Scribbledehobble - the ur-workbook

Yeh, yeh - work in progress...Scribbledehobble and/or the Buffalo Notebooks. They seem to have plans to publish transcriptions of all the Buffalo Notebooks, multi-coloured pens, and all.

Bobby - did you find the shorter online Wake? You can also find a webified version here although it says no US access (?) and some FW pub in Key West links to this FW online.

And this index thingy seems quite amusing...and for parts of words, try the concordance.

In-crowd, in-jokes and gossip (a personal point-of-view)

Last week in the MLA forum: after the first flurry of fun in our newly made ‘Tavern’ or play area, we seem to have reverted to our normal semi-serious selves. The running magical battles in graphics amused me, but I imagined my cone of white light most of the time, and then just grovelled at the feet of Dal (hail Dal!) and pleaded for protection from the platypus. We already miss Dal (hail Dal!) – who has had to go off fighting crime, or something (defending criminals?) – Mindy and ZP seem in great, feisty mode however, and Hecate turns up pretty often to support them, so between them they manage to balance our sometimes rather nerdy male selves…


.
The Reading Group plough on with the heavy-going, and sometimes depressing Reich reading - although it has led to some very interesting discussions on the nature of fascism, mob mentality, the current state of the USA, emotional armouring and the emotional plague, etc. All good stuff.



We plan to tackle Korzybski next. It may prove hard to get our hands on hardback copies of Science and Sanity, but we already found an online copy. So many of us refer to General Semantics, and to E-Prime, that I think this particular reading could lead to very stimulating discussions. I did read it more than a decade ago, but I remember feeling quite impressed (it made an impression on me, in me – it dented my reality). There may well exist popularisations of this material, but I always like going to the source.

The origin of this work was a new functional definition of 'man', as formulated in 1921, based on an analysis of uniquely human potentialities; namely, that each generation may begin where the former left off. This characteristic I called the 'time-binding' capacity. Here the reactions of humans are not split verbally and elementalistically into separate 'body', 'mind', 'emotions', 'intellect', 'intuitions', etc., but are treated from an organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment (external and internal) point of view. This parallels the Einstein-Minkowski space-time integration in physics, and both are necessitated by the modern evolution of sciences. - Alfred Korzybski

We still have a lot more members than active posters – but I never really know if people join who can afford to spend $60 just to look, and then wander off. Like people who think that ‘joining a gym’ shows they care about their health (but never actually go and do any classes). No doubt we have lurkers who don’t feel like joining in because we look like an in-crowd (and as a founder who posts several times a day I plead guilty to having a loud voice, or high-profile presence) but really we welcome new people in warmly, and encourage people to speak up, either with opinions, or links, or corrections. If we use argot or jargon - just ask!

A thread about The Church of Reality seems to have stirred up some serious discussion about religions, communities, useful beliefs, cults, etc. To me it looks like a joke (conceived when smoking a joint, it says in the history) - but that doesn't mean that it won't go the way of (say) scientology and turn into a cult. The 'guru' took a cult test by Secret Agent Orange, and reckons they pass the test as 'not a cult'. We could check this out for MLA, too, given that he offers this definition:

Examples of groups that have some cult properties include religions, nations, political parties, corporations, non profit organizations, sport team fans, neighborhood associations, bridge clubs, softball teams, online discussion boards, Macintosh users, bike clubs, and vegans. Not to say that you should quit all these groups but that all of them will be to some extent at least benignly cultish.

NB: This MLA does not represent the Modern Language Association (although I liked their map of where different languages get spoken in the USA – as we keep on teasing Americans for acting monolingual in English). Oh, and we have no affiliation with the Museums, Libraries and Archives council in the UK – although my own current job has to do with their project of rolling out “Internet access for all” through libraries. The Peoples Network.

How Many Heads?

The next edition of Maybe Quarterly has come out
(also link on the right).



Oh, and Blogger seem to have improved the image upload button, so you can just browse from the Web or your own computer...

The Glass Cockpit

I will likely cross-post this to my personal blog (still pretty much empty) but post it here because I've been putting off contributing here 'til the morrow... and we all know tomorrow never comes!

I had a bizarre dream on Tuesday night... the third of a series of strange dreams. But this one seemed the easiest to interpret, to me. I was a passenger on a plane, and I was interrupted from my magazine reading by the pilot, who came out and sat in the back-facing flight attendant's seat. He started bantering with the passengers, and everyone was laughing. Except me. I looked ahead of him and suddenly could see through the cockpit to the outside world. We were coming in for a landing, but I could see that we were coming in too low to hit the runway. A very high concrete wall raced toward us.

I yelled to the pilot, "What the hell are you doing joking with the passengers? Who's landing the plane??"

And with that, we crashed into the wall. I awoke upon impact.


This dream seemed to say a lot about life, to me. Imagining the plane as the vehicle of one's life, I see so many people content to be a passenger, occassionally looking out the little window next to them, with no idea of where the plane is heading. Can't say that I blame them... those darned cockpits so often appear solid, opaque, and locked. But the few who can attain a glass cockpit to see where they're going... circumstance and luck still play a role, but at least they can see the dangers (and opportunities) before they've passed by.

Or even better, those even fewer who manage to get inside the cockpit and start flying the plane... "oh, the places you'll go!" At that point, one becomes responsible for the itinerary, the pitstops, every destination decided...

This post brought to you in E-Choice (coined by Bob in Trajectories). Dreams and personal narratives just don't seem to flow as well without "is"es.

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…