Cleveland Okie

2011-04-04T17:26:00.001-07:00

(Editor's note: This interview with Robert Anton Wilson appeared in "New Libertarian Notes/Weekly 39," September 5, 1976. I think it's one of the best interviews with Wilson I ever read, and I want to thank Mike Gathers, who made it available to me, and Jesse Walker, who made it available to Mr. Gathers. -- Tom)

Illuminating Discord: An interview with Robert Anton Wilson

By Jane Talisman and Eric Geislinger (Columbia Region New Libertarian Alliance)

Robert Anton Wilson, who along with Robert Shea wrote the Illuminatus trilogy, is the creator of yet another cult. The really neat part is that this is a cult of hard-core libertarian-anarchist-occult-mind expansionists whose demand for the Illuminatus books is making SF retail history. Walk into your corner bookstore and chances are excellent the books have been back-ordered. Borrow a copy or wait in line if you must -- it's worth it. The trilogy is truly mind-boggling, outrageous, and curiously familiar. With this in mind we set out to interview one of its authors, Robert Anton Wilson (hereafter R.A.W.)

Interviewing him by mail was an exciting, albeit frustrating job. His provocative answers triggered seemingly never-ending digressions. We had to more or less learn to limit our responses. Several of the questions in the following interview appear to be asked by R.A.W. himself. These are not misprints -- he does give himself questions. To give you some insight into Wilson's psyche we offer you this tidbit of data -- to wit, his return address rubber stamp has his name misspelled "Robert Antoon Wilson." Make of this what thou wilt. -- Jane Talisman and Eric Geislinger (hereafter the CRNLA).

CRNLA: Tell us a little about your background.

RAW: I was born into a working class Irish Catholic family in Brooklyn 44 years ago, at the brutal bottom of the Great Depression. I suppose this early imprinting and conditioning made me a life-long radical. My education was mostly scientific, majoring in electrical engineering and applied math at Brooklyn Tech and Brooklyn Polytech. Those imprints made me a life-long rationalist. I have become increasingly skeptical about, or detached from, the assumption that radicalism and rationalism are the only correct perspectives with which to view life, but they remain my favorite perspectives.

CRNLA: What are your favorite novels, movies, TV shows and music?

RAW: The novels would be, I suppose, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, The Magus by Fowles, The Roots of Heaven by Gary, Don Quixote and anything by Mark Twain. Movies: Intolerance, Broken Blossoms and everything else by David Mark Griffith, Citizen Kane, The Trial, King Kong, 2001. TV: Star Trek and Mary Hartman. Music: Beethoven's Ninth and his late quartets, Bach, Bizet, Carl Orff, Vivaldi, the less popular and more experimental stuff by Stravinsky.

CRNLA: What do you think of M*A*S*H, the Freak Brothers, Bob Dylan?

RAW: I loved Altman's film of M*A*S*H but I can't stand the TV series. The Freak Brothers are funny, but I deplore the lifestyle it celebrates. Of course, Einstein and Michelangelo were sloppy, too, but only because they were too busy with real work to fix their attention on sartorial status games. Hippies generally aren't busy with anything except feeling sorry for themselves. Dylan seems to me a totally pernicious influence -- the nasal whine of death and masochism. Certainly, this would be a more cheerful world if there were no Dylan records in it. But Dylan and his audience mirror each other, and deserve each other; as Marx said, a morbid society creates its own morbid grave-diggers.

CRNLA: How about Anderson, LeGuin and Heinlein?

RAW: I haven't taken Anderson seriously since 1968, when he wrote an account of the police-riot at the Chicago Convention which was totally false, according to my observations on the scene. I decided Poul loved the Vietnam War so much, that he could actually watch a cop hit an old lady and remember it as a young communist hitting the cop. I haven't bothered keeping up with Anderson's hallucinations since then. LeGuin is great already, and getting better book by book. Heinlein has been an idol to me for more than 20 years. He can do no wrong, no matter how much he loves wars and hates pacifists. (I'm the kind of anarchist whose chief objection to the State is that it kills so many people. Government is the epitome of the deathist philosophy I reject.)

RAW: Are you a pacifist?

RAW: Hell, no. I like pacifists, as a rule, and people who have a heavy emotional identification with deathism and war would probably call me a pacifist, but I am a non-invasivist rather than a non-violentist. That is, I believe that an invaded people have the right to defend themselves "by any means necessary" as the expression goes. This includes putting ground glass or poison in the invaders' food, shooting at them from ambush, sabotage, the general strike, armed revolution, all forms of Gandhian civil disobedience, etc. It's up to the invaded to decide which of these techniques they will use. It's not up to some moralist to tell them which techniques are permissible. As Tucker said, "There is nothing sacred in the life of an invader."

CRNLA: What magazines and newspapers do you read?

RAW: I read everything, including the labels on canned food. I'm a hopeless print addict, a condition alleviated only by daily meditation which breaks the linear-Aristotelian trance. (Most rationalistic libertarians would do well to try the same circuit breaker, or LSD.) National Lampoon, Scientific American and Green Egg are what I read most obsessively. I also read at least one periodical every month by a political group I dislike -- to keep some sense of balance. The overwhelming stupidity of political movements is caused by the fact that political types never read anything but their own gang's agit-prop.

RAW: Any more artistic opinions?

RAW: If I must. James Joyce is more important than Jesus, Buddha and Shakespeare put together. Pound is the greatest poet in English. Thorne Smith should be reprinted immediately, and would be enormously popular with the current generation, I wager. The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best (and only) literature of our times. All of these opinions are pompous and aggressive, of course, but questions like this bring out the worst in me. Artistic judgments are silly if expressed as dogmas, at least until we get an "artometer" which can measure objectively how many micro-michelangelos or kilo-homers of genius a given artifact has in it. Do you know that at UC-Berkeley, Dr. Paul Segall has a lab full of rats who are twice the age at which rats normally die of senility? And these rats are not only alive but still reproducing. This may be the most important fact I know. Dr. Segal hopes to have a life-extension formula for humans ready in the early 1980s.

CRNLA: Has Dr. Segall published any papers on his research? If so, where?

RAW: A good, non-technical article by Dr. Segall on his own work and on other approaches to longevity, is in the new issue of Spit in the Ocean, edited by Dr. Timothy Leary and published by Ken Kesey. That issue, incidentally, is also worth reading for Sirag and Sarfatti on quantum consciousness, and Leary himself on higher intelligence.

CRNLA: Speaking of Ken Kesey, What did you think of Cuckoo's Nest, and where can I get a copy of Spit in the Ocean?

RAW: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is certainly one of my favorite recent novels, but I like Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion even better. In fact, a great deal of the structural rhythms of Illuminatus, especially the space-time warps, were suggested by Kesey's similar techniques in Sometimes a Great Notion. The way the producers of the movie of Cuckoo's Nest swindled Kesey is entirely typical of the way producers and publishers rob writers -- it's perfectly normal Capitalist ethics and typically mammalian.

The last I heard, Kesey was supposed to have the new Spit in the Ocean out by mid-Summer. (Write: 85829 Ridgway Road, Pleasant Hill, OR 97401).

CRNLA: What route did you travel to get to libertarianism?

RAW: Arlen, my wife, discovered Kropotkin's article on anarchism in the Britannica and it immediately convinced us both (1961). We were both highly cynical about the alleged values of Capitalism and State Socialism already, and happy to find an alternative.

CRNLA: What is your present involvement in "movement" activities?

RAW: I'm more involved in space migration, intelligence increase and life extension which seems to me more important than any mammalian politics. What energy I have for terrestrial brawling goes into Wavy Gravy's Nobody for President campaign, the Firesign Theatre's Papoon for President campaign, and the Linda Lovelace for President (which I invented myself, since we ought to have a good-looking cocksucker in the White House for once.) I think these campaigns have some satirical-educational function, and, at minimum, they relieve the tedium of contemplating the "real" candidates, a more-than-usual uninspiring lot this year. Voting wouldn't excite me unless it included electing the directors of the big banks and corporations, who make the real decisions that affect our lives. It's hard to get excited about the trained seals in Washington. Of course, if voting could change the system, it would be illegal. Teachers would be handling out pamphlets for children to take home proving that voting machines cause chromosome damage, and Art Linkletter would claim that a ballot box drove his daughter to suicide.

CRNLA: There's another Vote for Nobody Campaign being run by Malibu. Have you heard of it? Are you interested in it?

RAW: Glad to hear it. There's a third "Nobody for President" headquarters in Washington, D.C. The more the merrier. One of my friends, the ArchDruid of the Berkeley Grove of the Reformed Druids of North America, is running George III for President -- although I admit that the satirical point there is a bit obscure for me. I've also heard, vaguely, about a Who-the-Hell for President campaign. There's also a Bonzo for President poster going around, Bonzo being a chimpanzee who once co-starred with the egregious Ronald Reagan in a rather dumb movie. The American people, who elected Richard Nixon twice, should not find any of these choices absurd. But before leaving this subject, I should mention the sanest political proposal I've heard in years, the Guns and Dope Party proposed by my good friend, Rev. William Helmer (who, like many of the characters in Illuminatus, exists also in so-called consensus reality.) The Guns and Dope Party, as the name suggests, would be based on a platform demanding an end to all government interference with guns and dope. Now, while the gun-nuts tend to be paranoid about the dopers, and vice versa, the Guns and Dope Party is a possible libertarian coalition that would constitute a clear majority and could really win an election. All that's needed for success, then, is for the gun-people and the dope-people to understand fully the advantages of affiliating -- that is, the very good chance of real success at the polls. Hopefully, this might be enough to persuade them to drop their mutual animosity. If this can be accomplished, we will have the first majoritarian libertarian party in American political history. It certainly seems worth thinking about.

CRNLA: Could you tell us more about your politics -- such as how you evolved from Kropotkin to Illuminatus?

RAW: After Prince Peter, I read Tucker, who was being reprinted by Mildred Loomis in a journal called, of all things, Balanced Living. (I later became co-editor of that, and changed the name to Way Out.) After Tucker, I read all the major anarchists and then began writing anarchist essays myself. I soon discovered that, in addition to the 99.8 percent of the morons who make up any political movement, every gang has its own intellectuals defending it (with every variety of sophistry the Jesuits ever devised.) To defend anarchism more effectively, I had to read Marx and Douglas and Gesell and H. George and William Buckley Jr. and so weirder, on and on into the depths of ideological metaphysics -- "the great Serbonian bog where armies whole have sunk," as Burke (the best conservative) once said. Such omnidirectional reading, alas, tends to produce a certain degree of agnosticism, but my basic axioms have remained that (1) a system which consigned me to poverty at birth and Nelson Godawful Rockefeller to riches, is demonstrably insane, and (2) I will do anything, including highway robbery and murder, to avoid leaving my children in poverty. In that sense, the political thinker I probably agree with most is Bernard Shaw, who presented that position, with equal bluntness, in his Major Barbara. I might add, to be even more offensive, that I regard morality and ideology as the chief cause of human misery. I am even more committed to unmitigated skepticism than I am to anarchism -- or to life extension, space migration or high intelligence. With doubt all things are possible. Doubt and courage.

CRNLA -- Your economic views still seem very much in the Benjamin Tucker tradition (especially on rent and interest.) Have you read any of the "Austrian" economists, such as Von Mises and Rothbard? What do you think of them?

RAW: Tucker is certainly a major influence. My economic ideas are a blend of Tucker, Spooner, Fuller, Pound, Henry George, Rothbard, Douglas, Korzybski, Proudhon and Marx. I always try to be inclusive, rather than exclusive. Read to see what I can learn from every school, rather than condemning any idea in its entirety. "Every man has the right to have his ideas examined one at a time," as Ez Pound once wrote. Rothbard is, like Marx and Pound, a brilliant closed mind: excellent for stimulation but anybody who gets dragged into a Rothbardian dogmatic trance should take LSD and try looking at the world through another grid. Von Mises is another who is excellent for stimulation, pernicious if erected into dogma. By and large, the Austrians remind me of a parable by Laurance Labadie, in which a certain tribe has the custom of allowing high-caste individuals to kick low-caste individuals in the butt whenever they pass them in the street. A philosophical school, much like the Austrians, naturally arises to prove rationally that the kicking is not only necessary but just, inevitable, beautiful and altogether glorious. If there were big profits in cancer, there'd undoubtedly be an Austrian school of medicine, proving that carcinoma is good for us.

CRNLA: Tucker is one of my favorite people -- but one of his views with which I can't agree is that in a free society interest rates and rent would disappear. I think the Austrians have advanced economic knowledge sufficiently since Tucker's day to show why these things exist and how they would come about even in an economy consisting totally of free trade. Your reply?

RAW: You can "prove" anything on the verbal level, just be accepting the necessary axioms at the beginning. Empirically, I don't think they can produce a single case in history where a free people elected landlords to own the land; the land monopoly always starts with conquest. Shot and shell are the coins of purchase, as Herbert Spencer said. Except by force of arms, nobody "owns" the earth, anymore than the moon, the planets, the stars themselves. When did God disinherit the majority of humanity, and turn all space over to the "ownership" of the Rockefellers and their friends? Without armed power threatening us, why would anyone but a fool continue to pay these conquistadores the extortion they demand? And, even if the Austrians could convince me that rent is legitimate, I still wouldn't voluntarily pay it to the present landlord class who remain receivers of stolen property. I would pay it to the nearest Indian tribe.

As for interest, I'm not aware of any case in which the credit monopoly has allowed a free currency to compete with them. In fact, every case I know of (e.g. Worgl in the 1930s), ended when the Capitalists used the armed might of the State to stop the competition. The one laboratory experiment in this field, by Don Werkheiser at Central State University in Ohio, confirmed Tucker and refuted the Austrians. Money, after all, is an abstract artifact, like language -- merely symbolized by the paper or coin or whatever. If you can fully grasp its abstractedness, especially in the computer age, it becomes quite clear that no group can monopolize this abstraction, except through a series of swindle. The average primate cannot distinguish the symbol from the referrent, the map from the territory, the menu from the meal. If the usurers had been bolder, they might have monopolized language as well as currency, and people would be saying we can't write more books because we don't have enough words, the way they now say we can't build starships, because we don't have enough money. As Bucky Fuller says, you might as well argue we can't build roads because we lack kilometers.

CRNLA: I think our differences in "rent" are basically in "land-rent" -- you don't see anything wrong if someone wants to rent out power tools and U-haul trailers -- true?

Your main argument with land-rent seems to be with the lack of legitimate owners. I'm assuming legitimate (i.e. non-conquistador) owners when I speak of legitimate rent. If two people went to Mars or the bottom of the ocean and one of them spent his time clearing rocks and fertilizing a section of land and the other spent his time assembling a tractor, and they reach an agreement to exchange the use of the land for one season for the use of the tractor for one season -- has anyone been harmed or exploited or extorted? Should some third party come onto the scene and say, "Hey stop that, you're committing rent?"

RAW: Land-rent, or ground-rent, is the most illegitimate aspect of the rent con, of course, and the main target of Tucker's criticisms. The whole concept of any rent, however, appears somewhat dubious to me, since it seems to presuppose "the accumulation of property in a few aristocratic heaps, at the expense of a great deal of democratic bare ground in between," as Ezra Heywood said. (Heywood's writings on this subject, and other aspects of libertarianism, are at least as important as Tucker's and Spooner's.) People rent, chiefly, when they cannot afford to purchase outright -- when ground-rent, interest and other inequalities haver already created a master-class of aristocrat-owners and a servile class of peasants or proles. I would expect to see rent wither away as the democratization of credit abolishes poverty.

I fail to see how your hypothetical "legitimate (i.e. non-conquistador) owners" would achieve "ownership." (I also don't see the bearing of such hypothetical, or fictitious, cases on the real issues of the real world, where all the landlords are conquistadors, or are receivers of stolen property from the original conquistadors, but that is another question.)

Ownership, in the real world, is a social agreement, a social fiction almost, and is produced only by force or by fraud or by contract. In practice, land ownership is produced only by force or fraud.

This may sound polemic, but it is literally true. The Henry George Schools have a book, Land Title Origins: A Tale of Force and Fraud, in which you can look up, wherever you live in the United States, exactly the acts of force and fraud (murder and robbery) by which land "ownership" was transferred from the Indian tribes to the current receivers of the stolen property. Now, the third alternative, contract, has never been tried, to the best of my knowledge. The only land contracts which I, or any other Tuckerites or Sternerites, would sign in freedom, without force being used against us, would be to our own interest, not to the interest of the landlords. In other words, we simply would not sign a contract giving up ownership of this planet, or any other, to a small group of the Elite who claim they have some better title to ownership than the rest of us have. If you would sign such a contract, I can only hint gently that you are more easily defrauded than we are.

The barter arrangement in your paradigm has nothing to do with perpetual tribute, which is the essence of rent -- indeed, the factor distinguishing barter from rent.

Of course, since Austrian ideas exist as factors in human behavior, I will admit that some people, hoodwinked by those ideas, will continue to pay rent even in freedom, for a while at least. But I think that, after a time, observing that their Tuckerite neighbors are not submitting to this imposture, they would come to their senses and cease paying tribute to the self-elected "owners" of limitless space, on this and other planets, and in interplanetary communities.

Of course, I myself would not pay rent one day beyond the point at which the police ("hired guns, on guard to see that property remains stolen" as Emma Goldman said) are at hand to collect it via "argument per blunt instrument."

CRNLA: Regarding interest: again I assume a totally free market, where there are no legal tender laws and anyone is free to mint, mine, print or grow anything that they feel the market will accept for money. I think that under these conditions the interest rate would be dramatically lower than it presently is but that it would not tend toward zero. Money generally performs at least three interrelated functions: (1) indirect exchange media, (2) provides a common "measuring scale," (3) stores wealth. In the first two money is definitely an "abstract artifact" -- a "cashless" society could exist merely using bookkeeping entries. But when it's used to store wealth it causes trouble as an "abstract" -- bank-runs and the like. Wealth isn't an abstract. It may be subjectively appraised, but it actually exists. When A wants to use B's wealth for a period of time, B is generally compensated for his loss of its use for that period by A -- interest. Among corporations (admittedly, a legal fiction) the issuing of "Tucker-money," (i.e., stock) is a fairly unfettered means of obtaining credit -- but the people who give it to them still expect a return and the corporations still expect to pay it. I'd be interested in seeing the Central State experiment. Usually because of the multiplicity of ever-changing factors involved in the market, it's difficult if not impossible to ever prove anything empirically.

RAW: Of course, my position is based on the denial that money does store wealth. I think it's a semantic hallucination, the verbal equivalent of an optical illusion, to speak at all of money containing or storing wealth. Such thinking should have gone out with phlogiston theory. The symbol is not the referent; the map is not the territory. Money symbolizes wealth, as words symbolize things, and that's all. The delusions that money contains wealth is the mechanism by which the credit monopoly hof study. as gained a stranglehold on the entire economy. As Colonel Greene pointed out in Mutual Banking, all the money could disappear tomorrow morning and the wealth of the planet would remain the same. However, if the wealth disappeared -- if squinks from the Pink Dimension dragged it off to null-space or something -- the money would be worth nothing. You don't need to plow through the dialects of the debate between the Austrians and the free credit people like Tucker and Gesell to see this; any textbook of semantics will make it clear in a few hours of study. Wealth is nature's abundance, freely given, plus the exponential advance of technology via human intelligence, and as Korzybski and Fuller demonstrate, this can only increase an an accelerating rate. Money is just the tickets or symbols to arrange for the distribution -- either equitably, in a free money system, or inequitably, as under the tyranny of the present money-cartel. As you realize, a cashless society could exist merely by keeping bookkeeping entries or computer tapes. Money is a primitive form of such computer tapes, serving a feedback function. If we are not to replace the present banking oligopoly with a programmer's oligopoly, in which the interest will be paid to computer technicians, we must realize that this is all a matter of abstract symbolism -- that it exists by social agreement and nobody owns it, anymore than Webster owns the language. Why is it, incidentally, that the Austrians don't follow their logic to its natural conclusion and demand that we pay interest to the dictionary publishers every time we speak or write?

You have to watch people playing Monopoly, and see them begin to "identify" the paper markers with real value, to understand how the mass hypnosis of Capitalism works. Fortunately, the Head Revolution is still proceeding and more and more people are waking up to the difference between our economic game-rules and the real existential situation of humanity.

Don Werkheiser might sell you a Xerox of his thesis on the Central State experiment if you write to him c/o General Delivery, Ponca, Arkansas. Similar experiments are recounted in Josiah Warren's True Civilization, involving four communes in 19th Century America. Let me conclude this answer by emphasizing that I do not blame the money-monopologists for any of their hoarding behavior. I am sure you will find similar absurdities in the primitive stages of anthropoid civilizations on most planets of G-type stars. Mammalian patterns persist in many other aspects of our society, especially in organized religions.

In my experience, I might add, virtually all adherents of the Austrian economic theories are academics who have never had any dealings with Capitalist corporations. The rosy view the Austrians have of these matters, I think, would collapse in two weeks if they had to deal with the damned corporate pirates as an ordinary worker does. When Joyce went into business briefly, he told Italo Svevo after a while, "You know, I think my partners are cheating me." Svevo answered, "You only think your partners are cheating you! Joyce, you are an artist!" Nixon is the typical Capitalist mentality, entirely identical in all aspects with every businessman I have ever encountered; his only real distinction is that he got caught. Of course, I'm not complaining -- part of the humor of living on this backward planet is listening to the hominids rationalize their predations.

CRNLA: I don't think that the Austrians have a particularly "rosy" view of business. I know a lot of them (Mises and Rothbard for two) consider a total separation of the economy and the government to be the best means of keeping these clowns from becoming too powerful. Most consider a totally free market to be the ultimate in "consumerism" -- not "capitalism" (at least as it's come to be known.)

RAW: Well, there is certainly a kinship between the Austrians and myself on the level of ultimate goals. I merely feel that their views of Capitalism-as-practised-in-the-past-and-present could only be held by college professors. After more than 20 years of working for the corporations in every position from office boy to middle executive, I have not been shocked or surprised in the slightest by the Watergate or post-Watergate scandals.

Austrians believe what they write, they must be somewhat abashed, I should think. For instance, David Friedman has published views about the corporate elite that would be flattering if applied to Jesus and his angels. However, this is turning into a diatribe against the group I find least obnoxious in the whole politico-economic spectrum (because you keep asking me questions that harp on my differences with them.) The orthodox conservatives and liberals, not to mention nazis and marxists, are really pernicious, and the Austrian libertarians are basically okay.

CRNLA: Regarding our Rent Interest discussion: I think that our differences regarding money stem from a difference in definitions. I would include wealth that is used in certain ways under the heading "money," while you limit the definition to just its transactional functions. OK, as long as we know where we are. Once we start dealing with this "wealth-money" as wealth (and forget the word "money"), the problem of interest becomes just a special case of rent. Which really brings us back to property and ownership. I've never attempted to tie the concept of ownership to the metaphysical framework of the universe. I realize that it's merely a human invention -- much like language (which is not to say that other inhabitants of the planet don't use it also) that's purpose is to make the allocation of resources go as smoothly and efficiently and with the least amount of head-cracking as possible. Like the use of language, the use of the concept of "property" doesn't necessarily have to be enforced. When people discover it they use it because it's in their long-range self-interest to do so. (This is not to say that particular instances don't require enforcement -- just that the concept is usually retained without it.) The whole system of ownership/division of labor/rent transactions etc. is merely designed to allocate resources so that they maximize the "vector sum" of everyone's satisfaction -- or more accurately, that this system has the potential to maximize. You don't have to use it. Without this system some alternative method must be found to determine who gets the use of what. LeGuin faced this problem in The Dispossessed. She chose to do it collectively. Ultimately, this results in some system of voting or represenatives or syndics which bear striking resemblance to governments (in addition to being very inefficient.) So the so-called "anarchy" in The Dispossessed is actually a widespread proliferation of governments and poverty. If the determination of the use of resources is placed in the hands of the individual who makes the resources useful (i.e., grows, finds, fertilizes, builds on, digs up, etc.) this provides him with a good deal of independence from the rest of the herd. Seems like a natural for any anarchistic society. This is basically the idea behind my concept of ownership. Could you give a summary of what you consider to be a good method of allocating resources and any concepts similar to ownership that might be contained therein?

RAW: Since ownership is a social fiction, it should obviously be fluid and sensitive to decentralized feedback, to match the evolving needs of the persons involved in whatever social game is being played. In other words, I do not propose one "right way" of doing it; that has to be found pragmatically in each new situation. The traditional feudal-Capitalist system in which one hereditary group of Great Pirates "owns" everything is not acceptable to me, and obviously would not be acceptable to any band of Stirnerite egoists; and, of course, the altruistic forms of socialism and communism are equally unacceptable to me, and I predict they would be equally unacceptable to a band of self-owners in the Stirnite, Tucker or Crowley sense. What would emerge in such a rationalistic-egoistic context would, in a general way, probably follow the guidelines suggested by Stirner, Spooner, Proudhon and Tucker -- except that this would only be in a general way, as all of those writers realized. The specific individuals in each situation would define their own demands according to the specific situation always. The only contracts that would be acceptable to them, as Tucker indicated, would be those that require no enforcement -- that is, those that are so obviously in the enlightened self-interest of each member that their wording would be accepted with the satisfaction the scientific world feels when a hard question is finally answered. If the proposed contract did not have that self-evident feeling character about it -- if it didn't provoke the general feeling, "This is the answer to our disagreements" -- it would not be accepted. I speak with some experience here, being part of an occult order who do indeed govern themselves that way. My only general rules are Crowley's "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" and Leary's Three Commandments for the Neurological Age, to wit: "Thou shalt not alter the consciousness of thy neighbor, 2. Thou shalt not prevent thy neighbor from altering his or her own consciousness, 3. Thou shalt make no more commandments." The so-called "resources" problem is a terracentric delusion. The Universe is a Big Mother.

CRNLA: To return to life extension, space migration and higher intelligence, I worry about the potential of all that being screwed up by the politicians. How do you feel about that?

RAW: If the oncoming mutation to interstellar immortality is screwed up by the politicians (or the corporations), it will be because those of us who see the opportunities in modern science are not adroit enough to outmaneuver the forces of inertia, stupidity and greed. Well, if we're not intelligent enough to overcome such obstacles, then we don't deserve to carry off the mutation at this stage of evolution. The thing to do, in that case, is to sit down and have a good Taoistic laugh at our own presumption. Meanwhile, until the game is over, I happen to think we're winning. The other side is very, very stupid. Concretely, I say that if we have colonization of L5 by 1990, and longevity at about the same time, I think the game is won; some human seed will become cosmic and immortal. Robert Phedra, M.D., has already predicted life extension to 1,000 years.

CRNLA: A thousand years is OK for a start, but it's not enough. Would you settle for "indefinite life extension" if it means transferring your thoughts to a synthetic storage system?

RAW: I'd consider it, but temperamentally I'd rather blast off for the stars when lifespan reaches about 400 years. I think in a 400 year cruise around the galaxy we'd contact races who have immortality already and we might arrange a trade for the technology of it. (Maybe they'd want an unexpurgated Illuminatus. I'm for space, actually, whether there are immortals out there or not. Aside from that bias, I'd support life extension by whatever means, from cryonic suspension to cyborgism to coding ourselves into our computers or whatever. Contrary to the last 2,500 years of "philosophy" among the domesticated and neurotic carnivore species we adorn, there is nothing noble or beautiful or dignified about dying. Like poverty, it is ugly, nasty, brutal and primitive. The function of intelligence is to do better than those mammalian norms.

CRNLA: Could you give us a bibliography on everything you've had published and who published it and if it's still in print?

RAW: Hell, no. I've got about 1,000 articles in print and I can't remember where most of them were printed and don't really care to. The things I'm willing to stand by, in addition to Illuminatus, are the essays being collected in Prometheus Rising: Sex and Drugs, a Playboy Press paperback; my piece on "The Future in Sex" in Oui, November 1975; the article on brainwashing by Leary and me in Oui for June 1976, (which I especially commend to those who thought the consciousness-warps, ego-fissions, reality-mutations and sex-role roulette in Illuminatus were "fantasy"); "Scientific and Experimental Magic" in Gnostica, January 1975; and two pieces on Caryl Chessman and the Marquis de Sade in The Realist, dates unknown. Most of what I wrote before last week bores me.

CRNLA: What kind of stuff was the 500 pages that got edited out of Illuminatus?

RAW: It was sacrilegious, blasphemous, obscene, subversive, funny, surrealistic, trippy and much like what did get published. The portion of hard anarchist propaganda in what got cut is perhaps somewhat greater than in what got printed, but I do not attribute that to a government conspiracy. Editors always amputate the brain first and preserve a good-looking corpse. I knew that, and told Shea they'd do it, so we put in so damned much anarchist material that a lot would be left even after the ceremonial castration.

CRNLA: Is Bob Shea a hard-core libertarian?

RAW: More or less. I really don't want to categorize Shea, who can certainly speak (eloquently) for himself.

CRNLA: Who wrote the Atlas Shrugged parody in Illuminatus? Who wrote the appendices?

RAW: I wrote the Telemachus Sneezed section -- which is not just another kick at poor old Rand, but also a self-parody of Illuminatus, and of Moby Dick, and of my arcane Joycean use of Moby Dick parallels in Illuminatus. Unfortunately, that section was particularly mauled and truncated by the editors. Originally, it was trans-Melvillian satire on all ideology and morality, including my own lapses into ethical thinking. I also wrote the Appendices on various occasions when very stoned as a parody on my style in my more academic essays.

CRNLA: What was Hagbard doing in a government printing office?

RAW: Hagbard was visiting the Discordian agents who have infiltrated the government and sneaked parodies into the bureaucratic forms: SMI2LE = infinity. (Space Migration plus Intelligence Increase plus Life Extension = cosmic consciousness.

CRNLA: Any word on how sales are doing?

RAW: Fine. I might not have to take up highway robbery and murder to get rich after all.

CRNLA: That's good. Who is Tarantella Serpentine and why is she working for Limit newsletter?

RAW: The Discordian conspiracy has been radically decentralized from the beginning, in accordance with Malaclypse the Younger's principle that "We Discordians must stick apart." The last I heard, Tarantella was a fictional character, working in a San Francisco massage parlor (in my other novel, The Sex Magicians.) It doesn't surprise that she has a life of her own, outside my imagination. Illuminatus is only part of a total art work, or "happening" known as Operation Mindfuck. A group of New York Discordians, for instance, celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Illuminati with a public reading of Principia Discordia (which also exists) outside the UN building on May 1 this year. A lodge of Crowleyan magicians in Texas has officially changed their name from the Temple of the Hidden God to the Ancient Illuminated Good Old Boys of Houston. Emperor Norton posters, endorsed by the Illuminati, are for sale through Solidarity Books in Chicago. Everything the Birchers ever claimed about the Illuminati is gradually coming true.

CRNLA: Do you feel frustration living in the "real" world? After reading Illuminatus it's a downer to get back to reality -- even my usual escapist literature is depressing. How do you feel about that?

RAW: Every nervous system creates its own "reality," minute by minute -- or, in the language of Don Juan Matus, we live inside a "bubble" of neural abstractions which we identify with reality. In metaprogramming systems like Tibetan Tantra, Crowleyanity, or Leary's Exo-Psychology, you can make this neurological fact into conscious experience, and you will never be bored or depressed again. Just reading the scientific evidence that this is true, in social psychology or general semantics or neurology or whatever, will not liberate you; one needs actual re-training, in Tantra or Crowley or Leary, to experience what I'm talking about here. It is a great privilege to be conscious in this universe. Those who understand, shine like stars.

CRNLA: I was just speaking in relative terms. Actually, I'm quite excited about reality -- it's probably my favorite thing. I was just wondering if sometimes all the fnords tend to get you a little pissed-off.

RAW: Never. As Tim Leary says, the universe is an intelligence test. The things that hinder me are opportunities to learn more and develop further. That's where amoral thinking is distinctly superior to moral thinking. If you recognize that your latest problem is totally without moral significance -- for instance, you have a disease which you can't, by the wildest stretch of imagination, blame on anybody -- then it's just a question of coping with the situation as best you can. When you realize that people are just as automated as bacteria or wild animals, then you deal with hostile humans the same way you deal with infections or predators -- rationally, without claiming you're "right" or they're "wrong." Then you begin to understand Crowley's great Law of Thelema (Do What Thou Wilt) and you're free, really free, instead of being an actor in a soap opera written by the superstitious shamans who created morality 30,000 years ago. You are also free of anger, hatred and resentment, which are great burdens to drop. They live happiest, my friend, who have understood and forgiven all.

CRNLA: Are there real people, alive or in history, who resemble any of your characters (Hagbard in particular)?

RAW: Absolutely. There are hundreds of thousands of Hagbards around, and all the sleep-walkers are potential Hagbards. They only need to be shaken a bit and awakened. As Jesus said, "Ye are all gods, ye are all children of the Most High."

RAW: Have you ever walked into some public place like a shopping center and said to yourself something like, "Christ, it's solid earthlings! You'd think there'd be at least a couple of aliens strolling around looking at the shops, etc." ?

RAW: Curiously, I belong to a loose association of skeptical Contactees -- people who have had a Contact experience but are too skeptical to take it literally. There are over a hundred of us in the U.S. alone, most scientists, and I think that the gradual surfacing of this story will be one of the major cultural shocks of our time. Right now, Martin Gardner has already registered his viewpoint and I trust that MIT will have the courtesy to print Dr. Sarfatti's rebuttal. I must add that most of us who are involved in this have grown extremely doubtful about the now-conventional extraterrestrial explanation and are trying out various explanatory models that are even more mind-blowing. Those who are interested in this subject might look up my article, "The Starseed Signals," in Gnostica for June 1975, and Dr. Jacques Vallee's book, The Invisible College. As the divine Mullah Nasruddin said, "If you haven't seen me before, how do you know it is me?"

CRNLA: What are your plans for future books?

RAW: Prometheus Rising will be published by Llewellyn next year. It's a collection of my essays on space age occultism and post-LSD consciousness. I hope it will knock holes in the Christian revival, the Hindu revival, the Buddhist revival and all the other neolithic metaphysics going around these days. A book on immortality research, possibly entitled Death Shall Have No Dominion, is going around New York seeking a publisher. A book on Dr. Timothy Leary, and a new novel called Schrodinger's Cat, about quantum paradoxes and parapsychology, are also in the works. Leary and I are working on a collaborative venture called The Game of Life which started out as one volume and became three. It modestly attempts to deduce the next four billion years of evolution from the data of Leary's brain-change research.

CRNLA: Who did you know in the old Berkeley crowd such as Danny Rosenthal, Sharon Presley, Tom McGivern? How about Kerry Thornley?

RAW: I never heard of any of those people except Kerry Thornley and Sharon Presley. Kerry is one of the co-creators of Discordian atheology, which is why volume one of Illuminatus is co-dedicated to him. Sharon is a fine person who I've only met twice but liked vastly. I'm sure all those others are excellent people, too, but I've never met them.

CRNLA: The editor of New Libertarian Weekly, SEK3, would like you to write for them -- "... we're a hell of a lot better than SRAF and can even pay a token amount, and can run stuff he can't get past Playboy and Oui."

RAW: I'd be delighted.

CRNLA: Do you have any concluding thoughts for our readers?

RAW: Absolutely not. As Korzybski said, nothing is conclusive, and every sentence should end with an et cetera. Or perhaps Woody Allen said it better: "Not only is there no God, but you can't even get a plumber on weekends." The answer to that, of course, is to become your own god and your own plumber. That may be the fundamental secret of the Illuminati.

2010-12-27T07:00:00.000-08:00

A look at the new Twitter

(Reprinted from the Lawton Constitution.)

Twitter, the popular Internet site and service, has launched a new and improved version of itself.

For those of you who need a refresher: Twitter is a Web service that allows anyone to set up an account and post short messages. Each message is limited to 140 characters -- one or two sentences.

This is obviously a limitation, but it's also a strength. The short messages make Twitter a Web service that also works well on a cell phone.

And it turns out that even celebrities can manage to write a few words, so Twitter has made it easy for famous athletes or actors to stay in touch with their fans. People who can actually write can use Twitter to point to longer blog posts or articles by posting links.

Anyone who sets up a Twitter account can choose to follow other Twitter accounts, and may also post messages and try to attract followers. You can view whom each person is following.

I have accounts on both Twitter and Facebook.

Facebook seems to be the more popular service, and more of my friends are there.

But I have more control over Twitter, because it's easier to choose who to receive messages from.

I use Twitter as a news service to keep up with what's going on in the world. I subscribe to Twitter accounts from the New York Times and CNN, and from various writers and commenters who interest me, and also a few friends.

Because the messages are short, I can use Twitter to keep up with the news while doing other work.

When the leader of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, was in a British court trying to post bail, I followed a series of short reports on Twitter as I went about my workday.

The new version of Twitter -- you can try it, or stay with the old version for awhile -- has some nice changes.

Clicking on a Tweet opens up a window on the right side of the page which provides more information, including comments from other Twitter users.

Clicking on a username for a message provides information on that person, without having to go to another Web page.

Twitter says it has also made it easier to embed photos and videos in messages.

For many people, what Twitter does with its Web site is irrelevant. Many people never go to Twitter.com at all, but access their Twitter messages and send their their own missives using a third party application, such as Tweetdeck. I have a widget on my Gmail account called Twittergadget that I often use. Twitter can be accessed on cell phones as well as computers.

Ping.fm is a Web site that allows simultaneous posting of the same update to Twitter, Facebook and many other social messenging sites. Threadsy allows people to monitor their e-mail, Facebook updates and Twitter updates at one Web site, putting all of the messages together in one place.

Twitter also has inspired two Web sites which track who used to follow your messages but dumped your feed. The sites are who.unfollowed.me and useqwitter.com.

(Tom Jackson wants to hear about interesting Southwest Oklahoma Web sites and blogs and sites his readers find useful or interesting. Write me attom.jackson@gmail.com. I'm on Twitter as jacksontom.)

2010-12-20T14:37:00.000-08:00

Robert Anton Wilson: The Trajectories interview

[Editor's note: I think I have something special here. This is one of the best interviews with Robert Anton Wilson I've ever read, and it's one that hasn't been reprinted on the Internet, until now.

It was published in issue No. 5 of Trajectories. This is NOT the magazine of the same name that Robert Anton Wilson published, but a journal published in the 1980s in Austin, Texas.

"In fact, I didn't know at the time RAW published a mag of that name, and believe that curiosity on his part is one reason he granted the interview. We determined they were different enough in scope to not worry about the name, and in fact, mine actually started publication first," says Richard Shannon, who published the Texas Trajectories, along with co-publisher Susan Sneller.

"As best I remember (and Rick probably has a better memory than I do), this all started with him. He found out Bob was going to be in town, and he knew that I was a HUGE fan of the ILLUMINATUS! trilogy. So he set up the interview, the three of us met for dinner (I think Rick picked up the check), and we had a tape recorder going the whole time. Rick even has a couple of photos of the occasion," Shiner says.

"It was kind of a weird interview. At the time, I felt like Bob was not really listening to me, kind of talking over me and delivering somewhat prefab responses. Yet when I listened back to the tape, it was a really good interview, and he sounded very compassionate and wise.. "

The interview is reprinted with Shiner and Shannon's permission. In fact,when I wrote to them, Shannon mailed a copy of the zine from Texas to Shiner (now a resident of the Research Triangle area of North Carolina referenced in my recent reprint of Arthur Hlavaty's article) and Shiner kindly scanned the interview TWICE, one as a jpeg so I could see what it looked like, and once as text so I could reproduce it.]

Conducted by Lewis Shiner, Susan Sneller, and Rick Shannon

We met Robert Anton Wilson in the lobby of the Marriott. It was April 28, 1988, and he was in Austin for a lecture and a workshop. He was dressed casually, his receding white hair combed straight back, his neatly trimmed beard slightly worn just under his lower lip, where he habitually rubs it while talking. He was only a little reserved, considering he'd committed himself to an evening with total strangers. We had a relaxed interview over dinner in the hotel. His answers were slow and well considered, delivered in a somewhat gruff voice that still has the accent of his New York upbringing.

Are you involved with computers?

I know a lot of people in Silicon Gulch. I know a lot of the gossip and shoptalk, but I don't do anything with my computer except write. I know I've got this enormous machine there that will do a million other things, but I'm so busy writing, writing, writing. Overproduction is the only way for a writer of minority appeal to survive.

I'm always trying new things to supplement my income. I did a new type of seminar in Boulder a few weeks ago, which I co-created with a friend named Liz Freeman. Instead of a regular seminar it was a game. Everybody who came in — we had about 40 people — was taken to a little room, and told who they were playing and what their goal was, and nothing else. And then the party began. There were five levels of deception, which we thought would be a lot of fun. The party ran from 3 in the afternoon to 9 at night, and by 9 most people had only got to the second level. We had made it too bloody complicated. Nobody found out how complicated it was. It was all based on competing conspiracies. I've been thinking that could be adapted for a computer game, for networking. If people had enough time they could get back on, in a week, you know, after they've thought it over, and figure out the deceptions.

Do you know about Steve Jackson's Illuminati game?

Everybody I meet thinks it's based on my Illuminatus! novels and I'm getting royalties on it. He claim it's not based on the novels, so I'm not getting royalties on it. Different lawyers give me different opinions. Decide for yourself.

Are you married?

Very. We're going to be celebrating our 30th anniversary soon. 30 years.

That's impressive.

I don't know if it's wonderful, but it's sure unusual. Especially in the circles we travel in. The average California marriage lasts about 6 months.

You grew up in New York, then moved to Ohio. Why Ohio?

I was offered a job editing a magazine for a place called the School for Living, which later moved to Maryland. The School for Living had a very interesting philosophy, which was "back to nature, live on the land, eat health food" — and a bit of anarchism and Wilhelm Reich. I agreed with about half of that and thought the over half was kind of flakey, but it was interesting. I thought it would be a great idea to live on a farm and see how I did at it.

I enjoyed it. We were there for two years.

Were you influenced by your years on the farm?

Yeah, I think so. My children were very young then. I guess the oldest was about eight when we left Ohio. I used to look at the grass and crops and trees and goats and cows and at my children and my wife and myself and think about evolution — all these different types of intelligence. I got fascinated by the intelligence of insects. It turned me into a pantheist. No, pantheist is not correct. The technical word is pan-psych-ist. I became more and more convinced that everything was intelligent.

Recently I read a Sufi philosopher of the 14th century who said, "Within every atom are a thousand rational beings." That's just what I've suspected for years.

How did you encounter Aleister Crowley?

I was having lunch with Alan Watts in 1969 and I told him I was writing a book. He asked me what it was about so I told him a bit about the Illuminatus trilogy, including the eye in the pyramid, and he said, "That reminds me of the most wonderful book I've read all year, called the Eye in the Triangle, by Israel Regardie." So I made a note of that. I was working for Playboy at the time — I went back to the office after lunch and I told the Playboy library to order the book. Editors had that privilege at Playboy; you could order any book you wanted and the library would get it in. So I read it and it got me fascinated, and that's how I got involved with Crowley.

So you came into Illuminatus through the conspiracy angle rather than the occult angle.

That's right. I was educated to believe that there are no conspiracies, or if there are we shouldn't talk about them. To think about conspiracies was somehow uncouth or lower class or might cause you to turn into a Nazi in your sleep or something. You should never think about conspiracies or talk about them. But then with the Kennedy assassination ... I just couldn't believe the Warren Commission. I started studying a lot of the different conspiracy theories and then I started running into the really kooky ones. Bob Shea and I used to go out for drinks every Friday evening after work and solve all of the problems of the world over a few Bloody Marys. We were talking about all of these kooky conspiracy theories and Shea said, "Why don't we write a book about all the craziest conspiracy theories." And eventually the Illuminatus trilogy developed out of that.

What have you been reading lately?

The book that impressed me most, recently, is The Psychobiology of Mind/Body Healing by Eugene Lawrence Rossi. It's a book about the neuropeptide system, and how the ideas in the cortex affect the hypothalamus, which affects the neuropeptide system. He explains how people can die of black magic curses and how they can get better if they have faith in something, like Christian Science, or Vitamin C — like Norman Cousins, who had an allegedly fatal disease. Cousins just took massive doses of Vitamin C and looked at comedies on television, and cured himself. I've known these things were possible for many years; Rossi's book gives the best, up-to-date, scientific explanation of how it works, how the neuropeptide system controls the immune system, how the immune system fights off disease or doesn't fight off disease. For instance, we all get cancer eventually, and most of us fight it off. The immune system is strong enough to fight it off. It's when the immune system fails that the disease kills you.

I'm a model of good health considering all my vices. Tim Leary said that recently, he said, "Bob is walking proof of the neurosomatic circuit — he has all the bad habits they warn us against and he's still healthy."

You've often said that we can't trust history — so how do you go about getting accurate historical research?

I don't know how accuracy is to be found in history, given the amount of prejudice and coverup. I don't have any faith in my historical research. I use what seems .... usable. I'm not entirely arbitrary; I can tell the difference between a real whacko and somebody who's fairly intelligent and rational. But even the people who are fairly intelligent and rational have their prejudices, so I don't trust them completely. Sometimes the whackos maybe were accurate.

You feel you've developed a nose for political agendas?

There's a certain style that warns you. There's a paranoid style of writing. When you see that you know you have to take everything very skeptically.

Are there any plans to restore the pages Dell ordered cut from Illuminatus?

No, all that got lost. Dell had the book for five years before they published it. They kept announcing they'd publish it next year, and then the editor would get fired, or quit to take a better job, and the new editor wouldn't know anything about it. The thing dragged on for five years. Finally we got a definite announcement they were going to publish it, but they wanted us to cut 500 pages, and they'd then divide it up into three volumes, which we'd never intended. Shea and I were so worn down, after five years of struggle, we said, "Okay, we'll cut 500 pages." So I said to Shea, "Let's cut it like Godard cut Breathless, totally at random. They're buying it by the pound, they have no concept of literary structure or anything like that, so let's give them a literary structure that's totally original, a stochastic structure." Shea agreed with me, so we just made our cuts at random. We didn't use any principle at all — there are cuts in the middle of dialog, people talking about one subject and suddenly they're talking about another. It's just like Godard did it with Breathless, even ten minutes he made a cut of a few feet of film. It kept the audience off balance. It seemed to work with Illuminatus, too.

When we were doing the cutting I was in Mexico and Shea was in Chicago and Dell was in New York, so in the process of these pages flowing back and forth through this loop, what got cut was lost permanently. I decided to accept it in the Zen way as a lucky accident. It turned out to be an even weirder book than we had planned. And the people at Dell were totally uninterested in literary qualities — they just thought it had enough sex and violence so it might succeed, and had no concept of literature at all. Nobody commented, "Hey you turned your book into total chaos." They were weighing it by the pound. If you've got a big name like Michener you can get a fat book published because everything he writes is a bestseller, but if you're unknown they divide it up into three books, cut it down to a size they can afford to lose in case it doesn't succeed.

Every chapter is based on a Sephiroth of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. You can still find that in there if you look hard enough. It was very carefully planned originally. For instance, Simon Moon's first words in the book are "Crown Point," which turns out to refer to the jail Dillinger escaped from, but it also refers to Kether, the title of the first chapter, and Kether means "crown" in Hebrew and is symbolized by a point. That cabalistic symbolism runs all through the book, every page has parallels with the Tree of Life. There were 22 appendixes, which were the 22 paths on the Tree of Life, and that got cut to eight. I finally just decided to regard it as a joke. That's the way you have to regard capitalism or you either go crazy or become a socialist and I didn't want to do either.

How about politics?

I've gotten increasingly agnostic and I've gotten older, and increasingly wary of ideologies, including my own. So if you tied me to a lie detector, with a gun to my head, I would have to say, most of the time, I'm somewhere on the libertarian-anarchist continuum. But I distrust myself. I distrust being rigidified and getting dogmatic, so I keep challenging my own assumptions and looking at alternatives. Knowing how dumb I am, I don't want to become another dogmatist. I saw what happened to Ayn Rand and sweet Jesus forbid it should happen to me.

Now my political activity consists of making regular contributions to Amnesty International, which I regard as insurance, not as charity. Amnesty has a very simply policy, namely, "People should not be locked up for their ideas." I'm all for that. I figure anybody in jail for his or her ideas is depriving my brain of nourishment. If they could get out and publish their ideas it might inspire me; it might give me new ideas; it might cause brain growth. As long as one heretic is locked up, part of my brain is locked up and I'm not getting the nourishment I need. So that's the one thing I still contribute to regularly: Amnesty. My wife contributes to the American Friends Service Committee — I don't, because she's already doing it. That's about it. I'm very cynical about politics. I have a wan, nostalgic hope that Jesse Jackson will win, just because a black president would restore a balance. So would a woman president, of course.

Large parts of The Earth Will Shake are openly didactic —

I don't mind being didactic. It's unfashionable, but my favorite writers were all didactic — Dante was didactic, Shakespeare was didactic, Chaucer, Jonathan Swift, Ezra Pound.

Do you see a big distinction between your fiction and non-fiction?

No, because I can't tell the difference myself. I think it's entirely arbitrary which books are put in fiction and which are put in non-fiction. I'm a big fan of Charles Fort, and one of the things he said that I especially treasure is, "I frankly offer this as fiction, in the same sense that Genesis and The Origin of Species and Euclid's Geometry are fiction."

Strieber's Communion is entertaining, whether it was true or not.

It's a very clever work of art. He creates more terror in that "factual" book than most "fiction" writers. He knows how to build up the tension and get under your skin. I'm pretty skeptical about abductee stories, but there was a point about three quarters of the way through that book where I found myself looking around the room to see what damned thing might have gotten in in the last few minutes.

I'm not convinced Communion is fiction. I'm not convinced it's non-fiction. It's in a quantum "maybe" state as far as I'm concerned.

Were you a Lovecraft fan before you got into Illuminatus?

I was a Lovecraft fan since I was about 12. I think it was when I was 12 I heard "The Dunwich Horror" with Ronald Coleman as the narrator. It impressed the hell out of me. I started looking for Lovecraft and I couldn't find any Lovecraft books, but I found a few short stories by him in anthologies. Then when I was 14 I found a whole book of Lovecraft, edited by August Derleth. So Lovecraft has been a passion with me most of my life. I like the way he uses techniques that make you think, "Gee, maybe this isn't fiction." That fascinates me, because doubt lasts longer than faith and provokes thought rather than discouraging it.

Surrealism fascinates me, too. The first Surrealist show, people had to come in through a garden where there was a taxicab, and it was raining inside the taxicab but not outside. When the audience — or victims — got past that, the first thing they saw in the building was a big sign that Andre Breton had hung up that said, "Dada is not dead! Watch your overcoat!" At that point the distinction between art and life had been completely obliterated. I aim for that in all my books.

I like happenings, I like that game I was telling you about earlier. I like to blur the distinctions, because most of what we think is perception is actually projection anyway. I like to make people more aware that they are creating the reality they inhabit. Lovecraft taught me a lot about how to do that, in a literary way.

My favorite of all my books is The Widow's Son because I think I created uncertainty better there than anywhere else. I don't think there's anybody in the world who can tell how much of that book is real and how much is fiction. Including me. I don't absolutely know how much to trust my sources.

--- and how much you made up may have been true.

I've had that happen, too. In Illuminatus I made Beethoven a member of the Illuminati. That was a parody of the Christian Crusade in Oklahoma — they were claiming the Beatles were Communist agents. I decided to put it back 200 years and make Beethoven an Illuminati agent. And, my God, that was just a joke, but it's true! Beethoven either belonged to the Illuminati or was certainly a fellow traveler. He was very closely associated with them. I had no idea that was true when I wrote it.

What other SF writers have influenced you?

Robert Heinlein. Some people say Heinlein's later stuff isn't as good as his earlier stuff. There are weaknesses in his later books but there are good things in his later books too. In some ways I think he's gotten worse, and in some ways he's gotten better. But his books are all interesting. They're certainly provocative.

Some people regard books as a narcotic. I regard books as a stimulant. If they don't stimulate me, to hell with them. Same thing with movies. I don't want soothing, sedative movies. I want provocative, challenging movies.

The next science fiction writer who's been a major influence on me is Olaf Stapledon. I think he's the greatest science fiction writer who ever lived, and a greater philosopher than Bertrand Russell or Sartre.

Phil Dick is another of my favorites. In fact there's a lot of synchronicities between Phil and me. Phil and I had a lot of the same sort of paranormal experiences at around the same time. Phil was just as agnostic about it as I am. Cosmic Trigger and VALIS were statements for that time. I'm still mulling over a lot of those things, and Phil would be mulling too, if he were here.

What kind of a person is Timothy Leary?

That's a hard one. Tim says there are 24 Timothy Learys, and which one you contact is a measure of your own intelligence. I guess I've encountered about 18 of them. He continually astounds me. I find him admirable, at times. He's certainly brilliant. He's very funny. At times I find him annoying. He can be very cold and inhuman, and he can be very warm and sympathetic. There are so many facets to Leary that anything you say about him is untrue. He's just too complicated for anybody to summarize him briefly.

Visiting Tim in prison was a really major influence on me. Seeing how he kept himself high and cheerful under those conditions convinced me it can be done.

Have you done any short fiction?

I had a few short stories published, but I sort of stopped writing short fiction when I started getting books published.

Do you have a favorite of your own works?

I like all my books. [Laughs.] If you don't enjoy your work, you might as well give up. Frank Lloyd Wright was a witness in a court trial once, and he was asked, "What is your profession?" and he said, "Architect." The next question was, "What is your standing in your field?" and he said, "I am the world's greatest architect." His friends told him later, "Frank, you carry this arrogance too far sometimes." He said, "What could I do? I was under oath."

You must feel you've had some kind of growth.

I don't think I'm moving towards becoming a Platonic Ideal Writer. I think my style has improved over the years. I think I'm more versatile with certain types of dialog, styles of dialog for different types of characters. And the conversational tone--I'm getting better at that, without getting sloppy, or losing such intelligence as I possess. I think my style has developed, and I'd like to go on developing it.

I want to write a whole book about Joyce someday. I have a lot of ideas for books. One of them is The Truth About Sex. I probably will never do this one; that's why I talk about it so much. I'd like somebody to rip the idea off, so I don't have to do it. There was a book that was a bestseller, ten or 15 years ago, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But You Were Afraid To Ask Your Doctor, and it was in question and answer form. I thought the author was one of the stupidest people I'd ever read. I decided to do the book correctly. It'd be in question and answer form, but instead of one answer to each question there would be four or five, or maybe even a dozen, all from leading authorities, and all contradicting one another. The idea of the book was to show that the authorities don't know what the hell they're talking about. It's an area full of prejudice. There's no real science of sexology yet; it's all various people expressing their personal prejudices and disguising it as psychology or sociology. So I thought, take a question like, "What causes homosexuality?" and give twelve different answers just to show how much the scientific community really knows; they can't even agree about a simple thing like that. "What causes heterosexuality," for that matter? "What is the difference between vaginal and clitoral orgasm?" I'd get about 24 different opinions on that, in the literature.

The reason I'll probably never do that book is getting the permissions from all these authors is a Herculean task, which publishers always dump on the writer. And once they found out what they had agreed to, the experts would all be furious because they'd all look like idiots, because they're all overly dogmatic. They'd be very furious and god knows what they'd do about it. So I hope somebody else does that book and I don't have to do it.

I'd also like to write a book about Pearl Harbor. The revisionist historians have been thoroughly slandered and are mostly out of print. I wouldn't be adding much original; I think everything worth saying has been said by Charles Beard and Harry Elmer Barnes and James J. Martin and a few others. But their books are out of print or hard to find. My book would be just one more effort against what Barnes called "the historical blackout." One more effort to put the facts on record.

Or, I'd like to do a book of eight essays on eight things that everybody believes about history that can be clearly proven to be dubious at best and probably untrue. That the arrack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise. Or the common image of Christopher Columbus. It's pretty well documented that he was a Jewish homosexual, but that's not what we're taught in school. And the genocide of the American Indians. Americans all assume genocide was invented by Hitler. I'd like to document that. Hitler was just copying the example of this country.

I'd like to do an essay on the case against Earl Warren. I remember getting into an argument with Ralph Ginsberg, and he said "I believe the Warren Report, because I believe Earl Warren was a great liberal and an honest man." So I'd like to do a whole review on Warren's record, beginning with putting' the Japanese in concentration camps during World War II, and show what a great liberal Warren really was.

Another book that I am doing, as a matter of fact, when I get the time--I've already discussed it with Falcon press--is New Age, Sewage. I just did a book, The New Inquisition, which was on the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. As usual, when you start writing a polemic, you get carried away by your own rhetoric. I figure I gave them such a drubbing that people are going to think I'm entirely on the opposite side--this being an Aristotelian culture where people think in either/or terms. So I figure I ought to give the New Age a drubbing too, to show what my true position is: agnostic, against all dumb dogma. I especially want to do a chapter on Ramtha, demonstrating that you can be dead 40,000 years and still be a bore.

Have you ever been tempted to pull an L. Ron Hubbard, and start your own religion?

Oddly enough, I've never been seriously tempted, although I think I could get away with it. It reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my daughters recently. She asked if she could borrow some money to pay her auto insurance, and I said, "Sure," and I sent her the money. She called back a few days later to say she got the money and thank me, and I said, "Would you agree there are 20 million cars in California, at least?" And she said, "Oh, at least 20 million." I said, "The lowest insurance you can get is $400." She said, "Yeah." So that's eight billion dollars a year the insurance companies are making, in one state. Eighty billion in ten years. So that was worth spending at least ten million on bribing legislators--maybe a hundred million--to get a law like that through. So I said, "Why don't we start our own insurance company." And she said, "I'm afraid that would be bad karma." And that's why I haven't started my own religion. It's bad karma to swindle people.

What's your opinion on pornography?

I agree with Magnus Magnusson. He's the host of an English quiz show called Mastermind, that's a very--not intellectual, but erudite quiz show. The contestants are all experts in some rare field of knowledge, like German history from 1872 to 1886, or Irish poetry of the 7th and 8th centuries--things like that. The winner is the person who can answer the most questions in one minute.

Anyway, Magnus Magnusson was on an Irish television show and somehow the subject of pornography came up and he said, "I'm absolutely against all censorship." And the host said, "That's on the usual Libertarian grounds?" And Magnusson said, "Of course. But I also like pornography." And I thought, my god, that's the first time I ever I heard that. Everybody else who defends it, they argue on these abstract things, the First Amendment or whatever--in England they quote John Stewart Mill. Magnusson was the first person honest enough to say, "I like it, you know." I like a lot of it. I'm not only against censorship, but I feel the damn people who want to ban it are interfering with my right to enjoy myself.

Kiddie porn is a different issue--that's nothing to do with censorship, that has to do with abusing children.

There's a lot of bad pornography around, but there's a lot of bad detective stories, a lot of bad science fiction. One of the things that fascinates me is, the best pornography I've seen recently is by women, and it's on the Playboy channel. There's a company called Femme Productions. They make very good soft-core porn, very artistic and very sensitive.

The issue that bothers me, where my libertarianism starts to break down, is not pornography, but the exploitation of violence in films. There's growing clinical evidence that it does tend to produce more violence, and that scares the hell out of me. It's caused me a long, painful reexamination of my principles, from which I have not yet emerged; I'm still working on it.

It was right up in the center of my attention in the last few weeks in LA because of this movie Colors, in which Hopper used the actual jackets of actual LA gangs. I can see why he did it, artistically, it makes the film more vivid and real. But the upshot is a lot of the community is in hysterics that this will inspire the gangs and it has already. There's been one shooting, The guy was waiting on line to see the film.

That is a hard one. Hopper is a serious artist, there's no doubt about that. But that's a very hard one and I don't have the answer. I don't believe it's necessary to have the answer all the time. It's better to think a while.

People need to use their creativity to come up with nonviolent solutions.

You know who's urging that? Colonel Jim Channon. He's retired, but he's still a consultant for the Pentagon. He keeps writing proposals for non-violent solutions to problems. He suggested we need a class of Buddhist soldiers. He's a really far-out guy and so far he's had no major influence on American policy.

Has he published?

He has, and he's been widely interviewed. His proposals on hijackers have been used a couple of times. His proposal is they should be given maximum media coverage and allowed to talk to television as much as they want--hours and hours on end if they want to. He says what motivates terrorists is their feeling that nobody in the world is listening. If they feel that everybody is listening, then it's easier to negotiate with them. Where that has been tried, it has tended to work. He's got a lot of other ideas, about the Army going into third world nations where there are anti-Capitalist revolutions brewing and instead of trying to kill the anti-Capitalists, go in and build dams and bring modern technology in, and give the people a better life.

The Sandanistas originally wanted help from the US and we wouldn't give it.

Ho Chi Minh's constitution for North Vietnam , began, "We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men ... " It begins like the Declaration of Independence. He was very influenced by Jefferson. But this country supported the French against them, and when the French couldn't fight anymore, JFK sent American troops in, so Ho became more and more anti-American.

While we're on this subject--I was saying some favorable things about Heinlein a while ago. The thing that irritates me most about Heinlein is his constant pro-war propaganda. What irritates me is not only that I disagree with him, but that it's inconsistent with his basic position. Heinlein's basic position is "never trust the government." They're a bunch of thieves, liars, and looters, they're out to rob us and deceive us and gull us and abuse us all the time, except when they say, "Hey, we want you to go kill a bunch of people on another continent." Then we must believe them, and we're traitors if we have any doubts whatsoever. That is such a thumping, enormous contradiction. How do these crooked, stupid bureaucrats suddenly become honest people we should believe once they declare war?

The only people who are pro-war who make sense are the people who believe the government is divine all the time. I wanted to get this into some science fiction magazine--thank you for giving me the opportunity. I hope Heinlein sees it. [In fact Heinlein died before this interview was transcribed.] Oh, well, if a few people who've been influenced by Heinlein notice this, and notice that contradiction in his thinking, then it's worth saying.

Any final thoughts?

I'd like to see people get a lot smarter, a lot kinder, a lot less gullible, a lot more skeptical, and a lot less paranoid, and a lot more optimistic. I'd follow Leary's basic rule: TFYQA. Think for yourself, question authority.

2010-11-26T13:00:00.000-08:00

Wilson: the Diagonal Relationship letters

In the late 1970s, science fiction fan Arthur Hlavaty began to publish a series of fanzines called Diagonal Relationship. The custom for science fiction fanzines was to send a copy to anyone who was willing to write a letter of comment.

Robert Anton Wilson wrote a series of letters of comment to Diagonal Relationship. Beginning today, I will serialize them, with one letter for each blog entry. When I have finished running them, I will then publish the letters as one block of copy and link to it in the Feature Articles and Interviews section.

Here is the first letter:

The Diagonal Relationship 9, 1979

Concerning "Again, Dangerous Fuck": Words have both denotations, which can be found in the dictionary, and connotations, which vary from one nervous system to the next.

Words like fuck, cunt, etc. became "obscene" when Puritanism took over the English-speaking world. They are gradually becoming de-obscenified in various segments of the population, but are still charged with heavily obscene connotations for other large segments. Thus, their use is fraught with psychological ambiguity--which makes them fascinating for writers of a certain cast of mind; namely, those who are convinced that ambiguity is the essence of the human situation.

Joyce broke through two centuries of Taboo to bring these words back into literature. in Ulysses, because they are present in the human psyche (even in Puritanical Ireland in 1904), and the psychological truth he was seeking could not be attained while tacitly submitting to the then-prevalent hypocrisy by pretending the words were not there. As used by Joyce, none of these words are obscene, anymore than a laboratory report is obscene. Joyce eliminated obscenity from his world view, as he eliminated anger, pity, sentimentality, and all other subjectivities; he simply observes, with Zenlike detachment, and reports what he sees.

D. H. Lawrence, on the other hand, attempted by brute force, or the poetic equivalent of brute force, to transform obscenity into tenderness and beauty; to cure Puritanism by artistic "persuasion." He invented a whole new way of writing about sex, which has been so universally imitated that we now assume it is the only way to write about it. In the course of the alchemical transformation of obscenity into loveliness, Lawrence rediscovered a childish innocence in so-called "dirty" words. Just as Mellors lapses into his lower-class dialect as his intimacy with Connie increases, so both lovers lapse into "obscene" language as their passions mount;

Lawrence obviously realized that the semantics of love is a reinfantilization in some ways.

When Mellors rhapsodizes about Connie's cunt in working-class argot, he is deliberately rejecting his educated self and returning to the first language he imprinted as a child, with all its sensory, numismatic, emotive connotations. In short, as Kenneth Burke noted in A Rhetoric of Motives, Lawrence's use of these words is a species of baby talk, which was necessary to get down to the primordial level below and before the point where obscenity and shame are learned.

William S. Burroughs, on the third hand, uses obscenity with full obscene connotations intended. He is exploring those areas of the psyche where obscenity (sex hatred) and murder (life hatred) are bred. When he gives the formula for Nova as "Before I give an inch, the whole fucking shit-house goes up in chunks." he is clinically precise. The place from which nuclear holocaust comes is the place where every bodily function is charged with rage and fear.

Thus, fuck has three markedly different connotations in three of the major stylists of our century--and as many other connotations as there are writers and readers.

Test question: How is Ezra Pound using fuck in the following lines from Canto 39, describing Circe's enchanted island?

Girls talked there of fucking,

beasts talked there of eating,

All heavy with sleep,

fucked girls and fat leopards.

Second test question: In Canto 46, Pound asks, "Hast 'ou found a nest softer than cunnus?" What happens if we replace the Elizabethan and Latin and modernize the line to "Have you found a nest softer than cunt?"

If we ever have a totally post-Puritanical and post-obscene society, calling a man "you prick" or a woman "you cunt" will be the highest form of praise, since it will imply that they are delightful, lovely, exciting, creative, and cute.

Diagonal Relationship letters, No. 2

(Second in a series of letters of comment by RAW reprinted from the pages of the fanzine Diagonal Relationship).

The Diagonal Relationship 10, 1979

Alas, I have noted that in my letter in DR 9 I use the word "numismatic" where I meant "numinous." I guess all that fucking dope has finally fucked up my head.

Oh, well, even Homer nodded; jeder macht ein kleine dummheit; and the function of our mistakes is to remind us that humility is endless.

Do you realize that almost everybody is a member of a minority now? The Civil Rights Commission, which investigates complaints of discrimination, said in a recent news story that 86% of the population can have their complaints investigated since they belong to one minority or another.

Actually, since women are 51% of the population, and Gays are estimated between 12% and 37% (depending on whose figures you believe), and Blacks are around 11%, 11m surprised that only 86% of the population qualify as minorities. There are also Jews, Chicanos, Buddhists, atheists, Orientals, eighty dozen unpopular religious sects, Arabs, etc., etc. On second thought, I'm sure the 14% who don't presently qualify as minorities would qualify if the bureaucrats looked into the matter more closely.

Concerning your debate with Tony Parker about robots: I suggest that it is amusing and profitable to regard all of us as robots. Some of our programs are hard-wired via genetics. Others are softer and more flexible, since they are due to imprinting or conditioning. Conditioning, of course, is softer than imprinting.

Obviously, if this metaphor is accepted, we are presently in the process of derobotizing ourselves, becoming self-programmers or even metaprogrammers in Lilly's sense. We began to learn deconditioning with Pavlov and have learned more from Skinner, Wolpe, and Co. We learned, or some of us learned, reimprinting from the psychedelic revolution. Current work on genetics opens the possibility of rewriting the genetic Code and really becoming free masons, cocreators of our destiny.

If this is plausible, then any use of such sciences for other purposes, i.e., for more efficient conditioning, for more rigid imprinting, for the production of genetic drones, etc., is part of the general trend to increase our robothood.

Moral: Today is the first day of the rest of history. Are we becoming more efficient self-programmers or are we drifting along in oar old programs or passively allowing the many skilled Head Mechanics around to program us into their trips?

Which brings me to Buck Coulson's question in DR 9: What do we do with all the dumb people? As a libertarian, I find the only acceptable answer is: give them a chance to get smart. Fortunately, the chance to get smart is becoming more pragmatic and operational. The current OMNI has an article about intelligence-raising drugs already known; the majority of psychopharmacological researchers, in the latest McGraw-Hill poll of expected breakthroughs, believe the intelligence-raising drug industry will be in full flower by the 1990s.

In passing, quietly as it were, I might mention that this subject, and my previous remarks on self-programming, and the general H.E.A.D. Revolution (Hedonic Engineering And Development--using the brain for fun and profit) are the main themes of my next book, The Illuminati Papers, to be published by And/Or Press in December. End of advertisement

What about those who won't nohow noway never do nothing to increase their intelligence?

Perhaps they will be seduced by the general trend toward brightness that I foresee in the next two decades. After all, intelligence is the most powerful of all known aphrodisiacs...

Diagonal Relationship letters of comment, No. 3

(Third in a series of letters reprinted from the pages of the fanzine Diagonal Relationship).

The Diagonal Relationship 13, 1980

Permit me to horn in on the inside/outside debate between Ron Lambert and Adam Weishaupt.

I. An atheist is one who is quite sure there is no Higher Intelligence; if there isany doubt on the matter, you are not an atheist but an agnostic. God, by definition, is the only being who can be quite sure there is no higher intelligence than Hirself. Therefore, God is the only real atheist.

Others must be theists or agnostics.

II. Berkeley says the universe is inside the mind of God. Jesus says the Kingdom of Heaven is within us. If and only if both Berkeley and Jesus are right, I am inside God and God is inside me.

Berkeley and Jesus must both be right since:

III. In the highest mystical states, in all religions, the mystic experiences oneness with God. But we have already seen that God is an atheist. Therefore, the mystic alone can escape theism and agnosticism and become, like God, an atheist. This is possible by turning inside out.

IV. In a Möbius strip or Klein bottle, inside is outside and outside is inside. The same flip-flop occurs in music, art, and mathematics, as demonstrated by Hofstadter in the greatest book of our decade, Gödel, Escher, Bach. Therefore, if and only if God is like unto a Möbius strip, a Klein bottle, Gödel's proof, Escher's paintings, and Bach's fugues, Berkeley and Jesus can both be right, and God is inside and outside simultaneously

V. In Euclidean geometry, inside and outside do not flip-flop. Therefore, God is either inside or outside--and the Lambert-Weishaupt debate can be decided on one side or the other--if and only if God is limited by Euclidean geometry. But a limited God is not God. Therefore…

VI. Pantheism is really atheism under a fancier name, as all critics of pantheism agree. But the highest forms of theism, such as Vedanta, are all pantheistic on the very logical grounds that God must include everything, or else God is limited, and a limited God is no God at all. Since the highest form of theism is pantheism, and pantheism is indistinguishable from atheism, the highest form of theism is atheism.

VII. I can know the mind of only one Creator really well: myself. InSchrödinger's Cat, I put myself in the book as a character, but I also remain outside the book as its Creator. Therefore, the only Creator I know well is inside and outside his work at the same time.

VI I I. When God actually, or allegedly, wrote a book, He put Himself inside it as a character. If one Creator is like unto another Creator, God evidently wanted us to understand that He is inside and outside at once.

IX. When God actually or allegedly wrote a book He made Himself the villainin it, as all intelligent readers have noted. (This is why the Gnostics and William Blake, among others, have denied that God wrote the book and claimed Satan wrote it to discredit God.) But if God did write it, the portrait of Himself as a sadistic monster must be either an attempt to frighten us or a very subtle joke. Since God would not want to frighten us, it must be a joke. Since God is both an atheist (knows no Higher Intelligence) and a mystic (is at one with Hirself), the joke must be such that only those who are both atheists and mystics can understand it.

X. Since only the mystic is one with God--an atheist--all others, as demonstrated above, must be agnostics or theists. But the theist claims to know what he has not experienced; if he had experienced it, he would be, like God, an atheist. Therefore, for those who are not mystics, the only honest, modest, and logical alternative is to be agnostics.

XI. According to literal Christianity, Jesus was God and the son of Mary; the Holy Ghost was God and the husband or at least the impregnator of Mary. Therefore, God is His own father. But God is also the father of all humanity, including Mary, so God is the father of His mother, and thus His own grandfather. If God is both inside and outside, and an atheist, and His ownfather and grandfather, any attempt to reason about God must lead to paradoxes and contradictions.

It will be observed by the thoughtful that these arguments are quite logical, and totally mad. I do not claim that they are true, but merely that they are at least as lucid as the other writings about God produced by the human mind to date.

Diagonal Relationship letters, No. 4

(Fourth in a series of Robert Anton Wilson letters reprinted from the fanzine Diagonal Relationship).

The Diagonal Relationship 14, 1980

Adrienne Fein is quite right about the term "temple prostitute": It is a projection of Christian prejudice backward on pre-Christian theology.

Certainly, sexual yoga or sex magick or hierogamy is powerful magick, and that is what the so-called temple "prostitutes" were doing. It takes a considerable amount of shamanic training to work up an equally passionate and devout religious mood by any other method.

The trouble with Christians is that they are constitutionally incapable of understanding anybody else's point of view. I mean literally I have never heard or read a Christian describe a non-Christian belief system accurately. (The one exception to this rule is the Jesuits, but there is some doubt--shared by the Pope lately--that they are really Christians.)

I was amused by your account of the parapsychology class where everybody thought skepticism meant a dogmatic refusal to believe. This confusion has been created by a band of vehement and intolerant fanatics (the Fundamentalist wing of the Materialist Church) who have coopted the word "skepticism" to describe their own bigotry.

I haven't been able to take the so-called "skeptics" seriously since the burning of Wilhelm Reich's books in 1956. The ringleader of the "skeptics," Martin Gardner, was one of the instigators of the persecution of Dr. Reich, and I was young and naive in those days. I kept expecting Gardner to say, when it became obvious that the government was going to throw Reich in jail and burn his books too, "Hey that isn't what I meant. I meant Reich's theories should be criticized, not obliterated." But Gardner never objected to the mutilations of the Constitution in the Reich case, and I finally decided that having Reich in jail and his books in a bonfire was exactly what Gardner wanted. I strongly suspect that what he wants today is all the parapsychologists in jail and their books burned, too.

If you will pardon me, I think you misuse the word "nature" just as badly as the pop ecologists or ecologoids do. That is, both you and they seem to mean by "nature" something which does not include humanity. I think it is semantically and scientifically more accurate to use the word for something that does include humanity, as a domesticated primate species as much a part of the biosphere as the wild primates.

In the latter usage, not only are our bodies part of nature in general, but so are our brains, as tools or adaptation for our bodies. The purpose of the dog brain is to make survival of doggihood possible; the purpose of the human brain is to make survival of Homo Sap possible. I believe Freud pointed this out before me.

The idiocy of the ecologoids is that they believe, or talk as if they believe, that nature stops at around the human neck, everything above there being "unnatural." On the contrary, I cannot conceive of my thoughts being any less natural than my bowel movements, my endocrine system, or my blood circulation.

In this connection, it is obvious that the dog brain does not abstract enough information to create a perfect model of the total universe; it abstracts enough for the dog's survival, pack-status, and reproduction scripts. I assume the same is true of the human brain. Those who are looking for the Total Truth are probably looking for more than a domesticated primate brain can achieve. I do, however, think it is amusing, entertaining, and survivally useful to look formore of the truth than we currently own.

No, the Craft is not a front for Discordianism. But, since more and more witches are Discordians, and more and more Discordians are getting initiated into Wicca, the two are increasingly hard to disentangle. Which is just the way I want it....

The Diagonal Relationship letters, No. 5

(Fifth in a series of letters from Robert Anton Wilson, reprinted on the Internet for the first time since their original appearance more than 30 years ago.)

The Diagonal Relationship 14, 1980

On the "nature" problem: Bucky Fuller suggests that "Universe" should mean everything that exists including me and "environment" should mean everything that exists excluding me. This is totally arbitrary, like all definitions, but at least is (or seems to me) clear and bereft of muddy metaphysics.

Of course, this distinction is only useful in some areas of discourse. In other areas, it becomes necessary to note that environment and me are constantly interacting, exchanging energy, etc., and that we cannot, ultimately, be disentangled. (That is, we can only be relatively disentangled for special purposes in special areas of discourse.)

This does not clarify the "nature" problem but possibly confuses it further. I'm sorry. I'm doing the best I can. Give me a few more years and maybe I'll figure it all out.

In any case, I cannot feel, imagine or conceive myself as outside of "nature." I seem, to myself, as natural as any hamster, rosebush, cockroach, bear, rock, pelican, or star anywhere. I may be peculiar, but that does not make me unnatural. Pelicans are peculiar, too. Lobsters are very peculiar.

I think my blasphemous inability to develop a sense of guilt has to do with this inability to develop a feeling of being outside nature. When a moralist (Christian, Marxist, Libertarian or whoever) tells me I should not be what I am, I am not offended; I just think they are silly-as if they were telling a lobster not to be a lobster.

Einstein got into relativity by imagining vividly what it would feel like to be a photon. I got into whatever is wrong with me by imagining vividly what it is like to be a cow. I was living on a farm and doing acid at the time and maybe the six-legged majority on this planet somehow got more real (or as the mystics say, more Real) than the domesticated primates with whom I am supposed to identify. I don't know if I'm a star imagining progressive games in which I pretend to be a cow, a lobster, domesticated primate, etc. or if I'm a domesticated primate imagining I have been a star, a lobster, a dinosaur, etc.

Ecology and ethology make perfect sense to me. So does sociobiology, that bane of the Left. But nobody makes any sense when they start telling me that I'm unnatural or that any part of domesticated primate life is unnatural. I don't know why birds sing or why Beethoven wrote Sonata 23, but, while both astonish me, neither seems un-, anti-, super- or infra-natural to me.

I have read Theodore Roszak, who argues at length that everything or most things that I like are unnatural. I concluded that Roszak does not like the same things as me, but I could find no merit in his claim that what he likes is natural and what I like is unnatural. I think that he and I are equally natural, but different, as the purple-assed baboon and the preying mantis are equally natural, but different.

And I have read you, Arthur, arguing that nature is "mundane shit" but that did not change my perceptions. I merely registered that Arthur Hlavaty has different perceptions than me--which is not astonishing to me, since it is an axiom of my neurology that everybody has different perceptions. I continue to perceive all of nature, including myself, as beautiful, mysterious, grand, and radiant with intricate intelligence.

James Joyce said he had never met a boring person; he was a Humanist. I have never had a boring perception, because I am a Universalist.

In answer to Sam Konkin, I am an agnostic about every thing, not just about "God," and for totally pragmatic and selfish reasons. I have observed that when certitude enters a human mind, mental activity then quickly ceases. Wishing to continue mental activity, I therefore avoid certitude. This is not a philosophical position (I am not a philosopher) but an empirical rule for growth, change, and mental alertness.

I'm as agnostic about Sam Konkin as I am about "God," or more so, since I have had a great many experiences with "God," or with what is alleged to be "God," and only a few experiences with Sam Konkin or what is alleged to be Sam Konkin.

I am also dubious about Sam's proposition that if you can't prove something, you should assume it has been disproven, or pretend that it has been disproven, or label yourself as one who has disproven it. (This may not be exactly what Sam meant but it is as much as I can understand of his argument against agnosticism. I am sometimes slow.) I think at once of the alleged 10th planet beyond Pluto. Nobody has found it yet, but astronomers do not for that reason assume it is not there; they go on looking. Similarly, the proposed quarks in quantum theory have not been found yet, but physicists do not assume quarks are not there; they go on looking.

To "go on looking" seems worthwhile to me, because It is good exercize for the intelligence, and also because if one goes on looking, one generally finds something, although not always exactly what one was looking for.

I suspect that "God" is a term invented by humans in certain cultures to describe experiences of contact, or seeming contact, or mind-fusion, or seeming mind fusion, with an intelligence or intelligences that are, or seem to be, inhuman or trans-human or super-human. I suspect that similar experiences in other cultures led to the invention of terms like "the Buddha-nature," "the True Self," "the World Soul," "the Atman," "the Tao," and once, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, "the Force." I also suspect that Alan Watts was a very smart man in simply calling it It. And I suspect that contact, or seeming contact, with It provoked philosophers and scientists to such terms as "Mind" (as distinct from individual mind (Plato), "orgone" (Reich), "implicate order" (Bohr), "the psychoic Level" and "synchronicity" (Jung), the "neurogenetic" and "neuro-atomic" circuits (Leary), "Life Force" (Bergson, Shaw) "synergy" (Fuller). These are suspicions, not certitudes.

The Diagonal Relationship letters, No. 6

(Latest in a series of blog postings reprinting letters Wilson wrote to a fanzine, the Diagonal Relationship, about 30 years ago).

The Diagonal Relationship 16, 1980

Seeing myself as part of nature, rather than as an alien who landed here by mistake, does not incline me to determinism. In fact, it inclines me to the opposite...if not to free will in the classical theological sense, at least to a notion of give-and-take or feedback or flexibility in the system.

"In nature there is immediate adjustment but no Compulsion," said Chuang Chou, who also considered himself part of nature.

l am part of nature in that my mother and father produced me by purely natural processes, with no supernatural aid. r.\y DNA comes half from her, half from him, and is one node in a molecular message going back, via him, to Irish and Norwegian strains, and via her, to Hungarian, Austrian, and Polish-Jewish strands, and, further back, to various primates, other mammals, reptiles, fish etc.

Natural selection played a role every step of the way in this process. Which male mated with which, female involved some kind of stochastic process of "choice"--see Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature.

Since I am whimsical, playful, imaginative etc., I assume that these traits can be traced back pretty far in this genetic roulette.

All of which is to reject traditional or constipated determinism. I also reject classical notions of free Will, of course, since there are some elements of determination in the process.

"In addition to a yes and a no, the universe contains a maybe," as David Finkelstein says. That's my view.

bThe Diagonal Relationship letters, No. 7

(Seventh in a series of letters reprinted from the Diagonal Relationship).

The Diagonal Relationship 17, 1981

I was delighted to read of your oceanic experience at the Samhain festival.

The first "satori" is a turning point; the second is much easier. After a while, it becomes fairly regular and even deeper....One discovers gradations in the oceanic, more and more comes through....(See Maslow on what he calls "the Peak Experience.")

Encouragement: it tends to happen after 35, as documented by Bucke in Cosmic Consciousness. If this is the fifth neurological circuit, as Leary sez, it may be genetically programmed. Bio-survival circuit turns on at birth, emotional-territorial circuit at about 8 months (walking), semantic circuit between one and two years, sociosexual circuit at puberty, between 11 and 13. Neurosomatic (oceanic) may be more and more likely to open up (if one is not rigidly armored against it) the more years one lives after about 35 or 40....Maybe it is becoming more common because people are living longer than they used to.

Further encouragement: in many cases, after neurosomatic circuit begins to work, conditions like asthma "miraculously" disappear. (That's why Mary Baker Eddy invented Christian Science after her fifth circuit opened....)

I don't share Michael Shoemaker's disdain for those who think they have found something new, or for those who think they are important. Everybody I admire in history (a) thought they found something new and (b) thought they were important. E.g. Beethoven, Shakespeare, Joyce, Michelangelo, Galileo, Leonardo, Jefferson, Newton, Blake, Frank Lloyd Wright, etc. etc. etc. As Wright said, give me honest arrogance rather than hypocritical humility any day. And as Mark Twain said, it is dangerous to associate with the depressed, because they will make you depressed, whereas those who expect to accomplish great things will make you think you can do great things yourself.

All my friends believe they are geniuses or damned close to it; that's why they're fun to have around. You can find all the humility you ever care to see at a mental health clinic, but that scene is very dreary indeed.

I also disagree with Shoemaker's Ecclesiastes-like insistence that "there is nothing new under the sun." Evolution being a stochastic process, there is newness appearing every second; one has only to open one's eyes and LOOK for it. Besides, as Picasso or somebody else of that school said once, Art always shows heredity but never shows identity. Many are children or grandchildren of Pirandello, as Shoemaker would have it, but all are new voices nonetheless.

I hope that Shoemaker soon comes to feel that he is so damned COSMICALLY important that he will enjoy rather than deprecate the possibility that others are important, too.

(A) Anybody who speaks English probably has, somewhere, a signal that I can learn from; (B) The more important they think they are, the more likely they are to utter that signal.

In this connection, I also dissent from Mary Frey's expressed wish that people stop discussing religion in your pages. I had no desire to write anything about religion for you when 1 saw that letter, but after seeing it I nonetheless felt constrained, repressed, mildly annoyed, and somewhat (in the jargon of the day) "dehumanized." I think the desire to communicate is very strong in third-circuited (symbol-using) critters and all repressions of it are unhealthy. It is, in general, much better for humanity if those who wish to avoid certain signals (political, religious, pornographic or whatever) simply AVOID them, i.e., avert their eyes, go elsewhere, etc., rather than trying to shut up those who wish to communicate. That is, I think it is more in keeping with our humanity for people to walk away from communication than to stifle the communicator. (This is a generalization but not an absolute. In some cases, seeing real distress, I am willing to stifle myself until an unhappy person leaves the scene. Courtesy and tact are real factors even if one can't include them in a legal definition of civil liberties....)

Since I believe that ONLY immediate sense impressions are given to us by the universe (and even they are edited by our previous imprints and ideas), all maps and models and theories are projections of the mind that creates them. Thus, the Atheist creates an Atheist universe, the Theist creates a Theist universe...and both are too modest to take credit for such marvelous artistic-philosophical organizing and information making skill! (They don't even take credit, generally, for making roses red....) Perhaps they both need more sense of self-importance.

The Diagonal Relationship letters, No. 8

(Another of a series of letters Robert Anton Wilson wrote to the fanzine the Diagonal Relationship. Roy Tackett, mentioned here, was a famous science fiction fan; I used to get fanzines from him years ago. His Wikipedia biography says Tackett "was a rifleman with the United States Marine Corps during Wolrd War II who was credited with the introduction of science fiction to Japan following the war when he was stationed in that nation as part of the American occupation.")

The Diagonal Relationship 18, 1981

In answer to Roy Tackett's question, "How many of these professed believers in the ancient gods have even the slightest knowledge of the ancient gods?" I would say: Having met with hundreds of neopagans in all parts of the country, I have been astonished at the abundant erudition they generally possess and their extensive and sometimes scholarly or pedantic knowledge of minute details about the old religions. If Mr. Tackett's question was rhetorical and he assumed the answer would be that most neopagans know little about their historical origins, then either he has met a different sampling than I have, or he has met few or none and formed his opinions without data. In any case, Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moonis the most complete sociological study of neopaganism thus far, and it confirms my own impression of the generally high level of erudition among neopagans.

I assume that Tackett's sentence, "A superstition is a superstition is a superstition is a superstition is a superstition," is some kind of incantation. Certainly, he could not intend it as argument, since it is only a tautology. Perhaps there is a missing first term and we are to understand it as meaning "paganism is a superstition" etc. In that case, it is not a tautology, but a mere assertion, and still does not qualify as an argument. It is not clear to me whether Mr. Tackett will not argue his position or does not know how to argue it. Or perhaps his letter was a clever piece of satire, intended to illustrate the axiom that ignorance is the origin of intolerance.

As a lover of the past as well as the present and the future, I was delighted with David Palter's letter, in which he frankly stipulated that he did not try the Thoth exercise before passing judgment on it. I think all archaic ideas should be revived periodically, so that we may look at them anew and reevaluate them; and it is refreshing to have the classical antiexperimentalist dogma reasserted in our time. I had thought that position vanished around the time the Inquisition refused to look through Galileo's telescope before condemning what he saw through it. I hope Mr. Palter will continue to enlighten us about experiments he hasn't tried and Mr. Tackett to inform us about groups he scarcely knows

The Diagonal Relationship letters, No. 9

(Last in a series of letters reprinted from the fanzine the Diagonal Relationship. A short letter from Robert Shea also is included.)

The Diagonal Relationship 20, 1982

My apologies to Mr. David Palter. His original letter attacking the Thoth exercise sounded dogmatic and intolerant to me, and I thought it was funny for someone to sound so certain about an experiment which he admitted he had never tried. Due to this misunderstanding, I wrote a short rebuttal which be quite correctly describes as "baroque sarcasm"; be also says that he was not dogmatic about the experiment, but only tentative. Well, everybody has a right to form tentative opinions (pro and con) about experiments they haven' t tried, so there is no real argument between Pa1ter and me. I merely misunderstood his style of expression.

Since this subject has aroused debate by others as well as Palter, I would like to add something. The Thoth exercise is in four parts. These are (1) the traditional assumption of god-forms, out of gnosticism and Tibetan Buddhism; (2) experiments in self-hypnosis with tape recorder; (:3) experiments in self-hypnosis adding marijuana to tape recorder; (4) reading books by Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Aleister Crowley, G. 1. Gurdjieff, Israel Regardie, and Mary Baker Eddy. These books will provide six contrasting "maps" (or models, or paradigms) to interpret the results obtained in steps 1, 2, and 3. Seeing that each of these "maps" fits the results to some degree leads to the last, synthesizing step of forming one's own conclusions about what such exercises offer and show many neurological programs they can be extended to reprogram. These books also suggest many other, more advanced exercises to accomplish more radical reprogramming and reimprinting.

Anybody who shares Palter's dread of such matters should emphatically emulate him in avoiding such experiments. "Fear is failure and the forerunner of failure"; or in Freudian terms, those who fear have reason to fear. There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in Mr. Palter's philosophy, and one should not gaze into them if one is not prepared to have them gaze back at one.

And one from Shea (1980)

We have a lot to be thankful for. Many of us were too young to experience the Scopes trial, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the days when books like Ulysses had to be smuggled into the country, the McCarthy era and the judicial murder of the Rosenbergs. Now, as a consequence of election day 1980 we have a chance to live through a replay of those great days. Let us gird our loins, because if the New Christian Right has its way it will soon be illegal to have loins at all.

2010-08-02T06:05:00.000-07:00

Michael Johnson answers my questions about Robert Anton Wilson

By TOM JACKSON

Few people on Earth know as much about writer Robert Anton Wilson as Michael Johnson, a former Aldous Huxley devotee who walked into a bookstore the dayafter Christmas in 1992 and became a dedicated Wilson fan almost instantly.

Johnson had never heard of Wilson, but bought a copy of RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE SITTING NOW

“I bought it, and stayed up all night reading it before going to work in the library at Palos Verdes, CA, all bleary-eyed. I finished it, then started again from the beginning,” Johnson says. “Within a year I'd read everything that was in print by him, being particularly blown away by Illuminatus! and the SCT.”

Since then, Johnson has intensively read and re-read everything everything he can find that Wilson wrote or cited as an influence. He also seems to have read just about every book that mentions Wilson.

To inaugurate the series of interviews and articles I plan to publish on this site, I asked Johnson if he would agree to let me interview him by e-mail. He agreed, and the interview was conducted in July 2010. Although I told him he could reject any questions he didn’t like, he answered all of them.
Johnson, 49, has worked as a rock music guitarist, a music teacher and a library employee. He and his wife live in Berkeley California.

Johnson posts comments at alt.fan.rawilson and other sites devoted to Wilson, but he doesn’t have a Facebook or Twitter account or a blog of his own. “I'm glad other people do that and find it helpful; I'm far more stodgy than most, it seems. I'm committed to books. (And in turn some people think I should be committed, but that's anotherkettle of fish.)”

Q. What are your favorite RAW books?

A. Over the years it has changed; I vacillate. The Widow's Son seems uber-RAW to me because he's working all (mostbunall?) of his favorite late 20th c. ideas into a novel set in the late 18th century. At the same time he's also doing his "historical novel" with a bit of Bildungsroman added in, PLUS he's got that whole other footnote-world counter-narrative, which captures the mad acidhead postmodernist-cum-surrealist Erisian Wilson. I love that book. He did too. He said when he wrote it — circa 1985 — he was "really hot." He wrote that one in Ireland.

I could go on about other favorite books by Bob, but I'll let it stand there. The easy answers would be either Illuminatus! or Schrodinger's Cat, because I've had endless hours of joy — as I bet your readers have too — and they are practically inexhaustible. "Inexhaustibility" was a very high value for RAW himself as far as hisown literary tastes went, witness his 50-plus-year mania for Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and Pound's Cantos, amongst other weighty wiggy tomes.

I'm also crazy about Cosmic Trigger Vol III: My Life After Death. So much so that I wrote an index for it. In that book I think RAW got deeper into the issues of "mask/reality" that he often hovered around and played with in the past; he had a lot more to say on the topic and that book fleshed it out, I thoughtwas really well integrated. I think it's one of the greatbooks about postmodernism — his take on pomo — and it also highlights him as a non-academic intellectual in a particularly brilliant way.

Robert Anton Wilson and Michael Johnson, Feb. 18, 2003, in Wilson's apartment. Wilson's shirt designates him as a "Pope."

Q. You discovered RAW when you stumbled on a copy of RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE SITTING NOW in a bookstore in 1992. Do you think your perspective on RAW is any different from the vast majority of us, who came to him via ILLUMINATUS!, or is that irrelevant?

A. Wow. Okay, I confess I've been asked when I started reading RAW many times and I always winged the answer because I didn't really know until now. Your question prompted me to look back in my old journals and try and find the exact day I found RWYASN. I have written in a journal (usually just a log of the day's events) almost every day since September of 1989. It's compulsive, really.

So I took about 35 minutes today and found this entry from December 26, 1992 - I was WAY off!:

"On to Borders, where I blew $41 of Noble's (my future father-in-law) $50 gift certificate. on Harper's Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience, Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade (in the Women's Studies section), and Robert Anton Wilson's Right Where You Are Sitting Now. I have been leafing through Wilson and am rapidly falling in love...he's so hip and intelligent! UFOs, drugs, conspiracies, semantics, strange loops, Teilhard, games, humor, Bucky Fuller, entropy, evolution, witches, consciousness, Wm. S. Burroughs, on and on and on. I could easily get hooked on this stuff. Like eating potato chips."

So first off: thank you, Jackson, for forcing me to nail exactly when I stumbled onto RAW.

I think my perspective must differ from every other RAW reader — and each reader from all the others — if only because I take Korzybski seriously: No two experiences are identical, for a welter of reasons — age, genes, previous education, unconscious habits, imprints, the phenomenon of time and a person's place in space and perspective, whether they're having a bad day, etc, etc, etc.

On another level of abstraction, I've met many a RAW reader and it's almost always like I've found someone from my Tribe. Most of the RAWphiles I've met strike me as scary-smart but not really thinking they're all that brilliant. They do like to smoke dope and laff, aye!...to state the obvious.

I think you're probably right in that Illuminatus! was the entre for many a Wilsoniac, but then again I think Cosmic Trigger Vol 1 was also a tremendous first reading of RAW for a lot of my fellow weirdos.

So to answer your Q: yes, it's irrelevant.

AND: better than eating potato chips, turns out.

Q. Why did that book have such an effect on you? What elements of RAW's philosophy made you determined to find out everything you can about him?

A. Well, what I didn't write about in that first journal entry (Which I thought no one would ever read; I always write in my journal asking myself "Why would anyone wanna read this shit?" and then, "Well, they won't. I'll die and someone will look through this mound of bound-spiral notebooks and just dump them in the round file." Then again, "Then why are you writing? Ego? Lack of serotonin leading to some mild form of hypergraphia? What, asshole?") Anyway...What I didn't write about in that...what was the question? Oh...

Later, after seriously delving into RAW and his ideas about information and structure, his influences — especially Burroughs and Pound and McLuhan for RWYASN — I think he knew the structure of that book was a large part of the info-dense character of it. (It's dedicated to Burroughs and Philip K. Dick, "pioneers.") There's a bit in there where he says the book is a machine for living in, or something like that, and he invokes Le Corbusier's name. It was cut-up/experimental enough to not be "too much" for me at the time, as WSB's Nova Express and Joyce'sFinnegans Wake were when in my first delvings. I found that book and RAW at just the right time, maybe?

I told RAW that RWYASN was where I found him, and that I still dearly love that book after many re-readings, and he seemed a little surprised. I don't think he'd heard that very often.

The crux of my interest in his philosophy lies in the matrix of model agnosticism/perception/language/"reality." For RAW, epistemology seems to be the handmaiden of ontology, but maybe I'm just full of shit.

Q. Tell us about your upcoming book about RAW.

A. I've already ditched about 300 pages, because I'm trying to learn how to do this thing called, umm..."writing a book that would not be boring if I were the reader." Lemme see: I will try to show how RAW's oeuvre is similar to many of his contemporaries, but the interest lies in DIFFERENCE. I will trace the trajectory of his career as a particular kind of Artist-Intellectual. I have outlined his outstanding metaphors and recurring tropes as I have read his body of work, and I note that beneath all the deep play there's an urgency. RAW was very much like Buckminster Fuller, in that he wanted humankind to be "a success in universe." The Bomb seems always lurking behind Wilson's work.

I flesh out a minor bio, I have a long interview in there, and I go over each book, not in E-Prime like Eric Wagner's book The Insider's Guide To Robert Anton Wilson, because I find the E-Prime thing too difficult, although the spirit is there...I'm quite fascinated by RAW's sociology of knowledge and the deeper structures of it. I speculate, bullshit, pull legs, put-on...and try to situate RAW as a thinker, a hairy endeavor indeed for a damned eejit like myself.

Ya know? I just realized something profound. Yosemite Sam was right! Bugs Bunny was INDEED a "long-eared ijit-galoot"! Let that sink in a bit...

I recently realized, via Ed Sanders, via Charles Olson, that I'm trying to do my "Saturation Job." See p.420 of Sanders' book on the Manson group, The Family, 3rd edition. Oh? You don't have that on hand? Okay, here is the relevant passage, for any other writers in a similar quandary:

[Sanders is talking about trying to score ultra-elusive videos of
famous people fucking for who-knows why]:
"Then the meeting ended. During the next few days I strove to complete
the deal, to no avail. I couldn't devote full-time to it, since I had
begun writing my book, the biggest book of my life. My mentor, the
great bard Charles Olson, had written about a 'Saturation Job,' as a
rite of passage for a writer of substance. In a Saturation Job, Olson
pointed out, you studied one subject, whether a place or a person or
persons, 'until you yourself know more about that than is possible to
any other man. It doesn't matter whether it's Barbed Wire or Pemmican
or Paterson or Iowa. But EXHAUST IT, Saturate it. Beat it. And then U
KNOW everything very fast: one saturation job (it might take fourteen
years). And you're in, forever.'"

"Writer of substance." Aye, there's the rub!

Q. I hope you will finish the book, rather than spending years working on it. If you have second thoughts, you can always write another book!

Rudy Rucker, in a book called SEEK that collects his nonfiction, described RAW (at age 62) as an unpleasant person who was only easy to be around when he was inebriated on alcohol or pot. What was your experience with RAW, and what did you think of Rucker's account? Was RAW generally kind to fans?

A. I was disappointed in Rucker's aloofness towards RAW. It would've been easy to find out RAW's wife of 40+ years was dying — I either remember or suspect Rucker knew this yet was still kind of a dick writing about RAW — that his post-polio made long plane trips to places like Portugal (where they filmed) far more uncomfortable than any of us could imagine, and that RAW needed the money desperately, having bills and a brood. It was a dark and difficult time for Wilson, and Rucker seems so blase about Bob's pain. Rucker is freaking brilliant though; I love his books. He's distantly related to Hegel, or so I heard him say when he gave a talk in Berkeley three years ago. All of his books have stimulated me, but some of the math is over my head. He's prolific too. In that piece you cite of Rucker's, if I remember, he said he thought RAW was obviously a genius of some sort; I think the same of Rucker. [Editor’s note: The article, originally published in “bOING bOING” magazine, was about a 1994 movie made in Portugal called “The Manual of Evasion.” The Internet Movie Database lists nothing about the movie, but excerpts are posted on YouTube.]

Rucker once said he liked the IDEA of people doing psychedelic drugs; he himself wasn't interested. Maybe there's a bit of a wedge there? And then again he and Terence McKenna (TM was also in that same Portuguese film with RAW and RR) were born in 1946, while RAW was 14 years older. So there was a generation gap? Who knows? (See my bit about Writin' 'N Fightin' below.)

I could speculate too much about the Rucker perspective on Wilson as depicted in that piece in Rucker's Seek! Selected Nonfiction. I don't want to misrepresent Rucker. Wilson is an object of interest by many a writer/artist/musician, and this picture of RAW by Rucker represents an anomaly, in my experience. I have heard numerous accounts of RAW being incredibly sweet with his fans. When I asked for an interview, he invited me and my wife into his home, and made me feel very comfortable. He seemed like a Buddhist sage with otherworldly intelligence, spoke in complete paragraphs from questions I had not given him beforehand, quoted passages of Pound from memory, had limitless jokes. I had the feeling that interviews were a sort of performance for him, but he was also genuine and warm. I've heard similar stories from others.

At the same time I couldn't help but feel this guy doesn't suffer fools gladly, and was so trying not to be one. The documentarians doing the film about him called Maybe Logic were there when I got there, all their equipment set up, so he was warmed up and I was nervous and he made me feel relaxed. By the end of the interview we were discussing things more as equals, and he was extremely open-minded and listened attentively. He complained that it was hard to keep up on everything; he felt like he'd fallen behind. When I asked him if he'd read this or that book and he hadn't, he said there were a lot of books he had not read! (I admitted to thinking it seemed like he'd read EVERYTHING.) His apartment was filled with gifts from friends and fans, books piled up everywhere.

As far as pleasantness and inebriation, one writer who knew RAW since the 1970s said — and I'm quoting this second hand, so maybe I have it right — that he never saw RAW not stoned! (Let us chalk this up as "lore"?)

Q. I want to explore a few vexing questions for Wilsonians. Here's one: What do you think happened to the material that was cut from ILLUMINATUS! at Dell's insistence? Do you believe any of it survives?

A. Jesus H. Christ on a pogo-stick, I wish it would resurface, but I have strong doubts it will. I think if RAW could've recovered it he would've found a way to sculpt it — ideally working in tandem with Shea — into another genius tome and get it into our hands. I see no reason to doubt the official story (from him) that it's lost. 500 pages or so! Can you imagine a 1300 page version of Illuminatus! ??? The reel minds, or rind meals, or...see what I mean?b

Q. Do you have any insight into how far Wilson got on BRIDE OF ILLUMINATUS, and why it was never finished?

A. Of this question I have almost no insight. I hope to tease out some more info before my book gets published. When I saw him give a talk after Cosmic Trigger III came out, in Santa Monica, he got that question about Bride. I recall him saying there will be a satire on the OJ Simpson fiasco, and Monica Lewinsky. He said very little about his upcoming book projects, which with hindsight seems like a "smart" thing to do.

Q. How much material was cut from SCHROEDINGER'S CAT when it was reduced from three separate books to one omnibus edition?

A. Quite a lot of really really RILLY cool stuff, to my eyes. I don't have the actual page count difference. I had read the omnibus edition four or five times before I finally scored all three of the originals via Ebay, and I was astonished and delighted there was so much "new" and Wilsonic-trippy stuff that got left out of the one-volume edition. Why? The ways of the publishing houses are inscrutable to me. I have the feeling that if I found out someone who knew the straight answer it would be something like, "Oh yeah. That was Joe 'Bottom Line' Smith who edited that. He took one look at it, said, 'Naw. Sorry. Too big. No one's buying fat books anymore,' then cut out a shitload of pages. He quit soon after that and became a broker on Wall Street."

Do I sound jaundiced?

On the other hand, RAW ended up with New Falcon because they wouldn't tamper-edit his books. The drag of it is: he could've used someone at least proofing his books there. They are filled with typos, and only two of his non-fiction books published by New Falcon have indexes. And I don't think they had any marketing budget to speak of. But I digress...

Q. Did TALE OF THE TRIBE turn into EMAIL TO THE UNIVERSE, or was it never completed?

A. The way I understand it, RAW wanted to write the book that is delineated with tantalizing tidbits at the end of TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution, pp.203-213. He ended up publishing Email To The Universe instead, and there's no bloody way that was what he was wanting for Tale of the Tribe. He ended up finding about half to a third of old pieces that Mike Gathers, Eric Wagner, Dan Clore, myself, and a few others had found in disparate old magazines that had never made it into RAW's published books. We had collected tons of stuff we'd bought on eBay or had stashed in old boxes somewhere, some of it from quite obscure little magazines. Gathers took the time and put it all up at rawilsonfans.com. I think he did a helluva job. One day, New Falcon asked Mike to take certain pieces off the site, and he did without complaint. Those pieces ended up in E to the U. Gathers got a free copy out of it.

There's a quote from RAW in an old entry for him in the reference set found in libraries, Contemporary Authors. He said he had, if I recall correctly, about 1500 articles in print before he made it as a writer. And those articles were in scholarly journals, porno mags, little literary mags, schlocky publications, everywhere. And in a circa 1980 interview with Dr. Jeffrey Eliot he told Eliot he'd rather be "rhino-gored" than to see some of those pieces re-surface. Methinks RAW saw quite a lot of stuff at up at rawilsonfans.com and thought they weren't half-bad at all, at all. I'm glad he was able to put out that last book with our anonymous help. He was having a really tough time those last eight years or so, after Arlen died. His post-polio syndrome really did a number on him; cannabis was a godsend for him, but being stoned all the time definitely slowed his writing down. But I quite like E to the U, don't you?
I think it remains for one of his disciples to carry on and write a heavily-influenced by RAW Tale of the Tribe. The blueprints are on the pages I cited for TSOG, above. And he did an online course for his MaybeLogic Academy that was intensively "Tribe" oriented. There are many others more qualified than I to comment on this projected last book.

Q. Do you believe Wilson's fans will succeed in keeping interest in his writing alive?

A. Maybe it's just selective perception, but I see it, yeah. I think it's building, slowly. I do think Wilson was quasi-tragically ahead of his time. But if it was between dying out or growing interest, my money's on him getting bigger over the next decade or so. Let it ride, too! I hope to be some sort of influence on that, obviously.

Q. How aggressive do you believe Wilson's family will be in bringing his out of print books back into print and bringing new material into print?

A. That one scares me a bit. My impression is that (I will just say "they") they knew he was an author with a particularly devoted fan base; I don't get the impression they understand his work the way fans like you or I do. I hope I'm wrong. Wilson did leave his kids with debts. They may be jaded, I don't know. It's in their best interests — one would think — to maintain control of the rights and to keep him in print, but there are too many moving parts there for me to tell for sure.
If they do have unpublished material I wish they'd let someone like me edit it first! (Am I dreaming?)

Q. You have worked for years as a musician and guitar instructor. Do you have any particular insight into Wilson's writings on music?

A. I asked him why Beethoven, especially the Ninth Symphony, shows up so often and with such prominence in his work. I said, is it because he represents your highest ideas about Enlightenment? He bluntly said he'd had a peak experience while high on acid and listening to the 9th. Ahhh...why didn't I guess that? I asked him if he wrote with music on, and he said he listened to "light" classical sometimes while writing, but his favorites — esp. Ludwig van — were too engrossing; they demanded all of your attention.
He once listed favorite pieces in Usenet under the nym "Mark Chan." I remember they were all classical, maybe a jazz performer or two, and then last, "Iron Butterfly." I think Wilson's take on rock was ironic because he perceived it was the music of his fans, but he thought JS Bach wrote the "sexiest" music in history.
I have a section about RAW and music, so I don't wanna blow my wad here. I will say that I think the hotbed — or one of the hotbeds — for RAW's thinking about music is found in Sigismundo Celine's interior monologues as found within the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles.

Q. I've never noticed any reference to sports in Wilson's writings. Do you know if he had any interest in any sports?

A. I mentioned this to Eric Wagner years ago, and he said RAW had interest and knowledge of Joe Louis, Babe Ruth, and few others, if I recall with any accuracy that email exchange. But by and large, I'd say, comparatively speaking, RAW was not a big sports guy...and can you blame him? Having polio and being as cerebral as he was as a kid? He liked Mailer, I'll say that. Is that sports? He was also an acquaintance of the great Oakland/Berkeley-based writer Ishmael Reed, whose Mumbo Jumbo reminds some of us of Illuminatus! and Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 in tone and antic humor and secret society tropes. Reed says, "Writin' is fightin'!" From Hemingway to Mailer punching Gore Vidal: writers as boxers, trying to knock their fellow (Male? Oh let's let in Joyce Carol Oates for fairness...) writers out of the ring, writin' bein' fightin' 'n all, ya know...

Q. It's my impression that California is a particular hotbed of Wilson fans. Has that been your experience?

A. RAW and Leary had some things to say about the maverick genes lighting out for the territory, and ending up in California, the edge of the Pacific, the Granola State, filled with fruits and nuts. But they were also serious: they thought that genetic neophiles agglomerated in California, where you got Hollywood and Silicon Valley, CalTech and JPL and Berkeley, the progressive-liberalism of San Francisco, and all kinds of weirdo cults and inventors: their kinds of peeps! At times they identified parts of California as the avant garde of 5th circuit Hedonic Engineering: hot tubs and pot, fine wines and tantric cults, surfing and fucking on the beach, then going to a movie after a vegetarian meal. (This all fits more the coast of CA; the inland areas can be pretty conservative and pent-up-regressive, right wing, what have ya. Their point was generally: when there is enough Wealth, more people will activate the somatosensory circuit of "feeling good" floating, which usually leads to tolerance towards others doing their own things. It can happen anywhere.)

I think it's probably right that CA has more RAW readers than any other state, but hell, it's a big-assed state, and the neophilic gene thing was probably a rhetorical flourish not quite fully-baked. I know he has a substantial fan base in Germany. He said he thought it was the children (and their children in turn) who were particularly raised to Question Authority, after the unpleasantness of 1914-45. Anywhere there are freaks like us, we will find guys like RAW. Libertarians and anarchists of various stripe, Discordians and Sub Genii, futurists, New Agers with scientific educations, surrealists, particularly literary science fiction fans, entheogenic enthusiasts, and people who like dense, eccentric and difficult heretical ideas, writers and thinkers will gravitate towards Wilson, wherever they are. Anyone can find him, even right where they are sitting now.

Q. What did you think of Eric Wagner's "An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson"?

A. 1.) He knows more than he let on.
2.) Any first book on an author starts the conversation in a literal way, for me at least, and for that he's to be commended. Subsequent books on Wilson will have to answer some of what Wagner addressed, if only to take issue with him. I'm grateful he got the first book on RAW out there.
3.) There are some tremendous insights in there; there are some things that really opened my eyes, and we're all lucky he spend time with RAW and corresponded with him.
4.) He carries the E-Prime off really well. No mean feat!
5.) Wagner takes his epistemology very siriusly indeed, and that renders his book as at times wildly subjective, intensely personal...really pretty avant in approach, especially for a first book on the subject. I admire him, but I think he hurt his cause a bit by being so subjective (which seems in keeping with a certain strict reading of RAW and Korzybski regarding "what we can know").
6.) He definitely "knows" more than he lets on. (I know I already said that.) I wrote the first review of the book at the Amazon site.

2010-07-22T06:19:00.000-07:00

Prometheus Awards announced

(I reproduce here the official press release. I voted for the winner, THE UNINCORPORATED MAN, although in the Hall of Fame category I was disappointed that CRYPTONOMICON by Neal Stephenson did not win.)

* The Libertarian Futurist Society will hold its annual awards ceremony for the Prometheus Award during Aussicon 4, the 68th World Science Fiction Convention, September 2-6, 2010, in Melbourne, Australia. The specific time and location will be available in the convention program.

* The winner of the Best Novel award is "The Unincorporated Man", by Dani and Eytan Kollin (TOR Books). The Hall of Fame award was won by "No Truce with Kings," a story by Poul Anderson, written in 1964. The Kollin Brothers will each receive a plaque and a one-ounce gold coin, while a smaller gold coin and a plaque will be presented to Anderson's estate.

"The Unincorporated Man" is the first novel publication by the Kollin brothers. It is the first novel in a planned trilogy to be published by Tor. "The Unincorporated Man" presents the idea that education and personal development could be funded by allowing investors to take a share of one's future income. The novel explores the ways this arrangement would affect those who do not own a majority of the stock in themselves. For instance, often ones investors would have control of a person's choices of where to live or work. The desire for power as an end unto itself and the negative consequences of the raw lust for power are shown in often great detail. The story takes a strong position that liberty is important and worth fighting for, and the characters spend their time pushing for different conceptions of what freedom is.

Poul Anderson's novels have been nominated many times, and have won the Prometheus Award (in 1995, for "The Stars are also Fire"), and the Hall of Fame Award (1995 for "The Star Fox" and 1985 for "Trader to the Stars"). He also received a Special award for lifetime achievement in 2001. This was the first nomination for "No Truce With Kings".

Poul Anderson's "No Truce with Kings" was first published in 1963. Like many science fiction stories of that era, it was set in a future that had endured a nuclear war. Anderson's focus is not on the immediate disaster and the struggle to survive, but the later rebuilding; its central conflict is over what sort of civilization should be created. The story's title comes from Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Old Issue," which describes the struggle to bind kings and states with law and the threat of their breaking free. Anderson's future California is basically a feudal society, founded on local loyalties, but it has a growing movement in favor of a centralized, impersonal state. As David Friedman remarked about this story, Anderson plays fair with his conflicting forces: both of them want the best for humanity, but one side is mistaken about what that is. This story is classic Anderson and, like many of his best stories, reveals his libertarian sympathies.

The other finalists for Best Novel were Hidden Empire, by Orson Scott Card (TOR Books); Makers, by Cory Doctorow (TOR Books); Liberating Atlantis, by Harry Turtledove (ROC/Penguin Books); and The United States of Atlantis, by Harry Turtledove (ROC/Penguin Books). Eleven novels published in 2009 were nominated for the 2010 award.

The other finalists for the Hall of Fame award were "As Easy as A.B.C.," a story by Rudyard Kipling (1912); Cryptonomicon, a novel by Neal Stephenson (1999); and "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," a story by Harlan Ellison (1965).

The LFS is announcing the winning works so that fans of the works and the writers can begin to make plans for attending the awards ceremonies. Anyone interested in more information about the awards ceremony or other LFS activities at Aussicon 4 can send email toprogramming@lfs.org.

The Prometheus awards for Best Novel, Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) and (occasional) Special awards honor outstanding science fiction/fantasy that explores the possibilities of a free future, champions human rights (including personal and economic liberty), dramatizes the perennial conflict between individuals and coercive governments, or critiques the tragic consequences of abuse of power--especially by the State.

The Prometheus Award, sponsored by the Libertarian Futurist Society (lfs.org), was established in 1979, making it one of the most enduring awards after the Nebula and Hugo awards, and one of the oldest fan-based awards currently in sf. Presented annually since 1982 at the World Science Fiction Convention, the Prometheus Awards include a gold coin and plaque for each of the winners.

The Hall of Fame, established in 1983, focuses on older classic fiction, including novels, novellas, short stories, poems and plays. Past Hall of Fame award winners range from Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand to Ray Bradbury and Ursula LeGuin.

Publishers who wish to submit novels published in 2009 for the 2010 Best Novel award should contact Michael Grossberg, Chair of the LFSPrometheus Awards Best Novel Finalist judging committee online atmikegrossb@aol.com or on paper at 3164 Plymouth Place, Columbus OH 43213.

Founded in 1982, the Libertarian Futurist Society sponsors the annualPrometheus Award and Prometheus Hall of Fame; publishes reviews, news and columns in the quarterly "Prometheus"; arranges annual awards ceremonies at the WorldCon; debates libertarian futurist issues (such as private space exploration); and provides fun and fellowship for libertarian SF fans.

A list of past winners of LFS awards can be found on the LFS web site at www.lfs.org.

2010-05-30T21:14:00.000-07:00

Renovating an old computer with Linux

I am posting this article on my blog using an IBM Thinkpad that's about 10 years old.

A Windows computer that ancient would be considered almost useless. It would likely not be able to run a modern Internet browser, for example.

My computer, however, uses a variation on the Linux operating system called CrunchbangLinux. I won't claim that it's fast, but it is adequate. I can use it to surf the Internet, play music, write an article with a word processor, read PDF files and do pretty much anything else a computer is normally used for. A "light" version of Linux, which uses a relatively small amount of memory, can rehabilitate an old PC that otherwise would not be very useful.

As I assume there might be other people who might find it interesting to obtain a useful computer by downloading software from the Internet and installing it on an old machine, I'm going to explain how to use Crunchbang Linux, my current favorite version of Linux. I am not a computer hardware expert at all, and I will do my best to write an article for ordinary computer users.

First, I want to define my terms, in case anyone is already confused. All computers run on an operating system, a software program that controls the computer and provides a base for the various other programs it runs. Most personal computers run a variation of Microsoft's Windows system. Macintosh runs an Apple OS.

Linux, invented as a kind of hobby by computer users around the world, is a noncommercial operating system available for little or no money that usually runs on computers that otherwise would usually run Windows.

Anybody is free to develop his own version of Linux, and there are many different versions to meet different needs. There are quite a few light Linux versions written specifically to run on old computers and to run very fast on new machines. Crunchbang Linux runs well on old machines, and so does Antix Linux.

To get started, you'll need an old computer and at least one copy of Linux. You may also need a wireless card or Ethernet card to connect the computer with your Internet provider, if you use a cable connection rather than wireless Internet.

You may not want to run your Linux experiments on the computer your children use for their homework. It's best to find an old computer to play with. Your family, your friends or your employer may have an old computer they consider useless that they are willing to let you have for next to nothing. Otherwise, you may have to shop around using classified ads and other resources.

Next, you'll need Crunchbang Linux, Antix Linux or another "light" Linux.

You can try almost any Linux distribution before installing it by using a "live CD."

To get yours, download a copy of Linux and then burn it on a blank disk using a CD burner.

Any such file will be stored online as an ISO image file. All Web sites for Linux have such files, which are designed to to burned onto a blank CD. The Antix Linux site, for example, has links to many sites which store the files and make them available for downloading. Similarly, Crunchbang has downloading links on its site.

Download Antix Linux 8.5-486 if you have a very old computer, such as Pentium I. Download Antix Linux 8.5-686 if you have a Pentium II or later. The 486 version will work in just about any computer.

Any computer with a CD burner should have a program for burning ISO image files on disk. If you don't have one, you should be able to Google for such a program. If you don't have a CD burner, find the computer nerd in your family or your circle of friends to help you.
Downloading Linux and burning it yourself to a CD may be too much of a hassle for some people. An easier way is to buy a cheap disk from an online vendor. OSDisc.com sells Linux disks for $1.95 apiece, including the latest versions of Antix and Crunchbang. (Click "Live CD" and look under "MEPIS" for AntiX.)

It's probably a good idea to have copies of another couple of varieties of light Linux to test, too. Google "lightweight Linux" for ideas. Xubuntu is probably the most popular light Linux and is easy to use and install.

If your old desktop computer does not have a network card, or if your laptop does not have a wireless card, you'll likely want one to connect to the Internet. Unless you are sure it will work with Linux, don't buy your device on the Internet. Buy it at the store and save the receipt. (The packaging won't tell you if it works with Linux, and the salesman at the store likely won't know.)

Now, it's time to have fun.

Make sure your computer's settings will tell it to boot from the CD drive. If you don't have the manual anymore and can't figure out how to do that, Google for a PDF of the computer's manual. In my experience, there's a PDF of the manual available for download somewhere for almost any computer ever made.

Insert your Crunchbang Linux CD (or whatever Linux CD is being tested) into the CD drive and reboot. It should load. If Antix Linux is being tried, enter "demo" and "demo" in the username and password fields.

This "live CD" version of the software in theory load, and allow the user to see if it works on the computer being tested. If Antix Linux is being tested, right click the desktop with the mouse to bring up a menu of software programs to try. The same action will bring up a Crunchbang menu.

If a laptop is being tested and there isn't an unencrypted wireless Internet signal at home, tote the laptop to a library or coffee shop. If all goes well, the software will recognize the wireless card (or the networking card on your desktop computer.) Clicking on the browser should connect you to the Internet.
If the wireless adapter doesn't work, you can try another version of Linux, including an older version of the same software. (For some reason, only older versions of Antix Linux work with my D-Link wireless card.) If you saved your receipt, as I advised you a few paragraphs ago, you can exchange the wireless adapter for another one.

Make sure the sound card works by playing a sound file or trying an Internet radio station.

When you are satisfied the software works on your computer, it can be installed on the hard drive.

Most Linux varieties will ask for a username and password for an administrator and a username and password for a user. To avoid messing up your computer, always log on as a user for ordinary computer tasks such as surfing the Internet, listening to music files, etc. Administrator log-ins should be reserved for when you really need to tinker with the software.

If the software doesn't work or doesn't recognize all of the computer's hardware, try using a different variety of Linux.

When you have finished, you should have a computer that can do almost any task you'd expect a computer to do.

Using it will be a little bit like switching from Windows to a MacIntosh. The system will seem unfamiliar in some ways, but figuring out how to do something normally won't be too difficult.

Your old computer will not be as fast as an expensive new computer. Because you aren't running Windows, you won't have access to all of the computer programs Windows users can run.

But there are advantages to using Linux, too.

Spyware, viruses and other nonsense programs written by troublemakers are written for Windows computers. Running Linux puts an end to having to worry about such things.

2010-05-17T10:40:00.000-07:00

'We are Lebron' video

Here's an amusing video: "We Are LeBron," a plea for the Cavaliers star to remain in Cleveland, sung to the tune of "We Are the World." Various Cleveland celebrities take part.

I have a soft spot for Zach Reed, the Cleveland City Councilman -- he was one of the few local Democrats who helped when my wife and I participated in a futile effort to force a vote over whether to raise the sales tax for the Medical Mart boondoggle. So I'll take a moment to note here that apparently Councilman Reed can actually sing.

2010-05-15T07:15:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama's crummy Supreme Court nominee

President Barack Obama has nominated a Supreme Court justice who thinks that prosecutors who use fake evidence to convict someone of murder should be shielded from lawsuits. Details here.

There's nothing that can be done about this. Given the partisan realities in Washington, the president could nominate almost anyone, and the Democrats holding a solid majority in the U.S. Senate would set aside whatever private reservations they might have and confirm that person. Only a few of the usual soreheads (libertarians, card-carrying members of the American Civil Liberties Union, those sorts of folks) will raise a fuss. They probably won't get much traction in the media.

I want to thank a couple of the usual soreheads for alerting me to this: Jennifer Abel (via Jeffrey Quick).

2010-03-23T18:30:00.000-07:00

Prometheus finalists announced

Much of my free time the last couple of years has been spent reading books that are being considered for the Prometheus Award, a science fiction award that honors books concerned with liberty. I'm a judge on two committees, one that nominates books for the main award and another that nominates for the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award.

The nomination committee for the main award has finished its work and put five books on the ballot, which I call to the attention of libertarian sf bookworms.

Here is the official press release:

The Libertarian Futurist Society will present its Prometheus Awards
ceremony in September at the World Science Fiction Convention, which
will be held in Melbourne, Australia from September 2nd to September
6th, 2010. We are happy to announce the finalists for the Best Novel
award. The finalists for the Prometheus Hall of Fame award were
announced in January.

The finalists in the Best Novel category of this year's Prometheus
Award, for the best pro-freedom novel of 2009, are:

* Hidden Empire, by Orson Scott Card (TOR Books)

The sequel to Card's "Empire" (also a Prometheus finalist) covers the
emergence of an imperial president and the role of voluntary action in
saving human lives. Card has had three previous novels nominated for
the Prometheus.

* Makers, by Cory Doctorow (TOR Books)

An inspiring story of entrepreneurial competition in the near future.
The story makes Schumpeter's creative destruction visible, and shows how
even the poorest can be helped by competition and invention. Doctorow's
"Little Brother" (TOR Books) won last year's Prometheus award.

* The Unincorporated Man, by Dani and Eytan Kollin (TOR Books)

This novel explores the idea that education and personal development
could be funded by allowing investors to take a share of one's future
income. The story takes a strong position that liberty is important and
worth fighting for, and the characters spend their time pushing for
different conceptions of what freedom is. This is the first nomination
for the Kollin brothers.

* Liberating Atlantis, by Harry Turtledove (ROC/Penguin Books)

The third book in Turtledove's Atlantis trilogy illustrates why people
of all colors should be treated equally, and shows slaves in an
alternate history demonstrating their humanity by fighting for their
rights. Turtledove's "The Gladiator" was a Prometheus co-winner in
2008. The first book in the trilogy was a finalist in 2009, and he had
one other novel nominated for the award in 1999.

* The United States of Atlantis, by Harry Turtledove (ROC/Penguin Books)

The second book in Turtledove's Atlantis trilogy covers his alternate
colonies' revolution to free themselves from the British crown. This is
the first time an author has had two books as Prometheus finalists in a
single year.

Eleven novels published in 2009 were nominated for this year's Best
Novel category. The other nominees were The Prisoner, by Carlos Cortes
(Bantam Spectra);The Good Humor Man, by Andrew Fox (Tachyon
Publications); The Iron Web, by Larken Rose (Larken Rose); The
Revolution Business: Book Five of the Merchant Princes by Charles Stross
(TOR Books); Prophets: Apotheosis, by S. Andrew Swann (DAW); Ground
Zero, by F. Paul Wilson (TOR Books).

The Prometheus Award, sponsored by the Libertarian Futurist Society
(LFS), was established in 1979, making it one of the most enduring
awards after the Nebula and Hugo awards, and one of the oldest fan-based
awards currently in sf. Presented annually since 1982 at the World
Science Fiction Convention, the Prometheus Awards include a gold coin
and plaque for the winners.

The Prometheus awards honor outstanding science fiction/fantasy that
explores the possibilities of a free future, champions human rights
(including personal and economic liberty), dramatizes the perennial
conflict between individuals and coercive governments, or critiques the
tragic consequences of abuse of power--especially by the State.

For a full list of past Prometheus Award winners in three categories,
visit www.lfs.org. Membership in the Libertarian Futurist Society is
open to any science fiction fan interested in how fiction can promote an
appreciation of the value of liberty.

2010-02-17T17:26:00.000-08:00

A few notes on Boskone

Tyler Cowen wrote a book last year called "Create Your Own Economy," arguing that in such a vast, prosperous culture that most of us live in now, each of us has the option to essentially create our own culture to immerse ourselves in, using our iPods, computers, etc.

Any good-sized convention allows attendees to "create their own conventions." For example, I just got back from Boskone (Feb. 12-14, at the Westin Waterfront in downtown Boston), a regional convention that includes two writers I really admire, Charles Stross and Vernor Vinge, and I didn't attend a single panel or event that featured either of them. There were so many good panels, I had to make choices.

I haven't been to a convention in 10 years, but I had two particular reasons for wanting to to Boskone. One, I have been obsessed with rediscovering Roger Zelazny ever since I walked into the Poison Pen, a mystery bookstore in Scottsdale, Ariz., in March 2009 and found a copy of his new posthumous mystery, "The Dead Man's Brother." NESFA, the folks who put on Boskone, have been publishing a six-volume set of all of Zelazny's short fiction, all of his poetry and all of his articles that it could find. And I knew that NESFA would give the premiere performance of a Zelazny play, "Godson."

F. Brett Cox and his wife, Jeanne Beckwith

Then, too, I knew that my old friend Dr. F. Brett Cox and his wife, playwright and director Dr. Jeanne Beckwith, would be at the convention. Brett is a very old friend from my teen fan days, but I had not seen him in about a decade.

Brett is a professor, a writer and an academic with a big network of friends, and he turned out to be an excellent "native guide" to the convention in a region of the country where I don't know many people. While I was having dinner Friday with Ann, Brett and Jeanne, Brett waved over a friend to the table, Jim Kelly. As James Patrick Kelly, he's the author of a Golden Gryphon Press collection I have at home, "Think Like a Dinosaur," which is as good a single-author collection as I've ever read. When we got back to our room I told Ann that the guy Brett had flagged down might be the most talented writer at the convention.

Science fiction readers are really privileged in their ability to casually meet many of the best authors in the field. Boston is home to some of my favorite mainstream writers, but I don't know where I could go to be able to meet Elinor Lipman or Janice Weber.

During the NESFA party on Friday night to celebrate the group's latest small press books, such as the two new Poul Anderson volumes, I met Dr. Christopher Kovacs, one of the three editors of the NESFA's Zelazny project.

Kovacs told me that he had spent years assembling many boxes of all of the Zelazny material he could find. When he found out about the NESFA project, which originally was going to be a collection of selected works, he contacted the NESFA folks and told them they could assembly everything, if they wished. Kovacs also took on the job of annotating every work in the volumes and writing a biography, serialized in the six volumes, which covers Zelazny's life and literary career.

Jo Walton, at the autograph-signing table

I went to several interesting panels and discussions on Saturday, including the Jo Walton Kaffeeklatsch.

I had not realized that I was supposed to sign up for the Walton event, and when I showed up I was told there was no room for me at the table, but a participant generously got up to leave and I wa s able to take his place.

I very much admire Walton's "Small Change" trilogy, particularly the first two books, and I also had a chance to pass on some questions posed by my friend Julianne Chatelain. Walton told us that although she is from Wales, she thinks of hersel f as a Canadian writer, as she lives in Canada and has never seen any of her books published in Great Britain. She said that living in Canada gives her distance to write books in a British setting such as "Ha'Penny."

Walton, asked how her LIvejournal blog affects her writing, replied that she is not only a writer, she is a person, and she participates in Livejournal to keep up with her friends. Similarly, Walton asserts that she attends conventions as a fan, not as a writer seeking to promote her books, and said she often sits on panels as a reader rather than as a writer.

Eytan Kollin, left and his brother, Dani Kollin, work well together

I was wise to the rules of Kaffeeklatsch and properly signed up for the Kollin
brothers, the authors of "The Unincorporated Man," currently being weighed
for inclusion on the 2010 final ballot for the Prometheus Award, although in fact they drew fewer fans than Walton. They were both very nice and answered all of my questions.

I told them I was disappointed at finish their novel and not really knowing what their protagonist, Justin Cord, stood for as opposed to what he was against, and they advised me to read the sequel, which appears in May. I asked if their treatment of virtual reality was influenced by Robert Nozick's famous libertarian philosophy book, "Anarchy, the State and Utopia," which makes much the same arguments, and they said, nope, they weren't familiar with the book. I asked if a anyone had complained that the space elevator in New York City could not possibly be at that location, and they said no, they had not heard that criticism.

They also told me stories about their dealings with David Hartwell. They were terrified when Hartwell invited them to breakfast at a science fiction convention after reading their manuscript, not realizing that Hartwell would not have extended the invitation if he had not been interested in the book. In the original ending for "The Unincorporated Man," the hero, Justin Cord, was still trying to decide what to do at the end of the book, a conclusion the two authors described to me as Talmudic. Hartwell told them to forget that and to have Cord make up his mind, and made other changes which the two brothers acknowledge improved the book and its sequels.

I told them that Hartwell's work on Robert Heinlein's novels was probably good preparation for working with them, and that I liked to imagine an alternate universe in which Heinlein allowed Hartwell to edit the books. (Heinlein refused to allow his later books to actually be edited, to the obvious detriment of novels such as "Time Enough for Love.")

Saturday's highlights also included a performance of Zelazny's play "Godson." Jeanne Beckwith, who had served as a consultant for the staging, sat next to me and gave me a bit of commentary. I thought it was pretty good and would have been better if only the participants had had more time.

Brett reads from his novel

I attended little programming Sunday but did make it to Brett Cox's reading of his work in progress novel. It sounded really good, although I think Brett is going to regret reading it because all of his friends who heard it will no doubt pester him endlessly until he finishes the book. I certainly intend to.

2010-02-01T19:04:00.000-08:00

Prometheus 'Hall of Fame' ballot announced

The Prometheus Award Hall of Fame ballot has been announced, and I nominated two of the four works that will be on the ballot: "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson and " 'Repent Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" by Harlan Ellison. Balloting will be decided by members of the Libertarian Futurist Society.

Here's the official press release, minus contact info at the end:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, January 30, 2010

The Libertarian Futurist Society has announced the finalists for the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. This category honors novels, novellas, stories, graphic novels, anthologies, films, TV shows/series, plays, poems, music recordings and other works of fiction first published or broadcast more than five years ago.

The Libertarian Futurist Society’s Hall of Fame committee has selected four finalists for the 2010 award, from a field of 13 nominated works:

“As Easy as A.B.C.,” a story by Rudyard Kipling (1912)
Cryptonomicon, a novel by Neal Stephenson (1999)
“No Truce with Kings,” a story by Poul Anderson (1964)
“’Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” a story by Harlan Ellison (1965)

Final voting will take place in June and early July of 2010. All members of the Libertarian Futurist Society are eligible to vote. The winner will be announced after the counting of the votes; the award will be presented in a ceremony at the World Science Fiction Convention.

The Prometheus awards for Best Novel, Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) and (occasional) Special awards honor outstanding science fiction/fantasy that explores the possibilities of a free future, champions human rights (including personal and economic liberty), dramatizes the perennial conflict between individuals and coercive governments, or critiques the tragic consequences of abuse of power--especially by the State.

The Prometheus Award, sponsored by the Libertarian Futurist Society (lfs.org), was established in 1979, making it one of the most enduring awards after the Nebula and Hugo awards, and oneof the oldest fan-based awards currently in sf. Presented annually since 1982 at the World Science Fiction Convention, the Prometheus Awards include a gold coin and plaque for each ofthe winners.

The Hall of Fame, established in 1983, focuses on older classic fiction, including novels, novellas, short stories, poems and plays. Past Hall of Fame award winners range from Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand to Ray Bradbury and Ursula LeGuin.

Founded in 1982, the Libertarian Futurist Society sponsors the annual Prometheus Award and Prometheus Hall of Fame; publishes reviews, news and columns in the quarterly "Prometheus"; arranges annual awards ceremonies at the WorldCon; debates libertarian futurist issues (such as private space exploration); and provides fun and fellowship for libertarian SF fans.

A list of past winners of LFS awards can be found on the LFS web site at www.lfs.org.

2010-01-08T21:12:00.000-08:00

No good deed goes unpunished, Iain M. Banks edition

One of my favorite writers is a Scottish science fiction writer, Iain M. Banks. He is arguably the best living SF writer who has never won a major award in the field (e.g., Hugo or Nebula).

Doing my small bit to redress this injustice, I nominated his novel "Matter," for the Prometheus Award, and my fellow judges voted to put it on the final ballot last year, where it duly lost to Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother."

A few months ago, as I read his great new novel, "Transition," I got more and more excited. It's a really fine work of science fiction, and politically it's all about the dangers of abuse of power, why it's important to guard against the loss of civil liberties, etc. Sounded like a strong candidate for another Prometheus nomination.

Then I ran across this passage, in which the novel's heroine, a Mrs. Mulverhill (a freedom fighter, apparently great in bed, too) is talking to an assassin about one of the hired killer's victims:

"No, he really was a shit. He wasn't really a genocidal racist as such but whenever he's not stopped he ends up causing such havoc he might as well as been. Wanted to buy up a state in the U.S. midwest and build an inpregnable Nirvana for the super-rich; Xanadu, Shangri-La.

Fantasy made real. A Libertarian." From his expression she must have thought he wasn't entirely familiar with the term. She sighed. "Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic

self-regard." (Chapter 13, page 326 of the American edition.)

It's a gratuitous passage, unrelated to the rest of the book as far as I could tell. Banks apparently just wanted to give a poke in the eye to any libertarian who might be reading his book.

You can see my dilemma. I wanted to nominate it, anyway — if Banks didn't want the nomination, well tough. It's not his decision. He's not a libertarian, but neither are other recent winners such as Charles Stross, Jo Walton, either. But I didn't want to subject my group to ridicule. If "Transition" showed up on the final ballot, inevitably someone would ask if members of the Libertarian Futurist Society can actually read. So I didn't nominate it, and nobody else has so far, either.

Well, maybe "Transition" will get a Hugo nomination. It certainly deserves one.

2010-01-08T21:02:00.000-08:00

Let's hope she gets the android vote

Tessa Dick, ex-wife of Philip K. Dick, is running for Congress. Campaign blog here.

I've had a smile on my face ever since I heard about this. (Via Marty Halpern. Thanks for the informative Tweet!)

2009-12-31T10:02:00.000-08:00

Books Read 2009

1. When Will There Be Good News? Kate Atkinson. Really well-written novel, somewhere between a genre mystery and a contemporary work of fiction.
2. The Phoenix Exultant, John C. Wright. Libertarian-oriented, far-future novel. Quite interesting.
3. The Edge of Reason, Melinda Snodgrass. Fantasy novel set in New Mexico. Didn't really work for me.
4. The Ruin of the Roman Empire, James J. O'Donnell. Argues the empire was "ruined" by Justinian's expansion. Not bad, but not great.
5. Little Brother, Cory Doctorow. Excellent novel, written for young adults but a good read for all ages. Won the Prometheus Award. Everyone in the Libertarian Futurist Society was enthusiastic about it, myself included.
6. Saturn's Children, Charles Stross. Science fiction novel about horny robots. A good read.
7. Dilbert 2.0, Scott Adams. Massive collection of Dilbert comic strips.
8. Opening Atlantis, Harry Turtledove (audiobook). Entertaining, average Turtledove novel.
9. Roswell, Texas, L. Neil Smith, Scott Bieser, et al. (graphic novel). Rather interesting look at an alternative Texas.
10. Liberation, Brian Francis Slattery. Unusual novel mixing literary and pop styles. I want to read more by this author.
11. The January Dancer, Michael Flynn. Good far-future SF novel.
12. By Schism Rent Asunder, David Weber (audiobook). Political-military soap opera. Held my attention.
13. The Dead Man's Brother, Roger Zelazny. Lost mystery novel finally published years after author's death. I thought it was quite good.
14. Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death, Robert Anton Wilson. Essays by my favorite writer.
15. Down in the Black Gang, Philip Jose Farmer. Re-read this after hearing about Farmer's death. I think the book proves he was a skilled short story writer.
16. The Cutie, Donald Westlake (audiobook). Fun and fast-moving.
17. The International Spy Museum Handbook of Practical Spying, Jack Barth. Amusing book I picked up at the Washington, D.C., museum.
18. The Spartans, Paul Cartledge (audiobook). Good study by respected scholar.
19. Freakanomics, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt (audiobook). Fun. I don't know enough about economics to really judge this book.
20. The Dream of Scipio, Iain Pears. One of the best historical novels ever. Individuals in three societies in crisis (fall of Rome, Black Death, World War II) in what is now southern France face difficult choices.
21. Hit and Run, Lawrence Bloch (audiobook). Typically entertaining outing by my favorite mystery author.
22. The Book of Lost Books, Stuart Kelly. I would have preferred more scholarship and less commentary.
23. Give Me Back My Legions! Harry Turtledove. Historical novel about the defeat of Varus by Arminius that essentially ended Roman attempts to conquer Germany.
24. The Family Man, Elinor Lipman. One of her best, which means it's really good.
25. As They See 'Em, Bruce Weber. Behind the scenes look at the role umpires play in baseball.
26. The Good Humor Man, Andrew Fox. Enjoyable novel about food Prohibition.
27. Nine Princes in Amber, Roger Zelazny (audiobook). I love Zelazny, but I can't figure out why people love the Amber books so much.
28. Prophets, S. Andrew Swann. Enjoyable, fast-moving space opera. First book of a trilogy.
29. Threshhold, Collected Stories Volume 1, Roger Zelazny. Wonderful beginning to NESFA's six-part chronicle.
30. Pallas, L. Neil Smith. Not as good as The Forge of the Elders.
31. Conspiracies of Rome, Richard Blake. Historical novel about Italy in late antiquity. I'm eager to read the sequel.
32. Power and Light, Collected Stories Volume 2, Roger Zelazny. NESFA is performing an excellent service by publishing these.
33. Rocket Men, Craig Nelson (audiobook). Excellent chronicle of the moon flights.
34. Saratoga, John F. Luzader. I read this because I knew I'd be visiting the battlefield. Somewhat revisionist treatment argues that Horatio Gates deserves much of the credit for the key victory.
35. Isle of the Dead, Roger Zelazny. One of Zelazny's best.
36. Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov. Another excellent Nabokov, more political than his usual work.
37. Songs for the Missing, Stewart O'Nan (audiobook). Chilling book about murder of young woman.
38. The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome, Stuart Kelly. Shows role Huns played in Rome's fall. See comments in my 'Best of 2009' posting.
39. Healthy Competition, Michael F. Cannon and Michael D. Tanner. Cato Institute's take on health care reform.
40. The Unincorporated Man, Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin. Very political science fiction novel. Interesting and intermittently good
41. By Heresies Distressed, David Weber (audiobook). Not as good as the previous book in the series.
42. This is Me, Jack Vance! Jack Vance. Memoir of one of my favorite authors.
43. Death of a Gentle Lady, M.C. Beaton (audiobook). Funny, very enjoyable mystery. Decided to try Beaton after reading Jack Vance's statement that Beaton is his favorite living author.
44. The Quiet War, Paul McAuley. Science fiction novel about global warming and its consequences. Pretty good.
45. Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, M.R. James. My Halloween book. He's quite good at ghost stories.
46. The Healing of America, T.R. Reid. Useful look at health care systems in other countries.
47. Transition, Iain R. Banks. Really excellent alternate-worlds SF novel.
48. Makers, Cory Doctorow. Doctorow's tribute to entrepreneurs shows a gift for characterization.
49. Create Your Own Economy, Tyler Cowen. Insightful study of how technology allows each of us to create our own little worlds of education and entertainment.
50. The United States of Atlantis, Harry Turtledove. Dull plot that essentially recapitulates American Revolution, but interesting political insights.
51. A Highland Christmas, M.C. Beaton. Brief holiday novel by the Scottish mystery writer.
52. The Secret Life of Eva Hathaway, Janice Weber. Passionate, energetic and often funny novel by author who is also an acclaimed classical pianist.

2009-12-22T06:30:00.000-08:00

Download a great, free Christmas audiobook

Librivox is a site that offers free audiobooks of public domain books, read by volunteer readers. (A public domain book is a work, usually old, that has gone out of copyright. Think Jane Austen.)

As you might expect, the quality of the volunteers varies quite a bit, and many of these works feature a succession of readers, some of them good, some not. That's a good description one of the site's versions of "A Christmas Carol." But I've made a discovery. A guy who goes by the name "Smokestack Jones," from my old stomping ground back in Oklahoma, made an excellent recording which you can download here.

More on Christmas audiobooks here.

2009-12-15T18:33:00.000-08:00

Best Books of 2009

Everybody else does a best books list; why not me? Mine is shorter and easier to get through.

1. The Family Man, Elinor Lipman. Another warm, funny novel about human relationships by an author often characterized, not unfairly, as a latter-day Jane Austen. Uncharacteristically, the most important romance in the book is between two gay characters. Characteristically, the two gay men offer Lipman a chance to say something wise and humane about what being a "family man" is really all about.

2. As They See 'Em, Bruce Weber. A book by a New York Times reporter that examines the roles of umpires in baseball, and explain what it's like to be an umpire. If this wasn't the best book about baseball in 2009, the better ones must be pretty great.

3. The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome, Stuart Kelly. I love to read about the later Roman Empire/late antiquity/the "Dark Ages." I read more than one such book this year; this was the best. Kelly shows how the Huns damaged the Roman Empire not just by helping to cause a series of invasions by various tribes, such as the Goths, but also illuminates how Attila's attacks critically hindered the Eastern Roman Empire's efforts to bring north Africa back into the Roman fold.

4. The Healing of America, T.R. Reid. If you want to understand how health care systems work in other countries, this is where to go. Reid's book suffers from flaws and bias, as any book on such a politically-charged topic is likely to do, but I learned a lot from it and and admired the way he could clearly illuminate difficult topics.

5. Transition, Iain M. Banks. Banks is the best science fiction writer in the world who has never won a major SF award (such as the Hugo). I'll defend such statements by pointing to books such as this one, a politically-charged, masterfully-plotted alternate worlds novel. What an indictment of our literary culture that outfits like NPR and the New York Times ignored this book.

6. Create Your Own Economy, Tyler Cowen. Cowen shows how technology has allowed each of us to create our own private university (or "economy," as the George Mason University economist puts it. The book could have benefitted from a little editing to force Cowen to define his terms more and tease out his arguments, but the book is full of sharp insights.

Notes and Honorable Mentions: I thought Roger Zelazny's "The Dead Man's Brother" was quite good; others seemed to disagree. I read quite a few excellent books that just weren't published in 2009, among them 2008's "Little Brother" by Cory Doctorow. (His 2009 book, "Makers," also is quite good). I finally got around to reading "The Dream of Scipio" by Iain Pears, which is maybe the best historical novel I've ever come across.

2009-10-30T06:31:00.000-07:00

Last-minute Halloween suggestions

I don't usually read horror, but I try to find something suitable every Halloween. In past years, I've read the Library of America collection of H.P. Lovecraft's short stories (good), Stephen King's vampire tale "Salem's Lot" (good) and Arthur Machen's "The Hill of Dreams" (a little disappointing.)

This year I am reading classic ghost stories by M.R. James. He's brilliant. I'm reading "Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories," an Oxford University Press book, but you can also simply download his stories from Project Gutenberg. (They are available as an audiobook as well as text.) Gutenberg also has oldies-but-goodies such as Bram Stoker's "Dracula" (also available as audio and text) and stories by Edgar Allen Poe.

For more suggestions on free Halloween content, go here.

2009-10-22T10:49:00.001-07:00

Hey, sheriff, where do you want me to put this bomb?

My favorite news story today is from my own newspaper, the Sandusky Register, and it's about a guy who found a pipe bomb out in the woods in a wildlife area. Naturally, the only thing he could think to do about it was to tote it somewhere where it could hurt somebody if it went off. Apparently he was under a time crunch and couldn't find a nursery filled with babies, or a kindergarden class, or a dormitory full of nuns, so he had to settle for taking it to the local sheriff's office. The lobby was immediately evacuated, and a brave official then carried it outside. It was a live bomb, too. It was detonated by a bomb squad.

2009-10-21T19:07:00.000-07:00

Internet column (Cooking By Numbers)

You probably have all kinds of food sitting in your cupboard and refrigerator. Ever wonder what you can cook with what you have on hand?
Cooking By Numbers (www.cookingbynumbers.com) has a simple menu that lets visitors check off which common ingredients they happen to have in stock. Click "search," and the site then provides a list of recipes for dishes you can make.
You may have noticed that Allrecipes (www.allrecipes.com) has a similar service. You can enter four ingredients you happen to have on hand (and optionally, four ingredients you don't want to include), run a search, and get a list of recipes. I entered lentils, onions, rice and tomatoes, and 10 recipes popped up. When I omitted the tomatoes and included the other three ingredients, I got 25 recipes. I was really just testing the feature for this column, but I found a recipe I wanted to keep and e-mailed a copy to myself, using the site's handy e-mailing tool.
Tipnut has put together a list of "25 Vintage Food Prep Tips" at tipnut.com/vintage-food-tips that are drawn from old cookbooks. (Sample tip: "Fried potatoes will be deliciously golden brown if sprinkled lightly with flour before frying.") TipNut has various household tips and is available at tipnut.com.
Thought4Food (food.blogdig.net) tries to collect the "best cooking and food posts from around the Web." The site includes a large collection of links to food and cooking Web sites and blogs.
If you are interested in cooking, or just looking for a site that fits your particular needs, here are a couple of places to check.
www.100topcookingsites.com is just what it sounds like -- a straightforward list of 100 recipe sites. BestCookingSites.com seems more comprehensive, covering kitchenware, baking and many other topics.
A fast browser. I've never been particularly interested in Apple's Safari Web browser. (A Web browser is the program you use to look at Web sites, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.)
The Macintosh computer I used at work came with Safari, but I noticed that not all Web sites worked well with it. And I can't afford to run out and buy an iPhone.
I was startled, however, when the Wall Street Journal's ace technology columnist, Walt Mossberg, reviewed the new Safari and reported that it is much faster in loading Web sites than any other browser he had tested. Mossberg also pointed out that Safari is available for Windows as well as Macintosh computers, which I hadn't realized. He also allowed he didn't like some of Safari's features. (You can read the review at his Web site, ptech.allthingsd.com.)
I decided to try the browser, so I downloaded it to my Macintosh work computer. I discovered that my computer's operating system isn't up to date enough to use it. Windows users, though, can try it if they have Windows Vista or Windows XP with Service Page 2.
If you want to give the browser a try, you can find it at www.apple.com/safari.
Baggage fees. Planning a trip soon? One of the most unpleasant recent developments for air travel is that the airlines have been tacking on hidden fees.
Flyingfees.com tracks baggage and other fees for the various airlines. I looked at it last week and saw that my wife and I would have to pay $30 for two checked bags if we each checked one each for a spring trip.
(Tom Jackson wants to hear about interesting Southwest Oklahoma Web sites and blogs. Write to him at tom.jackson@gmail.com).

2009-10-20T09:46:00.000-07:00

Where good environmental practices and frugality meet

Connie Schultz has a nice column in Sunday's Plain Dealer about what she calls the "eco-friendly" practice of hanging clothes out to dry instead of using an electrical dryer. I thought I was being cheap when I did this in Lawton, Oklahoma, years ago, but apparently I was part of the pro-environment avant-garde.

If she writes about such topics again, I hope she'll mention that her readers can also save energy (and money) if they simply turn off their desktop computers when they aren't using them. This is a good idea for other reasons, too. My computer runs better when it hasn't been on for hours and hours, and computer security expert Bruce Schneier points out that a computer can't be a target for hackers when it's turned off. He writes, "Turn off the computer when you're not using it, especially if you have an "always on" Internet connection."

CNN has just posted an article on "Six Simple Ways to Save Energy at Home." Some of these were new to me.

2009-10-16T07:01:00.001-07:00

Jack Vance: A couple of miracles

Science fiction writer Jack Vance has been one of my favorite writers ever since I was a teenager. I've never wavered in my opinion that he's wonderful.

When his 2004 novel, Lurulu, came out I thought that was the last we had heard of him. But it turns out there was more.

The New York Times magazine ran a wonderful article about Vance in July.

And now there's even a new book, a memoir, "This Is Me, Jack Vance!" published by Subterranean Press. I've just finished it, and I'm hoping to get somebody to accept my review of it.

2009-08-18T08:22:00.000-07:00

New recording of Duckworth classic

I've been waiting for quite awhile for someone to get around to making a second recording of composer William Duckworth's signature piece, "The Time Curve Preludes."

It's finally happened. Pianist Bruce Brubaker has released "Time Curve," which includes many of the preludes. It's a little maddening that he didn't record all of them, but I have to say I like the Philip Glass etudes also include on the disc. The recording is available as a cheap "Web album" at lala.com and is listed at Emusic.com.

Duckworth, by the way, has revamped and modernized his Web site.

2009-07-07T19:27:00.000-07:00

Doctorow's 'Little Brother' wins Prometheus

Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" has been awarded the Prometheus Award for the best science fiction novel of 2008 by the Libertarian Futurist Society. J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy picked up the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. Full announcement here.

The other finalists also are good books and deserve to be listed here: "Matter" by Iain M. Banks, "The January Dancer" by MIchael Flynn, "Saturn's Children" by Charles Stross, "Opening Atlantis" by Harry Turtledove and "Half a Crown" by Jo Walton. (Cross posted at Libertarian News Network.

2009-05-09T08:14:00.001-07:00

Roger Zelazny's lost novel

I've published my piece on Roger Zelazny's lost novel, "The Dead Man's Brother."

2009-04-24T12:47:00.000-07:00

L. Neil Smith's top 15 favorite books

A friend of mine on Facebook named Catherine Green has begun a "15 Books" meme on Facebook. The idea is to name the first 15 books you can think of in 15 minutes.

After I posted my list of 15, science fiction writer L. Neil Smith followed with his 15 books. Here El Neil's list:

Anthem by Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Crossroads of Time by Andre Norton
Death of a Dude by Rex Stout
Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein
Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein
Guardians of Time by Poul Anderson
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen by H. Beam Piper
Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif
A Planet for Texans by H. Beam Piper
Principles of Personal Defense by Jeff Cooper
Roosevelt's Road to Russia by George N. Crocker
Starman Jones by Robert A. Heinlein
Tunnel in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein
The Whenabouts of Burr by Michael Kurland

Smith noted later he forgot to list "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury. "I knew the instant I pressed ENTER that I'd think of five more books I'd like to have added," he remarked.

If you want to try one of Smith's own books, he suggests "The Probability Broach," "The Forge of the Elders" or "Pallas."

Here's my fifteen:

Illuminatus! — Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea
Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson
The Gold Bug Variations — Richard Powers
Money — Martin Amis
Hyperion — Dan Simmons
Excession — Iain M. Banks
The Book of the New Sun — Gene Wolfe.
Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
The World of Late Antiquity — Peter Brown
Nine Hundred Grandmothers — R.A. Lafferty
Main Street — Sinclair Lewis
Pale Fire — Vladimir Nabokov
This Immortal — Roger Zelazny
Islands in the Net — Bruce Sterling
Flag of Ecstasy — Charles Henri Ford

I wish I'd remembered Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." It's not a coincidence I listed "Illuminatus!" first — Robert Anton Wilson is a big influence on my politics and thinking.

My son Richard Jackson's list:

1.The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
2.The Princess Bride by William Goldman
3.And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
4.Matilda by Roald Dahl
5.The Giver by Lois Lowry
6.The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
7.The Seven Percent Solution by Nicholas Meyer
8.Road to Perdition by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner
9-15. All seven Harry Potters by J.K. Rowling

Ricky says he forgot Orwell's "Animal Farm."

Cathy Green's original 15:

The Botany of Desire - Michael Pollan
This Our Exile - James Martin
Exiles - Ron Hansen
Dancing in the Streets - Barbara Ehrenreich
The Far Field - Theodore Roethke
Six Tales of the Jazz Age - F Scott Fitzgerald
Sweet Thursday - John Steinbeck
Sex Lives of Cannibals - Troost
Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Bauby
Owl in the Family - Farley Mowat
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Dillard
Grendel - John Gardner
Nothing with Strings - Bailey White
A Green Journey - Jon Hassler
A Fine and Private Place - Beagle
Every Living Thing - Cynthia Rylant
Animal Vegetable Miracle - Kingsolver

2009-04-19T08:57:00.000-07:00

The good news about Kate Atkinson

A couple of months ago, I read an excellent mystery novel by Kate Atkinson called "When Will There Be Good News?" My wife has posted about it on her library's blog, Read it or Weep, to bring you up to speed.

2009-04-16T18:14:00.000-07:00

Obama's useless broadband program

ProPublica, the investigative reporting Web site, ran a largely-ignored story about a useless program to provide Internet broadband to rural areas that received a big dose of money in the federal government's stimulus bill.

The program pays for such useful projects as bringing broadband to an affluent Houston suburb "built around a golf course" and providing fast Internet access to areas that already have it. The waste began under Dubya but Obama has been touting the program's wonderfulness in his speeches, a nice touch of bipartisanship, so I've written a headline allowing the president to claim overship.

Note that ProPublica is a nonprofit that allows anyone to reprint its articles if you provide credit, link to it, don't edit the story and don't sell it.

Full story follows. (Original ProPublica headline, "Rural Broadband Stimulus Program Slammed in Government Report." I like my headline better.)

By Michael Grabell

A key stimulus program to bring Internet service to rural America may not be up to the job of spending its $2.5 billion in extra funding effectively, according to a report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s inspector general.

The Rural Utilities Service’s broadband program faced heavy criticism in 2005 when auditors found irregularities with a quarter of the funds the program had received in its first four years of operation. In one case, the program loaned $45 million to wire affluent subdivisions in the Houston suburbs—including one that was built around a golf course and another outside one of the richest cities in Texas.

Monday’s report found that the Rural Utilities Service continues to grant loans to areas that already have broadband service and to communities near major cities.

“We remain concerned with RUS’ current direction of the broadband program, particularly as they receive greater funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” Assistant Inspector General Robert W. Young wrote. “RUS’ broadband program may not meet the Recovery Act’s objective of awarding funds to projects that provide service to the most rural residents that do not have access to broadband service.”

In written comments attached to the report, the Agriculture Department said the law creating the broadband program contained no restrictions as to proximity to major cities. “Rural” was defined only as a community with fewer than 20,000 people.

More than 90 percent of the loan applications the agency has approved since the critical report in 2005 went to areas that already had broadband service, the report said. “OIG remains concerned because the overwhelming majority of communities…receiving service through the broadband program already have access to the technology,” Young wrote.

Agriculture Department officials declined to comment further Monday evening.

In nearly every speech about the federal stimulus package, President Obama has touted an initiative to expand broadband access to millions of Americans in underserved rural areas. Such an expansion, supporters say, would aid small businesses and improve access to health care and distance learning programs.

The stimulus package, passed by Congress in early February, provides $7.2 billion for broadband grants and loans. A Commerce Department agency will manage $4.7 billion while the Agriculture Department’s Rural Utilities Service will manage $2.5 billion.

That’s nearly twice as much as the rural broadband program has given out in loans over the last eight years.

The inspector general’s report also noted that 148 communities that receive broadband service funded by agency loans were within 30 miles of cities with more than 200,000 people, including communities outside Chicago and Las Vegas.

According to the Agriculture Department’s most recent report on April 3, none of the stimulus money for broadband grants has been awarded or spent.

2009-04-13T19:36:00.000-07:00

Halpern talks about George Alec Effinger

Even before SF writer George Alec Effinger died in 2002, ace editor Marty Halpern had begun working on a collection of Effinger's "Budayeen" stories and trying to revive Effinger's career.

Halpern has now begun a three-part blog series, looking back at the three Effinger collections he edited for Golden Gryphon Press. It's a valuable source of information about an author I've always loved.

My tribute site for Effinger (needs a bit of updating, but includes FAQ) is here.

2009-04-09T18:35:00.000-07:00

Much better than tofu, yes

Banned in Colorado.

2009-04-06T17:38:00.000-07:00

Everyone's a publisher these days....

So it's worth listening to what two professors from The Ohio State University had to say at the SPJ conference in Columbus on Saturday.

2009-04-04T05:32:00.000-07:00

Newspaper journalism, 2009

I'm in Columbus today, with five of my colleagues from the Sandusky Register, attending the Spring Conference 2009 of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Aside from the breakfast and lunch sessions, there are six program items. Five deal with the Internet, with one program on blogging and others dealing with various Net topics. The sixth item covers how to deal with layoffs, downsizing and "your next career move."
I seem to recall that when I went to these things in the 1980s, they used to deal with writing for a daily newspaper, one that was printed on paper.
(Cross posted at Jackson Street Beat.)

2009-03-30T14:51:00.000-07:00

Roger Zelazny's new book -- three surprises

Three interesting facts about the new Roger Zelazny novel, "The Dead Man's Brother," published a few weeks ago:

(1) It's a surprise, first of all, to see this title in print at all, as Roger Zelazny died in 1995. A couple of his books were completed by his girlfriend, Jane Lindskold, after he died, but I had no idea there was a completed novel out there until I saw this title in Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona.

It's not that unusual for even a successful writer to have unpublished novels. There are two or three unpublished George Alec Effinger novels that may never come out, barring a sudden revival of interest in his work.

(2) A bigger surprise is that "The Dead Man's Brother" is so good. This isn't "To Die in Italbar" or even "Jack of Shadows." It is a top flight Zelazny novel, crackling with wit and literary allusions, colorful and thoughtful. Trent Zelazny, the author's son, estimates in an afterward that the book was written "around 1970 or 1971." It's amazing that a book this good has gone unpublished for more than three decades.

(3) Finally, although this book is marketed as a mystery, it does have a science fiction element. The hero, Ovid Wiley, has been determined by scientists to be difficult to kill, i.e. they have used statistics to determine that a certain number of individuals can be determined to be "lucky" in surviving plane crashes, assaults by hit men, etc. This quality of Wiley's plays an important part in the plot. He's not another immortal Zelazny protagonist, but he is certainly less than mortal.

2009-03-24T13:43:00.000-07:00

Prometheus Award nominations announced

Movie lovers have the Academy Awards, music fans have the Grammys, readers have the Pulitzers. Science fiction fans such as myself have their awards, too.
One of the awards given out in science fiction is called the Prometheus. Its list of 2008 novels nominated for the award was announced today. (Disclosure: I am one of the judges who worked on the list).
The books are:
“Matter” by Iain Banks;
“Little Brother,” Cory Doctorow;
“The January Dancer,” Michael Flynn;
“Saturn’s Children,” Charles Stross;
“Opening Atlantis,” Harry Turtledove;
“Half a Crown,” Jo Walton.
More information here.
The Prometheus, given to science fiction novels that promote the cause of freedom, are not the biggest award in science fiction. At best, it’s like the Golden Globe. The top award, the equivalent of the Oscars, are called the Hugo Awards, and the novel nominees for the award were announced a few days ago.
The Hugo nominees are:
“Anathem,” Neal Stephenson;
“The Graveyard Book,” Neil Gaiman;
“Little Brother,” Cory Doctorow;
“Saturn’s Children,” Charles Stross;
“Zoe’s Tale,” John Scalzi.
I have read all of these books except for the Gaiman and the Stross. I especially recommend the books by Banks, Doctorow, Stephenson and Flynn.
(Cross posted at Jackson Street Beat).

2009-03-19T19:43:00.000-07:00

Getting computer advice

(Another Internet column for my former newspaper, The Lawton Constitution).

My first computer was a Commodore 64 that my sister gave me when she bought her first IBM computer.
It sat on my desk for months because I had never used a personal computer before, and I assumed that I would not be smart enough to figure out how to put it together and make it run. I finally worked up the courage to hook up the cables and components.
I discovered I could get the thing to run. I then discovered that playing with it was fun, and started attending the meetings of the local Commodore users group.
My point is I didn't always write a computer column. Everyone has to start somewhere, and even people who know quite a bit about computers can learn more.
The Internet is a great place to learn about computers, whether you are a novice who barely knows what a "mouse" is or a sophisticated techie who puts together his own distributions of Linux as a hobby.
People who don't know much about computers and need help with basic tasks while running Windows programs should look at the Computer Lady site run by Elizabeth Boston at www.askcl.com. She offers two free e-mail newsletters, "Ask the Computer Lady" and "Computer Lady Lessons."
More sophisticated users are the target audience for Lifehacker (www.lifehacker.com), a blog that concentrates on offering computer advice but also provides tips on many other topics, including diet and personal finance. Much of its advice can be used by anyone, but its detailed tutorials on Linux are aimed at computer nerds.
The blog makes good use of article tags. Visitors can browse the archives for a specific topic, and can subscribe to all posts about a particular interest. For example, you can follow all the posts about cell phones.
Most computer advice sites fall somewhere between these two. They are aimed at people who already know something about computers but are not experts.
Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal is a genuine expert, but he makes a conscious effort to write for ordinary computer users. His columns and advice appear in the Journal, but all of his articles, and the articles written by a sidekick named Katherine Boehret, are available free on the Internet at walt.allthingsd.com.
If you are planning to buy a desktop computer, laptop computer or digital camera, I suggest checking out Mossberg's buyer's guide.
All Things Digital frequently has articles about useful Web sites; currently the site has articles about an online college guide and a site for home buyers.
Lately, I'm convinced one of the best things about The New York Times (www.nytimes.com) is the free "Circuits" e-mail. Last week's issue had a great article, "Low-Tech Fixes for High-Tech Problems" by Paul Boutin. Google it to find out how to make credit card swipes work, how to keep your cellphone battery from losing its charge so quickly, what to do if you drop a cell phone in the toilet, and so on.
Mediamaster shutting down. One of my favorite music sites, MediaMaster (www.mediamaster.com), is closing down.
The site allowed users to upload music files and then play them from any computer with an Internet connection. No date was announced for the shutdown, but I assume it will be gone soon.
"It was a good time, but not good enough to make a business from in the current world," the owners said.
MediaMaster's blog suggests that music fans try www.lala.com or www.mp3tunes.com. I'll take a look at those sites soon and write about them here.
Jazz sites. I'm a big jazz fan, but I have had trouble finding jazz Web sites that would inspire me to pay a repeat visit.
Beckey Bright of the Wall Street Journal, however, has found some good jazz blogs for her column, "Blog Watch." Rifftides (ArtsJournal.com/rifftides) is written by author Doug Ramsey. Do The Math (TheBadPlus.typepad.com) is written by Ethan Iverson of the group, The Bad Plus. Straight No Chaser (StraightNoChaserJazz.blogspot.com) by Jeffrey Siegel also seems to cover the jazz scene well. I've added all three blogs to my Google Reader subscriptions (reader.google.com).
The Wall Street Journal is a paid Web site, but "Blog Watch" apparently is included among the free content (www.wsj.com).

2009-03-15T21:36:00.000-07:00

A new Zelazny novel

Yes, you read that right. The late, great Roger Zelazny died in 1995, but a new Zelazny novel, "The Dead Man's Brother," has just been published.

I've had Roger Zelazny on my mind a lot lately. I live in the Cleveland area, where Zelazny orginally was from, and I've been wondering which Zelazny book I should read next. (I've read many of them, but not all of them.) I'm on vacation in Arizona, and I was astounded when I went to the Poisoned Pen, a mystery bookstore in Scottsdale, and found "The Dead Man's Brother" on a display table, with the words "first publication anywhere" on the front cover.

It's a mystery novel he apparently wrote around 1970 or 1971, when he was writing science fiction mystery novels such as "My Name Is Legion." The afterword by his son, Trent Zelazny, says the book was discovered by Zelazny's agent.

It's published as a "Hard Case Crime" book, a cheap paperback available for $7. I haven't had time to read it yet and find out if it's any good, but at this point it feels like an unexpected gift.

2009-03-10T16:44:00.000-07:00

My 'Black History Month' column

Belatedly, here is the Internet column I wrote for Black History Month.

We are in the middle of Black History Month. I've tried to write about that in past columns, when I could find a site interesting enough to make that worthwhile.
This would seem to be one of those times, because the Smithsonian Institution has mounted a Virtual Heritage Tour on African American History.
The tour is an online exhibit of various objects in the Smithsonian's collection that relate to black history and culture. Visit it here
One thing I liked about the tour was that navigating around it was so easy. There are different ways to browse the site, none of them wrong. Clicking on "Timeline" and "Explore Objects" at the top of the page worked, but so did clicking on little icons of the objects themselves at the bottom of the page.
The exhibit seems to be aimed at children, although there's enough substance to keep the attention of adults. As I clicked on each, I could read a brief caption and hear a brief audio lecture.
Lawton's former Congressman, J.C. Watts, played a role in creating what will be the new National Museum of African-American History and Culture, which will likely be another wonderful Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C. You can find out how the museum is coming along by going to nmaahc.si.edu.
I downloaded document from the site that told me an architect for the new museum is supposed to be selected in April. The estimated start of construction is in 2012, with the museum to be finished by 2015.
Weather alerts. In light of the tornado damage at Lone Grove, it seems timely to remind everyone that the state government offers weather alerts at www.ok.gov/notifications/index.php.
Notifications are available for winter weather, flash flood, severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. The alerts can be sent as e-mails or as text messages to your cell phone.
Love me, love my pet? I should have gotten around to mentioning this site before Valentine's Day. Oh well. Date My Pet (www.datemypet.com) is a site that aims to unite dog and cat lovers. Visitors can browse the site for photos of owners and their pets.
Visiting college campuses. If someone in your family is trying to figure out where to go to college, point that person to Campus Tours (www.campustours.com), which offers virtual tours (or least links to home pages) for many different colleges across the U.S.
Customizing your signature. Like many people, I run all of my e-mail through my Gmail account. It means I can check all of my e-mail in one place, rather than three different places.
But I've had one complaint about Gmail. The signature I use for my work address (promoting my newspaper's Web site) is not the one I wanted to use for my personal e-mail. Gmail only lets me create one signature, but I needed two. I wanted a personal sig to promote my personal blog site.
Wisestamp (www.wisestamp.com) is an extension for the Firefox Web browser that lets me create different business and personal signatures, and quickly choose one when composing an e-mail.
(Tom Jackson wants to hear about interesting Southwest Oklahoma Web sites and blogs, and sites that his readers find interesting or useful. Write to him at tom.jackson@gmail.com).

2009-02-26T19:54:00.000-08:00

Philip Jose Farmer dies

One of my favorite old science fiction writers, Philip Jose Farmer, has died. I fell in love with his writing when I was a teenager and for awhile I collected everything by him that I could. I have given up most of those books by now, but I remained fond of him. Some of my favorites: the first two "Riverworld" books, the "World of Tiers" series, his novella "Riders of the Purple Wage," the collection "The Book of Philip Jose Farmer."

2009-02-21T06:31:00.000-08:00

Gary Farber, your Internet cause of the day

Gary Farber, the well-known blogger (and also a longtime member of SF fandom) has been booted off Facebook. Details here. If you are not a spammer or a troublemaker -- and Gary is not -- this is kind of cruel, as Facebook is a useful tool for keeping up with friends. If you are on Facebook, please consider joining the group, "Why Has Gary Farber's Account Been Disabled? Please Explain and Reverse!"

2009-02-14T12:45:00.000-08:00

Gmail adds offline feature

(My latest Internet column for my old newspaper, The Lawton Constitution).

I've long been a fan of Webmail services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
I change Internet providers all the time, but I've been able to keep the same e-mail addresses for years. Someone who writes to me using an e-mail address that's five years old will likely get me.
There's one disadvantage to using Webmail. You can't use it when you are disconnected from the Internet. You can use an e-mail program such as Outlook Express with Gmail and other Webmail services, but you can't use the service itself.
Until now. Gmail has just launched a new service, allowing its users to work with their Gmail even when disconnected from the Internet. It seems very promising, although it still has a few bugs.
The offline version of Gmail works by loading a Google software program called Google Gears, which is an add-on for the browser you use to look at Internet sites.
Google Gears can be used with both Internet Explorer and Firefox. It allows users to save information for Google applications so that they can still use them when you aren't connected to the Internet.
Google Gears was deployed first for Google Reader, Google's online tool for reading blogs. It then made Google Docs available offline. (Google Docs at is an online office suite that allows users to create or read text documents, spread sheets or slide shows from any computer connected to the Internet.)
Using Google Gears for Gmail only started a few days ago.
To try offline Gmail, click on "Settings" when you are logged into your account, then click "Labs," where Gmail keeps new, experimental features. Click "enable" for Offline, then click "Offline" while you are in your Inbox.
Google will walk you through what you need to do. It will put a Gmail icon on your desktop, which you'll click to log in to your e-mail when you are not connected to the Internet.
You can read your messages offline, compose new messages and do anything else you would normally do while connected to the Internet. Then, when you connect again, what you did offline will be synchronized with your online Google account.
It took Google awhile to figure out how to use Google Gears with Gmail, despite the obvious demand for offline e-mail, and there are still a few bugs with the service. When I tried it the first time, the offline feature someone got switched off, and I had to enable it for my account again. I've also encountered delays trying to synchronize my account, even when I appear to have a good Internet connection.
I generally have the Internet connected all the time at work and at home, but the offline service would be useful when I know I can't be connected for awhile — when I'm on a plane, for example. It would also be a way to "get by" for people who are on the road or can't afford an Internet service. You could work on your mail offline, then synchronize when you go to the library or a coffee shop.
It does work, but if you want a service that works flawlessly, it might be a good idea to wait a few months for Google to get the bugs squeezed out.
File storage. Speaking of Gmail, here's a simple idea for file storage. E-mail documents you want to store online to your Gmail account, and you have an archive that's searchable. You also have an online storage site that's unlikely to disappear soon. (XDrive, a free online storage stie that was run by AOL, shut down last month.)
I got the idea from an author named Susan Wise Bauer who is writing a history of the world in several volumes. She mentioned in her blog that she backed up the first volume by e-mailing copies of the chapters to her Gmail account.
Watching the lawmakers. The Oklahoma Legislature has just begun its new session. You can track the bills you are interested in by going to ok.gov/3167/3512/3180/3382/. (Or go to ok.gov and follow the bill tracking link.)

--

2009-02-13T20:53:00.001-08:00

New version of AntiX Linus released

One of the best reasons for using Linux is that it can make an old computer useful again. The light versions of Linux use the latest version of the operating system and have the applications you need, but use window managers that run faster on an old computer than the latest version of Windows or Ubuntu.

My wife has given me an old IBM Thinkpad 600X for my birthday (256 MB of memory, 12 GB hard drive) and I've already installed my favorite light Linux distro, AntiX Linux (the light version of Mepis Linux). A new version was just released today. As with past versions of AntiX, it appears to have many more applications right 'out of the box' than other light distros, and installing it was fast and easy.

2009-02-10T13:34:00.000-08:00

Tourism in Madagascar not for wimps

My brother-in-law, Kevin Kerns of Kent, Ohio, has a degree in biology. He is in the middle of a several week trip to Madagascar, a large island off the coast of Africa, looking at the animals and plants. Kevin tells me that the flora and fauna is very interesting, more akin to what's found in Asia than in Africa.

Since he's arrived, two people have been struggling for control of the country, and at least 25 people were shot dead outside of the presidential palace over the weekend. Here's Kevin's e-mail, sent to us Monday:

Wow! Just unbelievable! I've been in El Salvador and Guatemala during their civil wars and in Nicaragua just after the Contra counter-revolutionary war. Those were some screwed up countries. But Mada beats them all hands down!

The Malagasy people are known for their politeness and orderly lines. They don't raise their voices or show visible anger. But through their history they have been known to erupt and lash out.

Just as I was flying out to the most remote part of Mada, the mayor of Antananarivo decided to make a coup attempt against the president who had dismissed parliament. The people erupted with looting, burning and killing in the two largest cities: Antananarivo and Toamasina.

Fortunately I was in a part of Mada that was unaffected except for bank closures and canceled domestic air flights. I'm fine but I've seen the roughest travel that I've ever seen in my entire life.

If any of you have four wheeler ATVs and can't find places to ride them, I've got good news for you. Mada has hundreds, thousands of miles of the wild roads (no these aren't roads). Bring plenty of spare parts though: Tires, axles, wheel hubs, gas cans, tools because you'll need them. While you're at it you'll need to hire porters to carry (I'm not kidding) your ATV or moto across some really rough stretches.

Land transport here is by a vehicle called a taxi-brousse. It's usually a midsize Toyota pickup with extra heavy suspension, modified double 4-wheel drive transmissions. The beds are then welded shut and then a steel frame is welded around it to make a heavy duty conestoga type cargo vehicle. They load these things with thousands of pounds of freight: Mostly agricultural goods and crops. After the freight is loaded in go the people: Three in front, four or five on a bench seat behind the driver, and as many as fourteen in the cargo area.

Now come the roads! The Route Nationale Nu. 5 would be hard for a horse. Nothing can get through this but taxi-brousse - and only if it's dry. It often isn't. At best you achieve top speeds of ten mph. More often it's walking speed. As a matter of fact you frequently have to get out and walk because of the danger of flipping, getting stuck, or careening onto the rear wheels. Often one of the two front wheels leave the ground for distances of two to four meters.

The ruts can be eight feet (not exaggerating) deep. You drive over boulders, around washed out bridges, and through holes that would swallow in one bite a regular car. The road south of Mananara, where I flew, takes twenty or thirty hours to trasverse a distance of about 100 miles. Inside the Taxi-brousse passengers hang onto whatever they can for this entire journey or they ride standing on the rear bumper. That sounds fun untile after about thirty minutes your arms are so fatigued you can't hold on. It is physically punishing!

Once I rode this thing back from the south on a return to Mananara. I expected to get in and see some very grumpy and exhausted people. To my utter amazement these Malagasy were singing and joking like they'd only been in it for twenty minutes, not twenty hours.

South of Mananara I visited a park called Mananara Nord which protects one of the very last lowland rainforests left in Mada. Its a UNESCO World Heritage site. I didn't see many animals but the half day of hiking through the rainforest was stunning. The water thqt runs from streams here you can drink without treating - just delicious.

The political situation mens that internal flights are delayed or cancelled so I had to take (you guessed it) a taxi-brousse to Maroantsetra which is a town on the inside of that thumblike peninsula on the Mada northeast coast. Our ride, two taxi-brousse, and thirty some passengers had to wait eight and a half hours to leave. We had to time the tides!

The route is fairly flat north of Mananara but there is lots of loose sand and several rivers. On every river crossing we had to all get out and walk. There were a couple ferries but most big crossings were done on rafts. That's right, they would put the vehicles on rafts and use poles to push the raft across the rivers. Mostly, the rafts were big enough. On some crossings low tide left a brief time window where the taxis could just race through the river but loose sand on the banks made pulling each other out a necessity. These were the good crossings.

The remaining bridges were made of local timber and many were collapsed. After dark the taxis would illuminate bridges with only a few single planks left so we could balance our way across in the dark. Then the taxi-brousse operators would take pieces of what was left of these collapsed bridges and rebuild by hand in the dark the first portion of the bridge.

They'd then drive the vehicles onto the bridge. You could hear the wood breaking and snapping and occasionally the headlights would move as a wheel dropped through. Then they'd disassemble the bridge from behind the taxi, carry it in front, and create new(?) bridge to continue. They did this three times. It was simply amazing - and sheer lunacy!

I made it to Maroantsetra to see the last extensive jungle left in Mada, Parc Nationale Masoula. The problem with banks owing to the political unrest meant however that I was beginning to run low on cash. This is a big area. It's very remote and rugged. To do things here means cash - lots of it because you need to hire boat transport everywhere. You also have to hire compulsory guides in all Mada parks.

Three or four days of taxi-brousse was a non-starter. Air travel was suspended until further notice. This must be Africa! The only option was to walk 63 miles north to the town of Antalaha. At least I would see a small portion of the Masoula wilderness this way. But missing doing major portions of it is the single largest disappointment of my trip here. The Masoula really had caught my imagination.

I hired the obligatory guide and we set off. First was an hour long trip by dugout canoe through swamp areas and then by foot for the next sixty miles.
The Masoula wilderness was always within sight but we only skirted small parts of it. Nevertheless I was grateful to be there even if from afar.

The first day was short and we stayed in villages of palm thatch and woven bamboo. The next two days we covered 25 miles each day. Major portions were spent climbing boulders and crossing rivers. It was really tough going. I'm a pretty tough hiker. Ask anyone who's been out in the woods with me. But this was about pain. My feet were always wet and after such abuse they were in shreds by the time we finished. I was one of the fastest trekkers my guide (his name is Ramiandry) had ever been with.

I'm back in civilization, such as it his here in Mada, with recovering feet and relative comfort in a place called Sambava on the northern northeast coast. I look forward to writing again.

2009-02-08T12:37:00.001-08:00

Munger on the stimulus bill

Here's a wonderful interview with Duke professor Michael Munger on what's wrong with the stimulus bill. (Via his Kids Prefer Cheese, one of my favorite blogs. The other guy who blogs there is pretty great, too.)

2009-02-07T14:54:00.000-08:00

The Cramps' lead singer dies

Lux Interior, lead singer of new wave rockabilly band The Cramps, died Wednesday at age 62 in Glendale, Calif., from a heart condition.

I saw the Cramps perform in Norman, Oklahoma, shortly after I was out of college (it would have been 1978, 79, 80, something like that.) I thought they were one of the best concerts I'd ever attended. The line consisted of Interior on lead vocals, two beautiful women who played rockabilly electric guitar (one of them his wife, Poison Ivy), and a drummer. The few records I ran across by the band left me a little underwhelmed, but it sure was a great show.

My friend Brett Cox loved the records, too, and he has a nice appreciation here, with useful video links.

Lux Interior was from Stow, a city near Cleveland where my sister and her family used to live. The Cleveland Plain Dealer's John Petkovic has a nice article about Interior here, with interesting information about the band and its Cleveland roots.

2009-02-07T13:35:00.000-08:00

Doctorow's outstanding 'Little Brother'

I've been reading novels that have been nominated for the Prometheus Award, the literary award for science fiction handed out by the Libertarian Futurist Society. I'm on the committee that's charged with sifting through the nominees (13 so far, I think) and coming up with a list of five or so for a finalist ballot that the general membership will vote on.

I've just finished Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother," one of the nominees. It's a really fine book, one of the best books I've read in months, and I recommended it to anyone who wants to read a good novel, learn about Internet and computer technology as it relates to privacy, or is concerned about civil liberties and politics. It was written for the young adult market, but it's really a book for everyone. Everyone else on the committee seems to like it, too; at the very least, I think it's almost surely going to be a finalist.

The book also includes an afterword by Bruce Schneier, who also contributed an afterword to one of my other favorite books, "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson, which was a finalist for the Prometheus some years ago.

Doctorow at his Web site is his usual mix of rampant egomania and breathtaking generosity. He has a post urging everyone to nominate him for the Hugo Award for his latest batch of fiction. He also has free downloads for "Little Brother" and a new book of essays, "Content," which I'll tackle when I finish the various Prometheus Award nominees.

2009-02-06T20:22:00.000-08:00

Internet column: Spiralfrog

(I've decided to start reprinting the Internet column I write for The Lawton Constitution here on my personal blog, as a courtesy to readers who have trouble finding past issues of the column. Here's the first one:)

Any site that offers tons of free music can't be all bad.
I am referring to SpiralFrog.com, a site that despite offering plenty of music has generally earned bad reviews because of its use of DRM, or Digital Rights Management technology, which seeks to prevent pirating but also limits what honest users can do.
I am not a big fan of DRM, either, and I found it prevented me from doing everything I wanted to do with SpiralFrog. Nontheless, I am rooting for SpiralFrog to succeed. I hope it survives the current economic downturn and I urge you to give it a try.
SpiralFrog.com resembles services such as Napster-To-Go, Yahoo Music Unlimited or Rhapsody. All of the latter are subscription services. In return for paying a modest monthly fee, the user can "borrow" a huge number of music tracks, downloading and playing them on a computer or an MP3 player. As long as you are paying the monthly fee, the songs work. If you quit paying, you lose the music.
SpiralFrog.com, however, is supported by advertising and is free. As long as you log in once every 60 days, its service continues.
Now, here's the bad news. SpiralFrog works only with Windows XP or Vista, so if you use Macintosh or Linux computers or an older form of Windows, it won't work. You have to have a recent version of Windows Media Player on your computer. And if you want to be able to put the tracks on a portable music player, you have to use one that uses Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" technology. SpiralFrog won't work with the iPod or the Zune.
I signed up for SpiralFrog and downloaded a couple of albums. I found they played fine on my computer. But when I tried to transfer them to one of my MP3 players, I only got error messages.
Admitted, my rather cheap players aren't on SpiralFrog's list of compatible devices. But the site says that's only a partial list, and I thought one of my players, compatible with Windows, should have worked.
I was all set to write a bad review of SpiralFrog. But you know what? That classic Tom Petty album I missed, "Let Me Up I've Had Enough," sounded fine on my computer.
And when I searched for other artists, I found SpiralFrog has a truly impressive music library. There's lots of Tom Petty, including many entire albums. There's plenty of Rolling Stones. There's a good deal of jazz and classical.
Whatever kind of music you like, you can find it here. The country section includes George Strait, Lee Ann Womack, Keith Urban, Rascal Flatts, Willie Nelson, Toby Keith and many others. There's no Beatles, but lots of Paul McCartney, including live albums in which he plays many Beatles songs. There are gaps -- no Brad Paisley albums, and the many Miles Davis albums seem to be limited to his 1950s period -- but what's available is more impressive than what's missing.
And I found that although the music only played on my computer, a little creativity would allow it to be heard in other parts of the house. I plugged an FM transmitter into the headphone jack of my computer -- one of those little devices designed to let your MP3 player broadcast on a car radio or anything else with an FM tuner -- and I found I could listen to SpiralFrog albums in my bedroom. if I used my best radio.
If you have the kind of computer (and the kind of portable device) that SpiralFrog allows, give the site a try.
More music. Here are a few of my favorite music sites, all of which work with a wide variety of computers. Imeem streams music only rather than allowing free downloads, and it does not seem to have many entire albums. But it has an awful lot of songs and you can put together playlists. It works fine on Macintosh as well as Windows computers.
Slacker is an awesome collection of Internet radio stations; if you don't like any it offers, you can build your own. It's meant to sell an apparently cool portable music device, but works fine as a free offering on your computer.
MediaMaster will stream any music you upload, to any computer. It's another free service and works well, although it says that someday it will charge a fee.

2009-02-05T12:01:00.000-08:00

'Hyperion' novels to be filmed

Variety is reporting that the two Dan Simmons "Hyperion" novels, "Hyperion" and "Hyperion Cantos," are being made into a movie to be directed by Scott Derrickson.

Initial reaction seems to be negative, but I think the "Hyperion" books and the "Endymion" sequels are a great SF epic, one of the best works of fiction ever produced in SF. Any attention a movie could draw to those books would seem to be a good thing.

2009-02-02T12:54:00.001-08:00

Hey, shouldn't the losers get the prizes?

The Shirley Jackson Award, an award that honors top horror and suspense stories, is raising money with an appropriate vehicle: A lottery!

This is a lottery you'll want to win, though, if you're a horror fan, because it means you get various nifty stuff, including books autographs by the likes of Neil Gaiman, the right to have a character named after you disemboweled by devils in an upcoming literary work, etc.

You can get all of the details you need by clicking here. Because remember, on the Internet, everyone is just a stone's throw away.

2009-01-31T13:49:00.000-08:00

'We'll always have Burris'

Any "Casablanca" fans out there? Don't miss "Best of the Web" blogger James Taranto's rewrite of the romantic final scene of Casablanca, with former Gov. Rod Blagojevich standing in for Humphrey Bogart's character. (Skip down to the dialogue).

2009-01-24T07:48:00.000-08:00

Are you a libertarian? A test you can't fail

If you lean libertarian, you are probably familiar with the World's Smallest Political Quiz, designed for newbies to figure out if they are libertarians, too.

I recently ran across the Libertarian Purity Test, by Bryan Caplan, which seems aimed at promoting a more generous view of libertarianism. The answer key is amusing. I scored in the 60s. The answer key says, "51-90 points: You are a medium-core libertarian, probably self-consciously so. Your friends probably encourage you to quit talking about your views so much."

Caplan, by the way, is the guy who wrote "The Myth of the Rational Voter."

2009-01-06T19:35:00.000-08:00

Adolf Hitler, bookworm

I’ve always been kind of a bookworm. When I have free time when I’m off duty, as often as not I have my nose buried in a book. I know many of the people at the Sandusky Library by sight.

So it’s a little disappointing to learn that Adolf Hitler was kind of that way, too. The New York Times has an interesting review of the new book “Hitler’s Private Library” by Timothy Ryback.

At the end of a long day of work, Adolf liked nothing better than to kick back with a “steaming pot of tea” and a book in his study. A photograph from the book shows him posed in front of a bookshelf in his apartment. The only personal possessions Russian soldiers found in his Berlin bunker at world’s end were dozens of books.

I suppose the book proves what we already know — that what's scary about the world's monsters is the way they seem just like the rest of us.

Jo Walton's excellent novel, "Ha'Penny," about an alternate world in which Britain makes a separate peace with Germany, includes a scene that depicts Hitler as charming. Last November on her blog, Walton answered questions from readers about her "Small Change" books, including "Ha'Penny," and I remarked about the portrayal of Hitler.

Walton replied, "Hitler really did have attractive qualities. The way I describe him is based on how many British and American people writing about meeting him in the thirties described him. If he'd been a visible monster radiating evil, people wouldn't have followed him in the first place. You read Diana Mosley's letters and she says things like 'Poor dear Hitler.' And you read that and the cognitive dissonance is quite astounding, because the way history has painted him after the fact you can't quite imagine that anyone could ever have spoken about him in that tone of voice. Yet if you let him be a monster, and uniquely evil and all that, it makes it much safer, because you'd recognise a monster, wouldn't you, you couldn't be taken in by one? Part of what I was doing with these books was showing where the monster is in us."

Addendum: Off topic, but topical, Jo Walton remembers Donald Westlake. (Via Supergee).

2009-01-05T19:34:00.000-08:00

Prometheus Hall of Fame nominees announced

About a year ago, I joined the Libertarian Futurist Society, a group that exists mainly to present two annual literary awards for science fiction works concerned with liberty: The Prometheus Award, for the best novel published the year before, and the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, for a classic.

During last year's awards, I simply voted for the nominees in each category, but for 2009, I've been allowed to serve on the two judging committees. The Prometheus Award nominees won't be announced until next spring, but the Hall of Fame panel has finished its work and come up with six nominees.

They are:

Falling Free, a novel by Lois McMaster Bujold (1988);
Courtship Rite, a novel by Donald M. Kingsbury (1982);
"As Easy as A.B.C.," a short story by Rudyard Kipling (1912);
The Lord of the Rings, a three-volume novel by J. R. R. Tolkien (1955);
The Once and Future King, including The Book of Merlyn, a novel by T. H. White (1977); and
The Golden Age, a novel by John C. Wright (2002).

I think it's a strong batch of nominees.

There are three works that weren't on the ballot last year, and I really like two of them, including Courtship Rite, about a planet with few natural resources that practices cannibalism and group marriage. Sounds off-putting, I know, but it's a very interesting and original novel. The John Wright is a kind of far-future libertarian utopia; the conflict comes from a struggle by the hero to build and pilot an interstellar spaceship. His peaceful society believes establishing colonies on other star systems could reintroduce war. Wright is a very philosophical writer, with a style obviously influenced by Jack Vance. The Bujold, also new to the "Hall of Fame" ballot, isn't terrible, but it's not particularly interesting, either.

Official announcement is here.

2009-01-04T11:29:00.000-08:00

Scott Adams' war on Amazon

My main Christmas gift this year was the new Dilbert book, "Dilbert 2.0."

I haven't had time to read it yet, but I know I'll love it. It's a very large collection of Dilbert comic strips, plus a DVD of every Dilbert strip published so far over 20 years, and there's a long introduction on how Adams creates Dilbert.

So, it's good news for Dilbert fans. But I can't see how it can be good news for Amazon, where my wife ordered the book. It's a very large, heavy book -- I can't fit it in any of my bookshelves. I'll have to find out whether I can sell my spouse on putting it on the coffee table.

Amazon loses two ways. First, the book is heavily discounted. And second, the free shipping must be a killer for a book so large and heavy. If we read in a few weeks that Amazon suffered unexpected losses during the holiday season, I'll blame Scott Adams.

2009-01-03T06:38:00.000-08:00

"Lost" Cheap Trick

If they remember Cheap Trick at all, most people remember the band for their early, commercially-successful albums, e.g. "At Budokan" or "Dream Police." But although they fell out of critical and commercial favor, many of their later albums are quite good. Some are not so good, admittedly, but "Music for Hangovers" is a great live album, and fine complement to "Budokan."

"Woke Up With a Monster" (1994) is a pretty good. It's produced by Ted Templeman, the producer who discovered Van Halen and made them into stars, and the album sounds as if Templeman is trying to turn the band into a typical 1980s hard rock band. The thing is (as a character in a book I just read, Kate Atkinson's "When Will There Be Good News?" is wont to say), Templeman has a lot to work with. There's no better hard rock singer than Robin Zander, and Rick Nielsen is a fine hard rock guitarist. It's a cheap album, too; it's available on Emusic.

2008-12-30T14:31:00.000-08:00

Life's tough for bookstores

The New York Times has a fascinating article by David Streitfeld about how the Internet is killing off traditional bookstores and hurting book publishers. It's not so much sales of new books by Amazon that's hurting so much as the ability of readers to buy used books very cheaply. There's little incentive to buy a book new unless you're an "early adopter" who has to have it right away when it's published.

Streitfeld emphasizes the sale of used books on the Internet, but my wife and I most often obtain our used books from trading sites such as PaperbackSwap.com and BookMooch. I still have to buy books when I want something that's brand new, such as the expensive new Dilbert hardcover I got for Christmas, or something from a hard-to-find cult author such as Robert Anton Wilson, but for most books the book-swapping sites work just fine.

2008-12-15T18:23:00.001-08:00

Listening on the cheap

I seem to have acquired a new hobby -- buying very cheap MP3 players.

A couple of months ago, my current favorite electronics outlet, Ollie's Bargain Outlet, had a sale on remaindered MP3 players and I picked up a half-gig Coby MP3 player for $10. It also has an FM tuner, it has a screen giving information on the track, it can record....it has everything you need.

Evidently I 0verpaid, though, because some weeks later I noticed that Ollie's was selling MP3 players for $5. The package included cord allowing the user to connect it to a radio or stereo. One bummer: Only 256 MB of space, although if you can find one, you can add half-gig SD card. In any event, if you get tired of the 3 albums it can hold, you can change it out quickly -- like all of the other cheapo players these days, you plug it into your computer and it's recognized as another drive.

My wife's nephew left his iPod on a bus a few weeks ago and it was stolen. My $1o player works fine, and if it's stolen, well, it's not the end of the world. The important this is the music. The bulk of my MP3 collection is backed up, online at ADrive and on backup CDs.

2008-12-10T08:36:00.000-08:00

For the Jane Austen fan, i.e. any literate reader

"Pride and Prejudice" is one of my favorite novels. You've read the book, you've seen the movies, what's left? Why, the Facebook edition. (Via Supergee and Jo Walton's blog.)

2008-12-05T18:39:00.001-08:00

Paul isn't dead, man

Over at my newspaper blog, I bring up some surprising news: 66-year-old Paul McCartney has released a good album.

2008-12-05T17:36:00.000-08:00

Two bloggers for the price of one!

Favorite blog post in the last couple of days: Duke prof Michael Munger explains what's wrong with bailing out bad home mortgages. Second favorite: the other blogger at Kids Prefer Cheese, University of Oklahoma Prof Kevin Blaine Greer, asks, "They can't really want Al Franken in the Senate can they? Isn't that eerily close to Caligula making his horse a Senator?" Don't forget to read the comments about the post.

Nice to see a good blog from someone at my alma mater.

2008-11-28T14:00:00.001-08:00

Lots of books at the Times

The New York Times books section has posted its "100 Notable Books of 2008," with links to the original reviews. I'm afraid the fiction list does nothing for me, but the nonfiction reviews pointed me to several interesting-sounding books that I'd missed.

2008-11-26T14:16:00.000-08:00

Who's our man (or woman) in 2012?

The Libertarian Party desperately needs a good candidate in four years, so perhaps it isn't too early to start talking about who that person should be.

Over at Reason's Hit and Run blog, Nick Gillespie has tried to get the discussion rolling by mentioning two people: Michael Munger, a Duke University political science professor who ran for governor of North Carolina this year, and Angela Keaton, identified as a Libertarian Party activist. Both seem initially more attractive to me than Wayne Allyn Root, who already is running for the nomination.

At first blush, Keaton seems to be kind of a performance artist candidate. I haven't seen any sign of a real organization. Then again, she works for the folks at Antiwar.com, so she seems likely to be strong on the peace issue, which will likely be an asset in four years, when the antiwar crowd has had time to become disillusioned with Barack Obama. It's really too early to express an opinion, but I've "friended" her on Facebook. A campaign Web site or blog would be a nice sign of seriousness.

As for Munger, I followed Nick's link to a Reason article about him and found that Munger said he was aiming for a final result of 3 percent to 4 percent of the statewide vote. He finished at 2.85 percent.

This is a big deal, because it bespeaks a Libertarian candidate who actually understands politics -- a 3 percent showing is GOOD for a Libertarian. He's also intelligent and well spoken.

Munger is currently planning to run for the North Carolina state senate in 2010, but his blog seems to refute the idea that he's running for president; in this post, he mentions the Reason post but says Gillespie is "having a little fun." I wrote to Munger, and he confirmed that he's not a candidate for president until at least 2016, and maybe not then. Still, he bears watching.

2008-11-18T06:28:00.000-08:00

Libertarian vote up for grabs?

Before I forgot, I wanted to link to this post a few days ago by Cato's David Boaz, which posits (among other interesting points) that the libertarian vote is up for grabs between the two major parties: "A candidate in either party who presented himself as a product of the social freedom of the Sixties and the economic freedom of the Eighties would be tapping into a market that both parties have yet to nail down." (Given the Libertarian Party's latest failure to attract a significant number of votes, I wonder if some libertarians might be searching for an alterative.)

I also like this comment about the Republicans and educated voters: "If conservative Republicans continue to respond to the loss of educated voters by declaring themselves proud to be 'real Americans' who don't care much for book learning and Darwinism and elite stuff, they will only accelerate the process."

2008-11-13T19:49:00.000-08:00

We're in Reason!

I joined the Libertarian Futurist Society a little less than a year ago, entitling me to vote for the Prometheus Award and the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award (I've been reading SF like a fiend for months as a result, particularly because, to my surprise, I was allowed to join two different committees, which come up with the nominees for the two awards.)

Reason magazine has just published a rather good article by Katherine Mangu-Ward on Tor books, the five nominees for the Prometheus Award this year (all were Tor books), the LFS and the Prometheus.

Of the five nominees this year, I loved two: Jo Walton's "Ha'Penny" and Ken MacLeod's "The Execution Channel." Harry Turtledove's "The Gladiator" is also very good. "Fleet of Worlds" by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner is a quite readable "Analog" novel. The only one I really didn't like was "Ragamuffin" by Tobias Buckell. Very violent, but little of literary or ideological interest. Obviously, I must have some kind of blind spot, as other LFS members must have really liked it.

2008-11-12T13:33:00.000-08:00

Another blog on the roll

I've added a link on the blogroll list for Wirkman Netizen, a particularly interesting blog I intend to pay closer attention to from now on. This guy is a left-leaning libertarian AND he loves Stravinsky. I mean, come on, does this guy have perfect taste or what?

2008-11-05T18:48:00.000-08:00

Read science fiction, win a Nobel Prize

Want to know how economist Paul Krugman began his march toward fame and a Nobel Prize for economics? Krugman says Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" novel explain "how I got into economics: I wanted to be a psychohistorian when I grew up, and economics was as close as I could get." (Via the November issue of Ansible.)

2008-10-31T14:25:00.000-07:00

A case for McCain?

Over at the Vokokh Conspiracy, blogger and law professor David Bernstein tries to make a libertarian case for John McCain. His arguments fail to sway me -- how anyone who cares about foreign policy or civil liberties can vote Republican this year is beyond me -- but he had one paragraph I loved, so I'll quote it here:

"I think there are two great moral issues in American politics today, the disastrous War on Drugs, and free trade. The War on Drugs, for now, is hopeless. Free trade though, is not. Over the past couple of decades, a (statistical) billion people, more or less, have moved from poverty to the local middle-class because of globalization and free trade, far more people than have been aided by all the liberal do-goodism Obama, or any else, has or can muster. McCain is the candidate of free trade; Obama is the candidate of "fair trade," which in practice means protectionism. McCain's policies have the potential to rescue tens of millions of additional people from poverty, who will stay mired there under Obama. (And I always had at least one soft spot for Bill Clinton, for standing up to the unions and the know nothing wing of his party in favor of free trade and NAFTA)."

At the same blog, Ilya Somin makes an interesting case for divided government, but not enough to overcome the nausea the McCain/Palin ticket induces in me.

2008-10-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

Yes, Barack is better

I don't want my last posting to be misunderstood. I voted for Bob Barr in the current election, but I do think the Obama-Palin ticket is clearly superior to the McCain-Palin ticket. (I cast an early absentee ballot, like many voters in Ohio. I tried to arrange a vote swap, promising to vote for Obama in Ohio if a Democrat in a "safe" Democratic state would vote for Barr, but I got no takers and gave up.)

My big issues in the current election are foreign policy and civil liberties, and Obama is clearly preferable on both to John McCain, who in these two areas seems determined to follow in President Bush's footsteps.

That said, please spare me the rhetoric about how Obama is going to set a new tone in Washington or practice a new kind of politics. Here in Ohio, a key swing state, Obama supporters are engaging in vote fraud. His acolytes in the Strickland Administration are ransacking state databases to dig up dirt on Obama's opponents. Nationwide, the campaign that broke its promise to use public financing is engaging in campaign finance fraud. If anything, this time around the Democrats are dirtier than the Republicans.

2008-10-27T18:34:00.000-07:00

Look what you're getting, Obama fans

Leftist writer Alexander Cockburn uncorks a fine rant, insisting that it doesn't make much difference whether McCain or Obama gets elected. I can't totally agree with him, but I think he's a lot closer to being accurate than my old friend Steve Browne, who insists unconvincingly that Obama's apparent impending election is "Russia, 1917, or the end of the Weimar Republic."

A couple of Cockburn's best points deserve amplification. Cockburn writes that Obama "stood against warrantless wiretapping" and then voted in favor of it. To be more precise, Obama promised he would filibuster against any bill that granted amnesty to telecommunications companies that broke the law. Then he voted for the bill without making any effort to block it. That's a hell of a reversal.

Cockburn also writes, "Obama wants to enlarge the armed services by 90,000." I didn't think Cockburn made that up, exactly, but it seemed kind of hard to believe. Maybe Cockburn is putting a negative spin on something a little more benign.

Well, here's the link to the official Obama Web site, which says, "Barack Obama and Joe Biden support plans to increase the size of the Army by 65,000 soldiers and the Marines by 27,000 troops." The page is headlined, "The change we need." A guy who is even more determined than the Republican Party to turn the U.S. into an armed camp does not represent "change."

Cockburn also tells his readers to "read the portions of Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr's platform on foreign policy and constitutional rights." Exactly right. There's one political party left that has a decent platform on civil liberties and militarism — and it's not the Democrats.

2008-10-24T07:22:00.000-07:00

My Bob Barr interview

I interviewed the Libertarian candidate for president, Bob Barr, along with two other reporters, when he spoke at Oberlin College last week. For anyone who is interested, large excerpts from the interview are here.

2008-10-09T19:02:00.000-07:00

Selling libertarianism

The new issue of Reason magazine has a David Weigel interview with Bob Barr (not online yet, as far as I can tell) which includes a great Barr quote on how Libertarians should talk to the unconverted:

"Every citizen in this country, I believe, has some area of their lives — whether it's their personal behavior within their homes, whether it's how to educate and discipline their children, whether it's about how to run their business, their political thought, their religious practices — where they want to be left alone. The Libertarian Party, I think, needs to recognize that and appeal to that and draw that out from the American public and the American voters, rather than talk just generally about great philosophical principles."

2008-10-03T13:28:00.000-07:00

Well, that didn't take long

The New York Times reports that the British publisher of "The Jewel of Medina," a historical novel about one of the Prophet Muhammad's wives, has survived a firebomb attack on his house.

The attack apparently was incited by inflammatory statements by Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of book burning and incitement at the University of Texas at Austin. The attacks apparently will continue until infidels stop saying that Islam promotes hatred and terrorism.

2008-08-12T14:52:00.000-07:00

Chabon wins Hugo

Michael Chabon has won the Hugo Award for best novel for THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION. (I haven't read it, but it also nabbed a Nebula, a good sign.) Details on the other Hugos here.

2008-08-06T11:28:00.001-07:00

Music criticism hits new low

Here's a technique for critiquing performances that Alex Ross probably never thought of: Bring a claw hammer with you and use it to bang out a bad review for musicians you don't like.

The Sandusky Register reported that a Baldwin-Wallace College music graduate and music teacher named Richard Rice armed himself with a hammer before taking on a rock concert in his neighborhood in the small city of Huron, Ohio. "The band was out of tune and loud," Rice explained.

Accounts differ on whether Rice swung the hammer at music equipment and a spectator, depending on whether you believe other people at the scene or the allegedly drunk music critic. Witnesses says he did, although Rice said the hammer was just a prop.

"I had a hammer in my hand," he concedes.

2008-07-30T17:17:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Carter: A fine libertarian president?

Jim Henley's claim that President Jimmy Carter could be termed a good "libertarian president" seems too interesting to be buried in a comment thread, so I'm pointing to it here.

Henley, who blogs at Unqualified Offerings, claimed in a Reason Hit and Run comment thread that Carter was "the greatest libertarian president in living memory."

Challenged on that assertion, Henley wrote, "I'm at least half serious. Carter deregulated trucking and air travel, two moves which have had more lasting economic benefit than just about anything else that happened in the last quarter of the 20th Century - except possibly allowing Paul Volcker, at enormous political cost to the incumbent president, to tighten money enough to kill core inflation until Dubya began his LBJ imitation (running phony wars on phony money). Of course, that was Carter too. Plus, to coin a phrase, He Kept Us Out of War. Not a bad record for a guy who had the bad fortune to become President when the bills for Johnsonism and Nixonism couldn't be stretched out any longer.

"On the other hand, Carter made a speech once wearing a sweater, and Nick Gillespie vaguely remembers hating him, so it totally makes sense to discount the massive good he did the country in trying circumstances."

I take it that under this formulation, Carter gave the country the Paul Volcker medicine, and Reagan reaped the reward. Reagan was not a libertarian in many ways, but he did cut taxes and help created Individual Retirement Accounts.

2008-07-26T20:32:00.000-07:00

Walton reacts to her Prometheus

Author Jo Walton, author of the Prometheus Award winning novel "Ha'Penny," has reacted to the victory on her blog.

"I'm delighted, amused and honoured to announce that Ha'Penny has won the Prometheus Award -- actually, it's better than that, because it's co-won with Harry Turtledove's The Gladiator and you can't imagine how lovely it is to co-win something with a splendid book by an author you've loved for years," she writes.

She adds, "I'm amused because of all my online arguments with Libertarians. I am so not a Libertarian. Ask zsero. But I am anti-authoritarian and I suppose I have written a book about the moral corruption of an authoritarian society, and if they think that's good enough to give me an ounce of gold (an ounce of gold, how cool is that?) then good for them. As they've given it to Ken MacLeod and Charlie Stross before, they're obviously looking at the book, not the author."

The insistence that she's not a Libertarian (she also noted that when she was nominated) seems odd; as she herself notes, the award lately has gone to other non-Libertarians such as MacLeod and Stross.

Perhaps people haven't noticed yet that the nature of the award has changed a bit over the years. If you look at the list of winners posted by the Libertarian Futurist Society, the earlier awards tended to go to doctrinaire libertarian writers such as L. Neil Smith, J. Neil Schulman and Victor Milan. That seems to occur less often in the last few years. I can't comment on whether there has been shift in the quality of the award-winners, as I haven't read enough of them; one of my reading projects this year will be to read as many past Prometheus Award winners as possible.

2008-07-22T09:55:00.001-07:00

Walton, Turtledove win Prometheus

For the first time since the award was created, the Prometheus Award for best novel is a tie. Jo Walton's "Ha'Penny" and Harry Turtledove's "The Gladiator" will share the award at the Worldcon in Denver. Members of the Libertarian Futurist Society just got the announcement via e-mail, so this is breaking news.

"A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess won the Hall of Fame Awards.

I'm really pleased by the news. I voted Walton to win, MacLeod in second place and Turtledove in third. (See this posting.) I thought "Ha'Penny" was brilliant. My review of it will appear soon in the Prometheus Society's fanzine.

2008-07-13T18:04:00.001-07:00

Obama: The Libertarian case weakens

Back on March 10, I noted that more than one Libertarian had been arguing that Sen. Obama is worth supporting this fall. More specifically, I paraphrased four points made by Scott Flanders, the CEO for Freedom Newspapers (a libertarian newspaper chain.) As quoted by Reason magazine from a dispatch in the Orange County Register, Flanders said Obama supports four key libertarian reforms (1) getting out of Iraq, (2) restoring the separation of church and state , (3) easing enforcement of victimless crime laws, such as the laws against illegal drugs and (4) curtailing the Patriot Act.

Two of the four points Flanders cited aren't looking so good these days. Obama's support for civil liberties doesn't seem very firm after he promised to filbuster against telecom immunity and then reversed course to support the FISA bill.

Church and state separation doesn't look like such a firm plank in the libertarians-for-Obama program, either. Obama has announced he supports actually expanding the practice of giving tax money to "faith-based" organizations. Given that the Democrats have a more diverse religious base than the Republicans, look for an Obama administration to shovel out tax money to a mosque and Scientology center near you, as well as to churches.

As the weeks pass, a vote for Bob Barr is looking better and better.

2008-07-11T13:22:00.000-07:00

An argument for Bob Barr

Over at Unqualified Offerings, the fellow who posts as "Thoreau" has been doing a series of fine,
angry rants over Obama's sellout on the FISA bill. (If you haven't kept up, Obama promised to filibuster the bill if it included amnesty for the telecoms that broke the law, then broke his promise by supporting a bill that does include amnesty.)

In his latest post, Thoreau asks, referring to Obama "So, can somebody make a case for him, on his merits, that doesn’t involve “Look! Over there! John McCain!”? I’m not looking for libertarian or civil libertarian purity tests here. I’m looking for basic stuff: Evidence that he will support habeas corpus, oppose torture, oppose warrantless wiretaps, and end the war. You can say that these are unrealistically high hurdles to cross, but that’s f**king pathetic. If we are in a situation where even those very basic items are too much to ask for then I’m sitting it out. You can tell me that I’m only making it worse by doing so, but I maintain that once you reach that point the thing is basically on autopilot. It might not be at the bottom yet, but it’s heading there, and there’s no way to apply the brakes."

Isn't this an argument to support Bob Barr? I know there's a lot not to like about Barr: His immigration stance, his grab for Southern conservative votes by issuing a statement praising Jesse Helms, his claim that global warming is just a "hoax." But on the two issues that matter to me — civil liberties and the war — he seems to be solid.

2008-07-07T15:08:00.001-07:00

RIP Tom Disch

I seem to be losing a lot of my favorite writers this year -- first Arthur C. Clark, now Tom Disch, who died, as a suicide, on July 4. A good blog entry by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, with comments from various SF writers, is available here.

I only read a couple of Disch's novels (I liked ON WINGS OF SONG, didn't care for 334 very much), but I read a couple of his short story collections and also had some of his books of poetry.

I only met Disch once, at a SF convention in Norman, Oklahoma. (Disch was the toastmaster, and Gene Wolfe was the guest of honor. How's that for a small convention in Oklahoma in the 1980s?) I told him that I liked his poems, referring to several by name. He seemed to be pleased to hear about his poetry being read (probably not a common experience at SF conventions) and invited my friends and I up to his room for a drink. I remember that he had a partially-read paperback copy of NEUROMANCER laying by his bed.

2008-06-30T11:07:00.000-07:00

Censorship alert

Google has been shutting down anti-Obama blogs. So far, Blogger has not explained what's going on.

2008-06-20T06:29:00.000-07:00

Glenn Reynolds, liar

Have you ever noticed that the biggest liars are the people who are eager to insist that everyone else is a liar?

On his blog this morning, the Instapundit complains about a a MoveOn ad in which a woman holds up a baby and says, "So, John McCain, when you said you would stay in Iraq for 100 years, were you counting on Alex? Because, if you were, you can’t have him.”

So what is Reynolds complaining about? It's McCain's statement in which the candidate envisions, um, staying in Iraq for 100 years.

Here's what the New York Times article says, the one Reynolds avoids actually quoting, although the blog post he links to references it: "The quotation Democrats most commonly refer to was from a town-hall-style meeting on Jan. 3 in Derry, N.H., when a voter mentioned that President Bush had spoken of 'staying in Iraq for 50 years.' Mr. McCain interrupted to say, 'Maybe 100.' "

We seem to have reached a stage in our political discourse in which you can't accurately quote what someone says without being accused of being a liar. You're supposed to add a disclaimer explaining that the guy didn't really mean it.

2008-06-16T09:43:00.001-07:00

My Prometheus ballot

I joined the Libertarian Futurist Society this year so I could vote for the Prometheus Award. I still making my way through all of the "Hall of Fame" entries, so I won't send my ballot in for a couple of weeks, but I've read the five novels on the ballot and made up my mind about them. Here's how I intend to vote:

1. Ha'Penny, Jo Walton.
2. The Execution Channel, Ken MacLeod.
3. The Gladiator, Harry Turtledove.
4. No award.
5. Fleet of Worlds, Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner.
6. Ragamuffin, Tobias Buckell.

The first two books are particularly good and would add luster to the award.

My favorite, Ha'penny, is an alternate world novel about a Great Britain which made peace with Hitler rather than fighting on. It's also a mystery novel about a gay, deeply-conflicted Scotland Yard detective who loathes the fascist regime but can't help doing his professional best as he battles a terrorist cell plotting to kill Hitler. I'm describing the book in terms of genre conventions, although it's so well-written it transcends genre.

There's no doubt Walton is on the side of freedom in this subtle, fascinating book, but the book is loaded with dramatic irony and complexity. Many of the people who support loathesome ideologies in the book are more sympathetic in the way they treat people than the folks who are working to oppose Hitler.

"Ha'Penny" is a sequel to the author's "Farthing," which I'm now eager to read. "Ha'Penny" works fine as a stand-alone. The author, by the way, is a native of Wales who has trouble getting her books published in Great Britain. That would seem to reflect badly on British publishers.

The MacLeod is a political thriller with nice touches of science fiction (including a nod to James Blish). The plot is so fast-moving you might not notice MacLeod is wrestling seriously with issues such as civil liberties vs. terrorism and how fear pressures us to give in to impulses of fascism.

The Turtledove reads like young adult novel although it apparently is not marketed that way. It has teenage protagonists and a narrative with little sex or violence and and a pleasing story about a Communist-dominated alternate world in which a few people are rediscovering the virtues of capitalism and free speech.

The other two books aren't bad but aren't good enough to merit an award. The Niven (and Lerner) reads as if it was written in the 1970s and sat in a drawer for three decades. It's quite readable, but recommended only for Niven completists. The Buckell has lots of glowing blurbs on the cover, so I expected it to be better. It is particularly violent, but not particularly interesting or plausible.

2008-05-16T18:38:00.001-07:00

My other blog

The Sandusky Register has let me launch a blog on the newspaper's Web site. You can read it here.

2008-03-31T16:56:00.001-07:00

Connie's mad at me

My column in the Sandusky Register on Barack Obama apparently has annoyed at least one reader. After I mentioned a recent column by Connie Schultz, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, she sent me an angry e-mail accusing me of misrepresenting what she wrote.

Well, one of the virtues of the Internet is that often you can see for yourself. Here is my column; here is the Schultz column I referenced, and here is the speech by Obama I urged everyone to read.

2008-03-27T18:13:00.000-07:00

George Washington, traitor

When you read debates about the Iraq war, it's striking to see which opinions are considered respectable and which are considered beyond the pale.

Here's a quote from an isolationist kook who sounds like Ron Paul: "The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible." Here's another from the same guy: "It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them."

As you can guess from my headline, both quotes are from George Washington (the 1796 farewell address.)

Megan McArdle knows what to do with people who oppose roaming the world looking for wars to get into -- dismiss them. On her blog, she concedes that the people who opposed the war turned out to be right, but then warns that many such weren't the right kind of people: "Other peoples' opposition was animated by principles that may be right, but aren't really very helpful: the pacifists, the isolationists, the reflexive opponents of Republicans or the US military. Within the limits on foreign policy in a hegemonic power, these just aren't particularly useful, again, regardless of whether you are metaphysically correct."

Note the presumption that if you have doubts about the wisdom of hegemonic power, you aren't useful. As Thoreau writes at Unqualified Offerings, "If the most thoughtful critics of a disaster, the ones with the best track record of predictions, are also the ones with ideas that fall well outside the status quo, well, maybe that means something!"

Meanwhile, over at Instapundit, Charles Martin weighs in on a depressing choice: Who is more libertarian, McCain or the two Democratic front runners? Martin writes, "I can see a libertarian case against McCain, but you go to an election with the candidates you've got. Does Matt [Matt Welch] really think McCain would be *more* of a libertarian disaster than "It takes a village"/"We're doing it for your own good" Clinton or the "it would be a mandate, but it's a *voluntary* mandate" Messiah of Change?"

Well, Charles, it's arguable that McCain is the biggest disaster of all, because he's the least likely to do anything about the war machine and the ongoing slide into a National Security State.