Robert Anton Wilson Speaks to Me From Beyond the Grave

Robert Anton Wilson: Beyond Conspiracy Theory – V. Vale (2019)

            Robert Anton Wilson (A.K.A. RAW) has been one of the most important literary figures in my life, ever since I first picked up the Illuminatus Trilogy around age 19-20.  I devoured almost all of his books, even digging up the out of print ones through the internet.  His ideas on philosophy, language, reality tunnels, and general agnosticism are deeply important to me and help drive my intellectual curiosity and awareness of the world around me.  Through his work I have been introduced to other awesome writers and thinkers such as Buckminster Fuller, Alfred Korzybski, and Benjamin Tucker.  His passing in January of 2007 from Post-Polio Syndrome complications was felt very deeply by me, especially as I thought it silenced a voice that had so much more to share.  This is what he posted online just a few days before his death, after a groundswell of support managed to raise money for his crippling medical debt, "I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying. Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd."

            A few months ago, as I was perusing the internet, I saw a post about a new book being published, containing a recently re-discovered interview of RAW from 1985 found in the RE/Search Publisher archives.  What a surprise!  I placed my pre-order and waited.  When it arrived in my mailbox I was so excited.  When I began reading it, and could hear RAW’s voice in my head again, I was thrilled.

            Reading so much in the field of occult knowledge, conspiracy theories, and such high weirdness sometimes leaves me with a deep need for some humor, as so many of the writers of these books seem humorless.  They feel like they must take themselves very seriously or else their ideas will not be properly considered.  Robert Anton Wilson never fails to be hilarious.  Reading this interview reminded me of how funny RAW was, and how much his humor actually shines a light on our reality.  He who cannot find something to laugh at is not looking hard enough.

            This book not only contains the aforementioned interview, but also several other sections that Robert Anton Wilson had prepared for publication.  These items were to be part of a book about RAW to be published by RE/Search Publications in the mid-1980’s, but the project was shelved, and the interview was archived and forgotten.  These parts include a list of 50 books from RAW’s personal library, which is bad-ass for a book nerd like myself!  It also includes a section with a 120+ question International Conspiracy Trivia quiz he created, and a listing of 8 different lecture titles and descriptions, lectures that RAW was available to deliver to any group or organization that wished to invite him to speak.  Many of these are available to view on YouTube.

            One of the greatest things about Robert Anton Wilson was that his ideas were not framed as high intellectualism, suitable solely for the refined mentalities of elite thinkers.  His work speaks directly to the normal human, hoping to stir something in them that will improve their life and the lives of those around them.  Not only did he describe his ideas in his fiction books, but he expounded upon them in his non-fiction work, providing methods and techniques by which to help expunge the conditioned reactions we all have, and allow us all to understand ourselves and the world around us as much more than an either/or scenario.  This is the core of his “Guerrilla Oncology,” which is how RAW described his writing.  It sucked you in with a good story while at the same time rewriting the way one thinks.  He fought an endless battle against what is called Aristotelian logic, the idea that every question can be answered solely by a Yes or No.  This faulty logic has caused so much trouble to our world, and has invaded our collective thought so successfully that no one thinks about it anymore. 

RAW pushes a “Maybe Logic” where every question has many more possible answers than just Yes/No.  For example, “Does acupuncture actually work?”  The answer could be Yes, No, Maybe, I Don’t Know, etc.  Nothing in our experience just “IS.”  Instead of “You are evil,” RAW would state it as “You seem evil to me at this time.”  Instead of the statement “Beethoven is better than Mozart,” which is inherently meaningless, RAW would say “Beethoven seems to me to be much better than Mozart.” This is a true and verifiable statement, applicable only to the mind that is speaking, and not a wholesale generalization.  This is how scientists talk, because it is the only really truthful way to convey information and it allows for the variety of experience and chance that is inherent in our existence.  Our language is limited and unless we recognize it and fight it, our thinking is also limited.

I am so glad I got a chance to order this book and add it to my Robert Anton Wilson collection.  I highly recommend his books, and hope that more and more people will read them and understand the point.  Thanks to V. Vale from RE/Search for sending me the book, and for including such a cool photograph of Robert Anton Wilson alongside!  Much appreciated!

(This book can be ordered directly from RE/Search Publications HERE )

Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa hang out, listen to records, and talk about music.

Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa – Haruki Murakami (2016)

“Like love, there can never be too much ‘good music.’ “ - Haruki Murakami

The Japanese author Haruki Murakami has been one of my favorites ever since I first read A Wild Sheep Chase in my sophomore year of University (oh so very long ago...around 1992-1993).  I owe my love of Murakami to my man Elliott French, who loaned me his copy of that book.  I have also been aware of Maestro Seiji Ozawa’s work, as I spent 7 years playing cello in the school Symphony Orchestra.  Coupled with my father’s enjoyment of classical music at home, this left me with a life-long love of classical symphonic and chamber music.  When I read that Haruki Murakami’s newest book was to focus on conversations between these two giants, and their shared love of music, I grew restless to read it.  Thank Mario for the University of Houston’s M.D. Anderson Library and the bad-ass librarians there who keep the shelves full of fresh new books!

Previously on this Intellectual Journey, I had the chance to read and write about Haruki Murakami’s first non-fiction book, the moving and shocking Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.  Where that book delved into a tragedy that shook a nation to its core, and the after-effects of it all, this book is a joyous celebration in many respects.  Murakami has been a life-long fan of music, with a deep knowledge of Jazz and Classical music.  Ozawa has been working as a conductor since the 1960’s, where he was Leonard Bernstein’s principal assistant.  He was barely 30 years old, knew very little English, and eventually studied and worked under the tutelage of some of the greatest conductors of the 20^th century.  Both of these men have very strong opinions and ideas about music, but since one is a music creator and the other is a music aficionado, there is no rancor in any of their conversations, only mutual admiration and the joined love of good music.

The interviews recorded here were conducted over the course of several years, and include the time period when Maestro Seiji Ozawa suffered from a debilitating condition which required surgery and left him unable to conduct what was usually a quite frenzied schedule.  Through the course of these meetings, Murakami would pull out music from his vast collection of records and play them for the Maestro.  These included classic performances by Glenn Gould, and various world-renowned Symphony Orchestras.  Some of these were recordings of Maestro Ozawa’s performances, and others were from various contemporaries of his.  The insights that both men bring to the various recordings is just wonderful for a music nerd like me.  It is the next best thing to sitting in a room listening to music with them.  What a cream-dream that would be!

I learned quite a lot about music, about the art of conducting, about the art of teaching young students how to make good music together, and about the relationship between the conductor, the score, and the musicians that make that score come to life.   I also learned a lot about Haruki Murakami himself, and the deep musical knowledge that he has acquired over his lifetime.  Their discussions regarding the differences between a professional writer and a professional conductor make for enlightening reading.  As a writer, Murakami answers to no one, sets his own time-table, works completely alone, and keeps a very rigid schedule.  He awakens around 4 AM, writes for about 5 hours, then proceeds to go eat lunch and get on with the rest of his responsibilities.  Maestro Ozawa likewise gets up around 4 AM, but he states that he gets quite a hunger around 3 hours later, which causes him to interrupt his work.  He then spends the rest of the day in the myriad other duties of a professional conductor.  The quiet morning time is for his most difficult work, that of reading scores and understanding what the composer intended.  Murakami does not travel much due to his work, but Ozawa is all over the world, from guest conductor stints in Vienna, Berlin, Boston, etc., to his several once-a-year Orchestras that gather up players from around the world.  He has to be an organizer, a teacher, a musical genius, and above all, a leader of people.  

 While both men live in quite different worlds, their relationship only got stronger as the interviews took place.  One of the coolest things in the book is a short afterword by Seiji Ozawa where he discusses how him and Haruki met, how he grew to appreciate the talks with Haruki more and more, and how much he actually learned and remembered through the conversations.  Books like this give a great insight into the minds of genius.  I highly recommend it to anyone who loves classical music, and any fan of Haruki Murakami.  I learned a great deal.  

(On his website, Haruki Murakami lists a selection of music that he and Seiji Ozawa listened to during the course of this book’s writing, and provides links to listen to these recordings.  AWESOME.  Here is the link: http://www.harukimurakami.com/resource_category/playlist/absolutely-on-music )

(This book can be purchased here:  ABSOLUTELY ON MUSIC  )

From Great Pain Comes Great Humor...Thank Goodness For That!

 

Black Comedians on Black Comedy: How African-Americans Taught Us to Laugh – Darryl J. Littleton (2008)

            One of the best book-buying days of the year in Houston is when the Friends of the Houston Public Library hold their annual book sale.  Most years it is in a large convention center floor with hundreds of thousands of books that are available for purchase.  Many of these are donations that did not fit into the collections, or were multiple copies, or were discarded due to either damage or a new edition being published.  The volunteers divide all the books into different categories.  I rarely look through the Humor section but on this particular day the other tables were running thin.  That is how I found this cool book, which reads like an oral history of black comedy.

            The history of black folks in the USA always starts with the lowest of the low, the capture and enslavement of millions of Africans brought to the New World as property to be used in the service of white plantations and farms, and to breed the next generation of new slaves.  The author discusses how the very earliest forms of black humor in America, the post-Civil-War minstrel shows, began in the plantations, where the African slaves would sing songs and crack jokes ridiculing their white owners.  These antics, especially the ones where the slaves would exaggeratedly play-act what they saw their masters doing, were seen by the plantation owners as entertaining.  They did not understand that they were the butt of the joke.  The slave-owners found the slaves’ cracking jokes and acting the fool to be hilarious, and demanded them to do it for the slave-owner’s amusement.

            This is very ironic, and still happens to this day.  The oppressed mock the oppressors, and the oppressors, in their willful ignorance, find it amusing and start to believe that the oppressed are actually that way, instead of understanding that they were pretending/acting/cracking jokes.  The original minstrel shows were white entertainers painting themselves up in black-face and imitating the antics they saw the slaves do.  Black entertainers after the Civil War figured they could do the same and earn a living, even though they still had to put on the black-face themselves!  Ridiculous, but then again, everything about racism is ridiculous.

            This book traces a history from those original minstrel shows to the development of what today is called “stand-up comedy,” with a focus on African-American comedians.  It proceeds chronologically and touches upon most of the comedians of note, splitting time between the history lessons of the author and quotes from the countless interviews the writer did with modern-day comedians.  Many times these interludes are straight jokes, and others are discussions of comedic heroes.  It is very cool to read about what current comics think of the old masters, and to share in their understanding that the comedians that had to suffer the black-face and the minstrel shows and the demeaning roles in movies and television did so because otherwise they would not have worked at all. 

            One of my favorite comedians is a man named Robin Harris, who died in his late 30’s, and was integral as an M.C. in helping create the comedy club scene that sprang up in the early 1980’s.  Like most comedians, he had to hustle and scrape to develop a career, and was well on his way to being the next Redd Foxx type when he died.  Having come up at a time before ubiquitous cameras and the internet, there is not much out there to remember Mr. Harris by.  What there is out there is pure gold, but it is very cool to read a full background of Robin Harris as well as the comments from many comedians who revered this master of the put-down.  It is in this respect that I most enjoyed this book.  Unlike many other performers, a comedian’s personal history is not really shared with us regular folks.  This book does this and makes these comics much more real.

            No art is created in a vacuum and comedy is most definitely an aggregate of its previous history.  Today’s African-American comedians and their personae were earned by the many that came before them, and it is this shared history that makes black comedy stand out from the generic comedy on stage at many of our comedy clubs.  The influence of black comedians and black comedy on the general American sense of humor is second to none, and carries a lot of pain and suffering through it, much like the other ethnic comedy that shapes American humor, that of the Hebrew comics and vaudeville acts. 

From great suffering comes great art, and from great pain comes great humor.  The least funny among us is usually the most content and satisfied.  Humor is a weapon against pain, and when we share the laughs, we share in the easing of that pain.  We’re all in this together people!  It is hard to imagine that it was only a few decades back that black folks were still relegated to “n****r heaven” at clubs and theaters.  Not only were these paying African-American patrons relegated to the hottest part of any theater (the upper balcony) but they were actually instructed to wait until the white audience laughed before they laughed themselves.  The privileged white audience could not be made to feel uncomfortable because the blacks were laughing at a joke they did not get.  Horrible.  Humor allows us to look directly at the ugliest parts of ourselves, and to laugh at them, and hopefully defuse them enough to be changed.  A clever joke can make one think more deeply than the best written and persuasive oratory could ever hope to do.  Thank goodness for the comedians.

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

Interviews with one of my idols

Conversations with Isaac Asimov – Carl Freedman Ed. (2005)

            Isaac Asimov is one of my all-time idols.  From his science fiction to his science writing to his many non-fiction books, everything he has written is valuable to me.  He was known as the “Great Explainer” in the decades before Carl Sagan took up that mantle for his ability to digest and then explain the most difficult of scientific subjects.  What many people do not know is that, apart from being one of the most prolific authors ever, he was an amazing conversationalist.  He could expound on nearly any subject with witty, informative conversation.  This book captures many of these instances.  It collects a few dozen interviews with Mr. Asimov from the last 40 years of his life.

            One of the reasons I have such an affinity for Mr. Asimov is that he and I are very similar in many ways.  He was born in another country and came to the USA at a young age, (3 years old, from Russia, whereas I was 7 years old, from Puerto Rico). He first fell in love with reading because of science fiction.  He greedily devoured any book he could find that provided him with information about a topic he found intriguing.  He rarely read the “classics” of literature, preferring information.  He had the ability to recall seemingly every bit of scientific information he absorbed.  He was a lifelong skeptic with little use for spirituality or religion.  He was married twice.  He hated flying, due to an admittedly irrational fear.  (I hate flying because the changes in air pressure causes me to have violent vertigo)  He was a man who stood for the beauty of knowledge and the joy of spreading that knowledge. 

He was also a master of the "side-eye" when you acted the fool.

            Much of this is discussed in the various interviews collected in this volume.  The majority of the interviews cover his personal life and then begin to ask him questions based on his science fiction writing and general science knowledge.  It is great to see him defend the view of rational scientific thought, and its myriad benefits.  He talks about how his writing is his favorite thing in the world, how he spends 7 days a week writing and hates anything interrupting him.  He is asked about his views for humanity’s future, technology’s advancement, and the world of science fiction in general.  It is great to read this stuff, as it feels like Mr. Asimov is directly talking to me.  As my brother has stated, only slightly exaggerating, “All my heroes are dead.”  It is a very lucky thing for me to come across a book like this, as it allows me a peek into the mind of a man who, while he wrote millions of words, rarely spent those words in talking about himself.  I am currently reading “Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible,” and am almost ¾ of the way through the Old Testament.  Isaac Asimov could write about anything that crossed his intellect.  We are all luckier and better for it.

(To read one of Asimov's early classic sci fi stories, Nightfall, an RXTT favorite, click here: https://www.uni.edu/morgans/astro/course/nightfall.pdf )