James Joyce - Modern Psychonaut

“I am convinced personally that Mr. Joyce is a genius all the world will have to recognize.”

– Aleister Crowley, The Genius of Mr. James Joyce

“Joyce’s prose prepared me to enter psychedelic space.”

– Timothy Leary, FLASHBACKS

“(Finnegans Wake is) about as close to LSD on the page as you can get…”

– Terence McKenna, Surfing on Finnegans Wake

“If you’ve never had a psychedelic, reading Joyce is the next best equivalent.”

– Robert Anton Wilson, RAW Explains Everything

“I have read Finnegans Wake aloud at a time when takers of LSD said, ‘that is JUST LIKE LSD.’ So I have begun to feel that LSD may just be the lazy man’s form of Finnegans Wake.” 

– Marshall McLuhan, Q & A

“Someday I’m going to get my article published; I’m going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn’t exist until centuries after James Joyce’s era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I’ll be famous forever.”

– Philip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion

“Joyce’s book is called Finnegans Wake. The missing apostrophe creates another pun,
which Joyce explained to friends as a warning to the ruling classes:
 the oppressed rise, eventually, in every historical cycle.”

– Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance

“Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either
shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.”

– James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

I thought it would be fun on the occasion of Bloomsday 2015 to offer up a smattering of James Joyce’s hierarchitectitiptitoploftical influence on the psychonaut counter culture, and hopefully provide a novel context for his great works, which might help them extend beyond the trappings of highfalutin literary scholarship.

Please feel free to explore for yourself:
The collected works of James Joyce

ALL SEEING EYES

“These people, Joyce, to some degree Pound, McLuhan, they were the prophets of the world in which we now stand, the world of integrated interactive media, extraordinary data retrieval that erases the 17th century notion of the unconscious. Nothing is now unconscious if your data search commands are powerful enough.”

- Terence McKenna in Riding Range w/ Marshall McLuhan

If we're going to live in a Brave New World / 1984 mashup can I at least humbly request that my Netflix recommendations be a bit more doubleplusgood?

I originally drew the Joyce & Pound / 0 & 1 bit for RAW's now mythic Tale of The Tribe class, in reaction to his observation that (pardon my poor paraphrasing) Pound's The Cantos modeled history as linear progression moving up & down (from inferno to paradiso), and that Joyce's Finnegans Wake modeled history as a cyclic process going round & round (from swerve of shore to bend of bay). With further nudging by his equation that Joyce + Pound + Mcluhan = Internet.  (I may not have that notation exactly right, Mcluhan may have been a multiplier, but you get the idea)

My first exchange with RAW concerned the shape of things to come.  I proposed to him the model of an escalating spiral, to which he said he agreed, though wasn't dogmatic about it. I do find it encouraging though what visual concept results from combining the historical trajectories of both Joyce & Pound...

Excelsior!

bc
bobbycampbell.net
@RGC777

Marshall McLuhan born 100 years ago

Marshall McLuhan would have reached the age of 100 today, if he had lived this long...

The official MM website














You might enjoy this illustrated article that Bobby Campbell created for the Maybe Quarterly

Happy Birthday Bucky!

Bucky did sometimes imply that McLuhan had got quite a lot of his radical ideas from Fuller's own work...he doesn't seem to have born a grudge...

You Know Nothing Of My Work

Great to see a brief and highly readable account of Marshall McLuhan from Douglas Coupland.

Like many "guru-charlatans" McLoon remains ambiguous, almost paradoxical, often misquoted and misunderstood.

People either co-opt him to their cause, or decide he needs translating, or write endless, solemn analysis of what he 'meant'.

Many people may simply think his time has past - but Coupland indicates how his approach still has much to tell us. Others perhaps think he acted as a cheer-leader for the future, and new technology (far from it!) Yet he does appear to have predicted the future (the way we live now) quite accurately.


Still, the title of the book (referring to the great gag in Annie Hall) offers fair warning that I should explain my own take on his work with a fair amount of diffidence. Suffice to say, I considered him a provoker of thought, rather than a man with all the answers.

I often find it hard to agree with a Catholic, a man who hated hippies and acid, etc.

Unlike the evasive or smartass answers to the press (the style adopted by Dylan and then The Beatles), McLuhan bewildered people through his mask of the absent-minded professor, or his use of odd puns, his sudden lucid responses, his own weird perspectives. He remains highly amusing when running rings around people trying to 'understand' him - using the provocative trick of hinting that their own outmoded reality tunnels will prevent them from 'getting it'.

"You mean my whole fallacy is wrong."

One of the reasons I consider him a trickster guru.

"The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual’s encyclopaedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind." M.M. 1962

State of the computer art in 1962.

Google Search Stories & Youtube Shared Tales

I stumbled upon this new video story creation 'tool' about 45 minutes ago and these three 'stories' are the first that I have made. Maybe this tool can be used across the board for some of our common interests here, stunning results for so little effort, great gift to share... Enjoy, steve fly.

http://www.youtube.com/searchstories

DREAM AWAKE - HOW JAMES JOYCE INVENTED EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA & DISGUISED IT AS A BOOK

Poet John Sinclair just shared details of a filmfestival scheduled in his home of Ann Arbor later this year, featuring a lecture that sounds like the perfect sand-wedge, between Bobby Campbell's fantastic artwork and recent mind-cleansing MCLUHAN/JOYCE postings:

Friday, March 26 at 5pm: ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL LECTURE -

at Ann Arbor Library, 343 South 5th Av, AA, MI 48104, 734-302-7774, free admission http://www.aafilmfest.org/

DREAM AWAKE - HOW JAMES JOYCE INVENTED EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA & DISGUISED IT AS A BOOK - Paramedia-ecologist Gerry Fialka's challenging interactive workshop probes how Joyce's 1939 book/epic collage/meta-narrative film FINNEGANS WAKE (and Marshall McLuhan's Menippean Satirized translation of it) presaged experimental & political activist cinema. How did the WAKE influence Hollis Frampton, Owen Land, John Cage & Peter Greenaway? How & why does the WAKE tell the history of everything that ever happened and will happen? Why did Joyce hang out with Masons and reveal their secrets? Why did the British secret police study the WAKE? How did the WAKE invent MK-ULTRA, the CIA's mind control program? How does the WAKE write a detailed history of the future? How and why did Joyce anticipate the Facebook-Google-Wiki-Twitter-YouTube-Blogosphere swirl (social networking), TMZ, Girl Talk and whatever comes after the Internet? Harry Smith, who claimed Giordano Bruno invented cinema, stated that the function of film viewing is to put people to sleep - dreaming awake. ReJoyce interconnecting Finneganese "funny funereels," "allnights newseryreel," "they leap looply, looply, as they link to light," "cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript," and "a ... riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed." Fun for all at Finnegans Wake. "Gerry Fialka's 'Dream Awake' is a great, entertaining, eye-opening, mind-widening, and provocative event. It amply demonstrated for me Marshall McLuhan's assertion that Finnegans Wake is 'a memory theater for the entire contents of human consciousness and unconsciousness.' Highly recommended." - John Bishop, seminal James Joyce scholar, author of "The Book of the Dark," and author of the intro to the current in-print edition of Finnegans Wake.

"Marshall McLuhan, What Are You Doing!?"

THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE (1967)

THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE, MARSHALL McLUHAN: SIDE A

THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE, MARSHALL McLUHAN: SIDE B

McLuhan's Wake

A minute or so in (this back in the early 60s, before The Sixties really got going) listen to McLoon describe Internet. We need visionaries - check out Douglas Rushkoff in the previous post...



And yeah, for you Maybe folk, he references Finnegans Wake, too...

Just a coincidence!

If you read the extended Comments on the previous post, you will know that Ben Mack shares a respect for RAW (Robert Anton Wilson) and Bucky Fuller, and others that this blog references (like Hakim Bey, or Kurt Vonnegut) - and for honesty in communication.

Poker Without Cards

For fellow MLA students interested in treating Poker Without Cards as a text for our Reading Group, but who feel resistance to Ben as a ‘marketeer’ – I recommend taking an hour to watch/listen to this interview. The book does not refer to all his thinking, but covers a period when BM found himself incarcerated in a mental institution after a breakdown, and got casually informed that he ‘was’ a paranoid schizophrenic. Later that diagnosis got retracted (because he rebuilt himself in a way that someone with that diagnosis couldn’t have done). He didn’t receive any kind of apology. It brings to mind Timothy Leary’s incarceration for ‘dangerous thinking’ – and also the approach that R.D.Laing took to people in similar states of mind, back in The Sixties.

Go to Grey Lodge for a pirate PDF edition Or Second Attention.
[spoiler alert: Lulu Review of the book]

You could also research Ben Mack’s marketing lectures (1h20m), and books, and stuff, but that might set off your prejudices. Some of us have remarked on the fact that he set up a website entitled “What Would Bill Hicks Have Said”, and have countered it with Bill’s quotes about people in advertising. Well, BM makes a distinction (in this video) between marketing and advertising. I leave you to tease out the distinction. Having nothing in particular I wish to sell, I don't know how he can help me with his seminars (I don't even have much desire to 'make more money') but if he can use all those skills to get fresh drinking water to everyone on the planet, then I think he deserves all the support he can get. (rant over)

Genius comes in many forms

It seems that BM counts as some kind of ‘genius’ and they sometimes prove uncomfortable as companions, and often get 'misunderstood'. Think of Orson Welles, maybe.

Please bear in mind that what I write here remains a personal opinion, and not a ‘policy statement’ that the MLA Admin supports – this blog has no direct affiliation with the management group of MLA or RAW’s literary estate. You can see it as a critical fanzine if you like.

The Maybe Logic Academy

The Maybe Logic Academy attracts people fascinated by a wide range of subjects and approaches (magick, NLP, intelligence increase, conspiracy theory, psychosomatic medicine, creativity, etc) – we don’t always agree, but we got given one rule (just the one) by RAW when he set this place up online where we could study with him (and other tutors), and interact with each other - and which forms some kind of legacy.

If you can’t achieve tolerance, at least attempt courtesy.

Such an approach to debate still seems rare (if not unique!) in online discussion spaces, and remains one of the reasons that I still spend many unpaid hours promoting and supporting it (even with the current incarnation of the forum 4.0, which has bugs which annoy some of the participants).

I have failed several times in my own attempts at courtesy, especially around the area of magic/magick (which Ben lucidly elucidates in the interview), but have learned from that, and continue to attempt to improve my communication.

Please do not find any significance in the fact that my avatar shares initials with Ben Mack! I remain an entirely separate entity. It’s just a coincidence, just a coincidence (repeat this mantra after me “It’s just a coincidence!”)

PS: This seems like a good place to throw a link to Bobby's summary of Rushkoff's Technologies of Persuasion course - over at DeOxy.

"Tomorrow is our permanent address"

One of the things I most regretted about not having the complete Tale of The Tribe course with Bob - we never really got to discuss Marshall McLuhan.

He seems well out of fashion. For all his analysis of media, he probably appears difficult. Partly because of his teasing approach - trying to make you think!

Bobby has offered the complete version of McLuhan's Wake (with Laurie Anderson doing narrator). [but note Glandmaster's technical comment below, about the site].

I choose to watch/listen to it right now as I write. I'll probably go and buy it, so I can show it on friends' DVD players (you see! We do end up buying things, even when we can look at it online). Oh, yeah - you have to set 90 minutes aside, like a docu-movie.

In the 60s he amused me greatly. He seemed as good as Dylan at winding up journalists. He gave great soundbyte...he got slogans. He apparently gave Leary "Turn on, tune in, Drop out" (or the idea for it).

English teachers often seem to have done far more than teach one simple subject (mine did, for sure - he even understood why I had to drop out, and even wished me luck - unlike all the other teachers). I didn't know he came from a Roman Catholic position (I have my own prejudices - most of my heroes seem like lapsed Catholics - Leary, RAW, Lilly, Joyce, etc). I can't read Lord of the Rings for just that subtext from Tolkien. I didn't know it when I tried to first read it in 1972. I just felt mysteriously ill, and queasy, as I do with the Harry Potter books (which seem curiously old-fashioned with their boarding schools and 'magic powers' - but, as so often, I feel quite out-of-synch with many people. Apparently UK citizens have turned religious again, just to get their kids into the best schools. (sigh)

-There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.
Marshall McLuhan

“How can we make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone?” — R. Buckminster Fuller

Check out John Cage talking about both of them.

McLuhan seemed curiously old-fashioned and straight, and also 'hip' at the same time. A great teacher. Whether he really 'stole' a lot of it from Bucky and Korzybski still seems an open question - perhaps we might call him a populariser.

The Phantom Captain
(click to read whole article quoted below)

But there is some evidence that this idea of the extension of man, identified by many as the core concept of McLuhan's philosophical stance, may have come from the transcendentalist Bucky. From 1960 to 1970, Constantin Dioxides, an engineer, architect, and urban planner and the founder of the Athens Technological Institute in Greece, organized summer cruises complete with cutting edge guests such as Margaret Mead, and Jonas Salk.

Many, including McLuhan, were guests more than once, but only Fuller was invited on every single trip for twelve years in a row. In The Synergetics Dictionary, under McLuhan, notes such as these were made by Fuller: "Marshall McLuhan told me the first day he met me - on one of the early Dioxide cruises - 'I am your disciple.' He held up copies of No More Secondhand God and Nine Chains to the Moon and said to me 'I've joined your conspiracy!"'

In his notes, he writes: "McLuhan has never made any bones about his indebtedness to me as the original source of most of his ideas. The 'Global Village' was indeed my concept. I don't think he has an original idea. Not one McLuhan says so himself. He's really a great enthusiast, a marvelous populariser and teacher. He has an irrepressible sense of the histrionic, like no one I've known since Frank Lloyd Wright."

Indeed, in Nine Chains to the Moon, a passage reads: "Through the leverage gained by his inanimate instrument extensions of self, he has attained an extended mechanical ability far in excess of his own integral mechanical energy content ability." He goes on to claim that the idea of "man backing up into his future" appears in his books and that Fuller's concept of the "Mechanical Extensions of Man" is the basis for McLuhan's talk of the "Electrical Extensions" of man.

Open source - interesting and relevant post...

At that time, I was cavorting with known anarchists like the composers John Cage and Udo Kasemets. I had been a fan of Cage, Bucky Fuller, Marshal McLuhan and William S. Burroughs since my teens; in retrospect, I was probably a powderkeg in search of a terrorist. As an unabashed advocate of free and unfettered information sharing, free software appealed to my young mind, it held an almost Kabbalistic hope: "You may pay for knowledge, but you should never charge for it.". Community currencies would prevail over the economics of scarcity; I devoted myself to learning, promoting and participating in the Free Software Revolution.

Visit the Remains and Help Yourself to the Leftovers

[text remains unfinalised]

For new visitors, from whichever direction you arrived, just a little explanation about how I see this 'place'. RAW's wonderful (if hardly unique) creation of an interactive online forum for learning brought together an interesting group of people, with some core members emerging, and a glittering cast of guest stars, walk-ons, extras (who we might call lurkers), has-beens, wannabes, provocateurs, people hidden behind make-up and/or masks and people who strip everything off and run naked through the marketplace.


And the Academy has many more resources than a mere forum - it has a rather fine library of RAW material and work from people that he liked, I'll offer a relevant sample:

The values that Taoism sees in woman and water are their harmony with the Tao. I have not translated this key term, and I do not intend to; but Ezra Pound's translation - "the process" - seems to me more adequate than "the Way," "the Path" and most of the other attempts. Students of General Semantics might understand if I say that the "Tao" comes very close to meaning what they mean when they say "the process-world." The Tao is the flux, the constant change, amid which we live and in the nature of which we partake; or it is the "law" of this change. (But, of course, the "law" and the "change" itself are not different in reality, only in our grammar and philosophy.) A Zen master asked how to get in harmony with the Tao, replied, "Walk on!" Water and woman represent adjustment to the Law of Change, which "man, proud man, dressed in his little brief authority," and his abstract dogmas, tries to resist.

Anna Livia Plurabelle, the water woman, represents the values of the Tao in Finnegans Wake . The very first word of the book, "riverrun" - not the river and the running of the river, but "riverrun" - places us firmly in the "process-world" of modern physics, which is the world of the Tao.

Joyce and Tao By Robert Anton Wilson
From The James Joyce Review, vol. 3, 1959, pp. 8-16

Because of the ephemeral nature of a forum (a rather linear kind of transaction) we planned a quarterly magazine to capture 'the good bits'. Not only did that (through a McLuhan lens) appear based on an old-fashioned print cuture, but it seemed sluggish and unresponsive in a hi-speed modern environment - and, inevitably (or at least predictably) a few enthusiasts provided nearly all of the content, and when they lapsed the editor had to write most of it, and then the group complained it had become unrepresentative.

A few of us decided to start this blog as a more flexible alternative - hovering between chat and finished pieces. Here and Now we find ourselves on a 200th post, and a similar monoculture has appeared in terms of linear contributions by an ever-diminishing group of contributors. Perhaps just following a natural life-cycle?

I would feel disappointed if people only came to see 'the latest post' and not do a bit of detective work, rummage in the archives, ask about the odd items in the apothecary jars, or the strange preserves in the old-style delicatessen section, or visit the back rooms (access via Vico's Bar).

I have started indexing, labelling and linking precisely to encourage exploration - just as RAW encouraged us to do a little archaeology (or mining) of the Twentieth Century - combined with early-uptake and adventurous responses (brain machines, online forums, Futurist approaches to the Singularity, etc).

I think of this site more as a process that a publication. I feel free to return to, and edit, posts. After all, you don't want to find dead links, do you? Why would you want to lock down the words and images? OK, you might like to see the Director's Cut, or sample the raw source material (the first take, or even outtakes) but it seems obvious to me that we should allow ourselves the freedom to tweak, sample, cut-up, hide, reveal and edit the material. Not all contributors have Admin rights (but they could), and any contributor could start a peripheral blog and link back here (and many of us have, as you will find in the links on the right).

If I appear to state the obvious you have to understand that I recently visited another forum and got severely told off for going back and editing or deleting posts of my own. Apparently it made communication difficult for them, and more particularly could get used to make others appear stupid or incoherent, or myself look clever. Apparently, once something gets said (written) in their world, it goes into the electronic akashic records and you have to live with the karma of your own stupidity (or something). I find that impossibly conservative and restrictive! So, I can't correct typos, factual errors or uninformed (or badly phrased) opinions - nothing ever gets forgiven and forgotten! Ludicrous! The Wayback machine and cached Google pages suffice for me, and if people quote the parts of my posts to which they are responding, where can confusion arise? Unless I deny I ever said such a thing!

As a lover of Burroughs, Cage and other anarchists and process-based types, I couldn't believe how oppressive that felt (not to mention the flaming). After all, you can only mess with your own contributions to a dialogue, and further feedback from others remains possible. Of course, if you acquire admin rights (so you can interfere with other people's material) then you do incur some responsibilities, too - and need to act with good intent.

However, you can always sample the source and re-mix. I liked John Cage's distinction between communication (with intent to affect the other) and conversation (idling along together in parallel).

Whether this blog can remain a process, and can resist turning into an object, remains to be seen. I like the idea that we continue to develop what Bob initiated, and these recent posts simply form my attempt to devise some Brief MLA courses, in the tradition of self-directed learning.

Meanwhile, I will work on making the blog denser, but not longer - feel free to do what you want with it. You can always check out further opinions of mine on my own blog. Be Seeing You!

NB: the next Maybe Quarterly falls due on the Autumnal Equinox, 23 September 2007 - that leaves you a month to consider making a contribution.

Bogus MLA Courses

Accept no cheap substitutes! Fakes and Simulations have flooded the market!
For three years now, the MLA has offered high-quality online courses to people from all around the world [but only in English, so far].

Robert Anton Wilson ran all the first few courses, but slowly the range of tutors has expanded, and also the subjects tackled. Current instructors include Patricia Monaghan, Rev. Ivan Stang, Philip H. Farber, Antero Alli, Peter J. Carroll, Starhawk, R. U. Sirius, Douglas Rushkoff and David Jay Brown.

Of course, not everyone has sufficient time to study, and those with time on their hands may not have the money…but you can always join the general forum, for the flavour of the place. If you understand the freelance life you may understand why tutors need paying (!) and the course fee also means you get a closed environment, with concentrated energy from other students, rather than the potentially dispersive/disruptive content of free-for-all forums, which you can find on the web on almost any subject, and which certainly have a value of their own.

As RAW graduated to His Serene Absence earlier this year, we can never complete some of the assignments he set us. The feedback he got from participants meant he continued to tune his teaching methods and subject matter from course to course. He would certainly have noted a certain disappointment in sombunall students that in one of his last (and very ambitious) 12-week courses [The Tale of The Tribe] we failed to cover all the ground that the Syllabus hinted at. As it happens, those of us who enjoyed the course did not mind that we focussed on just some of the material on offer (we still assumed we could do pick-ups later). You can only do so much in 3 months.

Anyway – for those who wanted less Joyce and Pound, and more on the communications/information people of the 20th Century, I have begun encouraging the creation of brief teasers/tasters or possible courses in the open forum. And yes, I did mean them as a joke, before you ask…MLA may eventually initiate self-directed courses on some of these, or seek out appropriate tutors, but meanwhile you can join in relaxed conversation about McLuhan, Gregory Bateson, Bucky Fuller, Shannon, Bandler, Korzybski, Nietzsche, etc.

[2014 update] Although that generation of the forum has gone into hiding, I did find a link to that thread on the Wayback Machine.  For what it's worth.   aka Bogus

The Tale of The Tribe

My apologies for over-writing in the previous post. For a moment I thought I had got onto another course! The ideogrammic aspect of Bob’s interests emerged in one course called The Ideogrammic Method, and then later when we discussed internet and McLoon on his course called

Tale of the Tribe

The first of Wilson's MLA courses bridging the political, the social and the psychological, Tale of the Tribe promises to be a landmark journey with our dear Dr. Bob. Starring Giordano Bruno, Giambatista Vico, Friederich Nietzsche, Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, Alfred Korzybski, James Joyce, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon and Marshall McLuhan -- the nucleus of the extraordinary minds that have helped shape the information age of 21st century and the mindscape of Robert Anton Wilson. Join Wilson as he explores the themes, minds and ideas of his forthcoming book, The Tale of the Tribe.

We got a bit excited on that course, as we felt that our contributions directly affected RAW’s work-in-progress (you can still find it listed as unpublished on Amazon!)

It appears that our interest (both in the course that happened, and the book that didn’t) has encouraged Admin to attempt something new. A self-directed course based around the material. I can see encouraging signs in the Academy that such a course may begin fairly soon.

Stop the Press!

I have a piece in process, so I welcome any comments or ideas. I don’t even have a First Draft to show you yet. The theme I want to pick up comes from boredom with the whole Freemason thing. Did they evolve from Operative Mason Guilds (who built the Gothic Cathedrals) or do the Speculative Mason’s rites actually go all the way back to Egypt? If they do, does that mean the highest initiates really have to challenge all their own taboos by child sacrifice, etc – or should we just see all those stories as desperate Christian propaganda (they used to say the same sort of things about the Jews) aimed at any radical humanists or freethinking educators? Anyway. Bored with all that stuff - like they held the fort, and no other groups got involved. Yeh, right. I have more interest in actors and writers as subversives.

Having got into printing presses through McLuhan and the Gutenberg Galaxy, I got interested in paper-making (which seems to have come out of the same Southern France where intelligence seems to have had its supporters – the Cathars, the Troubadours, the Spanish Cabbalists, etc.) Muslim Spain and the Languedoc had universities and other high IQ intentions and practices until the Inquisition threw us ALL back in the dungeon of ignorance. Huguenot papermakers (later Protestants, same area of Europe) had to run away from similar persecution, and took their skills with them. Whether the Vose part of my family come from the de Vaux papermakers I have no idea (unproven romantic connection). Harold Bayley has a whole theory linking the watermarks in paper to heretics and subversives.

So I have two areas of interest. Craft Guilds, and the subversive nature of printing.

Guilds of settled communities tend to specialise and control local business (capitalism, shop-keepers, closed shop unions, etc), but Guilds of itinerant workers needed to recognise each other and confirm relevant qualifications wherever they went. Musicians and actors audition each other, of course. The commitment to a bogus stone mason (dodgy builder), however, could cost you a lot of money and waste a lot of time, so the codewords (jargon) and ability with tools and even secret handshakes, etc became quite important.

As to paper makers and printing – the people involved in such work seem to have often felt like a threat to the Church and the State. For a start, they could read and write (always dangerous). Secondly, printing meant they could mass-produce pamphlets, newsletters and other scurrilous items for a newly literate public. So the powers-that-be have often controlled printing presses as tightly as they could. Many secret ones continued to function, however. And this still continues to this day (think of Samizdat publications in the USSR, while strict censorship still got enforced by people like the KGB.)

I feel particularly drawn to Harold Bayley - he may think Bacon wrote Shakespeare, and he may have a point, but his work on watermarks and their secret significance certainly intrigues me. Look at this very modern looking but enigmatic fool's cap watermark, for instance - yeh Cathars, troubadours, jesters, sufis, you got it. Oh and foolscap paper, too, of course...

Any ideas and relevant stuff - to help me with an article for either the Blog or the Winter Solstice MQ - gratefully received.

Tale of the Tribe

I look forward to this course in the Fall, as Bob’s eclectic mind seems to range over material I have a lot of empathy for. As the course material will probably get published later, under the same title, this feels like an opportunity to contribute (however indirectly) to shaping Bob’s thoughts – to actually getting involved in reader feedback on draft material – a really interactive option.

Bumph: "The first of Wilson's MLA courses bridging the political, the social and the psychological, Tale of the Tribe promises to be a landmark journey with our dear Dr. Bob. Starring Giordano Bruno, Giambatista Vico, Friederich Nietzsche, Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, Alfred Korzybski, James Joyce, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon and Marshall McLuhan -- the nucleus of the extraordinary minds that have helped shape the information age of 21st century and the mindscape of Robert Anton Wilson. Join Wilson as he explores the themes, minds and ideas of his forthcoming book, The Tale of the Tribe."

I would say that all the people Bob enjoys seem to have a ‘magical’ quality to them – and the theme of hidden streams of ancient knowledge, as well as the possibility of new models of the universe. Although Bob acknowledges an interest in Crowley, he doesn’t recommend setting out to become a magickal practitioner, as such. Uncle Al does seem to obsess people (the Cult of Personality worked for him) but Bob leans the other way, it seems to me, towards freeing oneself from obsessions and habits of thinking, and/or worship of any particular form or method or person. He also explains the magical side to the arts (thinking of Burroughs and Pound and Joyce and the Surrealists) as well as of the sciences (with particular reference to Quantum Physics and anthropology and futurist planning and design).

So don’t feel dismayed if you think any particular area of study doesn’t appeal. The sheer eclectic mix means some particular approach to the future, or to the mind, or to the future mind or to the future of mind…may intrigue you.

RAW’s whole approach can lead to misunderstandings. The infinitely satirical side of Illuminatus! often gets overlooked, and the implications of the story get taken seriously, which means he gets described as a conspiracy theorist.

This seems strange to me, as that book seems like an obvious send-up of the conspiracy scene. Well, OK, that represents one of the various possible readings. The two Bobs who wrote it treated all conspiracy beliefs the same, and said “what if they all had a part of the truth?” Somehow, treating them all as real blows it up into an outrageously improbable picture of the insanity we live by…