike most people, who get high and grow quiet, cannabis never affected Terence that way; it only made him more articulate, more talkative, and more able to weave his enraptured narratives. He often had a receptive audience of very stoned listeners hardly able to speak or move while he regaled them. He was in his element, and he loved it. That may have been when Terence first realized he had the gift of gab, in spades. People just loved to hear him talk; he could keep a group seated on the floor of his bedroom spellbound for hours. It didn't really matter what he said — it was the way he said it. Much later in his life when Terence started to address larger groups in more structured venues, he found the old magic still worked, a talent he eventually leveraged into his public career."9

There's an amusing fact-anecdote from Murray Kempton, who was covering the 1992 Presidential National Conventions. In 1932 Americans heard actors in movies putting on an accent every now and then, and voice actors on radio faked accents too, of course. But the 1932 conventions for POTUS were covered on radio, and Americans could finally hear all sorts of regional accents:

"Sixty years ago the miracle of bringing the conventions alive for untraveled Americans was the work of the radio alone, and it did that office more than handsomely, by reducing commentary to a minimum and leaving the tale to be told by the delegates in a jumble of regional accents and regional prejudices conjuring up the image of a vast continent of exotic provinces, each with its own language."10

To think this was less than 100 years ago!

Dr. Stephen Porges has had some intriguing ideas about the vagus nerve, which has become a hotbed of research since he started to make much ado about that nerve in us. From what I can tell, much of his hypotheses and theories have taken a hit in recent years, but he really helped to get the ball rollin'…and what of this mysterious effect (or affect!) regarding the musical and hypnotic qualities of human speech called prosody and the vagus nerve?. His notion:

"Prosody is the intonation in voice that conveys emotion. Polyvagal Theory emphasizes that prosody is mediated by vagal mechanisms and, similar to heart rate variability (i.e, respiratory sinus arrhythmia), conveys information about physiological state."11 Further: "When we listen to intonation - prosodic features of voice - we are reading the other person's physiological state. If the physiological state is calm, it is reflected in a melodic voice, and listening to that voice calms us down. Another way of thinking about the relation of vocalization and listening is to understand that long before there was syntax or language in mammals, there were vocalizations, and vocalizations were an important component of social interaction. Vocalizations convey to conspecifics - members of the same species - whether that individual is dangerous or safe to come close to."

Here is a theory about why I'm drawn to certain voices. Prosodic mediations via the vagus nerve about physiological states. A quick question comes up: what about detecting bogus "calm" and "safe" speakers? Can we detect those? How easy is it to fake these states? I need to do more research, but this seems like a good working hypothesis for me. Wilhelm Reich had some thoughts about how "character armor" affects speech via unconscious muscular constriction in the throat. "Reich retained an earlier interest in character analysis in the tone of voice. He noted that with armor in the throat, the voice is 'usually low, monstrous, 'thin'…In this condition, one will try in vain to talk with a loud and resonant voice. Children acquire such conditions at a very early age, when they are forced to suppress violent emotions to cry.'"12

I ran into this while reading about the history of overnight radio in American life:

"There's no doubt in my mind that all-night listeners establish a greater intimacy with the host. In fact, in my case, maybe I allowed too much intimacy. I've thought about this a lot. Being on the air 5 hours a night kind of inspires a greater closeness with the listening audience. I couldn't keep secrets. If something had happened, it came spilling out of me. So maybe I was a bit too open. I was so open with the audience that it felt it could be open with me, so there was certainly something of value to be gained. No one could argue that all-night radio doesn't contribute something of real value to American life. It comforts a lot of people who really need comfort - people who have either a temporary or permanent emotional problem, people going through divorce, people in prison, people who are ailing, and people of who have chronic sleep disorders, to name a few. It makes a connection with people that television and other media can't. All-night radio contributes a lot. If it causes somebody not to give up the ghost and go grab a gun and start shooting people, it's done plenty. Let me take this in a slightly different, if not perverted, direction. Talk about all-night radio being intimate, when I did that shift there were women who called and told me they had orgasms while listening. Some were upset because they were afraid they were being unfaithful to their mates. Did I like doing all-night radio? How can you not like being the guy who gave orgasms all night long on a 50,000 watt clear channel radio station?"13

This was uttered by longtime East Coast DJ Dick Summer, and while sorta braggy and possibly apocryphal, I think it's on to something.

My colleague Sebastian Marincolo quotes from High Culture: Marijuana in the Lives of Americans, by William Novak:

"After a joint or two, I find myself paying more attention to what the other person is saying, rather than only hearing the words he uses in trying to get his point across. By keeping track of his mannerisms and his tone of voice in a more concentrated way than usual, I can more fully understand his point, and can respond more directly than normal."

Marincolo links this to cannabis and hyper-focusing: "A shift of our attention to a stronger focus on body language and the 'tone' of a statement certainly may help us to understand others better. This is why dogs understand us so well, why they feel our sadness, joy, or pain, without being able to understand our language."14

When listening to the radio as kid, I had no idea about any of this, of course. But I intuited quite a lot of it. Voices on the radio know they're acting, know they're putting on a show, are aware that their speech qualities ought to have some aspect of magic in their utterances. So what's left is the unbidden effects of a voice. At least for me. And listening to voices will never get old. These auditory displays are everywhere we go, so let us cultivate our appreciation of them. There seems to be some sort of quality…

Here's The Raspberries doing a lip-sync of their hit "Go All The Way." 1972. As I got older, I realized they were very many bands who rode the coattails of the Beatles, and I thought The Raspberries were just trying to be Beatles with a hard-rock vibe. The bridge part of "C'mon/I need ya/I love ya!" is very Beatles, as is when they go to the relative minor of A major, F# minor, with the falling chromatic bass line in the guitar part, which jangles like George Harrison. I loved this song just a puberty hit for me. But the Beatles had long burrowed into my musical DNA, never to leave, only to grow.

If you don't know who Gary Owens is, just check out this bit: Golden Voice Announcers School. My gawd, I love this guy! I did not have $13,000 though, so I missed out. The Real Don Steele sounds here: skip to 13:17. I later realized there were 1000 DJs who sounded like The Real Don Steele…and why was that?

Understanding Media:The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan, chapter 30: "Radio: The Tribal Drum." This epochal book came out in 1964 and made McLuhan an intellectual superstar. Most of it was written in the late 1950s! I've since read multiple biographies of him and there's a lot more behind the curtains with this guy. When he's wrong, he's wrong in the very most interesting ways possible. I see reading McLuhan on media as super-valuable because, even when he's obtuse and swinging and missing, he makes us sensitive to the effects of media in a way that had never happened before. What a profound thinker, aye!

Phenomena: The Secret History of the US Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis, Annie Jacobsen, pp.184-185. I think the Wiki for "History of Amateur Radio" is really cool.

Letter To A Future Lover, Ander Monson, p.103

Books: A Memoir, Larry McMurtry, p.157.

Charismatic speakers and larynx folds. This kind of thing would be part of nonverbal communication for me. That rhetoric can be non-verbal was a jolt to realize. It has fostered a sort of hermeneutic of suspicion for me in that I consciously hear a good voice and something in me says to be on the lookout for who this person "really is." So that's another dimension of my obsession with voices. Similarly, possibly even more creepy than the well-known aspect of one politician being taller than another and that gives them the edge: the "caveman" aspect of politicians: deep voices subconsciously mean confidence and strength, which seems to outweigh age, experience, and professed values. I was astonished to see Trump win, not only because he was so obviously a grifter and loser but he really didn't sound good to me at all. So this research is either limited or I can't hear it. See here on this topic.

Age of Faith, Durant, p.173

Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life With Terence McKenna, Dennis McKenna, p.132. There's a group of people who recorded Terence's talks and now they've spread all over Internet, and if Terence's talk about the Voynich Manuscript wasn't the first thing I heard from him, it was one of the first things. It's HERE.

"Oh, For the Brawls of Yesteryear," collected in Going Around: Selected Journalism, Murray Kempton, p.405

Pocket Guide to Polyvagal Theory, Dr. Stephen Porges, p. 23 and p.109. I also find it interesting, along these lines, that Ezra Pound thought one aspect of poetic writing was the musical aspect, which he called melopoeia, and that sensitive listeners to poetry or poetic prose written in a language the listener didn't know could still experience effects that approached meaning. Pound: Literary Essays, p.25

Fury On Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich, Myron Sharaf, p.312. Sharaf's quoting WR from Character Analysis.

Sounds In The Dark: All Night Radio in American Life, Michael C. Keith, pp.12-13.

Elevated: Cannabis As A Tool For Mind Enhancement, Marincolo, p.131.

The Occult Timothy Leary: The Tarot, Magical States, and Post-Terrestrial Evolution, Joseph L. Flatley, Destiny Books, 2026, 242 pages.

I recall my first reading in Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminati Papers, when I turned a page and saw a cartoon panel of some math or physics professor at a chalkboard, a calculator in hand with a profusion of equations behind him on the board, and the caption, "Sir, are you using only half your brain?" and the professor looks at us, with a WTF? look on his face. What follows on this one-pager is a short magazine-like advertisement for egghead rational-mathematical types to get out of their computer programming code-writing, vector and flow charts, and differential equations, and take some time to investigate that mysterious human force of intuition, "synergetic apprehension of whole systems," esthetics, and ESP. RAW saw these things as what the right hemisphere of the brain does, while, of course, logical thought was left-hemisphere stuff. To only rely on the logics of the left hemisphere was like living with one lung or one eye or one testicle. It was a classic Wilson move to call for more generalistic thinking among intellectuals.1

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This rhetoric, which seems like an ad for the intellectual stoner class, was related to a minor riff running through Wilson's and Timothy Leary's work: Scientific Illuminism, which sought to open up channels of intuition and creativity among scientifically trained people: you should do more yoga, smoke cannabis and have a psychedelic trip or ten, practice tarot or I Ching, get out of the invisible cage of left-brained thinking and activate the "silent" holistic right hemisphere of the brain, which, after all, is where true creative breakthroughs come from.2

This prologue serves to introduce Joseph L. Flatley's book on an area of Leary that has not really been covered until now: how, as a political prisoner (he served years for basically possessing a small amount of cannabis), Leary read voluminously in prison, and fleshed-out his magnum opus - the theory of eight metaphorical "circuits" in the human nervous system - and found innumerable correspondences for each circuit, from Eastern religion, physics, sociology, history, chemistry, biological evolution, his own field of psychology, and here, the tarot deck. Among many other areas of knowledge. Flatley has honed in on Leary's use of the Tarot deck, Aleister Crowley's version of it, and when we do a general survey of Leary's psychological thought and his work in the Eight Circuit Model, Crowley's dizzying complexity in all things occult and magickal (implemented with a scientific frame of mind), and the lore of the Tarot, this is heady stuff indeed. Go slow. To say there's far more than meets the eye with all this is to woefully understate the case!

Flatley's book is well-written and researched, with citations, and a good index to aid future researchers in Leary's Eight Circuit Model. There's a valuable section of the book in which he discusses how other thinkers have already used the Model, and he interviewed many of them.3 For those who are new to Leary and his impossibly romantic and tragic life, he offers a concise biography of the renegade scientist-visionary, and, though I've read all the same sources, Flatley still managed to make it thrilling for me. Flatley read the primary sources but also dug down into the "scholarly journals, academic anthologies, and writings smuggled out of prison and published in limited runs."4 He also addressed an increasingly burning question I've encountered lately: Leary was a proto-Transhuman, and what about the Tech Bro billionaire fascists that have glommed on to this? What do we make of it? Flatley covers this as well.5

Over the years, in talking about Leary with colleagues and strangers, often the disjunction between "Theory Leary" from Berkeley and then getting fired from Harvard and becoming a telegenic "LSD advocate" is acknowledged, but most seem unclear how this transformation took place. Flatley pinpoints it as the Laredo pot bust, and I agree. Flatley goes into details.

Picture Leary in solitary, reading Gravity's Rainbow, then looking at Crowley's tarot deck, making mental lists, waiting to be allowed writing utensils. At some point Leary saw himself as Crowley reincarnated: the arc of their lives seems similar enough, but there's the problem of Leary being born 27 years before Crowley actually died. It was all metaphor. Leary defined reincarnation as something like all the heavy influences in your life: those people have been re-born in you, and you are carrying out their ideas, incarnate.

Flatley cites Helen Farley on the cultural history of the tarot deck, with the Major Arcana cards reflecting "many of the concerns of the Italian Renaissance."6 Sociologist Mike Sosteric links Italy in the 15th century and the tarot deck, which was used first for gaming and gambling, but which quickly morphed in its use to being invested with divine, occult and psychological significance in order to deal with new ideologies of power and industrializing society, and the structural bureaucratic State.7

Did certain people in the 1400s in Italy hold a meeting to decided to use the Tarot for ways to navigate social acceleration and tumult? No, these things tend to go those ways for complex, occult, psycho-social ways. When things "work," they stick because they serve some purpose and fill some human need. Leary and Wilson argued that non-rational systems like the I Ching and Tarot come out of very deep genetic memories and "programs" in the human race. While they are pre-industrial-age systems, they seem to yield information that is pragmatic for its users.

There's a fascinating history of how the Jewish kabbalah became co-opted by European Christians around the same time the Tarot took off.8 The deep desire of profound and ultimate knowledge drove the seeking of correspondences from one system of life into another. This method working analogously and the building up ideas has never left us, and, whether they like us saying so or not, hardcore physical scientists use these same psychological methods today, in order to drive new hypotheses for data that needs to "make sense" or make better sense.

Carl Jung thought the Tarot deck revealed insights into the collective unconscious and in his 1951 paper "On Synchronicity" he acknowledged that rational, inductive physical science had eclipsed something he had sensed in his work with the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli. In trying to account for the occurrence of highly improbable yet meaningful events that actually did occur, Jung notes that "No reciprocal causal connection can be shown to obtain between parallel events, which is just what gives them their chance character. The only recognizable and demonstrable link between them is a common meaning, or equivalence. The old theory of correspondence was based on the experience of such connections - a theory that reached its culminating point and also its provisional end in Leibniz' idea of pre-established harmony, and was then replaced by causality."9

That the Tarot works on well-known symbols and metaphors that correspond in interesting ways and require the wits and ingenuity of the reader of the cards, still seems mysterious. Flatley has broken new ground by showing Tarot adepts how they can further their understandings and readings by linking them to Leary's incredibly capacious Eight Circuit Model of human consciousness. Should a Tarot Adept decide to take on this body of knowledge in order to align it with their present system(s) of correspondences, they will become even more formidable a reader of the deck.

As for us neophytes in these things - I count myself here - Wilson's right hemisphere metaphors for a-rational and irrational systems, which may as well come from deep in the human genome, playing with the Tarot deck (or the I Ching) opens up my intuition, my creativity, my imagination. I see these systems as poetic expressions. And these things are limitless. What more value can we ask from these metaphysical systems of art, thought, and interpretation? For the generalist, nothing human is alien to us and all systems that humans discovered or invented in which they found meaning seems well worth investigation, if only for the revealing metaphorical thinking behind them.

Joseph L. Flatley's invigorating research and lucid style in The Occult Timothy Leary has much to recommend it, beyond my own elaborations and predilections. Its primary audience would seem to be those who are already well-versed in Tarot, but I think general readers will find much to fire their imaginations. The irony here is that Leary and Wilson probably would want those trained in logic, math, chemistry, biology, genetics, and physics to read it, and even try to use it. About which: shall we hold our breaths?

The Illuminati Papers, p.83 in my old And/Or Press ed. Foreshadowed by this "ad" is its counterpart on p.39, "Hey, man, are you using only half your brain?" with a cartoon of a hippie sitting lotus, surrounded by swirls (pot smoke?). Sure, this longhair can throw the I Ching and interpret it like a champ, and he knows how to manipulate the body to feel high and has learned to crack social games, but…what about the mysterious left brain functions known by the High Adepts at places like the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies? Equations! (they predict things before they happen!), syllogisms - you can find out if an argument is consistent with itself!, or…don't you wonder how your beloved stereo works?, etc. This ad concludes by an exhortation to "subscribe to SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN (not a religious organization)."

Recently, Iain McGilchrist has emphasized the dire need for more right hemispheric values and thought if humanity is to survive. See his magisterial The Master and His Emissary (2009). Arguments for Scientific Illuminism were peppered throughout the works of Leary and RAW, but it probably begins in 1962 (three years after CP Snow's The Two Cultures appeared). See RAW's Lion of Light, pp.169-171; Cosmic Trigger vol 1 (RAW, pp. 208-209; Leary's Politics Of Ecstasy, pp.252-258 (largely an homage to Aldous Huxley's psychedelic generalism); Leary's Info-Psychology, p.127 ("The great penetrations in our understanding of natural events come when the scientist succeeds in experientially empathizing with natural processes. We think of Kekule's serpent dream which set the stage for organic chemistry. And the use of the billiard-ball model by physicists to experience atomic events."); Timothy Leary: The Harvard Years (James Penner), pp.225-226 and subjective psychedelic accounts of objective hard sciences; John Lilly's Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, inter alia; William S. Burroughs's The Job, pp.125-224, which is a sustained (quasi-serious?) argument for an alternative academy because "research that could be used to free the human spirit is being monopolized by paltry intellects in the name of 'national security.'" In general, include here any thinker's call for much more open "system" views and permeable membranes between disciplines, less rigidity, etc. Jeffrey Kripal's The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge (2019) is a terrific source along these lines. Since RAW and Leary, many scientists have opened up about how psychedelics or cannabis have altered their intellectual orientation. (see: Francis Crick, Carlo Rovelli, Christof Koch, Susan Blackmore, Carl Sagan, Candace Pert, and many others.) As a final plea along these same lines, I urge all readers to understand the role of metaphors in our lives. You will not be drillin' in a dry hole.

The Occult Timothy Leary, Flatley, pp. 204-209.

ibid, p.61.

ibid, pp. 104-106. About Leary: "He wasn't a cheerleader for the currently evolving dystopian order that many in Silicon Valley seem to be. He was never that cruel."

ibid, p.117

"A Sociology of Tarot", Mike Sosteric, Canadian Journal of Sociology vol 39 no.3, 2014, pp. 357-392. J-STOR link HERE

With regard to Christians using kabbalah during the Renaissance, "In the attempt to apply midrashic tehniques such as gematria, temurah, and notarikon, which had formerly been restricted to Jewish circles, within a broader symbolic framework based upon new concepts such as the ten sefirot and many divine names, unheard-of new possibilities seemed to open up for scriptural exegesis and metaphysical speculation. Not only did the biblical text reveal hidden levels of meaning never suspected before, but the correspondences that could be established with pagan mythology and philosophy seemed simply stupefying." - Esotericism and the Academy, Wouter J. Hanegraaff, p.63

The Portable Jung, p.518. Jung goes on to argue that his synchronicity must be explained by some as-yet unknown force or dynamic in physical science. Robert Anton Wilson has speculated that the Irish physicist John S. Bell's 1964 inequality theorem, which fed the research that led to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022 for Clauser, Zeilinger and Aspect, was (maybe) this science. There are some who look at the uncanny weirdness of quantum entanglement and link this back to something like Leibniz's pre-established harmony, but I for one will not speculate further, being quite out of my depths there. I realize I've emphasized 15th century Italy and analogous thinking in correspondences, but the influence of the cult of Pythagoras might be the bedrock for all this: probably since humans invented numbers, counting, and a system of mathematics, we have always invested numbers with larger meanings outside themselves. "Odd numbers were universally considered more godlike, more perfect, and (in magic) more powerful than the even. This was apparently one of the more widely known Pythagorean principles," writes Vincent Foster Hopper in Medieval Number Symbolism, p. 101, and he links this to a quote from Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor: "Good luck lies in odd numbers…they say there is divinity in odd numbers, either in nativity, chance, or death." Act V scene 1.)

In Illuminatus!, a TWA stewardess finds a series of long gnomic notes in a "seat vacated by a Mr. 'John Mason' after a Madison, Wisconsin to Mexico City flight, June 29, 1969, one week after the last SDS convention of all time." These seem like some paranoid intellectual's links they (or you or I) need to trace at the library or elsewhere. There are notes and allusions about Dillinger; Christianity and 3s, Buddhism and 4s, Illuminati and 5s; Lovecraft; Hopi anthropology; "illumination" and "enlightenment"; Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49; "Kick out the jams;" why the Pentagon has five sides: who decided this? Etc.1

The same enthusiastic explorer then adds this:

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What gets me is how much has been out in the open for so long. Not just in Lovecraft, Joyce, Melville, etc., or in the Bugs Bunny cartoons but in scholarly works that pretend to explain. Anybody who wants to go to the trouble can find out, for instance, that the "secret" of the Eleusinian Mysteries was the words whispered to the novice after he got the magic mushroom, "Osiris is a black god!" Five words (of course!) but no historian, archaeologist, anthropologist, folklorist, etc, has understood. Or, those who did understand, didn't care to admit it.2

Many years ago I would use "Osiris is a black god!" as a postscript to emails to confidants. It felt like an in-group joke, enigmatic and a nod is as good as a wink to blind bat, innit? kinda thang. Then someone replied, "I don't know what that (the Osiris bit) means." So Imma explain an explanation, and it really has to do with the kind of weirdo reader I think most of y'all are, or why are you reading this Substack?

-Speak for yourself, schmuck. Who ya callin' a weirdo reader?

-Okay: point taken. I will speak for myself. I'm a weirdo, she's an eccentric, you're an erudite. It's all, like, semantics, man!

Frazer tells us that only Plutarch told the Osiris story in "connected form" whose "narrative has been confirmed and to some extend amplified in modern times by the evidence of monuments."3 Osiris was a creator, and his brother Set was jealous of him, so Set beheaded Osiris and chopped his body up into pieces. Osiris's sister, Isis, (and wife: yea: they were different back then) went to the ends of the earth to find the missing pieces and reassemble her god-husband-brother. She found all the parts except his penis. Osiris's penis: was it a McGuffin? Answer in the comments. Anyway…

Among the career highlights of Osiris's life as a god was: he reclaimed the Egyptians from savagery and taught them to worship the gods and gave 'em laws. Yea, the big-time God-stuff. Why were the Egyptians savages before Osiris happened on the scene? Simple: they had been cannibals. He also discovered wheat and barley growing wild, picked fruit, and showed Egyptians how to train the vines: he basically gave 'em beer and wine. He set out to spread the knowledge and if there were climates hostile to vineyards and wine, he made sure the locals got into brewing suds.4 It is at this point you tend to forget about his marriage to his sister and start really giving the stink-eye to Set. Osiris was so beloved by all the peoples of the Earth he returned to Egypt with untold wealth and was worshipped as a god until Set (with 72 accomplices, btw) had him whacked.

We can find innumerable Osiris stories, but we're still wondering, hey Sir James Frazer: why was Osiris a "black god"? 'Cuz Egypt is in Africa? That seems too prosaic; there's gotta be a better story behind this. What do the Rites of Eleusis have to do with this?5

Osiris takes up a ton of mythical space, so cut to the chase: he's the god of the underworld and symbolizes vegetation (he was worshipped for millennia when the Nile flooded the fields during the Dog Days, around July 23), and death and rebirth. He was a precursor to the Jewish guy who overturned the tables of the moneylenders.

This reminded me of Mad Uncle Ezra Pound's 1911-1912 essay on his new form of reading and criticism, "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris," his method of "luminous detail" and the essential thing in a poet, that "he build us his world." Ez's role, as he saw it, just before Gavrilo Princep took aim at the Archduke, was likened thus:

If a man owned mines in South Africa, he would know that his labourers dug up a good deal of mud and an occasional jewel, looking rather like the mud about it. If he shipped all the mud and uncut stones northward and dumped them in one heap on the shore of Iceland, in some inaccessible spot, we should not consider him commercially sound. In my own department of scholarship I should say the operations are rather of this complexion. There are many fine things discovered, edited, and buried.6

It's Ez's job to find the really good stuff - the jewels - for us. And then he teaches us how to do it ourselves. This is like unto going to the ends of the Earth to find Osiris's body parts. Ez would play Isis here, not the first, and hardly the last time he has spiritual dalliances with goddesses. It's a new method of scholarship and a lot of it is related to translation, but it's complicated. He's like the cool English prof who took over the class at the last minute 'cuz someone needed a sabbatical; the syllabus said you'd have to read Pilgrim's Progress this semester, but Prof Pound makes a cutting remark about Bunyan and gives you Chaucer and Ovid instead…and he's funny, too. (Just ignore those little rants about bankers and usury! By the way: does the Department Head know?)7

In the same year Pound began writing about gathering the limbs of Osiris, Aleister Crowley published The Vision and the Voice, about his experience with Dee and Kelley's Enochian Keys, in Mexico, and then in the desert in Algeria, with Victor Neuberg. When I read this, the magickal experience seems so profound I, after all these years, can't comprehend it. I don't feel like I can wrap my head around it. Listen to this, from November 30, 1909, 10-11:45 PM, in the Sahara, Bou Sada:

And we are standing, as if crucified, face to face, our hands and lips and breasts and knees and feet together, and her eyes pierce into my eyes like whirling shafts of steel, so that I fall backwards headlong through the Aethyr - and there is a sudden and tremendous shout absolutely stunning cold and brutal: Osiris was a black god! And the Aethyr claps its hands, greater than the peal of a thousand mighty thunders. I am back.8

The Beast seems to have been influenced by Andrew Marvell and Katherine Mansfield in poetry, by no one else in experience. Haunted by death and violence from his childhood to the date of this absolutely profound series of experiences in the desert, this was when Crowley saw Osiris's reign as the age of patriarchy, and he wanted to end it. He saw himself as Osiris's begotten son, Horus, the child, as the dawning of a New Age. Crowley was Horus. There is a footnote to this exclamation about Osiris by Crowley:

The attainment of of the Grade of Magister Templi involves the Annihilation of the aspirant. "Osiris was a black god!"; i.e, of the nature of Binah — BLACK. The love of Binah is that of the Queen Scorpion who devours her mate.9

Where is the origin of "Osiris was a black god!"?

Gonna tryna not get too much in the weeds here, especially after Crowley's language, but hey, I gotta. Because Osiris died and came back to life, like Tim Finnegan and sooo many other gods, including the Christ (who was a late-comer to the die-rebirth game, actually), of course Osiris is always showing up in Finnegans Wake. As I practice FW bibliomancy on the regular without lusting after results, I'm always on the lookout for Osiris, even in places where it's not "obvious"10 And around 70 days ago I was rooting around in an early passage:

Hurrah, there is but young gleve for the owl globe wheels in view which is tautaulogically the same thing. Well, Him a being so on the flounder of his bulk like an overgrown babeling, let wee peep, see, at Hom, well, see peegee ought he ought, platterplate.11

And then Joyce inserted the capital E sigla, lying on its back here, after "platterplate."I see this E on its back (three legs up in the air) as Jung's collective unconscious within the text. And this is on a page where, mourners are looking at the "dead" hod carrier Finnegan: "Orra, whyi deedye die? Of a tryin thirstay mournin?" How sad that Tim is dead! "Twas he was the dacent gaylabouring youth." The mourners surround the body with themselves, and enough alcohol to fuel the entire Army-Navy game, and one of the most sodden lines (to me) in all literature:

Tee the tootal of the fluid hang the twoddle of the fuddled, O!

Something about this passage sparked my intuition: is Osiris here? It doesn't look like it. There's a dead god about to come back (wake), but I see no Osiris here, starting with "Hurrah… platterplate. My trusty McHugh12 doesn't see it either. He actually sees "young gleve for the owl globe" as Islamic: there is only one God for whole world, etc. I see "young gleve" as one young French man-at-arms holding down this raucous wake. And the whole world is watching (wheels in view, the wheels of the casket screech "tee tee" which is "tautaulogically" the same thing: tau is the 19th letter of the Greek allforabit…err…alphabet. We are all looking at Tim Finnegan/the dead god who will soon rise again. He's on his back, like a flounder, an overgrown baby…let us all peep at the dead young man.

Then: "see peegee ought he ought, platterplate." WTactualF? I have always said to myself "maybe later" with this one. Platterplate was a lotta swings and misses. McHugh seems lost here, too, so I feel cool not sweating it out. "He" is the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. "Ought" might have to do with "aught" or zeroes? But…where is this getting me and all of us, attending the Wake? Then I found an old exegete, 50 years to the year: Apparently a Wakean named Mark L. Troy, in his dissertation, Mummeries of Resurrection: The Cycle of Osiris in Finnegans Wake (1976), links this to a 1911 (there's that year again!) book Rois et Dieux l'Egypte, by Moret, capitalizing on the then-recent finding of King Tut's tomb: on page 88 ("see peegee ought he ought") there's a photographic plate (platter) in the book of Osiris being roused by Isis! Recall: Osiris was the god of renewal and agricultural fecundity, so an erection seems totally apt, even if the wife-goddess is dressed up as a bird. (An "owl"?) So Joyce was referring to a page in a 1911 book in French on Egyptian gods. Further, Troy has, "The image of Osiris's literal erection from the dead, effected by Isis in the shape of a bird…is central to the cycle of Osiris."13

So: I now see Osiris on p.6, too. He's in very many other places in FW, of course.

And yet: I still haven't traced this origin. My reading fails me, again. And yet, this is the kind of Quest that gives me the kinda thrill that I really wonder about. That you are reading this sentence makes me feel a tad less…eccentric?

Q: Can you explain what Sirius is?

RAW: Sirius is a double star. Sirius A is the brightest star in the sky. You could find it by looking down the belt of Orion. It's the brightest star that the Belt of Orion points to, the brightest star in the southern sky. Sirius B is invisible to the naked eye and wasn't discovered by telescope until a few decades ago. It wasn't successfully photographed until 1970.

The odd thing about Sirius B, which Temple14 documents in his book, is that there are unambiguous, no-doubt-about-it references to it in the mythology of several African tribes. He has demonstrated by inference, and I think correctly, that the Egyptians knew about Sirius B too. He believes that Isis was the symbol of Sirius A and Osiris of Sirius B, and that's the meaning of the old secret of the Eleusinian mysteries: Osiris is a black god. Sirius B is a dark star, a collapsed white dwarf which is in the process of evolving into a black hole.

Q: What do you think is the significance of Sirius?

RAW: It could well be a red herring. It could be our own minds developing and we need to have some kind of entity that we can project all this on to. It could be that there are no allies, no holy guardian angels, no extra-terrestrials at Sirius. But, there's a whole chain of amazing coincidences. A guy I know names Neal Wilgus who's done another book on the Illuminati which is coming out soon, said that while he was researching it he couldn't go into a bookstore without picking up a book and opening it at a page which referred to the Illuminati. That happened to Shea and myself when we were writing Illuminatus! Once I got into the Sirius thing it kept happening. I went into a bookstore and looked at a book by J.G. Bennett called Gurdjieff: Making a New World. I opened it at random and found this passage where Gurdjieff talks about the hidden references to Sirius in Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson. I said, "What! Gurdjieff is making references to Sirius — why?" Then I found hidden references that Kenneth Grant talks about in Crowley's work. There it seems much more synchronicities. Grant says that Crowley was in contact with extraterrestrials and that Sirius was the Silver Star that's referenced to a lot in Crowley's poetry., the Argentum Astrum. Albert Pike, who was a thirty-third degree Mason and was the highest ranking Mason in the United States in the nineteenth century, says in Dogma and Ritual in Freemasonry that the silver star of eery Masonic lodge is Sirius. He doesn't explain why. I kept running into things like that and the communications got stronger and stronger. I tried experimentally entering other belief systems. I decided to take the most far-out belief system I could pick up, which was that fairy people actually exist. As nobody believes in fairies anymore — it's funny you kept poiting out James Barrie's place this morning — they've got to get in touch with us some way. So nowadays they're pretending to be extraterrestrials. I entered that belief system, took some acid and went to a witches sabbat…15

1. Sirius being the brightest star in the heavens, of course people would project and speculate about it for the last 5000 years. Then people talk to each other about what things mean, and these ideas morph and get passed along down through the ages.

2. Lore accretes and the poets with the most active imagination create "reality." Sirius would be no exception here.

3. There has been actual contact by (disembodied?) intelligences from some entities within our own podunk Milky Way galaxy. Maybe only the dreamy types are receptive.

4. This is all a long, drawn-out, ongoing artist's conspiracy. Andre Breton writes about Sirius being a black god in his wartime Arcane 17, published in 1945…which doesn't explain 1909-1911 stuff, but I'm sure you can work it all out. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen had some sort of contact with Sirius, and we could really go down a road with names here, and I'd like to just mention one in passing: Harry Smith, folklorist, ethnographer, musicologist, visual artist….Carl Sagan is debunkingly positive-sure the Dogon people of Africa heard about Sirius B from Europeans, etc. (See Brocas' Brain, ch. 6, "White Dwarfs and LittleGreen Men,"pp.66-80) In a book titled Sexual Symbolism, which contains "A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus," Richard Payne Knight writes that Egyptians called upon Osiris as the being who dwelt concealed in the embraces of the sun, and that Osiris represents the male life-giving sexual power/Divine Phallus. The problem is: this book was published in 1786. So you tell me.

5. I'm sure you can come up with something better than I did!

Illuminatus! omnibus ed, p.123

THIS SPACE LEFT BLANK INTENTIONALLY FOR NATIONAL SECURITY PORPOISES

ibid, p.123. NB: Bugs Bunny, a favorite of the Chicago Surrealists of the 1960s.

The New Golden Bough (Abridged), revised and edited by Theodore Gaster, an old Mentor edition ppbk, mottled edges, disintegrating acidy pulp paper, p.384. The original Golden Bough, unabridged, took up the entire top of your shelf, ya know, the shelf above all your BDSM and psychoactive drugs books? Or rather: it would have.

Yea, I know: quite the hero! Here's how Ishmael Reed unpacks some of this: "Set wanted to use the death of their father as an excuse for invading foreign countries. Set hated agriculture and nature which he saw as soiled dirty grimy, etc. He was arrogant jealous egotistical and when Osiris issued a ban on men eating men, introducing the techniques he learned from the long-bearded Black men in the university at Nysa, Set began to plot his brother's downfall." - Mumbo Jumbo, chapter 52, p. 185

At this point, I get lost in the abridged Frazer. I lose the plot for a bit, because that info is so interesting, and because I know how influential armchair anthropologist Frazer was on all my favorite writers. While flippin' around in Frazer, I'm cavorting with my own gods.

Selected Prose, 1909-1965, Pound, p.22. "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris" pp.21-43, in this volume. I find it all fantastically nutty and wonderful.

Here, again, I forget myself and re-re-read Pound's long essay, 'cuz it's a gas, like Jumpin' Jack Flash. Where does this OG guy find the time? Easy: I got no job and I don't game. I barely even watch TV, and I certainly ain't mixed up in all that social media thing, that's fer derned sure. Now that every article in every issue of the Washington Post constitutes some species of doomscroll, why…

I take this passage from this site. See near the last. One of Crowley's main biographers, Israel Regardie, wrote that he felt unequal to the task of explaining what was going on here in, not only this vision, but others included in that book. (Eye In The Triangle: An Interpretation of Aleister Crowley, pp.392-396)

Binah: the sephiroth below Kether/The Crown in kabbalah. Separating, making sense of things: Understanding. Crowley's color correspondence with black here is an ancient one: it represents the absorption of all colors, depth, and the hidden, mysterious potential of understanding.

as if anything constitutes "obviousness" in FW!

Finnegans Wake, p.6, bottom, lines 30 -35 or so.

Annotations to Finnegans Wake. John Bishops' Joyce's Book of the Dark has a ton on Osiris in FW, but not a gloss for p.6 that panned out for me.

I nabbed that from FinnegansWeb HERE

Robert K. G. Temple, author of The Sirius Mystery (1976); the more recent edition has the full title The Sirius Mystery: New Scientific Evidence of Alien Contact 5000 Years Ago.

from a 1977 interview with a British magazine called Weird Trips.

concoctulary: noun: the making up of a word for a word that doesn't yet exist, but should. Coined by American journalist and blogger Jenny Lawson

I saw someone refer to themself as a "klismaphiliac" and I don't know enough Greek roots, so I had to look it up. The "—philiac" we all know: it was something they like. It turns out a klismaphiliac is sexually turned on by enemas, and it appears to be common enough. That reminded me of an old book I have on my shelves of sundry dictionaries and other word books: Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices, by Brenda Love. I took it off the shelf, blew some dust off, and paged through it, then sneezed a lot five minutes later from the dust. It's easier to look up words online; it's much more fun to look them up and read them in dead-tree books. Is klismaphilia in Love? Gawd yea: eight paragraphs of detail, including a fine line illustration. Of course it goes back to the Egyptians, but "was (was?-OG) also popular with the French (of course!-OG), Greeks (natch-OG), Romans, and Americans." There's an ancient health practice of enemas which, for reasons most of us can guess, got cross-wired with eroticism. Tobacco enemas? Yea: they gave a "rush to which they soon became addicted." The olde sex 'n drugs routine again, gawd bless it, from here to eternity. How about this bit of amusing ephemera: "Enemas have been used by rapists as well. There was one case during the 1960s of a man who would raid a female college dorm and tie up all the students, strip them, administer enemas to them all, and then selected the one to whom he was the most attracted would give her a second enema before leaving."1 This brings up a few questions, not the least of which, for me at least, is an apparent Hall Director asleep on the job. Also, I cannot for the life of me visualize this scene without it being extraordinarily untidy. Also, he "would raid": the word didn't get around that a guy might break in, tie you all up (the first to get roused really ought to speak up: sisterhood is powerful), and administer an entire fleet (pun) of enemas? Really? I'm not buying Love here, but it makes for a real kinky scene, eh?

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(When I did a search for "dark academia: images" this jumped out at me: it looks like one of my own shelves, although dark academia obviously goes in for much darker wood, and just, ya know, low-key lighting. Also: I wouldn't have a wicker container as shown here, unless it was holding my cannabis)

I've seen these two terms used quite a lot online, and seemingly most of the people who self-describe themselves as one or the other are under 40, maybe under 30. And now that I'm approaching - not "in" - my dotage - I find I have a fairly immediate reaction: are they overthinking this due to being cooped up with their phones and Covid restrictions and dwindling prospects under kleptocracy? And what do these terms mean, you ask?

Both have Wikipedia entries, but suffice:

• A sapiosexual is attracted to intelligence. I've read young sapiosexuals mourning their lack of being able to find a person who can keep up with their own fantastically scintillating conversation, say, on Reddit's r/sapiosexuals, and I want to be idealistic and take them at their word. Young self-described sapiosexuals get all bothered when someone else goes on in-depth about some topic, possibly etymology or physics or the history of Doctor Who. But here, as elsewhere young people write about their desires, this all seems just a tad dubious. I three-quarters suspect hotness is still "all that." It would be nice that the hottie has a wicked vocab, amirite? I half suspect there's a very strong Venn diagram intersection between those who post pictures of Dark Academia (seems like a weird kink I can't quite get a handle on) online and those who go on about how they're all, like sapio now, ya know? It's an alienative world and this alternative universe that some seem to actually be able to live in just not me, this dream-world and the desire to live there, where people "get ya" and not this dystopian hellhole where you have good enough grades to get into State, but it costs too much and dad says no, 'cuz there ain't gonna be no jobs when ya graduate, etc. Or am I reading too much into it? My gawd, I ache for the kids born into Gen Z, or Alpha or Generation Emoji or Gen Duckface, whatever's going on these days.

  That said, I am a very olde dude and confess my estimation of attractiveness shoots up a notch or two when someone reveals a certain fluency with words, ideas, or wit. I mean…I get it. I'm sapio, too. Comin' out right now, as you read this. Please be kind? "Sapiosexual" goes all the way back to 1998, when, writing for Live Journal, Darren Stalder called himself this. In 2002, he apparently clarified, writing that he didn't "care about the plumbing," a witty way of saying he's bisexual, but can't get tumescent unless you're perspicacious AF. The term caught on by the 2010s, due to dating apps and social media. (I know: shocking!) John Waters's now-famous admonition: that if someone picks you up at a bar and they take you home and they don't have any books, then don't fuck them…seems apt here.

• A demisexual is a person on the asexual spectrum, but will probably be up for all kinds of hot bone sessions once they've achieved a fairly deep emotion connection with you first. The OED traces this one back to 2006.

I think I've had periodic moments of both sapiosexuality (in the strong sense: she's hot 'n ready, but what she said 35 minutes ago, about liking Dukes of Hazzard?) and demisexuality: hey, not all guys are 24/7/365 ready to bonk anything that moves; some of us want an emotional connection. Both of these orientations seem normal enough to me, and what's really remarkable is that the words for these feelings toward sex are so new.

We all know what and why it's called "doggie style." So why is "missionary" a mere position, and no one ever says, "Let's try it missionary style"? My guess is missionary is widely seen as the default position, and so it's bereft of "style." Missionary seems like a perfectly fine way to do it, and who says you shouldn't try multiple styles, perhaps all in one go? It would seem the only limitations on pushing the Kama Sutra to its limits would be 1.) the local conditions: will she run the risk of gashing her shins on that baseboard, near the water heater? Can I stay suspended up here and go at it, while possibly giving myself a concussion on that low ceiling beam? Etc. 2.) How much yoga ya been doin' lately? 'Cuz a quick lesson in certain "muscles ya didn't know ya had" is a real thing, and you can vouch.

Research anthropologist Robert J. Priest concludes the first appearance of "missionary position" was in Kinsey's 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. But Kinsey appears to have either forgotten this or he wanted to protect himself for some reason, because he attributed "missionary position" to the great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, in his The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia. But it's not there. In his 1948 book Kinsey wrote that Malinowski wrote that the Trobriand Islanders referred to the man-astride variation of sexual intercourse as what the missionaries advised them to do. (And why would any self-respecting Trobriander take sex advice from some western meddler?) "According to Kinsey, Malinowski had reported in a 1929 book that 'caricatures of the English-American position are performed around…campfires, to the great amusement of the natives who refer to the position as the 'missionary position.'"2

In The Myth of Monogamy, the Evolutionary Biologist and public intellectual David P. Barash points out we've defined sex within the marriage frame: premarital sex, marital sex, extramarital sex. But where are the words for post-divorce sex, or widow or widower sex? Also, what about the 47 year old confirmed bachelor's sex life? No way is that "premarital."3 So: we need words…

One of my favorite Sociologists, Murray S. Davis, pointed out our desire to have sex within our own social group, endophilia, seems pretty normal, but why stop there when coining neologisms so we can think about these topics with a bit more flexibility? Exophilia would be the desire to have sex outside your own group. Strataphilia is seeking lovers outside your own social class; Davis has seen sectiphilia: wanting to smash with someone outside your own religion. Further - and what an education Davis provides! - transageism is when a man wants his wife to dress like a young girl. I wonder how much Davis was wingin' it sometimes: transcegenation is, for example, when a white woman wants her white lover to abuse her while using black ghetto slang. Trans-stratism is when a man wants his wife (or, presumably, girlfriend) to ditch her business clothes for "royal" dress; trans-sectism is when a woman wants her non-catholic lover to dress like a priest; genetism is named after Jean Genet and is role-play involving superior/inferior roles.4

I might have first become aware that new words were needed when I read Timothy Leary's Info-Psychology, where, he's writing about the 5th circuit (Neurosomatic/Hedonic) and how post-WWII hippies lacked a vocabulary for their experiences there.5 In Terence McKenna's Archaic Revival he cites the need of neologisms for expanded perception and consciousness, and I take this as a basic Sapir-Whorfian thing.6 This business of psychonauts calling for new wordshas a long pedigree: Sir Humphrey Davey, experimenting enthusiastically with nitrous oxide with Romantic poets Southey and Coleridge cited the need to develop a "language of feeling" related to these non-normal states.7

Philosopher Richard Rorty: "A sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species." And "Ironists specialize in redescribing ranges of objects or events in partially neologistic jargon, in hope of exciting people to adapt and extend that jargon."8

Lexicographers have as their proprietary territory: words. And all words are fossilized poems, as Vico and Emerson had it. All words began somewhere, somehow. They were all once neologisms, in the most basic sense. And so, I grab for my favorite consulting dead-tree book dictionary, Webster's New Collegiate (1979 ed) and look up "neologism":

neologism: noun: 1. a word, usage, or expression that is often disapproved because of its newness or barbarousness 2. a meaningless word coined by a psychotic

Why the attitude, Miriam? Cannot you extend a bit of cordiality to us barbarous psychotics? We prefer to think of ourselves as creatives. Thank you.

Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices, Brenda Love, pp.149-150.

The Hidden History of Coined Words, Ralph Keyes, p.40. This is one of the better works on neologisms I've ever seen. 2021, Oxford. Keyes doesn't come at neologisms from the same angles that I do, which is what I like. My lifelong interest in newly coined words having to do with altered states of consciousness, drugs, and sex are topics he slightly elides. There's a page in this book on Joyce's dizzying neologizing, and he cites some words from Ulysses: mrkgnao, diambulist, poppysmick, bullockbefriending, soliloquacity, etc, p. 140. On this page and at least one other - where he tells us how physicist Murray Gell-Mann got quark from Joyce - he writes Finnegan's Wake. And his editor(s) at Oxford didn't catch it. I'm absolutely sure he meant well.

Myth of Monogamy, David P. Barash, p.184. This book - like soooo many others - takes a sobering, data and fact-based look at humans as monogamous and concludes: we're not very monogamous primates. But my Wilson-Leary colleagues will cite the power and role of the 4th circuit, etc. That we don't seem to be wired for monogamy gets replicated in one study or another every four months or so. It's no conspiracy among academics. The proof is in the pudding. So to speak.

Smut: Erotic Reality, Obscene Ideology, Murray S. Davis, pp.143-149, but I highly recommend the entire chapter, "Perverted Sex: The Destruction of the Social,", pp.125-162. Davis posits three basic attitudes towards sex: 1. Jehovanist; 2. Naturalistic; and 3. Gnostic. He's strongly influenced by ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, and social constructivism. And he's very funny.

Info-Psychology, Leary, p.68

Archaic Revival, T. McKenna, pp.213-214. Terence thought consciousness couldn't evolve faster than language, so this was not an incidental thing.

Psychonauts, Mike Jay, pp.40-41

Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Richard Rorty, first quote, p.20; second quote p.78 To go deeper than Rorty here, who was influenced by Harold Bloom's idea of the Strong Poet, see Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson, pp.139-158, on how new metaphors create and structure reality and seem to lie at the heart of that mysterious force we call "creativity."

What We Can Know: A Novel, Ian McEwan, Knopf, 2025, 297 pages.

(No) God bless Ian McEwan and his novels of ideas, well on their way out in this increasingly illiterate epoch. In his latest, What We Can Know, McEwan addresses some of the more haunting ideas that stir me around the topic of History: memory, the blurring of history with nostalgia, the physiological extreme of Alzheimer's and its dire enclosure on what we can know, and, most interesting to me: the epistemology of documents in what we know about History. I found it thrilling, but it's no thriller.

Imagine some point where you're interested in burrowing deep down into some historical point: not only is every book on your topic available on some level, but everything that can be documented: social media activity, emails, written memos…they're all indexed by AI and you can, in principle, know in a way unfathomed by a Gibbon, a Dadrian, a Toynbee: will your knowledge be better? It would seem so. But what about your decision to cover this topic, rather than that one? Who wants to know this history, and why do they want to know it?

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McEwan has broken this novel in two: the first part is written from the period 2119-2120, with time-shifts back to the early 21st century, and then after the great Derangement and a series of limited nuclear and biochemical wars, post-2035. Global sea levels have risen and the world has been ravaged, low-level Great Britain is now a series of islands. The scholars of this period wonder how the people of our period could have known what was coming by heating up the planet, and yet chose to do, basically…hardly anything. Hence our period is called by theirs the Derangement.1

But this is not a global warming novel, per se, though that background informs the entire series of narratives. McEwan wants us to think about history and what we can actually know about it, and what this entails about our everyday thinking.

Two young scholar-lovers are obsessed in their own way with the socio-political aspects of our time: what were they (us) like? They were very exotic, those Europeans of 100 years ago. For example, they apparently took cheap flights to sunny places for a weekend and tried to "tan" their skin, though ultraviolet radiation was known to cause damage, but what seems odd: they were also racist toward people with darker skin. In 2120, Nigeria appears to be the world power and massive, desperate population migration after the great Derangement has caused much more genetic mix with the predominate brown eye-black-hair world population. Now "white" people are discriminated against, though this is awful and ought not occur…

McEwan has much commentary on the role of AI (college students appear to worship it as a god in 2120), about the nitty-gritty terribleness of having to care for someone who has Alzheimer's (probably the most sympathetic character, a nature-loving violin maker who loves unconditionally, falls prey to this beast of a neurological condition), about the role of the Humanities in our lives, and about how and why we lie to ourselves about class, sex, and scientific knowledge. Ya know: the little things.

As a weirdo heavy reader in my 20s, I became obsessed with Aldous Huxley's work. I read everything I could find by him, and there was a lot. Eventually I compiled a chronological bibliography and read through that, beginning with a slew of early novels that, I later found, were in the tradition of the Novel of Ideas: Aldous would gather a cast of characters from diverse backgrounds, who found themselves at some chateau for a few months.2 The characters were types: the professor, the artist who has liberated ideas about sex and other outré things, the idealistic young person, the very rich old man who's conservative, certain kinds of fools and wise people. They all have discussions about the very ideas Aldous was writing about in his essays. Novels of Ideas are first cousin to the essay. In What We Can Know, McEwan does a similar thing, but 100 years separate two different groups: the 22nd century Humanities scholars, and the people from the 1990s up to our time: a group of friends, colleagues and lovers who surround Francis Blundy, a grey eminence of British poetry, compared to Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin, and his wife, Vivien.

In particular, there was a dinner party for Vivien's birthday, in which Francis would recite the poem written for her, a nature poem in the current style, in the form of a crown: a series of Petrarchan sonnets all linked by a theme, with a rhyme scheme ABBAABBACDECDE, with other rules of form adhered to. Francis was not a nature-lover; he took his data from Vivien's nature guide books. He doesn't think it mattered: she was a true nature lover. This grand poem was for her. In addition, as the guests have all arrived and are well into their cups, Francis went off on one of his classic rants about how global warming is a hoax:

His subject was climate change, the mild term by which is was still known. That again. It was a major theme for Francis, and Harriet had tactfully excluded his opinions from her profile. He was, as someone had once said, a nuanced denier, but if opposed, a denier to his core. He had the knack in argument of making dissenting opinions appear like personal hostility. Most of his friends disagreed with him, and a few social occasions had been marred by raised voices.

When confronted with the latest scientific data from climate researchers: increase of floods, droughts, typhoons, hurricanes, forest fires, ocean acidification, glacial retreat, polar ice melt, pandemics, resource wars (travel to the US was perilous: you had to pay off rival gangs of pirates), and the US (an afterthought) feels like Rwanda in the 1990s), species extinction, and desperate and mass migrations - the "stultifying incantations" - Blundy says "Intellectuals of all kinds were professional pessimists and always had been." His friends stayed silent when he'd rant like this, and chalked it up to his poetic temperament.

The dinner party was grandiosely compared to the First Immortal Dinner, held in London on December 28, 1817, had as guests Wordsworth, Keats, Charles Lamb, and the painter Ben Haydon. Vivien Blundy's birthday party was the Second Immortal Dinner, one of many riffs McEwan gets in about his own class: the intellectuals. To put it bluntly, he's the conscience of that class. Or one of the consciences, we really have plenty of them; it's just that they are a minority and the stakes couldn't be higher. McEwan is supremely disappointed with his class's self-regard and relative obliviousness about the latest science data.

In 2119, a male scholar of this period is completely obsessed with the data and minutiae about this dinner. He's read Vivien's journals and her electronic trail and has fallen in love with her. Or what he thinks is her, because that's really what this book is about: assuming you have a profoundly nuanced level of data and understanding about some historical period, which would strongly imply: you "know" it. There are a couple of run-ins with other historians of other epochs and they are obsessed with their bailiwicks, too. One guy wishes he could go back and live in those golden times: the time of Pope Innocence III. Just as our 2119 scholar would love to live in 2026. (His girlfriend thinks this is delusional; she sees far more clearly the quality of mind that led to the Derangement.) I won't ruin it for those who want to read this novel. but will only make a few remarks about style, form, and our ideas about History.

This business of deep study and the delusion of some "golden age" that occurred in the past blurs with nostalgia, a not insignificant emotional state that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since, oh, maybe a certain escalator ride around 2015. That some of us simply accept as axiomatic that things were "great" at some undetermined hazy point in the past and we must scrap our ideas of democracy if we want to be great "again"…might be the most embarrassing aspect of nostalgia. No: scrap that: that it would be led by a complete narcissistic loser with the mentality of a nine-year old schoolyard bully? It's a bit much to take, but I digress.

I think it more helpful for us to root out and discern between the types of nostalgia we all engage with. Growing up in dead-eyed white lower-middle suburbia, broken home, in one of the smoggiest cities in the US, as an asthmatic kid: there must be a better place, with a better past, with more promise for the future, with smarter people: that place was Berkeley, California, 450 miles north but may as well have been 4500 miles away. As a 20 year old I had wet dreams of growing up there instead of where I was. I got these ideas through books, talking with older people who'd been there, and a documentary called Berkeley In The Sixties. Mostly books. A few years after 9/11 (my fellow citizens will decidedly not go to the library to try to understand why they hate us), my wife and I moved out of the Sprawl of Los Angeles…to Berkeley. I loved it there, but…things had changed since the 1960s. Suffice: it began my thinking about nostalgia as a delusional and, at times, a dangerous reactionary force.

There's another type of nostalgia that I'm still trying to grapple with: a very odd, dreamy, personal feeling we have about our past and how we idealize "what it was like" back then. While I know it wasn't "great" I still have, unbidden, memories of some innocuous day when I was 13 and riding my bike home from school, or ditching school with friends at age 17 and driving to Newport Beach to just sit in the sun, drink beer, smoke weed, and body-surf. Over time I think these sorts of personal memories and an attendant nostalgia (with all the levels of delusional falsity included) with those dreamy-memories are mostly harmless and are probably a way for the Ego to maintain some sense of its past, as discontinuous and unsolidified as these memories can be. Long before Escalator Day I had begun to think of public/mass-nostalgia as some sort of amorphous threat, and personal nostalgia as deeply personal and something to constantly interrogate when I wasn't enjoying it.

In What We Can Know, students in 2120 totally reject studying the History of the Derangement: they see it as "nostalgia" and there's a dramatic scene in which they walk out en masse on the professors who announce the new historical project: they've had it with the idea of idiots who allowed the world to get this way: let us study our own future prospects. I think they're fools, but I can see their point, an odd feeling to have. Of course I'd see them as fools: I have a deep, non-negotiable commitment to the Humanities (though I've never been an academic and don't even have a degree), and I think without Humanities-type-thinking, we run the risk of being run by childish billionaire fascists, if you can imagine such a thing.

McEwan was actuated to write this novel in part by two texts: a 2025 book of poetry titled Marston Meadows, by John Fuller, and Richard Holmes's This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer, from 2016, which McEwan sees as possibly a higher level of truth we might attain when doing our studies of the past. I haven't been able to locate a copy of Marston's book yet.

Lest I've made this novel out to be something dry, it's not: the prose sparkles as McEwan's always does, and he's a deeply intellectual writer, a fit heir to the great modern Novels of Ideas, starting with George Meredith and Thomas Love Peacock in the 19th century, into Aldous Huxley and Iris Murdoch, to our own time and other great purveyors of the form: Richard Powers, Rebecca Goldstein, Alan Lightman. And of course: Science Fiction as a genre in general: the one genre we might identify with the Novel of Ideas.

McEwan and History: the problem of documents: this is the "treasure hunt" narrative, which I found gripping: the scholars from 2120 have heard that Blundy's lost poem for Vivien might be hidden somewhere (no one know where it is; no one has read it!), so they must go on a heroic quest to try to find it. What's eventually found shows us that, probably, no matter how extensive our documentary archives are, we could still be missing something crucial, and therefore I kept thinking about how all our knowledge of the past cannot possibly be totally accurate. Of course not! But the nuances of this phenomenon seem starkly wonderful to me. It was only recently that we actually had extensive documentation that this or that went…somewhat like what we think it did; before that; some aristocrat with extra time on his hands may have taken down proceedings of what he saw, who said what, etc. Hopefully this biased tet didn't get lost or burnt. Writers of local histories were subject to authoritarian power; so much of what we read in history was an elevated form of ass-kissing. Hey, it's a variation on what we can know. Think of Shakespeare's history plays.

This all reminds me that everything is history, but the map is not the territory. There's writing and there's what actually happened and we just have to constantly use our wits and negotiate with texts. It's all "historical fiction," in a sense.

There's another riff on documentation in McEwan's novel that hit home: diarists and diaries and those who keep a journal. The main character's narration in the second part of the book talks about how she kept a journal, but then realized she was writing to an audience, and this warped what she recorded, why and how. After a time she only used her journals to document dates and times.

I've been compulsively writing in a journal every day since the 8th of September, 1989. And I don't want anyone to read it, because it's so damned boring. And I may have made it boring on purpose, because I found it drained too much energy to write about emotions, at the end of the day, on top of the nagging idea: why am I doing this? When I didn write about events and emotions and other people, I became aware I was writing as if I had an audience. Which…why am I?…Etc. Nevertheless, the sheer amount of writing is ridiculous, and I've come to realize that the neurobiology of writing is a set of circuits that, when exercised, make it easier to write for an audience, if I want or need to. It's as if writing is a set of muscles, and to exercise them: just write a bunch of boring mundane crap every day, for years: you'll be ready to do the obstacle course (actually writing for an audience) when the time comes.

As for McEwan's novel: the journals that the scholar read led him astray, as mine would someone in 2120. The purposeful, writing for posterity and confession that Vivien Blundy did was far more interesting, has more verisimilitude, and yet: how do we know what's accurate?

I think I felt, down to the marrow, that diary-journal writing was a special sort of bullshit only when I encountered Anais Nin.3

Finally: the 22nd century scholar of Vivien and Francis Blundy and their circle (and crimes!), who was led astray and had fallen in love with the journal-self of Vivien: have you ever fallen in love with a historical person? I have: Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman In The World in the 1930s and 1940s in a large number of Hollywood films. Join the club, you say. Ah yes, but she was also jew and a genius who invented frequency hopping, which we now think of as blue-tooth technology. Her father was a science-lover in Vienna and passed on this to his daughter. But Hedy was living in a world where it simply wasn't allowed you could be that pretty and also a scientific genius. And she paid the price. It's the fallen Hedy I feel so much for.4

I have also long harbored a ridiculously romantic idea about Eleanor of Aquitaine, but it's too embarrassing to discuss. Maybe some other time.

Please feel daring and free enough to let us know in the comments about a historical love affair you've carried on, in the privacy of your interiority. Or your thoughts on the fallibility of historical documentation, or nostalgia.

I'm writing this book review just after having read six or eight articles on a Super El Niño about to (probably) ravage our world. Biggest one since 1997, they say. May goddess have mercy on us all.

I had a professor - Dr. L. David Sundstrand - who was ideal for me in learning to identify and play with ideas I found in fiction. Huxley's novels of ideas: Crome Yellow (1921), up to Island (1962), with 10 others interposed, were a mini-education and perfect for that (genetic?) intellectual generalism I now literally identify myself with.

And we all love reading varieties of "trash." For me, its rock star and movie star biographies. As for Anais Nin and her diaries, it's impossible to think of them as anything but public display of self as if it were private display, which makes for very entertaining schtuff indeed, a sorta very highfalutin' literary gossipy sit-down with a stack of back issues of People magazine. O! Here's Henry Miller! Here's she's trying LSD! Here she is on her fucked up Oedipal and Electra stuff. Oh her actual (?) sex vs. her erotica written for some Oklahoma oil man. Wow! Gore Vidal steps into the proceedings! Etc.

Lots of good sources. Maybe go for Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the World's Most Beautiful Woman, by Richard Rhoades (2011). The story of her "autobiography," Ecstasy and Me, and how she said she didn't write it, sued, etc…is maddening. All too often women like this in history get to a point where they can't trust anyone, and I think this dynamic would be another problem in the hairy epistemology of History.

Hey there Dear Readers! Time for another episode of Sex/Food/Death, brought to you by my sponsor: the compulsion to write. On with it…

Sperm is one of the Main Players and is at the epicenter of the socio-sexual metaphorical circuit in the nervous system: sex is so heavily regulated, discussed, made taboo, theorized, politicized, fantasized about, used to sell products that have nothing to do with it, and is so central to our everyday life, is so omnipresent that at times we can't "see" it it's so…in our face. Because what happens when sperm meets egg is so profound we get worked-up into a lather about it all the time. Making more humans: not a small socio-political matter. It means everything to us and society. It's none of your business. It's everyone's business. It's private. It's everywhere you look. And, thus, there have been some colorful ideas about semen, sperm, jizz, baby batter, cream, bullets. My battered copy of Richard Spears's Slang and Euphemism (euphejism?) shows: semen virile, crud, gene cream, money-shots, man-oil, come (of course!), mettle-of-generation, filament, spendings, white honey, hot milk, and jazz, among scads of other terms.

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At some point, maybe around 3000 years ago, some dude realized if he just refrained from masturbating for a few days it seemed to have interesting effects upon his overall, let us say, mood. Eventually other men said they knew all about this, too. and it became theorized as to what was going on. Taoists and Tantrists were the big shooters in this area. So to speak.

(I wanna ask this lady: have you tried it? Yab-yum, that is?)

The heir to a steel fortune and honcho of the massively influential New Directions publishing house, James Laughlin, did more to resurrect Ezra Pound's work and reputation than anyone.1 Laughlin wrote:

I remember the afternoon when E.P. explained the mysteries to me. We were walking up the salita to join Buttercup & Bismuth (the Drummonds). He said that the epopte2 was the orgasm, and that the sperm went up to his brain, which was what made him so smart. And Plutarch has some good notes on what went on in that cellar.3

So, Plutarch is involved? Oh yea, he was a later-comer, though. This sperm-brain mysticism goes way further back. But first, more on what Pound made of this jazz.

EzP saw retention of semen as central to his politics and economics, but you really have to squint and decipher to see it. Here's Pound scholar Maria Luisa Ardizzone:

Pound sees a continuity between a natural religion present in the Greek world and a natural religion in the here-and-now. But it is only a matter of evaluating the centrality of natural religion insofar as living practices speak of rites of rebirth through the preservation of the seed.4

Further, EzP inserts coded mystical terms in his poetry that hints at all this. In Canto #36 there's a term: "Sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu" - "sacred, the illumination in fucking" is my gloss - and Ez explained in Selected Prose, 1909-1965: "Paganism included a certain attitude toward; a certain understanding of, coitus, which is the mysterium."5 "Inluminatio coitu" also shows up in Canto 74, the first Pisan one, written just after he got busted and confined to a panther cage. Gods and goddesses of regeneration were heavily implicated, to be sure. But what of this idea of sperm doing all that crucial heavy lifting?

Ancient Chinese: huanjing bunao: "returning the essence-semen to the brain," is one gloss. The ancient Chinese (at least 2000 years ago) thought the kidney-organ system was the reservoir for bodily fluids that were essential: bone marrow, brain matter, and semen. When a man retains his jin, it rises through the spine and bathes the brain with its essence, and it's a happy entheogen, enhancing well-being. The ancient Taoist texts indicate that during sex, this jin is all riled, but there are techniques of conserving - not ejaculating - that stuff, via breathing techniques, visualization, application of pressure to glans or perineum; the jin transform to vital energy chi, and the really good stuff occurs. Today we have the Latin "coitus reservatus" as a term for this.

So, we've learned some slightly more objective facts about physiology in the past 2000 years; one is that, when these techniques are used and semen is not ejaculated, it makes a retrograde traverse and ends up in the bladder, and this is no health concern. It doesn't travel up the spine turnpike, transmuting into chi inside the brain…but this doesn't matter at all if you believe something extraordinary is going on. Maybe it's all a metaphor. Hey, metaphors work.

Most modern medications men are prescribed for enlarged prostates6 have as a side-effect retrograde ejaculation: sperm is not "spent" outwardly, but goes inward. And, I say, if you want to see it travel up the spine to the brain, why not. But there are techniques besides drugs: the aforementioned pulling out and pinching the glans, application to pressure to the perineum/"taint", breathing techniques, and visualization, all well-known to committed practitioners of left-handed ("California") Tantric sex.

We're only at the tip here; this stuff goes way deeper. The Troubadours knew. Some of the Freemasons knew. The Bavarian Illuminati? Probably? Robert Anton Wilson showed that Renaissance poet Thomas Vaughan, the magus Giordano Bruno, and tantrists all over the Orient knew this stuff.7 Paracelus definitely knew. Magickal adepts certainly were clued in, and Austin Osman Spare influenced Genesis P-Orridge about the mystical powers of semen. Nikola Tesla, some think, was celibate because it drained his creative vitality if he wasn't.8 Nonetheless, the body will have its way at some point, usually when you're asleep and can't help it. Here's what Fred Nietzsche thought:

The reabsorption of semen by the blood is the strongest nourishment and, perhaps more than any other factor, it prompts the stimulus of power, the unrest of all forces toward the overcoming of resistances, the thirst for contradiction and resistance. The feeling of power has so far mounted highest in abstinent priests and hermits (for example, among the Brahmins).9

These techniques have been applied to what's now known as "premature ejaculation," a rationalized, industrial-world's term for a problem that can be remedied by scientific knowledge. I saw late night public-access TV "sex therapists" discuss these techniques in the 1970s, as an inquiring child. Masters and Johnson taught a legion of sex-therapists to deal with PE using these ancient tantric techniques, but it seems the historical knowledge was omitted for those undergoing therapy. It was just scientific techne, what the Greeks called "practical knowledge."

Timothy Leary had asked Aldous Huxley about Tantra, and Aldous spilled in a letter to Leary, February, 1962. By the time Leary had married Uma Thurman's mom, the fashion model Nena von Schlebrügge, and honeymooned in the Himalayas in 1964, Leary was a full-on tantric enthusiast, and probably a virtuoso, by dint of all the practice available to him.10

The Shakers and Oneida Community knew of these techniques and their use was female-centered. The fifth woman to become a doctor in the US, Alice Bunker Stockham (1833-1912), was a gynecologist11 and friends with Havelock Ellis and Tolstoy. Stockham taught birth control, gender equality, and sexual fulfillment as path to lasting marriage. The tantric techniques she taught were her simply her modern medical practice. She borrowed from the Italian word caress, karezza, and showed how male "continence" was the primrose path to a happy couple. Now we have "edging" as a much-talked-about sex technique, and male chastity devices available by the score via online merchants. Who sez there ain't no progress?

I wonder and ask the Reader: what's lost, if anything, by framing this practice as "modern" and not Eastern-ancient? The American right wing has recently admonished young male followers to "no fap," an onomatopoeic if ever there was one. But what's to be gained there, besides more incels and their backed-up semen? Is it not a sort of Golden Lie we might want to put forth: that coitus reservatus focuses more on women's pleasure, and that this tends to make everything better? That saving seed could push your creativity up to another level, as Pound and the Chinese thought? I am not anti-masturbation here. In fact, I love it.12 But there seems to be more interesting ways to frame this activity than some buzz-cut admonishing a young man: "Yer spillin' yer precious man-juice son! Have more control and get out there and walk up to some little filly 'n ask her for a date! Now scat!"

We choose our metaphors, or someone else chooses them for us.13

I was a 20 year old Chomsky acolyte. I had many questions, but Noam answered a lot of 'em; I'd say most of 'em held up, as long as they weren't about Linguistics. EX: I'd seen Seymour Melman's book The Permanent War Economy, which, cracked, daunted. Ask Noam. Why does the Pentagon get nearly a trillion dollars of our tax money every year, both Democrats and Republicans vote for it, no citizen has a say, etc? This seemed like it needed answering. Here was Noam's answer, from memory of reading a large number of his texts, circa 1982: In American history, capitalism repeated failed: The Great Panic of Pick a Year. They got worse as time went on: Boom!…then, for, uh, reasons…Bust! Finally, 1929's Bust led to the Great Depression. What got us out of it in the US? Not FDR's programs, but Pearl Harbor and everyone goes to work for the war effort, even Rosie, and you were asked to keep the faith with Meatless Tuesdays in an effort to help our boys fightin' the Huns and Japs, etc. After the way to save Democracy (in this semantic sense: "Capitalism"), it was decided in the Senate, that we must be on a permanent war economy. The economist Keynes had shown you can do this sort of thing that way, but there was another way: you could employ everyone and spend like mad to continually rebuild the infrastucture: roads, hospitals, national parks, universities, housing, etc. Apparently if you checked the Congressional Record you will find coded language about why we chose Permanent War over Permanent Sanity: this latter way of propping up capitalism makes people feel like what they do matters; we don't want the enemy territory (another term Noam found in a memo referring to the populace: US citizens) to feel like they have a say in the direction the country is moving in. We want them to shut up and do as they're told. We need now to police the rest of the world in a "Cold War" and scare the bejeezus out of the populace: Commie gonna hide unner yo bed, gitch yo mama! Some "red" might stare you directly in the eyes and suddenly, you're a commie-zombie like them! You hate America! Etc.

Noam pointed out: how come all your electronic gizmos - your TVs and stereos - have…Japanese names on them? Didn't we drop atomic weapons on them for being intransigent? Chomsky explained we needed a strong ally in the Far East, so after the war, we went in and re-wrote their Constitution - no standing armies for you! - and then dumped a ginormous amount of money into rebuilding and restructuring the Japanese economy: what happened was this: the latest scientific breakthroughs in physics, materials science, chemistry, etc: were shared openly with allies. The Japanese used Western knowledge to build better TVs and sold them back to America consumers. So: our taxes propped them up, then they sold us back products that came out of basic Research and Development that was based in Cold War ideology.

I found this compelling. I realized so much of the world I'd grown up in was influenced by the Cold War and the military, but it was sold to everyone as Americanism, "better living through chemistry,"14 etc. So: the trillion dollars were basically handed to hi-tech industry to build better laser-guided beam weapons, satellite technology, anything that gave us a leg up over the Rooskies and other Commies behind the Iron Curtain. What happened was the basic research and development (R&D) in trying to do these grand things eventually spun out - sorta accidentally-incidentally it's a long story products like GPS, Internet, hi-def this 'n that. This was how "capitalism" worked: socialism for the already well-off, "free enterprise" for everyone else. Good luck with that. It seemed just a tad ironic.

One of the things that spun out of Doin' War Better was this: military officials knew they needed GI Joe to get unspoiled, even tasty food on the battlefield. And…'cuz my Chomsky-derived explanation about how the Permanent Wartime Economy worked took too much space, let us just say that boxed, frozen dinners were another taxpayer-funded basic research thing that the Pentagon realized massive food companies could churn out better, so they just gave them the tech and said have at it, and get rich. So yea: your frozen pizza and burrito, nuked in the microwave oven (another spinoff of the R&D permanent wartime economy) had its genesis in the Pentagon. Think of the frozen food aisle. What does a body really need to function as a healthy killing machine? Ah: the rise of scientific nutrition!

Surely this crap has reached an endpoint, you think. And you think wrong, my dudes and dudettes. It's still all about not voting to subsidize $1 trillion to hi tech companies while the gap between the rich and everyone else has reached escape velocity, etc. We're strung out out on this basic economic model. Imagine taking one year out of the Pentagon budget and instead paying for higher education, food and housing for the poor, etc. Naw. That's liberal-talk. Which means socialist, which means communist, which means I hate America. Right and really ought to be taken out and shot, really. I keep forgetting.15

I will get to the neoliberal mind's mania for constant "optimization" of everything, and some guy's idea about optimizing food, called Soylent, some other day. Right now, I need to get in something on Death.

When I was a kid, one day my dad came home with a funny book titled World's Wackiest Inventions, by Brown and Jeffcott, Jr, first published in 1932. These were merely page after page of items found in the US Patent Office, with a line diagram and a short paragraph about the Hydraulic Alarm Clock, Vermin Electrocutor, Jury Protector, Bed-Wetting Alarm, etc. Among these inventions was something called a "Safety Coffin."

It's an "improved burial-case" dating from August 25, 1868. The inventor explains in the patent letter:

The nature of this invention consists in placing on the lid on a coffin, and directly over the face of the body laid therein, a square tube, which extends from the coffin up through and over the surface of the grave, said tube containing a ladder and a cord, one end of said cord being placed in the hand of the person laid in the coffin, and the other end of said cord being attached to a bell on the top of the square tube, so that, should a person be interred ere life is extinct, he can, on recovery to consciousness, ascend from the coffin and the grave by the ladder; or, if not able to ascend by the ladder, ring the bell, thereby giving an alarm, and thus save himself from premature burial and death; and if, on inspection, life is extinct, the tube is withdrawn, the sliding door closed, and the tube used for a similar purpose…16

I remember my mom thinking this was the funniest thing she'd ever seen and I don't think she thought it was on the up-and-up and was more like something my beloved writers of Mad magazine would come up with. It's certainly Rube Goldbergian, eh? I think I had a dire fear for awhile: they missed this guy not being dead and buried him anyway, but if "ere extinct" he (sexism! in 1868 death culture!) he might have died of…fright? Then, for some reason, the bell went off - rigor mortis? - and they pull this guy up, there's an "inspection" and life was indeed "extinct", so now he's out of options. What a way to go, etc. I was maybe ten.

It turns out the fear of being buried alive not only has - phobia name, but it's as old as tantric sex. We all know about Egyptian royalty being buried with their gold and jewels, famous pets, and even their unwilling, favorite Jeeves, but the Romans built "libation tubes" into caskets so the dead could continue to party on in the afterlife. I guess they were pretty sure grandma was dead though. The opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer was deathly afraid of being buried alive, but then so were many of the living in 19th century US and Europe. There were over 200 books published in the 19th century on how to avoid premature burial.17

In the past 20 years there's been a vibrant discussion of what constitutes death: is it merely an absent pulse? What about lack of brain activity? What if they're MAGA: how can you know? Zombies have arisen a cultural stars, which plenty of roles in movies and TV. Some in the death industry can cut corners and get a tad hasty these days: hey people are busy; mistakes will be made.18 I know what you're thinking, reader of the OG: it happened to Tim Finnegan19, it can happen to you. I hear ya, but I wouldn't worry about it. Your time will come, and everything will be just fine. Take a deep breath. Another. Feel better? Just reeeee-lax. You'll probably actually be dead when they declare you dead. These two realities are separate…but not by much. At any rate, if they bury you alive, it's highly likely that no one will know…unless you came prepared with Safety Coffin!

Or, just go out in style, like when the family of their 99 year old Grandma died: she wanted a gigantic cock and balls monument at her gravesite. They granted her wish.20

A Final Thought: how do you wanna go out? Have you thought about it? When I bring this up among friends the stock answer is you wanna just go to sleepy dream-time and never come back. Ya never saw it comin.' I totally get that, man. But it seems a little…if ya know a thing or two about Death…it seems a bit Idealistic. Maybe have a fall-back position. Woody Allen was asked about achieving immorality through his works, and he said that was not a good way to achieve immortality; he'd rather do it through…"not dying." But we just don't have the Tech yet, it seems. (Or: have you heard something? Do tell!).

The great 20th century evolutionary biologist William Rowan Hamilton had given it some thought: he wanted to be carried to the forests of Brazil, to be eaten from the inside by a Coprophanaeus beetle, which would nurture its young on dead Hamilton man-meat this guy knew his Biology! - and then the beetle would sprout wings - they do! - and fly off to do beetle things. Hamilton added, "So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone."21

The professor George Carlin, who taught me more than anyone else, wanted rhythm and blues music played at his memorial, no religion but private spirituality was fine, lots of laughing should be heard. He died at age 71 of heart failure, but his preference to was "explode in someone's living room."22

see James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound, by Greg Barnhisel, U. of Massachusetts Pres, 2005.

some deep, dark secret tied up with the rites of Eleusis.

The Way It Wasn't: From the Files of James Laughlin, p.273.

Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, Ardizzone, p.32. Pound saw usury in banking - excessive interest rates - as conta Nature's profuse generation of all that is good. It was as if money was copulating with…money. Which is kinda disgusting. Modern banking was too removed from natural generation of what humans actually need. The mindful preservation of "seed" which leads to vitality, creativity and a natural generation of things is all tied in to why Pound went nuts. Can't you see this?

p.70, op.cit.

exempli gratis: Finasteride, which has an off-label use to combat hair-loss.

Coincidance: A Head Test, p.69 (Hilaritas ed)

Lazy, possibly dubious source here: Mammoth Book of Oddballs and Eccentrics, p.81

Portable Nietsche, p. 75, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann. Originally from Notes FN made, 1880-81. The terms power, unrest, forces and resistances seem redolent here to me.

Aldous's letter to Leary: The Timothy Leary Project, edited by Jennifer Ulrich, p.65; the same letter appears in Letters of Aldous Huxley, edited by Grover Smith, pp.928-929. Also see Whatever Happened to Timothy Leary?, John Bryan, pp.96-100. Robert Anton Wilson noted that EzP predated Leary in using Eastern sources for ideas and texts by 50 years; the nexus here is the great import of Pound and Leary to Wilson himself. In a letter dated May 4, 1974, Wilson wrote to Leary about his own practice of tantric techniques, and notes that Aleister Crowley's book Magick In Theory and Practice is "a book about tantra disguised as a book about ceremonial magick," and later goes on, "the last time I tried Crowley's invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel, the message I got was that the seven stanzas in Troubadour poetry correspond to the seven chakras. That surprised me, since I hadn't been thinking about that, but it makes sense. That the Troubadours were into Tantric yoga is argued persuasively in Pound's Spirit of Romance, De Rougemont's Love In The Western World, etc. I am teaching my magick class, experimentally, to think of such chakras in terms of your 7 neurological circuits." This Letter courtesy of the New York Public Library Leary Archive. This seven-ness of chakras and neurological circuits shows how both Leary and RAW worked out the number to 8, very soon after this letter. Whether there "really are" 7 or 8 chakras or circuits seems incidental to their project of inventing a system (which would be commonly known as the Eight Circuit Model) in which all human experience can be linked to one or more metaphorical circuits that exist in the human nervous system in its interactions with the environment. RAW's teaching of magick here would have been in Berkeley, 1974.

Another Bunker, "Archie," thought it was pronounced "groin-ecologist."

"Stop knocking my hobbies! It's sex with someone I love," to paraphrase a line from a Woody Allen movie. James Joyce: "The wonderful availability of it."

Oh…come on!," you seem to be saying.

Dupont's actual slogan for a long time

By the way, did you see the military is now working out how to do 3-D printing for the grunts? Check it out and make of it what you will.

World's Wackiest Inventions, Brown and Jeffcott, Jr, p.119, Dover edition.

Good ol' Mammoth Book of Oddballs and Eccentrics comes through again for me: p.222. An unduly large number of those prone to taphophobia were writers. Check out also Paris Review HERE.

"Being Declared Dead When You're Still Alive: Why These Very Rare Events Occur"

"Woman Declared Dead Found Alive In Morgue Fridge"

spaykin' o' Finnegan, check out this Irish joker who had recordings of his voice piped out of his grave: "Hello?" "Lemme out!" "Where the fook am I? It's fookin' dark in here!"

see HERE

this tasty tidbit about Wm. Rowan Hamilton found in Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith, pp. 169-170. Hamilton actually died after flying to Africa in 2000 to investigate the origins of HIV. He caught malaria there and succumbed.

Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut, by Paul Krassner, later edition, pp.383-384.