Books: Notes on My Better Reading Experiences in 2015

Readers: I have not been doing the OG much over the past year, my previous post being on July 23. The reasons available to my conscious mind are numerous. Do a search for "why I quit blogging" and one of the most-cited reasons is depression. I think I've had some of that, but I guess I internally framed it in other ways: frustration/anger/hopelessness. How does someone make money writing? Where are we going in Unistat, politically? To quote the old Stones song "19th Nervous Breakdown,": "Nothing I do don't seem to work/It only seems to make matters worse. Oh pleeeeeeeze."

But I hang in there. I teach guitar and music theory and love my students and most of 'em love me. I love doing it. I did it a lot in my 20s. Boy, have things changed with the digital world vis a vis music teaching!

Over the last six weeks or so, I realized: well, about five people read this blog (the numbers that Blogger gives you for hourly/daily/weekly/monthly/yearly readership seem infinitely corruptible; never for one second did I believe 683 people had actually read anything from my blog in one day), and when I did write I almost always wrote a "tl/dr" post. Apparently? Anyway, I realized, there was a therapeutic aspect to posting an article/essay/rant/whatever. Even if one person "out there" liked it and never commented, I guess I'm now cool with it. (I imagine that one Ideal Reader of the OG, btw.)

Moreover, I recall one of the writing gurus - fergit which 'um - titled a book Writing To Learn. And I bet it was Zinsser, but I'm too lazy to look it up and it's immaterial anyway: it was a way to learn. That sealed it: I stopped going on. I will go on. I...

So yea: books I read in 2015 that I really really RILLY liked...

Blood and Volts: Edison, Tesla and the Electric Chair, by Th. Metzger (1996)
Metzger's essays first showed on my radar in supplements to the yearly Loompanics catalog. As far as I can tell, he has yet to collect those in a book. He's taught college in upstate NY for awhile and I consider him one of the greats in the so-called "marginals milieu." He writes fiction too. (Check out Big Gurl. ) B&V is a gripping, well-researched and in-your-face look at the early uses of electricity in capital punishment. There are scenes that feel like Wm. S. Burroughs at his most depraved. These were liberals who wanted a more "humane" way to kill people. Because killing is just plain wrong, we're gonna kill ya, in the name of The People. Recent news stories of the "kinder" method of lethal injection and the specific, horrific ways it doesn't work the way rationalists thought it would might prepare you for Metzger's descriptions of the experiences (if you can call them that) of the earliest electric chair recipients. We also get vivid pictures of Edison and Tesla: their personalities and attitudes towards science, business, ethics and fame. Most readers of a blog like this probably already know: the two geniuses couldn't possibly be more different. I love how Metzger depicts late 19th.early 20th century American society and its excited misunderstandings of an emergent electrical world.

Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy and the Power to Heal, by Tom Shroder (2014)
Journalistic, and among a sudden welter of books and articles in major publications about how psychedelics are slowly re-emerging after perhaps the most egregious moral panics of the 20th c. When I took this one home from the library and did a quick thumbing for index, structure, bibliography, style, etc: I was excited to note that a major section of the book was about Rick Doblin and his long strange trip trying to get psychedelic drugs back in the hands of researchers and scientists. And that part of the book delivered, for me: Doblin is one of the names that should be better known among those who consider themselves among what may be termed the psychedelic cognoscenti. But the interwoven story of the Iraq war vet with PTSD, and his treatment: utterly gripping. The descriptions of what this young guy went through gave me a bit of quasi-PTSD, and the only thing that would've alleviated it would be his ability to deal with life effectively after treatment, with a psychedelic drug, under knowledgeable, loving medical care. It worked!

Overall, the gradual acceptance that psychedelic drugs may have profound therapeutic effects seems to me one of the happiest of historical turns for our years, early 21st century. Know Thyself. Set and Setting. Sacrament. The Numinous and healing. A 2011 study revealed that one major psilocybin trip could make a person open-minded to new viewpoints and experiences for life. Let us weigh the pros and cons and the in-betweens?

Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, by Scott Timberg (2015)
I first became aware of Timberg many years ago when I read a feature piece he published in the LA Times, about a ridiculously erudite classical music clerk at Tower Records in West Hollywood, California. This book seems to have grown out of that piece and several others like it: the old business model for writing and performing music, poetry, doing architecture, cultural criticism - most of the creative arts - has changed so radically with the digital revolution that we're suddenly in a winner-take-all situation that seems unsustainable. And how some record store and bookstore clerks had been minor cultural heroes themselves, with tiny cult followings, simply because they knew so much and were tremendous sources for people who are into Their Thing. These clerks and weirdo-experts go away too, when it's all Amazon from here on out. Timberg is wonderful in fleshing out the etiology of all this, and has some compelling suggestions for how we get out of it. This book was written, seemingly, with almost all my friends I've ever had in mind. I do wish Timberg had suggested the Universal Basic Income idea, but you can't have everything...or rather: if you're trying to make a living doing creative work in the Arts, you can barely have anything. This book seems vital for those who have disposable incomes but who are only transiently aware that real people are behind their joyful cultural consumptions. The problem is: if these people thumb the book in a kiosk somewhere, it's likely to look like too much of a bummer, and they won't read it. It seems written for the very class who are suffering under the current dispensation. Timberg loves independent music, writers, weirdo painters, visionary builders. He really knows...more than you do about all these people and how they sought to contribute to culture. The book seems to function as: hey, thanks for reading, and I'm here to tell you I hear you. Maybe things will get better. It's very well-informed, empathetic, but  a bit of a reality sandwich for many of us. Still: I couldn't put it down.

Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists and the Search for Justice in Science, by Alice Dreger (2015)
This might seem like a weird riff, but right off I'm going to assert readers of Robert Anton Wilson will probably love this book, which I think will prove to be influential in the sociology of science. Especially if those RAW readers liked his The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science. (<---of course I'd say this, but one of the great underappreciated books in the sociology of science) Only Dreger is not taking on CSICOP, but liberal academics who attack other scientific researchers for coming up with data, information, journal articles and books that offend - in the widest sense - Political Correctness. I've long been fascinated by the late 1960s-now fallout around the cultural anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who famously studied and wrote an ethnography about the Yanomamo. From there: sociobiology/evolutionary psychology and the raucous campus backlashes from feminists, charges and counter-charges, how knowledges are constituted, the political ramifications of knowledge, the molten topic of what's "human nature," etc. And this is but one tendril in Dreger's story. For me, it's easy to see why the Right attacks science it doesn't like; what I want is a more balanced view: how do liberals react to science they don't like? The stories here are sobering. If you're fascinated by intersex folk and the political in-fighting among transsexuals, between those who brook no dissent from the line that "I was born in the wrong body" and those who changed sexes because they thought it would be exciting and sexy (I'm simplifying), here is a story for you. Or: what if your data shows that rape is not - according to feminist dogma - always and only an act of violence, that there's a sexual attractiveness component to rape? And that this data could be placed within the framework of evolutionary psychology? Even if you're a male feminist/liberal and know your data will cause great anger, do you deserve death threats? To get fired? All of the stories Dreger covers seem to violate this basic sequence: First: do good science and trust in your methods and data and your scientific peers. Second: we hope social justice will occur. If you get these two backwards, you may be in for a world of hurt. A captivating read for me, and Dreger combines her (rough) academic life with a journalistic flair. She's fearless, frank and I love her. Maybe some day I'll meet her.

Eminent Hipsters, by Donald Fagen (2013)
The brainiest and wittiest rock star book I've ever read. One half of Steely Dan, this is a short work in which the latter half Fagen describes in great detail what it's like to do the rock star tour when you're around the age of 60. The road, the dealings with different concert attaches, the poor sleep, whether to sleep on the bus on in your room, etc. And Fagen is cantankerous, if highly literate and funny. You understand why young rock stars trash hotel rooms, overdose, turn in bad performances, and act like ridiculous assholes: constant touring is rough on the nervous system; it tends to drive people nuts. And here's 60 year old Fagen doing it, making the best of it. There are short essays about taking LSD at Bard College, reading science fiction and Korzybski and the Beats, growing up in post-war suburbia, slowly developing musical chops and an esthetic. I hadn't ever heard of the Boswell Sisters, but Fagen sold me. Chevy Chase once played drums in a proto-Steely Dan? Yep. Fagen is, one of my musical gods: I love his composing and piano playing, not to mention that any studio guitarist who played on a Steely Dan record has...unworldly chops. To this day I go ga-ga over any lead break in any SD record. (Jimmy Page said his favorite solo of all time was  "Reelin' In The Years," which was by Elliot Randall; if I were forced to pick one it would be Larry Carlton's first solo in "Kid Charlemagne" which is about Owsley. Carlton's second solo in that song is merely great.) One last tidbit in this capsule quasi-review that kept me thinking for a long time: I have long had a very deep love-hate relationship with television, and Fagen's take on much of his audience addresses this when he uses the term "TV Babies" over and over when sizing up his audience:

"Incidentally, by 'TV Babies' I mean people who were born after, say, 1960, when television truly became the robot caretaker of American children and therefore the principle architect of their souls. I've actually borrowed the term from the film Drugstore Cowboy, in which Matt Dillon, playing a drug addict and dealer, uses it to refer to a younger generation of particularly stupid and vicious dealers who seemed to have no soul at all." (pp.98-99) This seems a pungent articulation for the loyal opposition, if you like what TV has done to you and balk at the idea that it was the "principle architect" of your "soul."

Ahem. Well. I see I've done it again: I meant to write about another 15-20 books, but the word spewage is probably too much for the Busy Person, so I shall quit for the day.

                                          artwork by Bobby Campbell

Sirius A, B and Maybe Even C Has Influenced Pop Culture...

...and some of us hope it will continue to. They have their ways.

There was a very strange musician from Europe who claimed to be from Sirius. He influenced Miles Davis, Jefferson Airplane, Frank Zappa, Grateful Dead, Kraftwerk, and many others. The Beatles were influenced by him. Look at your copy of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; he's on the cover, top row, fifth from the left, between Lenny Bruce and W.C. Fields. His name was Karlheinz Stockhausen. If you listen to his music (try THIS?), you may start to believe he really did emanate from the Dog Star system.

Clearly, the Airplane took what Sirius-born Stockhausen had to say in lectures at UC Davis...in some other way.

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I just got through re-reading Carl Sagan's piece "White Dwarfs and Little Green Men," collected in his book Broca's Brain, and originally in August 1979 issue of Omni. Sagan was a marvelous popularizer of science and wrote with verve. I recommend the essay, because he tries to refute claims made by Robert K.G. Temple in his book The Sirius Mystery. The Dogon people of West Africa told anthropologists Griaule and Dieterlen scientifically factual things about Sirius that they could not possibly know, given their level of technology. Sagan does a fairly good job of persuading us that the Dogon had been "contaminated"with European scientific knowledge before Griaule and Dieterlen talked to them, and my favorite rhetorical ploy Sagan used in that essay (I wish I could find it online for you; you'll have to obtain the book) was anecdotes about other anthropologists who'd been taken in (for a spell) by remote tribesmen.

But I'm not entirely convinced by Sagan's debunking. See Temple's answers and refutations of Sagan's debunkery HERE.

I'm not convinced the Dogon were told, or had information passed down to them, by ancient fish-men-like astronauts, either. Maybe the 1893 French expedition to Central West Africa to witness the total eclipse of the sun on April 16th seeded the Dogon with some Sirius knowledge. Noah Brosch in Sirius Matters think this may be the case. But still, it seemed the Dogon knew too much. I remain agnostic, but very interested.

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Temple's work is audacious and has kept the debunkers awake ever since his book appeared in 1976. Temple tried to link Sir Philip Sydney, the Knights Templars, Dr. John Dee, and Giordano Bruno together within an occult tradition that carries on to today. Temple got the Sirius idea to write a book because he'd been working with the helicopter inventor and scientific mystic Arthur Young, who may have hinted he'd been in contact with Higher Intelligence from Sirius. I don't know what to say about this, but Robert Anton Wilson's dear friend and co-writer of the Illuminatus! trilogy, Robert Shea, told Neal Wilgus that "It frequently helps an artist to imagine that the work he is creating has a separate life of its own and is being transmitted to him..." Shea then cited Stravinsky, Nabokov, Keats and Charles Rycroft. (Shea interview with Neal Wilgus, c. 1980, collected in Seven By Seven, a 1996 book, pp.43-44)

Robert Anton Wilson, Shea's friend, co-writer and co-conspirator, knew of RAW's exceedingly odd experience with (maybe) communication from Sirius, which started on July 23rd, 1973. As Wilson puts it, after many years of intense experimentation with yoga, psychedelic drugs, Crowleyan ceremonial magickal techniques, intense study of books dense, difficult and erudite, depth psychologies, non-Aristotelian logics, and a continued study of Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics, "The outstanding result was that I entered a belief system, from July 1973 until around October 1974, in which I was receiving telepathic messages from entities residing on a a planet of the double star Sirius." (Cosmic Trigger vol 1, p.8.)

As RAWphiles know, his previous grounding in scientific methods of doubt, Buddhistic doubt, Korzybskian linguistic doubt, and Niels Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation of the quantum theory - among other systems of thought and practice - led him to posit many models of what had happened to him. Maybe he was being contacted telepathically by beings from near Sirius. But maybe he'd pushed his nervous system in a way few humans have, and this is the sort of oddness that happens. Maybe he'd reached a level of neurologic status which you just have to chalk up to cosmic hilarity. The key word here is maybe. 

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At around this same period, fellow Californian science fiction writer Philip K. Dick began to have contact with an intelligent entity he called VALIS, an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. He too developed a welter of multi-perspectivalisms to explain this extreme weirdness. The scientist John Lilly seems to have had an equally uncanny experience - or series of them - around this time. His metaphors for superintelligent entities were the ECCO (Earth Coincidence Control Office) and SSI (Solid State Intelligence). Lilly's SSI reminds me a lot of VALIS, but there are differences, of course.

In 1971, the brothers McKenna had an experience so weird, so unheimlich that you really have to read about it for yourself - it involves intelligence from UFOs, among other Things - as chronicled in Terence McKenna's book True Hallucinations.

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"World's Oldest Temple Built to Worship the Dog Star", from August 14, 2013 issue of New Scientist. Read it and make of it what you will.

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The Great UFO Wave of 1973: "Well before Patty Hearst became the poster child for Stockholm Syndrome, hundreds of ordinary Americans were already experiencing their own versions of this syndrome in connection with visitations from outer space. In what became known as the Great UFO Wave of 1973, a series of sightings began in late summer and climaxed in October, ushering in a new era of official and public interest in UFOs, later commemorated by Steven Spielberg's 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind." - 1973 Nervous Breakdown, Andreas Killen, p.133. Killen then cites "debunkers" who pointed out how bad things were going for Unistatians socially at the time: war broke out in the middle east (Israel-Palestine), and Kissinger put the nation on nuclear alert because the Soviets threatened to send troops to the conflict. Many in the press thought Nixon had gone mad. Then OPEC caused an artificial gas shortage, veep Agnew resigned over tax evasion charges, and talks about Nixon being impeached ramped up. "Arguing that people 'see things' as a reaction to social stress, several prominent psychologists suggested that the UFO wave was a predictable response to a month of particularly bad news." - ibid, p.134

Okay, so I think social stress may have an effect on human visual perception, but who reading this in 2015 (or later) thinks this is mostly yet another example of "experts" who are full of crap? Was there a massive wave of UFO sightings after 9/11? I don't think so. Anyway...
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One reason why we might use the word "gnostic" to describe Stockhausen:

Five fingers. Four limbs. Two eyes. A brain. And a name, too: homo bipedus, sapiens, loquens. It is easy to describe man with the detachment of an inhabitant of Sirius. But the Gnostics did have this feeling that they came from Sirius, or rather from a world that was even farther away, stranger and still more puzzling, a world beyond Sirius. Perhaps this explains the alien and, above all, contemptuous view they took from our hominoform appearance, our anthropoid conformation, our condition as foetuses dropped prematurely into the deserts of the world, and therefore crying out unceasingly with the same howl of anguish that announced our arrival on earth. - The Gnostics, Jacques Lacarriere, p.34 in my hardcopy, but p.25 in the PDF linked to here)

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NB: Lilly, PKD, and the McKennas do not cite Sirius as the main deal. Also note: these writers, along with Robert Anton Wilson, are/were all imaginative people, steeped in science fiction, the hard sciences, logic, math, linguistics, and neuroscience, in addition to the history of esoteric thought. They all also used psychedelic drugs (and other drugs) in order to probe the deeper recesses of Mind.

Wilson wrote about LSD and the possibility that it opened up "noise" into the human nervous system. Writing in what appears to be pre-July 1973, he says that John Lilly thought he had been contacted by alien intelligences and that Wilson knew of other LSD users who'd had the same experience. (See Sex, Drugs and Magick, p.214) All I urge Dear Reader to do here is note the profusion of metaphors for odd experience. Noise, mathematically, is information that had been previously unintelligible to a given human nervous system. Noise represents something that was unexpected, and once it interfers with a person's ontology, it must be dealt with; interpretations must be made. As an analogy, in effort to illustrate this, The Reader is urged to obtain a copy of James Joyce's book Finnegans Wake and try to read it. It may seem very "noisy" but, with experience trying to make sense of it (reading it aloud, making notes about the phenomenology of the experience of reading it, using secondary sources, reading it in a group, etc), you may notice that what was previously noise now seems understandable and even psychedelic.

In the early 1970s, while all this was going on, Timothy Leary was in prison and developing his ideas for Starseed, which involved contact with Higher Intelligence.

                                      section of a Stockhausen score
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The OG has been using the term Higher Intelligence, but there might be other semantic senses of this term. I have seen very many articles and books that assert, like the true conspiracy of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program, that clandestine intelligence groups have been involved in this High Weirdness. (See for example, The Stargate Conspiracy, pp.282-287, esp. writer Lyall Watson's very bizarre experience in 1973 that supposedly came from some sort of Higher Intelligence of Black PsyOps, pp.218-219)

Indeed, Wilson knew all too well about these sorts of things, and was even accused by some counterculturalists as being a CIA man himself. Paranoia feeds on itself, and its ravenous hunger seemingly knows no bounds. RAW was circumspect enough to wonder if he had been what the CIA calls a "useful idiot."

RKG Temple himself has claimed that after he publication of The Sirius Mystery he'd been hounded by multiple governmental intelligence agencies. The skeptic here, Jason Colavito, says he has found no proof of Temple's assertion, but that intelligence agencies have investigated a more popular - and less scholarly - "ancient astronaut" writer, Erich Von Daniken.

Maybe Colavito is right. What's far more interesting to me is his book, The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, published in 2005. I have not yet read this book, but the reviews look promising. RAW, PKD, the McKennas all had read Lovecraft.

Could it be that intelligence agencies followed anyone who proclaimed some metaphysical relationship with Sirius because that's what mystic/Christian fascist/all-time weirdo William Dudley Pelley had done? Just throwin' it out there...

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In his "historical grammar of poetic myth," Robert Graves unpacks myth after myth, digging deeper and deeper and making us feel weirder and weirder. Graves's book The White Goddess has proven to function as a strange wind, blowing many minds, mine included.

There is an ancient story that includes a male roe deer called a roebuck, a short-billed bird called a lapwing, and...a dog. And various heroes. See if we can follow Graves here:

But why Dog? Why Roebuck? Why Lapwing?
The Dog with which Aesculapius is pictured, like the dog Anubis, the companion of Egyptian Thoth, and the dog which always attended Melkarth the Phoenician Hercules, is a symbol of the Underworld; also of the dog-priests, called Enariae, who attended the Great Goddess of the Eastern Mediterranean and indulged in sodomitic frenzies in the Dog days at the rising of the Dog-star, Sirius. But the poetic meaning of the Dog in the Cad Goddeu legend, as in all similar legends, is "Guard the Secret," the prime secret on which the sovereignty of a sacred king depended. Evidently Amathaon had seduced some priest of Bran - whether it was a homosexual priesthood I do not pretend to know - and won from him a secret which enabled Gwyndion to guess Bran's name correctly. Hercules overcame the Dog Cerberus by a narcotic cake which relaxed its vigilance; what means Anathaon used is not recorded.
-p.40

Okay, so Graves is fucking my mind here. There is much wild knowledge and obscure names of gods and goddesses and symbols that lead up to this paragraph, and lead onto many similar, that I confess pixillates me somewhat. Still: dog symbols guarding a secret? Sodomy and proto-Bill Cosby-like drug cakes are a fun addition. The erudition is staggering, the style bewitching. But the SECRETS!

Notice Thoth, the messenger-god of the Egyptians. He also gave them other little things, such as writing. Hermes is the Greek version. More than a couple Lovecraft scholars have identified Lovecraft's own Nyarlathotep in his Cthulhu mythos with those other two messenger gods.

What "is" the message?

I don't know. Neither did Robert Anton Wilson, but if you obtain a copy of Cosmic Trigger, vol 1 and study very very VERY closely pages 13-16, I think you might be onto the Final Secret of The Illuminati.

I said "might." Which seems a close cousin to "maybe."

A Haunting Frame For Generalist Intellectual Types in 2015

The optimist says, "The glass is half full."
The pessimist says, "The glass is half empty."
The rationalist says, "The glass is twice as big as it needs to be."

A general problem for insatiable readers and writers of journal articles, non-fiction books, novels, poetry, sociologies of science, histories of ideas, essays on arts, rants and diatribes by marginalized figures, economic ideologies, radical thinkers, etc: Let's let this dude sum it up for me:

"It requires in these times much more intellect to marshal so much greater a stock of ideas and observations...Those who should be guides for the rest, see too many sides to every question. They hear so much said, and find that so much can be said, about everything, that they feel no assurance about anything."

This is John Stuart Mill, in his diary, 1854. And for Robert Anton Wilson fans, how many Jesuses ago was this? 32? 64? 256? Oh wait: forgot to carry the three....several thousand J ago, arithmetically in fact.

                                         Emile Zola, apparently in self-portrait, trying to
                                         come off as a magician of some sort?

It's fairly well-known that, for a long time, intellectuals on the "humanities" side have wanted to foment revolution, and most-times a non-violent one. Some on the technical intelligentsia side have too. And the "intellectual" as well-known category traces only back, according to a popular intellectual riff, to the Dreyfus Affair. Emile Zola - a damned novelist so what the hell gives him the right to question?! - led the charge against the French military, and was hounded out of the country. But Zola and his fellow "Dreyfusards" were right: Dreyfus was innocent, and being persecuted largely for being a Jew. This story was resolved only 109 years ago.

And while the technical intelligentsia - specialist intellectuals in the physical sciences, to be brief - are a quite young group, maybe only 140 years old, the Humanist intellectuals go back perhaps 3000 years, if you include religious radicals, or just Old Men Who'd Read Everything.

The Haunting Frame
The dream of making a war-less, border-less and much more equitable and human political state of affairs perhaps had a window, briefly open, now closed. How so?

Well, for one thing, the class of State-supported scientific intellectuals have won. Oh sure, the economy is bad enough that even their newly minted PhDs are having trouble finding work, but it's nothing like what's going on for the Humanities PhDs. (Bing "adjunct professors") Moreover, another quote to suit my dire thesis:

"In this tremendous contrast with previous revolutions one fact is reflected. Before these latter years, counterrevolution usually depended on the support of reactionary powers, which were technically and intellectually inferior to the forces of revolution. This has changed with the advent of fascism. Now, every revolution is likely to meet the attack of the most modern, the most efficient, most ruthless machinery yet in existence. It means that the age of revolutions free to evolve according to their own laws is over."

That's Franz Borkenau, from his 1938 study of the Spanish Civil War. He's talking the military and police state apparatus, which will, it seems, always protect the interests of what's now called "the 1%." He had no idea about digital technology or the NSA, much less television. Even the Stasi were far in the offing.

What Were the Functions of Generalist Intellects?
I've seen a lot of answers, from the New York intellectuals themselves talking about their own powers and knowledges. I've read the lamentations in Russell Jacoby's book The Last Intellectuals. I've read just about everything Chomsky has to say about how his colleagues have used their knowledge and privilege to throw in their lot with the Owners of the country. (In this he's a lot like what Julien Benda said about his own class - in 1927! - in his The Treason of the Intellectuals. For those who see the irony here and like to savor it, please do so.) There is no end of books on intellectuals, if only because this "New Class" is so zealously protective of its own rights and privileges.

Whether from New York or London or Paris, or Hollywood's Hitler-inspired Jewish intellectual diaspora, or wherever else, a literate public saw how ideas hung together, how stylish sentences about important matters could revivify the mind, how discrimination among ideas could take place, how a writer could make something that you thought was not interesting was au contraire: quite a kick. Via wide-ranging intellect, the idea of a vibrant and informed popular culture was possible.

I think this may be all over. Not that there aren't still overweening weirdos who live for this stuff. But this one has to get All This off his chest. Possibly because I hope I'm wrong. Maybe because it's some sort of misery loving company thing. Or, you just like reading bookish jagoffs throw their erudite hissy fits; my misery loves your company. Could be I'm in a 30 Year Funk. Maybe I'm like the guy who just realized he got rooked by mega-unwisely investing in a chain of Foto-Mat booths, nationwide, in this year Our Lady of Eris, 2015.

It could be that, via some sort of magickal working, I confess my haunting frame here - many of you may be well ahead of me on this, I know, I know - so that it will ameliorate things and somehow cause them to go in the opposite direction. But this last "maybe"? I don't feel it. I know the words but not the tune. It feels flat. More's the pity.

Know Thy Enemy/Due Diligence
For me, it was a few solid years of feverish reading of the rise of Public Relations, and tangentially related areas. Such as the 1947 National Security State, which has never left us, only gets stronger, a Behemoth of untold proportions, one of its favorite moves being to make Itself invisible to almost everyone, all the while suctioning the sustenance from its own citizenry.

The signal fact about public relations experts - who Antonio Gramsci called "masters of legitimation" - is that they were so out in the open about what they did and why. Now? Not so much. But check out Harold Lasswell - or is it Edward Bernays? my notes are old and unclear; I had no idea I'd be blogging, and indeed, Internet wasn't really a Thing when I crashed on PR - anyway:

"The spread of schooling did not release the masses from ignorance and superstition but altered the nature of both and compelled a new technique of control, largely through propaganda..." He goes on to say this is the best means of controlling the proles because it's cheaper than bribery or outright violence.

It took a long time for me to not be struck by how arrogant these Mandarin intellectual officials were, or how gleefully subservient they were to the Captains of Industry and War. (And the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce, et.al) I was stunned by the disparity between what experts in legitimation for the Owners of the country think versus  all the patriotic "we're all Americans" "in this together" and "freedom" and "democracy"hokum I got in my own indoctrination camps (9AM to 3PM public schooling, minimum of 12 years served).

Some of these pricks just gave it all away. You think Lasswell (Bernays?) was crass, check out one of the fathers of the Neo Conservative movement, Irving Kristol:

"It has always been assumed that as the United States became more managerial, its power more imperial, and its population more sophisticated, the intellectuals would move inexorably closer to the seats of authority -- would, perhaps, even be incorporated en masse into a kind of 'power elite.'" (origin of quote unknown to me due to bad note-taking, but found again in George Scialabba's What Are Intellectuals Good For?, p.7)

If I had to pick two of the most egregious of these legitimators of State power today in Unistat, David Brooks and Thomas Friedman could easily lead the pacifist writer of this blogspew to punch either in the mouth, were I to come to within fist-shot of either. Talk about "treason"...

What intellectual on our side is seen talking about political ideas on the teevee in Unistat? Lemme see...Glenn Greenwald. (And you can only guess what multi-millionaire former head of the taxpayer-funded NSA Keith Alexander thinks about Greenwald: he ought not exist. Let's not even bring up Edward Snowden. Anyone got anyone I missed?)

Yea, But The Science Guys Can Come Around, Right?
Not likely. That's not to say there aren't physicists, chemists, biologists and engineers on the side of the huddled masses yearning to be free, or at least make their rent. Clearly there are many out there. But they still want their jobs. They're addicted to solving abstruse technical problems, then heading home to the spouse and kids. Compared to the average certified Humanities person, the physical science guys are apolitical. (In general.)

There's a heady literature (if you dig and have a library card) about the political commitments among the technical intelligentsia. Most of the best ones are about the morality of their commitments. My favorite among the minority of books that question those commitments from a libertarian position is a guerrilla ontological book, jocoserious, satirical and pissed: The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and The Citadel of Science, by Robert Anton Wilson. RAW has all the generalist chops of any New York intellectual, but rarely did one of that storied group take on the scientific elite. A golden passage here, and realize the book was published in 1986, but keep in mind Unistat's straddling of the globe with its military, and why Islamic militants are at such wit's end of desperation they're cutting off heads of journalists, knowing a drone could likely obliterate them with zero foreknowledge tomorrow afternoon, after having a piece of baklava:

"The late J.B. Priestly often animadverted among what he called The Citadel - the scientific-technologic elite which both supports and is supported by our military-industrial alpha males. The Citadel, in most countries, gets millions of pounds for every twopence doled out to the humanities, the social studies or the arts; it devotes most of its time and intellect to the task, as Bucky Fuller used to say, of delivering more and more explosive power over greater and greater distances over shorter and shorter times to kill more and more people. For this reason, The Citadel increasingly frightens most of us and there is a vast,  somewhat incoherent rebellion against it all around the world. The rebellion takes the form, most of the time, of return to some earlier philosophy or reality tunnel (hello ISIS and al-Qaeda! - OG), although within the scientific community there is also a rebellion which is seeking a new reality-tunnel, which is usually called The New Paradigm." - pp.20-21 of my tattered, pages-falling-out copy

RAW goes on to say Citadel personnel are intensely territorial, including in ideology, and they're proud of their atheism. He's appalled by death-centered nature of this well-educated group, but makes it clear his book is not an attack on the Citadel's moral grounds, but rather its violations of what he sees as the right of free speech and for every scientist to report any finding, even if it's in violation of the current paradigm(s). He particularly loathes the inquisitorial doings of the Citadel's ideological protectors in persecuting scientific heresy, as this simply should not take place in a supposed Free Society. Although RAW uses a rhetoric that at times seems outlandish in The New Inquisition, I think his thesis is very strong and ought be heeded. The academic version of his approach to the philosophy and history of science would be found in Paul Feyerabend, in a work such as Against Method, and possibly in Imre Lakatos's work. Bruno Latour's application of ethnomethodological-like inquiry to practices in actual scientific labs seems to bolster RAW's more Swiftian/Nietzschean/Fortean rhetorics. I also see a family resemblance in Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

However, I don't need a weatherman to know blah blah blah, and I guess we will just have to see if "Reality" can deal us a surprisingly good hand. Meanwhile, we do what we can.

Whither the University in General?
This deserves a few other blogspews of its own, but student debt is now well over $1,000,000,000,000 and mounting fast, and not only do young people "graduate" with a "degree" but they seem to not be able to think all that well for themselves. But then there aren't any jobs for them anyway. Meanwhile the highest paid public servant in most states is the head football coach, and that entire system stinks to high heaven. Go ahead, lift the lid and take a whiff. It's sulphurous-rotten and the older, comfy alumni say "Let's go all the way this year!" Their best players don't get educations and barely have enough to eat. If they're lucky they won't suffer brain damage by the age of 45 from too many violent blows to their inadequately helmeted heads. And undergraduate costs have vastly exceeded inflation (gee...why?), and your freshman is largely being taught by "adjunct" professors who make less take-home pay than a head manager at Burger King. Try to tell me how this is sustainable. Meanwhile, Obama seems to think  it's of the utmost importance to keep sausage-grinding-out "college graduates." So they can...monitor robots?

Well, The Citadel does need a plentiful supply of STEM students. Fuck the Humanities bastards, with their questioning of the political economy and values and all that.

It should get pretty interesting. I can't help but imagine the increasing numbers of very bright, hyper-educated Humanities types, and their degrees and their debt and the increasingly fucked job market. Will they get political knowing the NSA might be tracking their every move?

The entirety of scenario(s) above constitute a mere model, or frame. Since I'm not a modeltheist, I don't think I'm presenting "the Truth" here. I merely affirm it might have some weight and heft, and that I don't exactly consider the model as anything close to a felicitous state of affairs. I've tried working myself into a lather about the cup being twice as big as it needs to be, but it's not taking.

I will leave us there, to escape back into my comic books.

                                    image by Bobby Campbell    

Robert Anton Wilson: Missing Books

I've just finished reading Patton Oswalt's book Silver Screen Fiend:Learning About Life From An Addiction To Film (2015) and it was of course very hilarious and entertaining: it's Patton Freaking Oswalt. But I had had no idea he'd haunted the New Beverly Cinema as I had. LA's greatest revival house for film, it had and has a cult following of film freaks and the book is dedicated to Sherman Torgan, who ran the place while Oswalt saw gawd only knows: probably 400 films there over a four year period, 1995-1999. The Appendix (pp.189-222) lists all the films, so I guess I could count but I'm too lazy... Yea: Patton Oswalt saw hundreds of films in movie theaters in those four years, he lists them all: date/film(s)/venue, and it's a lot like my own lists, only his manic phase of crashing the canons of film seemed deeper and more intense than mine. Torgan's programming easily convinced me he knew what films were worth seeing. I knew that if the New Bev was showing it it was probably worth seeing, it didn't matter if I hadn't heard of the film, or if it was from a genre I don't strongly gravitate toward (musicals and gorefest, anything with Doris Day in it). There's a hilarious chapter where he details the unhinged drive to see 12 Hammer Horror films in two days, and eventually, from sleep deprivation and insane film gluttony, the Hammer films begin to run together in his mind with other classic Hollywood films he'd seen recently...he's having a bad hallucination trip while awake, hilariously described, like something out of Alexander Trocchi, while in the theatre supposedly watching another film. A fellow film weirdo asks him if he's okay. Yea. (Noooo.)

I think I started driving from San Pedro up the Harbor Freeway (to the 10) to that predominately orthodox Jewish neighborhood of LA (near the corner of La Brea and Beverly Blvd) around 1996. I drove that stretch a lot. From one corner of the metropolis to another. I think I was aware of Oswalt as a stand-up comedian, and I may have seen him there, but I saw a lot of familiar screen faces there. I remember one night I took a seat in the dark moments before a double feature of Jeunet et Caro: Delicatessen (one of my all-time favorite films), and City of Lost Children. When the delicatessen owner asks "Have I got something right here?" the crowd erupts in laughter (as it should: one of the great anarchic comic moments in cinema history), and I look over at a guy cracking up and note I'm sitting next to Doogie Howser's, best-friend Max Casella.

I remember dragging my wife to see a John Frankenheimer double feature, because Seconds was the second film. Seconds totally slays me. Always. It was a Friday night - date night, when young, well-educated hipsters invaded the New Bev, usually to see the first film, then leave for - their actual lives. They all saw the admittedly great and famous 1962 Manchurian Candidate then left, despite my leaning into the aisle and telling twentysomething strangers filing out: "If you thought that was good, wait till you see Seconds," and no one would even make eye contact with the Scary Old Guy.

                                       a bit from Seconds (1966): Rock Hudson rocks!

Anyway...After Sherman Torgan's death (and Quentin Tarantino publicly standing up for film freaks all over LA by saying "As long as I draw breath, the New Beverly will remain open"), Oswalt attends a "sloppy, spontaneously organized 'wake'" inside the not-too-far-away Egyptian Theatre. (Everyone agreed it wouldn't be right to do it inside the New Bev). Oswalt tells the anecdote about the night Lawrence Tierney walked into the middle of Citizen Kane and sat behind Oswalt and started talking out loud to the screen for about 15 minutes before his handler finds him and ushers him out. Tierney had never seen the film, but the stuff he says, like the best DVD commentary ever - as remembered by Oswalt, coupled with what we know about Tierney's history and that voice - a shimmering anecdote in a book filled with them. (see pp.94-98) (I wonder how many RAWphiles that know of Tierney and his work think of him as a classic 2nd Circuit type as I do.)

After the wake, Oswalt programmed an entire month of fantastic, non-existent films for the New Beverly in Heaven, just for Sherman. Oswalt writes that he got the idea from Neil Gaiman's storyline in  The Sandman books, of "Brief Lives," where there's a "dream library" of books that famous authors never got around to writing, like Raymond Chandler's Love Can Be Murder, or Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures on the Moon. I for one would drop everything going on in my life to go see every one of these dream films, which includes Orson Welles's 1942 Heart of Darkness and Orson's 1944 Batman: Riddle of the Ghoul, starring Gary Cooper as Bruce Wayne/Batman. "And leave it to Welles to populate his movie with six of Batman's cast of villains: Lee Marvin as Two-Face, Edward G. Robinson as the Penguin, Ella Raines as Catwoman, Dwight Frye as the Riddler, Everett Sloane as the Scarecrow and, towering imperiously over the whole mad feast, Welles himself as Ra's al Ghul. The Richard Widmark cameo, at the end, as the newly scarred Joker, leaping toward the screen from the smoking ruins of the chemical plant, still makes people scream. The costumes that longtime fans wear to midnight showings only add to the chiaroscuro carnival." (p.174) I see the great RKO noir Director of Photography, Nicholas Musuraca, doing the lights and camera here, with Orson, of course.

Oh yea: how perfect is this?: In some alternate universe/Torgan's Heaven that Hal Ashby directed A Confederacy of Dunces? John Belushi played Ignatius in a miraculous performance without ever having read John Kennedy Toole's novel. With Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin. Oswalt goes on with this, an invention of 29 films. Hey! I just noticed the blogpost that forms this chapter of "dream films" is HERE! (<----In the blog there, you only get the names of the nonexistent films; you have to get hold of Oswalt's book to read the synopses.)
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Reading this bit from Patton Oswalt's film addiction book reminded me of the Books Missing From Robert Anton Wilson's Oeuvre. Many of us have discussed what RAW's Tale of the Tribe would have been, but he died before he could write it. We got a precis, tantalizing to the utmost, at the end of TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution, pp.203-213. If we could pool the no-doubt thousands of pages of notes from RAWphiles on what RAW was hinting at, we might be able to cobble something together. But it wouldn't be RAW.

Now please bear with me: I've gotten hold of some...well...let''s just say I've gotten lucky and was able to obtain a hot underground tryptamine drug made by the Disciples Of Shulgin (DOS). Psychonauts have been reporting that at the half gram dosage level, they've had very pleasant glimpses of other possible worlds, but only those worlds the person had been daydreaming or thinking about in their ordinary, non-stoned lives. I took some after thinking of RAW's books and, for whatever it's worth, here's what I've come back with:

The Shea Correspondence Course: Letters Between Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea (2017): RAW finally collected the vast trove of letters received from his friend Robert Shea, and via excessive volunteer wrangling by RAWphiles, found well over 40 long type-written letters he'd sent to Shea. All of the letters from both men had been dispersed, scattered among numerous friends and collectors of literary ephemera. Interviewed by NPR about the 423 page tome, RAW says from his home in Capitola that he was surprised how much he'd forgotten about how Illuminatus! eventually coalesced, but was grateful such a large number of the letters had shown up after an Internet call-to-arms from his fanatic readers. NPR seemed most interested in the fervor of glee among the cultish readers of Wilson over the publication, long awaited and thought at one time impossible. Why the word "course" in the title, NPR asks? Wilson said his friend Robert Shea was the sort of person whose anarchic intelligence always made him think, and re-reading their letters before publication he realized how much he'd learned. Shea died in 1994. Reviewed at BoingBoing: "I've never seen a correspondence that was so funny and at the same time brimming with endless ideas. Even when they seem to have a simmering feud over some idea or another, you can always tell they loved each other."

Hollywood Notes (2012?): The long-awaited chronicles of RAW's first-hand experiences seeing his books Masks of the Illuminati, The Walls Came Tumbling Down, and the midnight movie Reality Is What You Can Get Away With made into films and the sausage-factory behind the scenes. RAW agrees with Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West and F. Scott Fitzgerald: if they want to pay you for the rights, best to just take the money and leave Hollywood. But RAW's too interested in the machinations of filmmaking and while he has grave problems with the liberties directors, editors and script "doctors" took with his material, he seems pleased by the results, all in all. My favorite part of the book is RAW's anecdotes about the film community party scenes in the hills above Hollywood.

Heretic: How Timothy Leary Foresaw the "New Teleology"(2025): This short tome is a surprise hit with academics who had been trying to forge the "New Synthesis" sometimes called the "New Teleology," since the rise in prominence of Sheldrake, epigenetics, CRISPR techniques that helped to rapidly cure most diseases and food shortages. Other texts had emphasized the rapid falling out of favor of "selfish gene" ideas as the main motors of evolution. RAW traces the history of self-organizing life to cosmic panspermia notions and the long list of scientific "heretics" who emphasized latent "systems" inherent in the human nervous system. This book argues that Leary's ideas about the brain and evolution were far ahead of his time (Leary died in 1996), that Neo-Darwinism was always a big chunk of the puzzle, but that scientific visionaries - once marginalized as "crackpots" or "mystics" such as Bruno, Reich, Lamarck, Sheldrake and Leary - are now seen, retrospectively, as victims of a sort of mass hubris and "Mind-Forged Manacles" of working prole scientists/old paradigm adherents (RAW loves to quote the poet Blake). It was said that the philosopher Thomas Nagel was a fan of this book, but this can not be substantiated at the moment you're reading this. At 225 pages and good humor, this one's on many a college syllabus and wins RAW a National Book Award for Non-Fiction.

New Age Sewage (2016): RAW seems to be channeling George Carlin here in his non-fiction satire on anti-vaxxers, Randroids, supply-siders (these last two not New Age per se, merely bad ideas), New Earthers, "race-ists," orthorexics, those fearful of taboo words, and fundamentalists of all sorts. Perhaps surprisingly, the book receives very good reviews from those Skeptics that RAW lampooned in many works. RAW at his most polemical, this book is at least the equal in tone and logical vigor as The New Inquisition and Natural Law.

Life Plus 3000 (2030): RAW's immortality book, which in the Preface he says he'd radically revised at minimum 32 times because of the "Jumping Jesus Phenomenon." A very old version had a working title Death Shall Have No Dominion. I found it most impressive that RAW doesn't gloat here: he'd been writing about longevity and immortality since the 1970s and was scoffed at by New York intellectuals. When the worm began to turn most decisively around 2023 he decided to wrap it up. Now he's been proven "correct" for the most part, but rather than name his fairly "wrong" (and mostly forgotten) detractors, he seems more in awe of Nature than ever.

Collected Writings on Joyce (2014): Joyce scholar Fritz Senn was the impetus behind this. He thought young European readers needed an introduction to Joyce by an intellectual non-academic Joycean. I had no idea RAW had written this much, in such detail, on Joyce. Lovers of RAW's book Coincidance will want to graduate to this text, many of the ideas of which were once too "far out" but have now made it inside mainstream Joyce scholarship.

Robert Anton Wilson's Book of Black Magic and Curses (2007): A rollicking book of humor about domesticated primate hypnosis and words, psychoneuroimmunology, the omnipresence of metaphor, a vindication of Vico and Korzybski, and "How To Tell Your Friends From the Other Apes." One reviewer blurbs on the back cover: "A linguistics book sui generis if I ever saw one. Highly recommended." RAW scholars can now see what Playboy's Book of Forbidden Words was supposed to be, before the editors took out all the most interesting parts. Or, as RAW put it, "The editors at Playboy Press, like most editors, want to pee in the soup before they let go of someone else's work."

Bride of Illuminatus! (2019) Long-awaited. Carries his (and Shea's) saga of certain families and ideas through the Age of Surveillance. The plotlines developed with Edward Snowden vs. Dick Cheney (under disguised names, for this is one long True Shaggy Dog Story) makes this Trip worth reading over and over.

Babylon L-5 (2021) One of the best of the sixty-some-odd books preparing humanity for space colonization. Said to have cheered Elon Musk, who, after reading it, redoubled his efforts to get LaGrange point communities going for industrial production in zero-gravity, followed by his (and others') move to make Project Exurb a reality. Meanwhile, space travel impact on human physiological systems are being solved almost weekly. RAW keeps up on this stuff.

Untitled Epic Poem on Evolution: So far: no publisher. He's said to still be working on it, although over 100 chapters exist in the version that passed through my hands. Seemingly influenced by both Pound's Cantos and Joyce's Finnegans Wake as well as the wildest, most outre ideas about baby universes, brane theory, black holes, and self-organizing Taoist cybernetic feedback loops within loops, the loose-leaf copy I had was over 1700 pages of "holographic poetry" and seemed to fuse in equal measure hardcore-scientific, poetic and mystical ideas. The work functions as an encyclopedia of history and hard science, while reading as poetry. One strain of poetic rumination, about a divine feminine and repressed aspect of history, coupled with - believe it or not - the history of economics (!) makes a bracing case for universal liberation and "true freedom" for all "sentient beings" and a freedom from fear, want, and State and other Gangster coercion, based on communication, humor and massive cybernetic feedback loops of information so dense...well, I just want you all to be able to get hold of a copy some day, as this is a true Terran Archive and "Blueprint For Humanity" (<-----the name of one of the poems.) There were references and allusions enough to support the argument that this might truly constitute RAW's Tale of the Tribe. Difficult and psychedelic. Readers new to Wilson are advised to study his works from 1959-2005 first. Another helpful idea, until the work is finished and published: RAW includes an annotated bibliography that in itself was over 200 pages and quite cosmically hilarious, I thought.

That's all I can remember until I take that particular tryptamine again. If any of you have similar access and find something out about RAW's nonexistent-in-this-world oeuvre, please report back here in the comments!

                                           graphic art by Bob Campbell

Swift/Marx/Wilson: Ironies, Paradoxes, and Satires Mordant: Some Faves

De gustibus non est disputandum, I guess it's just one of those things, but I marvel at certain stylistic flair in satire. I think a struggling composer must feel similar things when listening to Bartok or Beethoven, or a young would-be Serious Novelist when reading Joyce or Pynchon.

                                               Jonathan Swift                        

Swift (1729)
My first example is Swift's A Modest Proposal. I dig the rhythm, the build-up before the modest proposal. There certainly were major problems with poverty/overpopulation among the poor in Ireland around 1729, no doubt. And the tone is exemplary of the "can-do" spirit among the well-fed. One of my favorite devices: Swift bolsters his rhetoric with statistics - as if he's some proto-policy wonk - the subtext being that we're reading a rational man here. And, from the first paragraph, we know we're in the midst of a writer filled with compassion and empathy, with a foolproof appeal to the heartbreaking difficulties of Motherhood. (If you haven't read the piece, it's very short, and I know you'll read it all "eventually" but for now click on the link above and read the first paragraph, so we can all be on the same page. Thanks.)

Swift has given this a lot of thought. He wants to alleviate misery. He's a practical man, too.  He's considered others' attempts at solving the problem and thinks he has a better solution. And so, before he tells us he's going to enumerate many reasons why the poor should sell off their children to be fattened and eaten by more wealthy gentry-types, he soberly writes, "I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection." He then follows with this sentence:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

He just wants to "ease the nation of so grievous an encumbrance." Let's face it: a lot of these kids were born out of wedlock anyway. And you know what's really terrible? Many of these desperately poor kids are hired on as cheap labor, which, being so poor, they hardly have the strength to carry out. Eating these kids has so many advantages that Swift's argument is a slam-dunk. (To the madman who would take this seriously and not see that the real problem is vast income inequality and oppression by the church, state, and landlords...Are there such madmen amongst us? I mean besides Dick Cheney...)

Some of the benefits of this idea:

-Nine months after Lent, Catholics give birth at an inflated rate; eating their babies will lessen the number or papists in our midst.

-When the poor sell their babies for food, at least they'll have a slightly easier time paying off their landlords. The landlords have already (figuratively) devoured the parents.

-Butchers will do a bang-up biz. A kid can fatten up to 28 pounds after a year: delicious!

(As Swift cites esteemed, virtuous patriots who care about the dignity of humans, and while he keeps citing stats to bolster his claims...)

-A colleague - the same unnamed "American" who we find got his ideas from "the famous Psalmanazar"  - noted the problem of stores of venison being depleted too soon, so maybe we could eat boys and girls who have reached the age of 12 but not older than 14?: Swift is discerning: no, he's heard the boy-meat is "tough and lean" while you may as well let the girls live on, because they're almost of the age to produce more succulent meat from their own bodies. Point well-taken!

-Despite the practical reasons for not eating young teenage girls, as cited above, Psalmanazar's story about criminality - such as trying to poison the rich and powerful - should be considered if plump female teens commit such heinous crimes. Hey, it worked in Formosa...

-The argument against Swift - that he's not considered the aged, maimed, and diseased? Ah, but take this into consideration: they're already, every day, "dying and rotting by cold and famine, and filth and vermin, as fast as can reasonably be expected." Objections overruled. Swift wins this one, too. And besides, who cares really? Those losers aren't working anymore, anyway. Practicality, people!

-This new source of succulent, tender meat, will provide for a "refinement of taste" for "gentlemen of fortune in the kingdom." Who in their right mind can argue with this?

-Poor people will have a few less mouths to feed. Swift cares. He really does. Bless him!

-This whole scheme will be an economic boost to taverns, where gentlemen who "justly value themselves upon their knowledge in good eating" will gladly pay whatever is asked for that sweet sweet kid-meat.

-It will enhance the quality of marriage, something every state wants. Why? Well, for one thing, fathers will attend with much more loving care their wives who are pregnant with the cargo that will help them pay the rent in a few month's time. Wife-beatings among the poor will diminish. And who can quarrel with that?

-We all like the fruits of pig-meat: bacon, pork, etc, but let's admit it: things can get a bit dull eating pork chops and bacon day after day. And no pig is "comparable in taste or magnificence to a well-grown, fat, yearling child, which roasted whole will make a considerable figure at lord mayor's feast or any other public entertainment." Such refinement!

To sum up, Swift can see no objection to his proposal. I mean, think of the beauty of it: it provides for the poor while also relieving them. It also gives "some pleasure to the rich."

I've read this piece maybe 15 or 20 times in my life, and it's never lost its power over me. I think what I admire most is the way Swift, whose voice here seems to emanate from a completely insane man, at the same time has us on his side, because this mode of rhetoric - satire of the highest level - is perhaps the fullest response to poverty and suffering when one feels angry that we can do better. The requisite distance between the rhetoric and the suffering of humans is enough that no one can take this seriously, even if the tone and "rational" argument implore us to consider such a ghastly idea.

The Irish government made lame attempts to silence him, but his character and esteem were of such elevation that Swift continued to publish whatever he pleased.

                                                       Karl Marx

Marx (1862/63)
In the so-called fourth volume of Das Kapital, "Theories of Surplus Value," Marx discusses previous economist's ideas about people who provide productive labor versus those who provide "unproductive" labor. Adam Smith (who Marx greatly admired) thought that the unproductive were, among others: "churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, etc." When Smith wrote men of letters and musicians, it frankly stung the OG. But "buffoons"? That one was like a punch to the gut. Anyway...All these lay-abouts were parasitical upon the labors of people who actually did real, honest work. But Marx, who knew his Swift (and everyone who ever wrote anything of interest, it seems), disagreed with the greatest classical economist of all time:

A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor books and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we look a little closer at the connection between the latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crimes but criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable book in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as "commodities"...

Think how much of our precarious economy owes to criminals! Where would judges or bailiffs or courthouse builders be without them? How about those fine men we call "police"? Jailers, makers of iron bars, gas chambers, badges and truncheons, guns, handcuffs? What about John Grisham and Perry Mason and Sherlock Holmes and The Sopranos? They'd be nowhere without the productions of criminals. Marx reminds us of all the improved and applied science that went into torture devices, and just think how good locks have become because of criminals. In Unistat, the gun trade is booming (sorry); the criminal's at times murderous contributions seems most essential to our very way of life!

The value of crime upon the way we think about morality is endlessly productive, and furthermore, as Francis Wheen writes, "The criminal breaks the monotony and everyday security of bourgeois life. In this way he keeps it from stagnation and gives rise to that uneasy tension and agility without which even the spur of competition would get blunted..." (p.78, Marx's Das Kapital)

Here's more of Marx on the subject:

Would the making of banknotes have reached its present perfection had there been no forgers?...And if ones leaves the sphere of private crime: would the world-market ever have come into being but for national crime? Indeed, would even the nations have arisen? And hasn't the Tree of Sin been at the same time the Tree of Knowledge ever since the time of Adam?

To those of my Dear Readers who find themselves unemployed, I offer Marx's riffs on productive labor here as merely a suggestion that perhaps we may frame our problems in different ways...

Wheen's slender book is one I found a delight, and he made me go back to reading Marx anew. There's a considerable take on Marx as a literary figure. Marx certainly wanted to produce something thoroughly along the lines of a literary masterpiece, but I personally would direct the reader to something like Dickens's Hard Times instead.

That said, Wheen covers the reception and attempts at categorizing Marx's sprawling work: "The book can be read as a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the monster they created ('Capital which comes into the world soiled with gore top to toe and oozing blood from every pore')." Stanley Edgar Hyman saw the book as a Victorian melodrama: "The Mortgage on Labour-Power Foreclosed." The book can be seen as a black comedy, with a debunking of the "'phantom-like objectivity' of the commodity to expose the difference between heroic appearance and inglorious reality." (Wheen, p.75)

Wheen notes the critic C. Frankel saw Kapital as like a Greek tragedy: fate, tragic blindness, fixated ideas, seeing the truth too late, etc. In To The Finland Station, Edmund Wilson saw Marx as the greatest ironist since Swift, as a supreme parody of classical economics texts, and that, having read Kapital, the classical economists "never seem the same to us again; we can always see through their arguments and figures the realities of the crude human relations which it is their purpose or effect to mask."

I can see you now, Dear Reader: you've gathered your family and closest friends in one room for an announcement. Everyone is whispering what it could be. Tension in the room is palpable. Finally, you enter through the very large main door into the parlor. Everyone becomes silent. All eyes are trained on your every move. You let the drama build, then finally, get down to brass tacks: "Friends, my most beloved family members...this has been a difficult period in my life, as you all know, but I've done a lot of thinking - soul-searching, if you will - and I've made a decision about what to do, and I hope you will all help me in my new endeavor as best you can."

"Well? What is it?!?!," your father shouts, not with a small note of anxiety in his voice.

"I've...decided to enter a life of crime."

                                                 Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson (c. 1975?)
If Unistatians follow politics to any appreciable level, you will note that our "leaders" tell us that many things must be done in the name of "national security." The very phrase has proven to carry a mass hypnotic effect of considerable heft. "We cannot tell you anything about why we might be doing something that would make Al Capone look like Laura Ingalls Wilder. Trust us: it's about national security." And that is usually that. Oh, some Nosy Parker journalists will look behind the curtain and then report what vast cool and unsympathetic beastly doings are going on in our name, but who the fuck READS anymore?

Much less: who actually cares?

And maybe it doesn't matter at all. Why? Well, maybe we've had it all wrong in the first place. And I mean all wrong: it could be that "national security is the chief cause of national insecurity." This is the "First Law" of Hagbard Celine, a real character who uses the words of his author, Robert Anton Wilson.

The Reader would do well to consult the primary text, in The Illuminati Papers, pp.118-122. Wilson's virtuoso satirical chops are on display here, but like Swift and Marx - whose writings RAW knew well - it's only because he's at pains to convey the many invasions of our "privacies" that we find ourselves in. And I assert RAW was not drilling in a dry hole, but has shown that, in this First Law ("National security is the chief cause of national insecurity") he has, as of 2013, proven to be a Prophet. RAW made this observation around 40 years ago - probably after citizens broke into the FBI office in Media, PA in 1971 - and the essay was written (possibly) around the time Watergate became a news item, and (possibly) close to the summer of 1975 Church Committee hearings that "damaged" the CIA...at any rate, COINTELPRO was at work and possibly known, this was all well before Internet and the massive We Make the East German Stasi Look Like Pikers-era of Total Information Awareness by the NSA, FBI, CIA, local police, nefarious hackers, Wall Street, Facebook, Google, the TSA...et.al

RAW's main rhetorical ploy there was one he played with verve and aplomb like Bach played the organ: the reductio ad absurdum. That is, if we took the claims of "national security" seriously in the early 1970s, it meant that  the watchers must have watchers, because who can place total trust in the first group of watchers over our security and movements? But that second group can't be entirely trusted - something corrupt might happen - so we need another "security group" to watch the second group. And while they're at it, they should probably try to watch the first, initial group of security-providers. You can see where this went. For RAW, it was satire, but with a point. For us in 2014, it's something like Nightmare Prophecy come true: the (near) total Surveillance State.

Most of you are way ahead of me, so I'll just pick one story that I've mentioned with my friends that seems to have slipped through the cracks: NSA intercepts shipments of laptops purchased online and installs malware in them.  I'm sure you guys have a "favorite" that's "better" than this one. Have at it in the comments!

O! To be able to write satire with the panache of Swift, Marx, Wilson!

Western Academic Logic Has Broken Through! (Maybe?)

"An increasing number of logicians are coming to think that Aristotelian logic is inadequate." - Graham Priest, in a 2014 article I link to below.

Albert Einstein was asked to contribute an essay on Bertrand Russell for a compendium on Lord R, and  it eventually appeared in Volume V of The Library of Living Philosophers, edited by P.A. Schilpp, 1944. In "Remarks On Bertrand Russell's Theory of Knowledge," Einstein said he immediately said yes when asked to write on Bertie, because, though he didn't enjoy a lot of contemporary scientific writers, he'd spent "innumerable happy hours" reading Russell, and the only writer he enjoyed more was Thorstein Veblen (who, incidentally, forecasted the obvious state of academia today, but in 1899!). Then Einstein realized he had a lot of cramming to do: he'd limited himself to physics, and had embarked on Russell's turf, which Einstein found "slippery." It seems clear from the outset that Einstein is dubious about Russell's field - logic - and how it undergirds mathematics and (maybe?) all knowledge.

The key questions for Einstein are: "What knowledge is pure thought able to supply independent of sense perception? Is there any such knowledge? If not, what precisely is the relation between our knowledge and the raw materials furnished by sense impressions?" Einstein's essay was published in 1944.

My experience with reading on various logics is sketchy. I'm not of a logical bent temperamentally - I tend to think Rhetoric has more dramatic and personal effects, socially -  and yet I find any forays into Boolean thought, logic trees, Aristotle, informal fallacies, logical paradoxes, and how number theory fuses with logic? It's all delightful: I always cop an intellectual buzz if I get deep enough to "get lost"in it. Reading logic books feels a lot like reading linguistic books: I get to the point where all I can see in my mind's eye is absurdities, Cheshire Cats smiles floating before my eyes, the worm ouroburos eating its own tail, the seemingly surrealistic glint of reading a book about how words work, which uses words itself. A world filled with Dali-esque melting watches. For starters.

On a certain level, I think logic is bunk, or tends to the buncombe. And yet, it underpins all our advanced technology, including this thing I'm using right now to get my points across, so we must take It seriously. I think logic works fantastically well at very small levels, like logic gates in circuitry. I'm not sure it works all that well when describing society or as an approximation of the language of everyday living in the Cosmic Goof. Ahhh...but maybe I'm not reading the right type of logic? Or: how am I defining logic?

Every thought, even unconscious thought, can and has been modeled as the logic of neurons firing in a massive parallelism, involving ion channels, action potentials, axons and dendritic spines, all-or-nothing events, and, occurring in the synaptic clefts: the constant release and re-uptaking of neurotransmitting chemical messengers. I'm fascinated by the neuro-logic that does all this and creates circuits of perceptual frames commonly called metaphors, but I (logically) digress...

A pretty cool article in one of my favorite online magazines, Aeon, recently ran an essay by a philosopher named Graham Priest, and it's called "Beyond True and False,"and in it Priest argues that Western logicians, who have long dismissed Buddhist logic as mumbo-jumbo and "mysticism" have come around to an appreciation of it. The 2nd CE Mahayana Buddhist thinker Nagarjuna had insisted that "things derive their nature by mutual independence and are nothing in themselves." Any "thing" is empty, and yet it exists. We can only talk about a thing's "nature" when we include it in a field of other things. If you grok this immediately, you're the sort of person I love to party with.

Priest was one of the developers of something called plurivalent logic in the 1980s, and he asserts that neither he nor his colleagues knew anything about Mahayana Buddhist logic at the time...but their thinking had arrived at a very similar place. It's a breezy essay and delivered the reading-about-logic goods enough for me to get "high" off it. Try it, if you haven't already. It combines Buddhism and databases; what's not to like?

So, for Aristotle, there was only True or False, although I think Aristotle is more complicated than Priest lays him out here. The weird thing about Aristotle, as I continue to read him: his uber-famous book on Logic seems less nuanced about "reality" than his long, compendious and damned amazing book on Metaphysics. In his Logic, there is the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC) and the Principle of the Excluded Middle (PEM), which never made sense to me, irregardless the many modes I used to wrap my neurons around it. Methinks THC and CBD tend to dissolve PEM, PDQ.

Nagarjuna was working with the 600-plus year Buddhistic system of the catuskoti, or the logic of "four corners." Some statements are True, some False, just like Aristotle (it's highly unlikely Nagarjuna read Aristotle). But: Buddhistic logic had two more values: some statements are Both True and False; the fourth value was: some statements are Neither True nor False. Aristotle had actually briefly addressed the idea that a statement could be Both True and False, as if it were relatively trivial: these had to do with statements about future events. These statements violated his Principle of Non-Contradiction, so he seems to have wanted it to seem trivial.

Bertrand Russell, along with Alfred North Whitehead, had tried to use logical set theory to firmly put mathematics on a solid foundation. Indeed, the set of all sets is a member of itself; the set of all cats is not a cat, so it's not a member of the set of cats. (By the way: I find set theory a sure buzz, not unlike one small toke of very potent weed; your mileage may vary.) The problem of statements that were self-referential proved Russell's and Whitehead's undoing. Remember the Barber Paradox? Or simply the hilariously vexing problem of this sentence?:

                                            This statement is false.

So yea: let's apply Aristotle's PNC to the set of all the sets that are not members of themselves.

Well, okay, after awhile my head explodes; my consciousness becomes pixillated and then spontaneously rearranges into a collage of shards of paisleys and encaustic purples and pinks. I like it.

Back to Priest's essay: I didn't know about Relevant Logic from the 1960s, which presaged Priest's and his colleagues' Plurivalent Logic. I hadn't known about the 1905 logical proof about ordinal numbers and the limit of noun phrases in a language with a finite vocabulary, from the Hungarian Julius Konig (worth a buzz all by itself). What a cool article.

When Priest tells us that Nagarjuna said that language frames our conventional "reality" but "beneath" this is ultimate reality that we can experience only in special states - such as meditation - but we can't say anything about this "ultimate reality" because it's ineffable and that saying anything about it puts us back into conventional "reality" (<-----I have made it a practice to put quotes around the word "reality" to draw attention to the fierce contentiousness of the term)...Dude! This guy was saying this in the 2nd century of the Common Era.

So the high point (and I do mean "high") of Priest's essay was the discussion about two different ineffable "realities": 1.) the "real" one
                                2.) the "nominal" one; the one where we use language to talk about how wild and transcendent our experience was of the ineffable.

Let us apply good ol' Aristotle's PNC to the above? If it's "ineffable" we can't say anything, period, right? It contradicts itself.

Or maybe: I say all we can say is what we can say, along with lots of hand waving and gestures and hopping up and down, dancing. Jumping outside these particular logic systems (or "Jootsing" as Douglas Hofstadter coined it: jumping outside of the system) into another logical system, let us say that, under the "game rules" of Nagarjuna and Aristotle, we can speak of anything, even the "ineffable." The problem is, we might find ourselves in a straightjacket on the way to the Funny Farm. Either that or find we've obtained disciples, so may as well go for the big bucks with a New Religion.

It turns out that when you convert a logical function (which only relates to ONE other thing, such as your biological father) to relational ones (which can derive any number of outputs), you can arrive at a Six-Value Relational Logic - Priest and Co's Plurivalent Logic. In this system, statements can be:

1. True
2. False
3. True and False (EX: "Both crows and horses can fly." Or better: "This is a sentence that has twenty-three words in it.")
4. Neither True nor False
5. Ineffable
6. Both True and Ineffable (Konig's thing, as shown in the article.)

Furthermore, with relations, these values become fuzzified. Indeed, my Generalist's approach to understandings of logical systems sees Plurivalent Logic as almost the same as Fuzzy Logic, developed by Lofti Zadeh around the same time Priest and Co were doing their thang.

By the way: has anyone found a value that is Both False and Ineffable? If so, I implore urgently: send it to me via Angels and/or quantum encryption, or a secret, coded message in tomorrow's crossword puzzle. Muchas gracias.

Western Counterculture Intellects Were Ahead of the Academics? Maybe?
Jeez! I like Priest for his wowee-gee presentation of developments in academic logic in the 20th century, but fer crissakes Priest!: read Gregory Bateson's work from the 1960s and 70s: he was pushing for a logic of relations then. And Robert Anton Wilson was telling his dope-smoking intellectual readers about multivalent logics in the 1960s: Von Neumann's quantum logic of "maybe" as a third value beyond Aristotle's True and False. RAW also turned the present writer (OG) onto Anatole Rapoport's four valued logic of True, False, Indeterminate, and Meaningless. RAW also showed how Korzybski, by 1933, had developed an Infinite-Valued Logic in which we must use our wits to assign probabilities to the veridicality of statements. RAW even promulgated the logic of "Sri Syadasti," in the serious-joke religion of Discordianism, which was developed in the 1960s. Note the many-valued stoner logic there! It seems to anticipate Priest and Co's 1980s Plurivalent Logic by at least a decade. (Could it have secretly influenced the academics?) Timothy Leary developed, in the early 1970s, a type of neuro-logic that was embedded in a system of phenomenological "circuits" in human minds that developed according to genes, accidents, habits, learning, the culture a person was born into, the language they used, their education, and their openness to novelty. These counterculture thinkers noted and cited a plethora of examples on non- and anti-Aristotelian thinking that had run through world cultures, running back to Taoism and the I Ching.

So: I've seen this many times before. The longtime academic seems to either not know, or knows but pretends to not know, that things are muddied once they survey the vast historical mindscape outside their Ivory Towers. I've seen it so often I expect it. Or hell: maybe Priest is at best oblivious. Or worse: dismissive. At least Priest admits Aristotle's bivalent logic has major problems and that 1800 years ago a non-Westerner was prefiguring the thought systems that he and his friends thought they were inventing. And also, Priest is right: seemingly "pure" thought-systems in logic and math later on prove to be surprisingly useful in the workaday world in the sensual, sensory, existential, phenomenological space-time continuum.

Works Consulted:
- "The Logic of Buddhist Philosophy," by Graham Priest, Aeon.
- cool interview of Graham Priest by Richard Marshall. Priest seems pretty cool for an academic.
-The Fringes of Reason: A Whole Earth Catalog: "Beyond True and False: A Sneaky Quiz With Subversive Commentary," by Robert Anton Wilson, pp.170-173. For Generalists interested in multivalent logics, this piece complements Graham Priest's piece on Buddhist philosophy, above.
-Ideas and Opinions, Albert Einstein. "Remarks On Bertrand Russell's Theory of Knowledge," pp.18-24
-The Chinese Written Character As A Medium For Poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound (1936)
-Steps To An Ecology of Mind, by Gregory Bateson
-Godel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter
-Laws of Form, by G. Spencer Brown
-Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic, by Bart Kosko
-Prometheus Rising, By Robert Anton Wilson, esp. pp.217-252