A Tale of A Tribe: Sandpit.

Hearst shows heart after 71 years, black and dry like a stone.

2012-02-05T08:12:00.000-08:00

Hearst family forgive Orson Welles for Citizen Kane after 71 years

Screening of Welles' masterpiece at former home of William Randolph Hearst will lay to rest long-running feud

Orson Welles' masterpiece Citizen Kane provoked the anger of newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/RKO

When Orson Welles' masterpiece Citizen Kane first hit cinemas in 1941, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was distinctly unimpressed: the similarities between himself and Welles' creation Charles Foster Kane were too strong to be ignored. The powerful press baron went out of his way to derail the movie. Now, more than 70 years later, it seems that the family of the pre-eminent US media impresario of the early part of the last century has finally forgiven Welles after agreeing to a screening of Citizen Kane at the Hearst Castle visitor centre in California.

MORE HERE....

Cutting a Nietzsche

2012-02-05T08:07:00.000-08:00

"Nietzsche’s great champion on this continent was H.L. Mencken, who at the age of 27 wrote the first book on Nietzsche in English. He loved the way his hero “hurled his javelin” at the authority of God and that he “broke from the crowd” of thinkers. After becoming the most famous American intellectual of the 1920s, Mencken admitted that his ideas were based on Nietzsche. “Without him, I’d never have come to them.”
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/01/24/fulford-carving-a-nietzche/

"In 1889, when Friedrich Nietzsche suffered the mental collapse that ended his career, he was virtually unknown. Yet by the time of his death in 1900 at the age of 55, he had become the philosophical celebrity of his age. From Russia to America, admirers echoed his estimation of himself as a titanic figure who could alter the course of history: “I am by far the most terrible human being that has existed so far; this does not preclude the possibility that I shall be the most beneficial.” --http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/books/review/american-nietzsche-by-jennifer-ratner-rosenhagen-book-review.html

Bohm Dome Doodles

2012-02-05T07:30:00.000-08:00

Thoughts on the Universe...
x fly

Ezra Pound's daughter fights to wrest the renegade poet's legacy from fascists

2012-01-21T06:02:00.000-08:00

"He made mistakes and we have to take the good part of him, just as he did with others.--Mary De Rachewiltz

"De Rachewiltz has since fought a lifelong battle to separate Pound the poet from Pound the fascist and antisemite, which is why the emergence of CasaPound – now boasting 5,000 members – is so painful.

She rebuffs the suggestion that CasaPound's lionisation of him is no more than he deserves. "Pound just quoted what Mussolini said," she said. "This organisation is hiding behind Pound's name for intellectual cover," she added. "He made mistakes and we have to take the good part of him, just as he did with others. He fell into certain antisemitic clichés that were rampant in Europe and the US at the time."--http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/14/ezra-pound-daughter-fascism

Ez TSOG YALE and SPIES.

2012-01-14T04:20:00.000-08:00

“The scholar who works for a government intelligence agency ceases to be an independent spirit, a true scholar,” stated a Boston Globe editorial in the mid-1980s.

My Ezra Pound 'Google Alert' just alerted me to an article from the Yaledailynews by Ava Kofman that outlines the history of the CIA's relationships with Academia, and therefore criss-crosses with 'The Tale of the Tribe' material and helps to refresh our minds to Dr. Wilson's brilliant essay 'TSOG: The Thing that ate the Constitution, 2001' and information concerning Ezra Pound, James Jesus Angleton and the impact the Spycraft had on Modernism, poetry and the arts. Wilson writes:

But James J. Angleton was a pathological case of some sort himself; he often hid his middle name because it revealed his half-Hispanic genes. An exceptionally intelligent and sensitive student of modern literature while at Yale, Angleton adored Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, I.A. Richards, e e cummings and other SuperStars of Modernism; he met most of them personally. They collectively influenced Angleton's fascination with multiple perspectives, labyrinthine ambiguity and the eternal uncertainty of all inferences and "interpretations." These modernist tendencies, which also appeared in science and philosophy at the same time, blossomed into obsessions and, perhaps, raging madness when Angleton systematically applied them to the spy-game. After all, modernism really begins with Wilde's "The Reality of Masks" and Yeats's hermetic mystique the world we know emerging from interactions of Mask, Anti-Mask, Self, and Anti-Self: which may or may not fit all of us or all the world but certainly fits the world of spooks and snoops that Angleton created.--http://www.rawilson.com/tsog.html

Ava Kofman writes in ANNONYMOUS ACADEMICS:

"James Jesus Angleton ’41, breeder of rare orchids and disputably a paranoiac, founded and edited the short-lived but reputable literary magazine, Furioso, during his time as an undergraduate at Yale. Beginning a series of enthusiastic correspondences with Ezra Pound after the two met in Italy during the summer of 1938, Angleton published Pound’s poems along with the work of Cummings, MacLeish and Williams in his magazine the next year. But more ink has been spilled describing Angleton’s life than those of his beloved poets. Returning to Washington after World War II, Angleton would go on to help found the Central Intelligence Agency."http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

"Varsity crew coach Skip Waltz recruited for the OSS what he saw as the best of Yale’s white Anglophile protestant males from its population of mostly white Anglo-Saxon protestant males. Following the conclusion of war in 1947, OSS alumnus Walter L. Pforzheimer ’35 contributed to drafting the act that would establish the CIA.

And still today, some recent alumni from both campuses include CIA directors Porter J. Goss ’60, R. James Woolsey Jr. LAW ’68, and George H.W. Bush ’48. Now a visiting lecturer at the Jackson Institute, John Negroponte ’60 served as the first Director of National Intelligence under President George W. Bush ’68. William F. Buckley ’50, founder of the National Review, wrote one of the many aforementioned fictionalized accounts of Angleton’s life, and served a stint in the CIA as well." http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

“Why learn how to write a policy memo on preventing nuclear proliferation if you can’t even convincingly make a case that the human race — much less the United States of America — is a good thing that’s worth protecting,” laments the anonymous source. “Does the U.S. government exist to merely protect us and clothe us and feed us or to foster public and private virtue? These are questions that the Yalies of yesteryear could tackle quite easily and eloquently. Today, almost no one can.” http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

The skills that most Yale majors teach students well — namely, close reading, critical thinking and strong writing — are the same valuable assets that make its graduates good analysts. Or for that matter, good at any job.

“An analyst job is like writing a paper except its called an intelligence report,” said a senior government official, who requested to remain anonymous citing government policy. “But instead of using a book or a person as your evidence, you’re using classified intelligence.” He points to this as to why Yale turns out so many journalists and policy makers as well. The only difference in what those jobs consist of, the senior official argued, is in the subject matter and sourcing of what they’re writing on. http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

"In 2001, following the attacks of September 11, around 750 students expressed an interest in the CIA when they passed through the agency’s career fair booth. For some years thereafter, interest in the agency was at a new high. http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

"With the rise of cyber-espionage, it would seem that the CIA’s interest in Computer Science and Math majors who can write and break code might balloon.
Regardless of their background — whether it be in C++, the classics or both — applicants need to be realists and understand, the senior official warned, that for many it’s a “desk job.”
“Your cover is going to be a dark close-up of the shadow of Nathan Hale’s face,” a senior government official teased, “but the reality is that people [in the CIA] work in cubicles that look like a Proctor and Gamble office — and it’s mostly a bunch of Mormons.” The senior official paused dramatically, letting the reality of his vision of the CIA sink in.http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

Borrowing a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontion, Angleton often described the inner workings of the agency as a “wilderness of mirrors.” Angleton’s means of ordering the world moved along so many deceptions that it ceased to be real. http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

One that could recast, for better or worse, the arbitrary boundaries drawn between literature and the classroom, reality and a dream, poetry and analysis. Our fascination with the CIA, with its mythical figures and failures, as a national legend — as a genre of fiction — may be of just as much interest for learning about the intuitions of the modern mind — as it is for learning about the institution itself. http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

The spy world then, turns accident into meaning and so frees us to imagine and presume in broad leaps and strokes.
“For in [the spy] profession there is no such thing as coincidence,” writes Le Carre in the film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
And consider an illustration of these two approaches to thinking: Most of the American public would prefer to watch say, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a fictionalized account of the spy world, than read the continually growing number of now declassified documents made readily available, or, for that matter, the adapted book. http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

Grand Deft Mamalujo and Joycean computer games 2012

2012-01-14T03:20:00.000-08:00

My google alert just alerted me to a New Yorker artcle by Mark O'Connell called 'has James Joyce been set free?' which overviews the recent changes and probable ramifications of the copyright expiring on some-but-not-all of his work.

Towards the end of the article Mark writes something very interesting to me, today, whereby he describes how his off-handed joke to a friend about a James Joyce first-person-shooter game, gestates into pipe-dreams about a Ulysses inspired game. A little bit like Grand Theft Auto, but set in a Joycean world.

Yes, yes, I say YES. This 'Joycean computer game world' might be the best idea, next to my own, of course, that I have heard this year so far...once again...Joycean computer games, or to explain a bit more precisely: the interactive visual translation of his languaging engine could lead us into a literary inspired exploration of great literature, a new way of reading, a whole new style, and have it begin with the great master and grand architect James Joyce.--Steve.

"Sean Latham agrees that there will now be somewhat less quality control on Joyce publications, but sees it as not such a terrible development, pointing out that no one is much concerned about there being too many editions of Dickens or Shakespeare. As with most advocates of Joyce’s work, he thinks anything that might bring it to a wider readership should be welcomed. When I made a joke about the possibility of a first-person-shooter video game of “Finnegans Wake” hitting the stores in 2012, he mentioned that he himself has had pipe dreams about a “Ulysses” game. “I have an undergraduate student,” he said, “and we fantasize about exactly how such a thing might be devised. I know there is a Jane Austen video game being designed, so a ‘Ulysses’ video game can’t be far behind.” If any game developers happen to be reading this, I hope they take note. A simulated ramble around Edwardian Dublin—a sort of Grand Theft Auto without the theft or the autos—could make for a powerfully immersive gaming experience. It would almost be worth doing just to see how Stephen Joyce might react.-- Mark O'Connell

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/01/james-joyce-public-domain.html#ixzz1jQf2CCtE

."...and their farthing dip and read a letter or two every night before going to sleep in the twilight, a capitaletter for further auspices on their old one page codex book of old year's eve 1132, M.M.L.J. old style, their Senchus Mor by Mrs Shemans, final buff lunch edition, and Lally through their gangrene spentacles and all the good they did in their time for Roe and O'Mulconry a Conry ap Mul or Lap ap Morion and Buffler ap Matty Mac Gregory for Marcus on Podex by Daddy de Wyer, old bagabroth, and one by one and sing a mamalujo.--James Joyce, the Mamalujo vignette, taken from an early draft of Finnegans Wake.

Marshall McLuhan at John Hopkins University Part 3/5

2012-01-13T05:34:00.000-08:00

CYBERNETICS: WEINER AND VON NEUMANN WIKI

2012-01-08T12:27:00.000-08:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics

Cybernetics as a discipline was firmly established by Wiener, McCulloch and others, such as W. Ross Ashby and W. Grey Walter. Walter was one of the first to build autonomous robots as an aid to the study of animal behaviour. Together with the US and UK, an important geographical locus of early cybernetics was France.

In the spring of 1947, Wiener was invited to a congress on harmonic analysis, held in Nancy, France. The event was organized by the Bourbaki, a French scientific society, and mathematician Szolem Mandelbrojt (1899–1983), uncle of the world-famous mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot.

John von Neumann

During this stay in France, Wiener received the offer to write a manuscript on the unifying character of this part of applied mathematics, which is found in the study of Brownian motion and in telecommunication engineering. The following summer, back in the United States, Wiener decided to introduce the neologism cybernetics into his scientific theory. The name cybernetics was coined to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms" and was popularized through his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (Hermann & Cie, Paris, 1948). In the UK this became the focus for the Ratio Club.

In the early 1940s John von Neumann, although better known for his work in mathematics and computer science, did contribute a unique and unusual addition to the world of cybernetics: Von Neumann cellular automata, and their logical follow up the Von Neumann Universal Constructor. The result of these deceptively simple thought-experiments was the concept of self replication which cybernetics adopted as a core concept. The concept that the same properties of genetic reproduction applied to social memes, living cells, and even computer viruses is further proof of the somewhat surprising universality of cybernetic study.

Wiener popularized the social implications of cybernetics, drawing analogies between automatic systems (such as a regulated steam engine) and human institutions in his best-selling The Human Use of Human Beings : Cybernetics and Society (Houghton-Mifflin, 1950).

While not the only instance of a research organization focused on cybernetics, the Biological Computer Lab at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, under the direction of Heinz von Foerster, was a major center of cybernetic research for almost 20 years, beginning in 1958.

RAW: GENERAL SEMANTICS AT WIKIPEDIA

2012-01-08T11:58:00.000-08:00

Connections to other disciplines

General semantics has important links with analytic philosophy and the philosophy of science; it could be characterized without too much distortion as applied analytic philosophy. The influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, and of early operationalists and pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce, is particularly clear in the foundational ideas of general semantics. Korzybski himself acknowledged many of these influences.

The concept of "silence on the objective level" attributed to Korzybski and his insistence on consciousness of abstracting are parallel to some central ideas in Zen Buddhism. Korzybski is not recorded to have acknowledged any influence from this quarter, but he formulated general semantics during the same years that the first popularizations of Zen were becoming part of the intellectual currency of educated speakers of English. On the other hand, later Zen-popularizer Alan Watts was influenced by ideas from general semantics.

L. Ron Hubbard is widely believed to have used the theory in his creation of Dianetics and later to have incorporated it into Scientology, and acknowledges this in several texts; the first of these two movements in turn introduced General Semantics to a wider audience in the early 1950s, including popular science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt, personal growth theorist Harvey Jackins and his movement Re-evaluation Counseling and movements like Gestalt therapy. The founders of these movements did not themselves credit Korzybski for their ideas.

Albert Ellis (1913-2007), who developed Rational emotive behavior therapy, acknowledged influence from general semantics and delivered the Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture in 1991. The Bruges (Belgium) center for Solution Focused Therapy operates under the name Korzybski Instituut Training and Research Center.^[42]
During the 1940s and 1950s, general semantics entered the idiom of science fiction, most notably through the works of A. E. van Vogt, The World of Null-A and its sequels, and Robert A. Heinlein, Gulf. The ideas of general semantics became a sufficiently important part of the shared intellectual toolkit of genre science fiction to merit parody by Damon Knight and others; they have since shown a tendency to reappear (often without attribution) in the work of more recent writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Suzette Haden Elgin and Robert Anton Wilson. In 2008, John Wright extended van Vogt's Null-A series with Null-A Continuum.

Neil Postman, founder of New York University's media ecology program in 1971, edited ETC.: A Review of General Semantics from 1976 to 1986. Postman's student Lance Strate, a co-founder of the Media Ecology Association,^[43] served as executive director of the Institute of General Semantics from 2007 to 2010.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics#Connections_to_other_disciplines

Joyce Pound Shaw and Ulysses in Porno-mags

2012-01-06T14:54:00.000-08:00

SNIPPET FROM: An end to bad heir days: The posthumous power of the literary estate
By Gordon Bowker

The question of rights in Joyce's work was a fraught one even during his lifetime. Fearing prosecution, no one would publish Ulysses complete and unabridged until Sylvia Beach, the American bookseller in Paris, bravely did so in 1922. But Joyce's notoriety attracted pirates , and at one time he was unprotected by good contracts or good law. In November 1925, he found that without his permission Ulysses was being published serially in the magazine Two Worlds by Samuel Roth, the New York pornographer. His protests went unheeded. Roth simply sent a cheque for $1000 which Joyce refused to cash.

Among his literary friends and supporters, only Ezra Pound and Bernard Shaw were unsympathetic. Pound said that Joyce had only himself to blame for not registering his copyright in America. He advised him "to write letters to the press denouncing Roth", or alternatively, "organise a gang of gunmen to scare [him] out of his pants". But Roth, he warned, was a ruthless capitalist driven by avarice, not easily stopped.

Joyce was incensed, and with the aid of friends composed a letter of protest which was circulated among writers, attacking unjust American copyright law. Pound refused to sign, as did Shaw, who suspected a Joycean stunt.

READ ON HERE

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/an-end-to-bad-heir-days-the-posthumous-power-of-the-literary-estate-6285277.html

Semanto-phonetic writing systems

2012-01-05T13:25:00.000-08:00

Semanto-phonetic writing systems
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/semanto-phonetic.php

The symbols used in these semanto-phonetic writing systems often represent both sound and meaning. As a result, these scripts generally include a large number of symbols: anything from several hundred to tens of thousands. In fact there is no theoretical upper limit to the number of symbols in some scripts, such as Chinese. These scripts could also be called logophonetic, morphophonemic, logographic or logosyllabic.
Semanto-phonetic writing systems may include the following types of symbol:

Pictograms and logograms

Pictograms or pictographs resemble the things they represent. Logograms are symbols that represent parts of words or whole words. The image on the right shows some examples of pictograms from the Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic and Chinese scripts. The Chinese characters used to look like the things they stand for, but have become increasingly stylized over the years.

Ideograms

Ideograms or ideographs are symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas. The image below shows a number of ideographic Chinese characters.

Compound characters

The majority of characters in the Chinese script are semanto-phonetic compounds: they include a semantic element, which represents or hints at their meaning, and a phonetic element, which shows or hints at their pronunciation. Below are a few such compound characters which all share a semantic element meaning 'horse'.

Sometimes symbols are used for their phonetic value alone, without regard for their meaning, for example when transliterating foreign names and loan words.

Semanto-phonetic writing systems currently in use

Chinese (Zhōngwén)

Japanese (Nihongo)

Semanto-phonetic writing systems used mainly for decorative, ceremonial or religious purposes

Naxi

Semanto-phonetic writing systems that are no longer used

Akkadian (Cuneiform)	Ancient Egyptian Demotic	Ancient Egyptian Hieratic
Ancient Egyptian Hieroglypic	Vietnamese (Chữ-nôm)	Jurchen
Khitan	Linear B	Mayan
Sumerian (Cuneiform)	Tangut (Xīxìa/Hsi-hsia)

Please note

transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are used extensively throughout this website. The IPA transcriptions are the letters and other symbols which appear in square bracketts, like this [b], [p]. etc.
You can learn which sounds are represented by these letters and symbols at:
http://www.unil.ch/ling/page30184.html
http://www.unil.ch/ling/page12580.html (en français)

Other types of script

Abjads, Alphabets, Syllabic alphabets, Syllabaries, Semanto-phonetic writing systems, Undeciphered scripts, Alternative writing systems, Your con-scripts, A-Z index, Direction index, Languages by writing system, Language index

The Jumping Jesus Singularity

2011-12-29T02:32:00.001-08:00

Thanks to Bobby Campbell for bringing this into my head. RAW on his jumping Jesus Hypothesis with some great visual accompanyment.

How drugs helped invent the Internet

2011-12-29T02:16:00.000-08:00

Jason Silva seems to me to be a smart motherfucker who's touching on a large chunk of 'the tale of the tribe' and a large part of RAW's interests: linguistics, life extension, computers and neural-networks, philosophy and most importantly, i think, Techno-Optimism, as we enter 2012.
Fresh!
--Steve fly.

"The phrase that leaped to mind when I first saw Jason was ‘existential jazz’; like a trumpet player or modern-day digital Mingus, he jams, riffs and rhapsodizes through a tumbling thicket of ideas with such a sharp and vital alacrity that it can take the breath away. He’s a modern performance philosopher, reviving the vibe of Tim Leary and Buckminster Fuller and revivifying the dialogue that they started decades ago.--http://thisisjasonsilva.com/reviews/

McLuhan letter to Ezra Pound Dec.21st 1948

2011-12-20T15:59:00.000-08:00

ON THE EZRA POUND/MARSHALL MCLUHAN CORRESPONDENCEby EDWIN J. BARTON

http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss1/1_1art11.htm

"The only problem with this mode of thinking andpresentation, as McLuhan was to discover, lay in the resistancewith which it was met, and continues to be met, by Western intellectuals.For, as McLuhan put it in a letter written in 1948, this way ofwriting and thinking is inaccessible to those whose mentalityis "incorruptibly dialectical."

The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogramprinciple as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18thcentury. The 18th century chucked out the principle of metaphorand analogy-the basic fact that as A is to B so C is to D. AB: CD. It can see AB relations. But all relations in four termsare still verboten. This amounts to a deep occultation of allhuman thought for the U.S.A. (21 December 1948)

It was precisely this structure and action of the metaphoricalanalogy, of course, that enabled McLuhan and his son Eric, manyyears later, to arrive at tetradic model of laws with which tostudy media "scientifically."--EDWIN J. BARTON.

On the run up to the year 2012 (and The tale of the tribe)

2011-11-18T08:38:00.001-08:00

On the run up to the year 2012. by Steven 'Fly Agaric 23' Pratt.

While the domesticated primates enter the Gregorian year 2012, I would like to share some of my thoughts on interpreting the ‘2012’ phenomena , and with a focus upon Bloomsday (16th June, the single day of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses) opposed to Doomsday (the end of humanity and planet earth as we know it). Most but not all of my observations today are highly influenced by the work of Mark Pesce and his conception of the next billion seconds (roughly a giga-second or 30 years) spanning from 1995-2025. Mark’s species of ‘2012’ phenomena, if you like, does not involve any galactic alignments or geological earth shifts, or the return of the space gods it simply involves the facts surrounding humanities collective decent into novelty (connectivity) and proposes answers to the question ‘what happens after we’re all connected?’ (please forgive any miss-interpretations and blunders I may have made in recycling some of Mark’s innovative study).

Well I interpret what happens after we’re all connected based in part on Mark’s scholarly answers, to follow something along the lines of…your connectivity and your network defines you, and if you are not sharing or prepared to be shared then you may be made obsolete by some superior shared intelligence, wither, and die off quickly.

With a ‘biological meaning’ concerning the human brain body nervous system: a human health-knowledge network of shared wisdom in real space-time, to the more abstract ‘software meaning’ concerning globalised light-speed computer networks and the resulting tendency for mash-upable, sharable, and free media to flourish, Mark approaches an almost Hermetic principle for the digital age echoing that which is as above, as that which is below. To remove the up/down two valued duality it might make sense to replace up and down with Software and Hardware, to produce that which is software, as that which is hardware, somewhat exstinguishing the distinction between the two by showing their unity and ‘mash-upable-ness’, I am here reminded of Terence Mckenna’s clever inverse of the old saying ‘The flesh made word’ into ‘The word made flesh’, in describing the technological singularity possibly taking place during 2012 and beyond.

Today the idea of the ‘word made flesh’ could be ascribed to transhumanism and the impact that ‘information processing or information theory’ reflect on the human genome, neuro-psychology and thousands of other fields that are certainly radically and utterly transformed by the new ‘digital word’ or program made flesh. In this model the network provides the essential bridge between worlds, the vital connection between the two or more opposing forces, resolving them to the satisfaction of the individual, as defined by the group or connected network.

I see a similar thread of openness and sharability and mash-up-able-ness in the methods and innovations developed by those critters whom Dr. Robert Anton Wilson listed as inspirations and those he recommended attentive study of, in particular the heretics listed in his ‘tale of the tribe’ which consists of approximately Twelve historical geniuses who have had a long lasting positive impact on humanity, and on Bob; and who may still yet emerge like Dracula from the grave to reposes culture in 2012? At least I get excited the more I look into these characters and into Bob’s writings upon them and why I think they are important for all around the world humanity in 2012.

If this be a conspiracy theory so mote it be. Just consider the efforts to supress and keep out of print so many of the texts and source works cited before the age of bit torrent and pirate bay. The burning of Joyce’s books, and burning of Giordano’s body, the imprisonment of Ezra Pound, the ‘top secret privacy’ assigned to some of Shannon and Weiner’s early papers, the general harassment of Giambattista Vico, Freiderich Nietzche, and Orson Welles, and the ‘crazy stick’ poked at Marshal McLuahan, Joyce, Pound and even ‘Wilson’ himself, that damned old crank’ as he often referred to himself in that somewhat Irish humour of self-mockery. Praise Bob!

So the conspiracy, if there must be ONE in this article takes into account that the most suppressive and violent censors throughout history, generally authoritarian systems of Church and State. (remember that the first paragraph of Joyce’s Ulysses starts with the word ‘Stately’ and ends with ‘crossed’ to symbolize State and Church crossed, as Bob liked to point out to his readers.) What we see in the current 2011, OCCUPY (world around peaceful revolution of economic intelligence and shared wisdom) echoes through Wilson’s works in the form of writings on Benjamin Tucker, Silvio Gessell, Lysander Spooner, Buckminster Fuller, Marx (and the brothers Marx) and Ezra Pound. Therefore the study of ‘the tale of the tribe’ can give great footholds and anchors for the Occupy movement to expand and feed on nutritious like-minded research into the ‘open source consciousness’ all-around-the-world movement.

Perhaps if the ‘decentralized cosmology’ of Giordano Bruno were applied to the Mayan cosmology and 2012 calendar conundrum we might begin to see that we are each to our own calendar?, above as so below, and that ‘every man and every women is a star. Or, that in a decentralized cosmology with no absolute centre anywhere at all at all, it follows that the self-centred idea of a single paradigm shift on a single day, on a single typical G-star orbiting the sun in a galaxy among hundreds of Billions seems just slightly, to repeat the phrase, self-centred. So maybe the galactic alignment is up to where you place yourself and the geological shifts are within your body, the super cosmic overmind inside your head? Let’s no forget however that alongside his ‘decentralized Universe’ Giordano Bruno accomplished great innovations in Kabbalistic science experiments, magical programing languages and magical devices (memory wheels, alphabet wheels, symbol systems) all of which can greatly improve the art of protest and IMPACT at any Occupy events.

McLuhan, like Fuller and like Pound might have us question ‘what is money and how is it?’ How did it get that way, and a deeper somewhat metaphysical look into the chain of values that lead to money, the relationship between credit and money etc., and right now…“No people ignorant of the nature of money can now maintain its rights, let alone attaining or holding to sovereignty. We have in our time two parties: the infamous, which tries to sabotage economic knowledge; the intelligent, which demands full light on the issue of coin, paper means of immediate exchange, and of credit. Credit, from this angle, becomes the privilege of delaying compensation.”—Ezra Pound, ARABIA DESERTA, Guide to Kulchur, pg. 271.

I have found that like Wilson’s writing on so many varied subjects, McLuhan, Fuller and Pound can radically alter your perception of ‘what is money’ by raising varied and good questions seemingly ‘ignored by the mainstream economists and journalists’ up until only quite recently 2009. Wilson would home in on these grey areas of the counter culture, like alternative economics and alternative systems of distribution, chains of value, intelligence and transparency and weave them into both his fiction (maybe the most scientific of science fiction writers) and in particular into his non-fiction. Hunt em’ down and source out the sources, a treasure trove of workable methods and principles, not least, for example in Bucky’s ‘synergetics’ ‘dymaxion geometry’ and ‘Tesegrity geometry’ lie scattered among Lovecraft’s letters, Einstein’s dreams and Goofy’s nighmares to interpret how you will. READ HIM!

“It is action at a distance, both in space and in time. In a highly literate fragmented society, “Time is money,” and money is the store of other people’s time and effort.”—Marshal McLuhan, Money: The poor man’s credit card, Understanding Media, pg. 147.

To return to Mark Pesce and hypereconomics, we can now see the real impact of technology on peoples in real time, making Bucky’s ephemeralization and McLuhan’s Global Village apparent facts of the process of living on earth in 2011.

Now we have the social networks to use as a parallel to the Global Village imagined out of thin air by McLuhan 50 years or so ago, and we have nano-technology and invisible light-speed information networks crossing the entire planet, imagined by Bucky to bring about an individual revolution of intelligence, as in the open source movement, sharing the tools and methods to then use them to build more tools and more sharable methods (maps, instructions, languages, blueprints).

McLuahn and Bucky were right on many observations and predictions about the future of technology and how we be living today socially, psychologically, technologically, but Mark Pesce presents detailed new books and fresh video lectures taking these ideas, by way of working examples from the real world, into 2012 and beyond, combining the knowledge and confidence to make it real as Bob made it real in his own literary synthesis, and helped define WHY we should also go back and read the sources and roots of these innovations in sharing and ‘open source consciousness’.

Bob specialized in this field and has a lifetime spent digging up and translating for those that follow the obscure bridges and links between multiple revolutionary innovations and their place in popular culture, Bob’s open source interests ranged from traditional computer software, political science and currency’s to open source Theology, Magick and Neuro-linguistic programing and open source psychology, and dipping beyond into open source nanotechnology and open source genetic engineering I imagine. Perhaps even contemplating open source atomic reactors for kicks?

“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. –Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminating Discord Interview, 1976.

And remember that if your research into the tale of the tribe starts to get a little stale and you feel lost in Korzybski’s giant tome or Joyce's Wake, or staring at Shannon’s equations in a daze don’t be afraid to grab some stickers, a pen or some paint and go out into the wilderness and connect with your environment in a way that cannot be mistaken as vandalism but viewed as Art, funny, subtle, well placed and meaningful, and from the right place. Start a study group to begin looking into some of these characters and how they resonate with our current affairs on planet earth, make music, write, exorcise, smile, hug, love and live fully awake in 2011 and 2012. Get yourself connected. The writings on the wall, gotta’ get yourself connected, stumble you might fall.”

--Steven 'Fly Agaric 23' Pratt.

These fought in any case" by Ezra Pound

2011-11-13T02:23:00.001-08:00

"These Fought in Any Case"
by Ezra Pound

These fought in any case,
and some believing
pro domo, in any case .....

Died some, pro patria*,
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

*The famous line from one of Horace's "Odes":
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori ("Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country.")

http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/fight/fight.html

Twenty RAW quotes for 2011

2011-11-08T03:47:00.000-08:00

ALL QUOTES FROM DR. ROBERT ANTON WILSON.

DO NOT ADJUST YOUR MIND
IT IS REALITY THAT IS MALFUNCTIONING—TSOG

Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to preexisting theories.They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece, because masterpiecesmake their own rules.—Illuminati Papers, pg. 12.

Ez, McLuhan and associates reprinted Fenollosa's "The Chinese WrittenCharacter as a Medium for Poetry " As part of their Square Dollar Series.It Anticipates some formulations of General Semantics and NLP.--Recorsi

Little Tony was sitting on a park bench munching on one candy bar afteranother.
After the 6th candy bar, a man on the bench across from him said,
"Son, you know eating all that candy isn't good for you. It will give
you acne, rot your teeth, and make you fat.”
Little Tony replied, "My grandfather lived to be 107 years old."
The man asked, "Did your grandfather eat 6 candy bars at a time?"
Little Tony answered, "No, he minded his own fucking business.--Guns andDope Party.

Just as a hologram is so structured that each part contains the whole,Finnegans Wake is structured in puns and synchronicities that"contain" and reflect each other, creating the closest approximationof an infinite regress ever achieved in any art-form.--Coincidance.

Green plants, alive, like
the stone Buddha — rock solid –
— as twilight descends.

In 2012, if the McKenna scenario is right, comes Omega point.--CosmicTrigger, pg. 223.

What underlies the accelerations noted by Henry Adams and Korzybski isnowadays known as the selection of negentropy out of stochastic processes. Ourunderstanding of this is chiefly due to almost-simultaneous discoveries(1946-48) by quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger, mathematician Norbert Weinerand an electronics-communication expert at Bell Laboratories, Claude Shannon.--Prometheus Rising, page 110.

Like Joyce, Vico believed that poetry arose out of creative etymology("incorrect etymology," in Academese). Like Joyce--and also Whorf andKorzybski--Vico believed a radical change in language could alter our perceivedreality tunnels.--Coincidance, Pg. 22.

I distinguish between information—all that humans can check byexperience—as distinct from noise—those “things” (or non-things, or nothings)that thye can only make noises or chatter about.—Another faith-basedorganization, TSOG, pg 89.

The two philosophers most frequently mentioned in the Wake, Nicholas ofCusa and Bruno of Nola, taught a dialectic of resolution of opposites. JosephNeedham in his monumental Science and Civilization in China, repeatedlymentions both Bruno and Nicholas as the only two Occidental philosophers beforeLiebnitz to have a basically Taoist outlook.--Joyce and Daoism.

Conspiracy is just another name for coalition.--The Historical Illuminatus.

New bud on the vine:
But three thousand miles due East
Wall Street still smolders--Haiku

R. Buckminster Fuller, in his Synergetic-Energetic Geometry, which he claims isthe "co-ordinate system of the Universe," reduces all phenomena togeometric-energetic constructs based on the tetrahedron (4-sided), the octettruss (8-sided) and the coupler (8-faceted with 24 phases). Fuller arguesspecifically that the 8-face, 24-phase coupler underlies the 8-fold division ofthe chemical elements on the Mendeleyev Periodic Table. --Octave of Energy,Cosmic Trigger.

Every government that employs secret-police agencies must grow moreinsecure, not more secure, as the strength, versatility and power of the secretpolice grows.—Celine’s Laws, Illuminati Papers.

Two of the giants of quantum math, Schrödinger and Dirac, both spent time atthe Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin. Schrödinger, in fact, wrote hismost important nonmathemetical book there -- What Is Life? [1948], in which hedefined life as a function of negative entropy. This thought seemed so radicaland far-out that nobody began to grasp it until Wiener and Shannon showed thatinformation also behaves like negative entropy. Information = that part of a messageyou didn't expect; the unpredictable part.--Celtic Roots of Quantum Theory(essay)

Like marijuana, a Wellsian long shot creates an information overload andprovokes you to enlarge your reality-tunnel to accommodate it.—An InformationRich environment, Cosmic Trigger III. Pg. 88

I think it’s time to abolish politicians entirely and let everybodyparticipate in self-government via internet. We needed ‘representatives’ in the18th century because we couldn’t all go to Washington. Meanwhile,times changed and our ‘representatives’ have sold us out to the corporations,as we in the majority party all agree, whatever our differences in othermatters. And we don’t need ‘representatives’ anymore; we have the Nettechnology to represent ourselves.—TSOG. Pg 162

In the present context, Korzybski's mathematized language structures, likethe Fenollosa/Pound emphasis on Chinese ideogram helps us perceive/conceiveInternet in alternative ways, not possible for those restricted toIndo-European semantic structures.--Recorsi.

Sweet! Sweet!" sings a bird--
Old Ez in Virginia
Heard one cry "Tulip!--Haiku

'Marshall McLuhan strikes back' and 'the medium is the message'

2011-11-03T05:33:00.000-07:00

More Than Ever, the Medium Is the Message: How You Can Celebrate Marshall McLuhan's 100th

"This is the 100th anniversary of McLuhan's birth, and there's been a year-long global celebration of the man -- and his messages. All of this merry-making culminates in a conference and concert in Toronto November 7 - 10th."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julia-moulden/marshall-mcluhan_b_1065015.html

Marshall McLuhan strikes back

Published On Thu Oct 20 2011

Philip Marchand, author of Marshall McLuhan: the medium and the messenger

By Greg Quill Entertainment Reporter

ENTERTAINMENT COLUMNIST

Of the myriad arcane factoids, theories, impressions and interpretations likely to be disclosed during the course of the International Festival of Authors’ three major McLuhan 100 readings and dissertations over the next week, one is of exceptional interest: the Toronto-based communications guru, who was able to see a bigger picture than other contemporaries in his field, had a physiological advantage over most other mammals — a unique vascular pattern in his left cerebral cortex seen only in cats.

“Actually, he used to say it was unique to tigers,” says McLuhan biographer and former Star books columnist, Philip Marchand, whose Marshall McLuhan: the medium and the messenger (1998), is considered one of the most compelling portraits of the complex and often incomprehensible academic and theorist, who is said to have pre-imagined the Internet, and laid out such forward thinking notions as “the medium is the message” and “the global village.”
“It was the result of brain surgery in 1967 to remove a benign tumor,” says Marchand, who began his biography after being appointed to the task of cataloguing McLuhan’s papers for the national archive. McLuhan died in 1980 from the effects of a stroke.

“He feared a blockage of blood vessels would necessitate another operation, but rather miraculously, new vascular systems developed that were apparently uncharacteristic in human anatomy.”

What effect this anomaly had on McLuhan’s legacy is anyone’s guess, though some of his peers subsequently noted that the operation that saved his life cost him his genius, and that his work in later years never matched the promise in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in the early 1960s.

McLuhan might have fallen out of favour at the time of his death — “he was seen as a bit of a charlatan, because he preferred talking to writing and publishing, and used language and phrases that other academics considered dense and impenetrable,” Marchand says — but he’s back with a vengeance now, as one by one, his media prophesies become not just the new reality of communications-driven world, but a way of life.

The International Festival of Author’s McLuhan 100 events, which gets underway Friday night at the Fleck Dance Theatre with an appearance by New York University professor and renowned social and technological networks consultant Clay Shirky, aren’t just manifestations of Toronto’s official year-long focus on the centenary of one of the city’s favourite sons, an international star, says festival director Geoffrey Taylor.

“We were approached a year ago by the city to find a way of including McLuhan in the festival, which is, for the most part, a celebration of the written word and of new works of fiction.
“But it’s also a festival about ideas and communication, so it was an easy fit, particularly since McLuhan is being embraced by a new generation of writers.”

On Friday night Shirky will read from his latest book, Cognitive Surplus, and answer questions from Toronto broadcaster and graduate of the U of T’s McLuhan Program, Jesse Hirsh.
Saturday afternoon, at Studio Theatre, Brooke Gladstone, co-host and managing editor of U.S. National Public Radio’s news magazine On the Media, will present The Influencing Machine, a graphic novel on the complexities of the modern media, with illustrations by Josh Neufeld.

And Wednesday at Studio Theatre, Canadian novelist, essayist and filmmaker Douglas Coupland discusses his latest book, Marshall McLuhan, part of Penguin Group’s Extraordinary Canadians series.

The Generation X author will be interviewed by Nora Young, host and creator of CBC Radio’s Spark, which examines technology and culture.

McLuhan, says Taylor, is better appreciated in other parts of the world than in his homeland, “and generally underrated everywhere.

“But writers are having to deal with communications in so many different ways now … and McLuhan seems more relevant than ever.”

In a recent essay in the U.K. Guardian, Coupland, currently on tour in a remote region of China and outside the range of the Internet and email, outlined the origins of his fascination with McLuhan’s work, and the subject of his new book:

“To be fair, McLuhan was about more than ‘the medium is the message’, but that remains a fabulous reduction. McLuhan was an information canary, warning us that there were new media coming down the line, and it was the effects of these new media on the mind that he wondered about so extravagantly — the message seemed to be very dark, indeed.

“In his poetic and elliptical ways, McLuhan foresaw a fluid melting world of texting, email, YouTube, Google, smart phones and reality TV,” Coupland writes.

“Most of the content of any of these media is pure crap. But what's spooking us all is the inevitable message of these new media: what will be the psychic fallout of these technologies on our inner lives?

“As with TV in the 1950s, don't be fooled by the content of texts or blogging or online shopping. Look at what these media are doing to our souls. That's what McLuhan did.”

Marchand isn’t so sure either that McLuhan would have liked living in the wired world he foresaw as the inevitable confluence of broadcasting technology and the demands of the age of information.

“For one thing, he loved books, and worked in a book-lined office. He devoured non-fiction by reading every second page, and never missed a thing. I don’t think he’d have enjoyed reading e-books.

“He died before personal computers were a reality, but I think he’d have loved the Internet’s immediacy, and would have had no difficulty understanding its surrounding effect, or that it seems more real than the natural world,” Marchand adds.

“But keyboards and texting, the reliance on literate skills in this new environment — I’m not sure what he’d have made of that.”

BOOKS BY MARSHALL MCLUHAN:

The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man 1951
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man 1962
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 1964
Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations 1967
Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects 1967
War and Peace in the Global Village with Quentin Fiore 1968
Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and in Painting with Harley Parker 1968
Counterblast with Harley Parker 1969
From Cliche to Archetype with Wilfred Watson 1970
Culture is Our Business 1970
Take Today: The Executive as Drop-out 1972
City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media with Kathryn Hutchon and Eric McLuhan 1977
Posthumous books:
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan 1988
The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century with Bruce R. Powers 1989

Some Joyce/Pound 'News' items...

2011-11-03T05:25:00.000-07:00

The Politics of Modernist Poetics: Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell and Imagism:

Imagism was the poetry of directness and distillation championed by Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell in the first years of the 20th century, reacting against the flowery verse of late Romanticism and urging poets to look to earlier models—like Sappho in ancient Greece and Li Po in 8th century China—to create a poetry of precise and powerful images, without any superfluous words or ornaments.

http://poetry.about.com/b/2011/10/19/the-politics-of-modernist-poetics-ezra-pound-amy-lowell-and-imagism.htm

Great literature will live on with or without a prize

With readability the watchword for the Man Booker prize, it's unlikely any of the literary greats would even get on to the shortlist

Editorial
The Observer, Sunday 16 October 2011

Would James Joyce have ever made the Man Booker shortlist? Not, you guess, if the current crop of judges had anything to do with it. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man might have squeaked on, but Ulysses? Not a chance. "Readability" is the watchword of this year's panel, apparently, led by the former spy mistress, Dame Stella Rimington. Fellow judge and ex-MP Chris Mullin likes something with a "bit of zip".
Given that the Booker is at heart a speed-reading contest for judges – 100-odd novels to read in a couple of months – it is not surprising that those poor unfortunates faced with the task favour books that can be tackled in a few swift hours. Eighty books in and counting, who would want to be confronted with Finnegans Wake?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/16/observer-editorial-man-booker-prize?newsfeed=true

"Poetic possibilities

Review by MARTIN SPICE

Poet/editor Ezra Pound’s contribution to what we now know as The Waste Land was profound and is well documented. Many years ago, British publishers Faber & Faber released a facsimile transcript showing his comments and crossings out and he is frequently referred to, rightly or wrongly, as the architect of the poem. Those amendments and alterations are included in the app and can be seen alongside the final version of the poem. There are hours of interest here in examining just what Pound left in and took out.

http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2011/7/5/lifebookshelf/9009337&sec=lifebookshelf

Mad about the girl: Tate Liverpool's Alice in Wonderland show

Alice Liddell inspired Lewis Carroll, whose books inspired a thousand art works. But are they any good? Adrian Searle heads down the rabbit hole at Tate Liverpool's new show

- Adrian Searle
- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 November 2011 21.31 GMT
- Article history

The real Alice … Alice Pleasance Liddell taken by Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery London

Lewis Carroll, or rather the fictive world of Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, is firmly embedded in our culture. I am surprised no one has made a religion out of Alice. Perhaps they have.

She is also very much at large in Tate Liverpool. Here she is, here she isn't: in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and in Jorge Luis Borges; in Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, and in the surrealist works of Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. Alice captivated Virginia Woolf and Walt Disney, inspired Robert Smithson, Sigmar Polke and a host of better and worse visual artists. Characters from the Alice books, or rather their putative ancestors, can be found, according to Alberto Manguel (writing in a brilliant, short catalogue essay), in Hamlet and Don Quixote, in Kafka, Homer and the Bible. The influence of Carroll's creation can be found in sci-fi, detective fiction and philosophy, in pre-Raphaelite painting and in hard-arsed conceptualism. You can't shake Alice off.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/nov/02/alice-wonderland-tate-liverpool-review?newsfeed=true

Johnny Depp is reading a bit of 'Finnegans Wake' so it goes...
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/10/14/looking-for-a-guy-for-your-book-club-may-we-recommend-johnny-depp/?mod=google_news_blog

On the many worlds interpretation.

2011-08-12T14:02:00.000-07:00

on reading Finnegans Wake

2011-07-30T04:10:00.000-07:00

From the Guardian....

"
I've finally got round to Finnegans Wake. Here's how you read Finnegans Wake: you get a good guide book. You don't expect to read it like an ordinary novel any more than you would complain that Picasso's Weeping Woman hasn't got her face on right. You take it slow, keep a sense of fun and don't care about not understanding everything. Read aloud. Listen to its rhythms because it's music as well as prose. Linger over sentences that are like holograms. Find yourself mentally using Wake words such as "teetotalitarianism" and "chaosmos". Like Shakespeare and the Bible, the Wake will begin to throw up the right words for everything. At last something exquisite and strange begins to happen. You feel you've wandered into the collective unconscious. Chiming themes emerge, running through all history and experience, and underneath it all, a family lives out a small tragicomic drama that is the same human drama that has been acted and re-enacted since time began.

The Wake invokes death and the dying of the light with some of the most sublime poetry in the English language. It is almost unbelievable, a madly audacious and impossible work, and I can understand why some people hate it. But for me it's like falling in love with reading all over again.

Carol Birch will be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Wednesday 24 August.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/29/james-joyce-my-hero-carol-birch

RAW and PHYSICS CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH GROUP (RAW Illumination)

2011-06-30T06:22:00.000-07:00

From http://www.rawillumination.net/

Michael Johnson annotates the new book

[If you missed it, Michael Johnson posted a long comment to Sunday's blog post about How the Hippies Saved Physics, which is literally all about the offbeat physicists in the Bay Area who greatly influenced RAW's thinking. Michael's comment is a useful annotation to the must-read book of the summer, so I am reposting it here everyone will see it -- Tom]

The Physics-Consciousness Research Group. See:

Illuminati Papers: 32 (diagram of "context-dependent language model of Nick Herbert); 56 ( Sarfatti on ETI contactees); pp.94-103

Leary's Info-Psychology: 33 (and 8th circuit); 49 (note Sarfatti in context); 129-131 (written by Nick Herbert)

Cosmic Trigger 2: 257 (Back To The Future best artistic expression of quantum logic: Sarfatti model fro Chris Lloyd); 267-268

Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy: 242 & 314, 426-427 (Herbert's QUIP); 274 (Capra's Tao of Physics); 343-344 (Sarfatti); 345-346 (Sirag's General Field Theory); 540-545

Trajectories May 1982 and Fall 1984: Nick Herbert and Bell's Theorem

Gnosis, Winter 1988-89:(Sarfatti and Faster-Than-Light ideas FTL); Edwin Harris Walker

Coincidance: 153-155 (Walker, Honegger, Sarfatti)

Semiotext(E) SF: 70-72 (Nick Herbert's wild particle physics story that includes RU Sirius)

Omni, Dec, 1979, "UFO Update" (Sirag's conjecture about time travellers)

Prometheus Rising: acknowledgment page: Sirag, Sarfatti, Herbert, who "clarified (RAW's) whole comprehension of epistemology;" 41 (and 8CB model); 183 (Barbara Honegger: cave paintings & 5th circuit yogic/shamanic brain: 30K yrs ago); 204 (Honegger's theory of synchroncity); 267-269 (Bell's Theorem and Sarfatti, et.al)

Mavericks of the Mind: 67-88 (Nick Herbert); 124 (Honegger); 125 (Walker)

Chaos and Beyond: 232-235 (review of Fred Alan Wolf's Eagle's Quest)

Everything Is Under Control: 138 (Sarfatti)

New Libertarian magazine Interview, 4/10-77: two pages on magick and quantum mechanics. Sarfatti as the head of the PCRG. RAW recommends Space-Time and Beyond, by Bob Toben, but Sarfatti says the ideas are his?

for another view of Sarfatti, see him as a North Beach denizen (San Francisco) in Herbert Gold's book on Behemia

Email To The Universe: 41 (Capra and Herbert); 244 (group mentioned); 223 (Mishlove might have been PCRG)

Michael Hollingshead interview (High Times?): RAW says he's the PCRG's "chief literary spokesman;" RAW talks about physicists who've used LSD

Wilhelm Reich In Hell: 33 (Capra and "fundamental holism")

see Sarfatti in Imaginary Weapons, pp.11-14

see Kripal's book on Esalen: 291-314 (Capra, Stapp, Sarfatti, F.A. Wolf, Nick Hergbert, Gary Zukav)

New Libertarian mag, RAW interview, 9/5/76: RAW recommends recent issue of Spit In The Ocean, for Sirag and Sarfatti on quantum consciousness Sarfatti as a "skeptical contactee"

Eight Circuit Brain by Antero Alli: 293-294 (mentions Saraffti and Sirag at RAW's salons in Berkeley hills, 1979)

I could list more if anyone's innarested.

Were they related to the SRI group with Targ and Puhoff: Scientologists? Who funded them? What role might Werner Erhard have played? How close was Ira Einhorn to the group?

How influential was Stapp? How did Barbara Honegger make it into the Reagan Administration? She wrote the first book titled October Surprise.

RAW had mentioned a few times that he sometimes played with the idea that he had been a "useful idiot" to the CIA or some other group.

http://www.rawillumination.net/

TTOTT in 12 lines or less

2011-06-30T04:09:00.000-07:00

TTOTT in TWELVE by Steve 'fly agaric 23' Pratt.

without pip center/ever changing cyclic world/Brunocentral
gods hero's and men/recycling through the ages/recorsi vico
eternal return/the gods nietzsche left us here/beyond either or
oak branching forces/ideogramic method/Fenollosa's trees
spatial symbolist/weasels fighting in a hole/before the war Yeats
Ezra made it new/cantos brewing history/juxstaposition
Joyce cracked the cypher/hologramic comedy/to make Einstein cry
word is not the thing/no such noun only see verbs/motion in the thingzski's
...went in for structure/geodesic dymaxy/future's Fullerene
Boolean Logic/and electrical switches/bit twinned by Shannon
turn on tune in drop/Joyce in digital village/Ez save McLuhan
Orson at hawks well/cinema collage life force/fake filter buster

Imagism in the Cantos and Vorticism in the Tate

2011-06-30T03:25:00.000-07:00

"These lines are followed by a sequence of identity shifts involving a seal, the daughter of Lir, and other figures associated with the sea: Eleanor of Aquitaine who, through a pair of Homeric epithets that echo her name, shifts into Helen of Troy, Homer with his ear for the "sea surge", the old men of Troy who want to send Helen back over the sea, and an extended, Imagistic retelling of the story of the abduction of Dionysus by sailors and his transformation of his abductors into dolphins. Although this last story is found in the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, also contained in the Divus volume, Pound draws on the version in Ovid's poem Metamorphoses, thus introducing the world of ancient Rome into the poem.--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cantos

"Can you fell the force of the Vorticists?

by Brian Sewell.

Red: Wyndam Lewis's Crowd of 1914-15. By early 1917 he had joined the Royal Artillery and was at the Front. He survived, most important male Vorticists did not.

16 Jun 2011

A vortex, according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary I had at school, is a whirlpool, a whirling mass of fluid, fluid in rotating motion, anything whirling that is capable of swallowing all and everyone drawn into it.

As this definition goes on to discuss rings, spiral, arcs and curves, it might be reasonable to assume that a group of artists dubbing themselves Vorticists produced art that was certainly curvilinear and possible soft-edged, suggesting fluidity, rotation and other characteristics of the vortex, its depth and singular dedicated force. There was indeed such a group, but arcs and curves, though occasionally present, played surprisingly little part in their work; this, in painting, was for the most part hard-edged and rectilinear, jagged and fragmented as though by internal explosion, centrifugal rather than centripetal, rather than forced into a coherent design suggesting vortical compulsion.

If there is depth in it, it is the depth of shallow planes superimposed, or of low relief entirely subject to design, or of some architectural or mechanical construction often set, like an object of still life, against a flat ground. In painting, vertiginous rather than vortical forces are implied; in sculpture, either no force of any kind, just enclosed weight and form, as with Gaudier-Brzeska, or a force of entirely different character, that of the machine, as in Epstein's Rock Drill.

In 1914, the American poet Ezra Pound, his associate Thomas Ernest Hulme (always known as T E Hulme), a combative philosopher-cum-theorist-cum-critic, and a very small group of artists working in Britain chose the vortex as their emblem and dubbed themselves Vorticists. The term was far more logically first used in the 17th century of those who followed Descartes' hypothesis that vortices of matter had determined the structure of the universe, and my hunch is that Pound, who re-coined the term in 1914, must have known Descartes' considerations of cosmogony when he proclaimed the vortex to be "the point of maximum energy". Wyndham Lewis slightly modified this view, arguing that "at the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated. And there, at the point of concentration, is the Vorticist." Hulme, who knew nothing of the creative processes of the painter and sculptor and whose head was full of the theories of his immediate contemporary and associate in Germany, Wilhelm Worringer, who had firm grounding as an art historian before he became a philosopher, introduced the notion that "the idea of machinery" would differentiate all that was then contemporary art, and particularly the Vorticists, from the long arm of an exhausted Renaissance. He who reads Worringer's thesis, Abstraction and Empathy, published in 1908, need never read Hulme's Speculations, published posthumously in 1924. Both men wished to clear away "the sloppy dregs of the Renaissance", both offered a blueprint for a modern aesthetic and justification for all modern art movements, and both commended reference to the near abstract art of the far past (Egypt) and the primitivisms of Oceania and Africa, rather than the realism of the Renaissance which, they claimed, had weakened man's capacity for abstraction. I suspect that Hulme had difficulty with the concept of abstraction - for "abstract" he substituted "geometric" and as the term empathy first entered the English language in 1912, he may not have known it and used "vital" in place of "in feeling", the meaningless literal translation of "Einfühlung".

One may reasonably argue that Hulme was an ass with influence far beyond his knowledge and experience of art. One may argue, with equal reason, that Pound too was an ass, a frivolous intellectual gamester whose knowledge of art reached no further back than Whistler, recently dead, whom he saw as a touchstone of aesthetic excellence, "the great grammarian of the arts" and, absurdly, as some sort of avuncular spirit for his "little gang" of Vorticists. They influenced each other's thinking, yet for each behind the other's back lay scorn and derision, Pound complaining of Hulme's unintelligible lectures and loud-mouthed "crap", while to kick Pound downstairs was often in Hulme's mind. They are part of the history of Vorticism only because they were the pseudo-philosophical leaders of the little gang, but to it they contributed nothing but drivel and confusion. The one man who really matters is Wyndham Lewis.

According to Pound, in December 1913 the gang had been forming for five years. The minor figures drawn into the vortex and very rarely heard of in any post-Vorticist context were Malcolm Arbuthnot, an experimental photographer, Lawrence Atkinson, Jessica Dismorr, Cuthbert Hamilton, Frederick Etchells and Helen Saunders; the major figures, in addition to Lewis, were Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth. David Bomberg and Jacob Epstein were closely associated with the gang, but neither joined it nor signed the manifesto issued in July 1914; nor was Etchells a signatory, but Pound and another poet, Richard Aldington (one of the Imagist group for whom Pound wrote another manifesto), were.
Christopher Nevinson drew close to Vorticism but was never quite sucked in.

A month later the First World War began. Gaudier-Brzeska was killed within 10 months; Hulme, an early volunteer to the Royal Marine Artillery, survived until September 1917 and was then killed within sight of Lewis, who had joined the Royal Artillery six months before; in November 1915 Bomberg enlisted as a sapper, and in April 1916 Roberts too became a gunner; Wadsworth joined Naval Intelligence in June 1916 and in the same month Jessica Dismorr went as a volunteer to France. Pound did what he could to hold the rest of the depleted and inactive little gang together and took on Alvin Langdon Coburn, an American and another experimental photographer, assisting him in the development of his futile Vortoscope for taking Vortographs (no, not to be found in Edward Lear's little dictionary of Wurbl Inwentions) first exhibited in the London Camera Club in February 1917; these were superimposed exposures that rendered image and portraits semi-abstract.

....Please read the full article here:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23961140-can-you-fell-the-force-of-the-vorticists.do

The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World – review

2011-06-30T03:03:00.000-07:00

"The moon is frequently associated in the poem with creativity, while the sun is more often found in relation to the sphere of political and social activity, although there is frequent overlap between the two. From the Rock Drill sequence on, the poem's effort is to merge these two aspects of light into a unified whole.--Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cantos

This article from the Guardian gives us some context for Pound's impact, and gives us some insight into the creative explosion in the arts just before the first world war turned that creativity on its head. Some accents added and some removed--steve fly.

The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World – review

Laura Cumming
The Observer, Sunday 19 June 2011.

Tate Britain

‘A pile-driving vision of the future’: The Rock Drill by Jacob Epstein, 1913-1915. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/ Rex Features

Rock Drill ought to be his name, not just the title of this long-lost work (this is a reconstruction of the dismantled original). He has terrible force of personality. And he is the most devastating creation in this show by some way, a sculpture from 1913 that seems to summarise all that vorticism stood for with its driving ambition for machine-age dynamism and shattering new forms. The Rock Drill ought to be the ideal host, the perfect symbol for both the movement and the show. Except that Epstein was never a paid-up vorticist.

In the long march through modernism, vorticism is the quickest of steps. It flares up in 1914, peaks briefly in 1915 and sputters out towards the end of the first world war. There are only two shows. There are only two issues of its in-house journal, Blast. There may be only one full-time vorticist. "Vorticism," declared Wyndham Lewis in the 1950s, "was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period." The assertion may have infuriated the surviving members of the group, but it is not without its merit when you consider the diversity of their gifts, from the painter David Bomberg to the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, compared to Lewis's single-mindedness as ringleader, recruiting sergeant, megaphone, exemplar and theorist of England's only homegrown avant-garde movement. Lewis belongs to the first generation of Europe's non-representational artists.His drawings are incisive, satirical, on the edge of abstraction. His paintings from this phase – angular, syncopated, explosive – are even better, which is some claim, given that scarcely any survive. In the 1912 illustrations for Timon of Athens, he begins to abandon depth for a flat pageant of forms that jostle like the elements of some unsolved puzzle. By 1915, in his enormous painting The Crowd, he shows quasi-cubist figures haplessly scattered in a system of grids that seems to prefigure the pinball machine. Workshop (1914-15) is a marvellous concatenation of geometric planes, in coruscating pinks and hot mustards, that almost resolve into windows, ladders, stacks and shelves, by day and yet also, as it seems, by night. It turns architecture inside out. And seeing it in Tate Britain's survey, surrounded by fading issues of Blast, old catalogues and invitations, typed manifestos and handwritten declarations of solidarity or hatred – period pieces of English art history from 100 years ago – it suddenly looks more modern than ever. With its graphic zip and register, Workshop conjures pop art half a century in advance.There are other masterpieces in this show, but not many. Tate Britain has David Bomberg's terrific painting The Mud Bath, with its interplay of bent, reclining and zigzagging forms packed into a scarlet tank. It has Gaudier-Brzeska's Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, on loan from the National Gallery in Washington, biting its mucklestone lip. From the front, it is Pound to a stylised T (was ever a poet more portrayed?) from his goatee to his bouffant quiff. From the rear, it resembles a circumcised phallus. "Make it virile," was Pound's bombastic command; contemporary critics found it merely pornographic. Nobody visiting this show could fail to spot the influence of abroad in almost every work. The Dancers, Les Demoiselles: Wyndham Lewis's chorus line wends its way directly out of Picasso. Roger Fry had mounted his celebrated exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, back in 1910, the same year Marinetti delivered his futurist lectures in London. The trick with this show is to try and remain indifferent to the obvious strains of cubism and futurism that appear wherever you look. It is not hard, for instance, to deduce local figurative forms in all this accordion-pleated abstraction – piano keys and nightclubs, people and performers, London alleys and even the back-to-back terraces of northern mining towns. Lewis saw that cubism, for instance, could be more than a highly advanced visual language. It could be made to speak of life itself, with all thronging motion, humanity, incident.One of the strongest works here is his wonderfully acute Architect With Green Tie (1909), which skewers the self-importance of a particular man while sending up the profession's characteristic fondness for that calculated spot of colour. The work isn't abstract at all, in fact; it's one of Lewis's best caricatures. But it also predates vorticism, exposing an unusual dilemma for the curators of this show, which originated in North Carolina. Vorticism is such a brief movement and so little of the art survives (a huge tranche of it, belonging to the US collector John Quinn, vanished long ago) that it is quite a feat to assemble anything representative. The exhibition attempts to counter the problem by including a good many fellow-travellers, recreating both of the original vorticist shows and displaying the issues of Blast, with its upper-case insults, wonderful woodcuts and wild demagoguery, along with testaments of war, imaginary and real. Here is the row between Lewis and Fry over the Daily Mail's Ideal Home Exhibition, of all things, played out in aggressive letters. Here are the missives from the Western Front, including Gaudier-Brzeska's final postcard before he died in the trenches. He was 23.By the time you get to the end of this vigorous yet melancholy exhibition, vorticism has dwindled into a graphic style. Anyone can imitate it by now and they do. There are still some startling works to come: Edward Wadsworth's fantastically concise woodcuts are among the best things here. Look at his Newcastle, as neatly condensed a sonnet to industry, ironwork, bridge span and community as you could find, all stitched together with saw-tooth zips: English printmaking at its sharpest. But even if its members had not lost their lives, the first world war had to kill off this machine-loving movement. Alas, because this show is so strictly vorticist, you do not see how the best of the artists responded, what Lewis made of the trenches in his war paintings, how he mocked his own brutal machismo, his own vicious energy, in the savage self-portrait Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro. But what you do see is what became of Epstein's The Rock Drill, once again an accidental symbol of the group. Legs gone, drill removed, hands lopped off, Epstein turned the torso into an amputee, vulnerable, disarmed, a victim of wartime violence. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jun/19/vorticists-tate-britain-review

To confuse the newshounds

2011-05-28T05:03:00.000-07:00

"To confuse the newshounds, he joked, the bride would be dressed as a lifeguard while the groom would wear green satin and a white veil and carry an orange umbrella."

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/0521/1224297422955.html

Vico's age of heroes and the age of men...

2011-05-22T18:29:00.000-07:00

Great big thanks to BOBBY CAMPBELL for putting this one up. Cheers:
http://www.bobbycampbell.net/VICO-LIBERTY.html

Title: Vico's age of heroes and the age of men in John Ford's film 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.' (Giambattista Vico)

Author(s): Vittorio Hosle and Mark W. Roche

Source: CLIO. 23.2 (Winter 1994): p131. From Literature Resource Center.

Document Type: Article

Vico, the father of historicism, discovered that the nature of man changes: the archaic man feels, thinks, acts in a way completely different from modern man. In Vico's scheme of the necessary evolution of every culture, three phases are distinguished: the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men. The age of gods is characterized by a theocratic government: it is anterior to any differentiation of the various aspects of curlture such as religion, politics, or art. The age of heroes, on the other hand, is dominated by the conflict between classes, the heroes and the plebeians. This age does not yet have a state; therefore, force and violence reign. The right of the stronger is the main ground of legitimacy. Two types of relations are characteristic of this age: the relation between enemies who fight each other, risking their own lives and those of their combatants, and the relation between master and servant. The duel, a fight between two heroes accompanied by their servants, is the symbolic action of the heroic age. In it the value of a person is proved, even constituted. Relations toward wives in the age of heroes are clearly asymmetric: women are not yet recognized as having the same human nature as men. "Love of ease, tenderness toward children, love of women, and desire of life" are alien to the heroes, so Vico once sums up his view of the heroic age.(1) CONTINUED
http://www.bobbycampbell.net/VICO-LIBERTY.html

W.B Yeats and Avision

2011-05-22T18:25:00.000-07:00

Snipped from the NATION:

Think back to the autumn of 1917. Stuck in the Ashdown Forest Hotel, her four-day-old marriage a disaster, George began (by her own admission) to “fake” automatic writing in order to entertain her despondent husband: she then felt her hand seized by an unseen power. Willy described what happened next in the revised edition of A Vision (1937), the esoteric account of all human history and personality that the automatic writing ultimately made possible:

What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer, and after some half-dozen such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences, “No,” was the answer, “we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.”

Over the next several years, Willy and George produced more than 3,600 pages of script, his questions, her answers. This is their most intimate exchange, and it is almost never referred to in the actual letters Willy and George wrote to each other.
The first few days of automatic writing have not been preserved (the remainder having lately been transcribed and edited by George Mills Harper and a fleet of assistants), so there is no record of Yeats being assured that the spirits had contacted him, through his wife, to further his poetic career. George remembered the initial contact differently: “What you have done is right for both the cat and the hare,” she scribbled, confident that her husband would understand that the hare was Iseult Gonne and the cat was herself, which he did. In the approximately 450 sessions of automatic writing that followed, the intimate sex life of George and Willy Yeats looms as prominently as metaphors for poetry (though Willy would go on to write great poems about sex). “What is important,” says one spirit through George, is “that both the desire of the medium and her desire for your desire should be satisfied.” Willy is advised to keep up his strength by making love to his wife more than once a day: “it is like not taking enough exercise & a long walk exhausts you.” “You mean,” asked Willy, “by doing it once I will lose power of doing it twice.” Yes, came the answer, “& then of doing it once.”
The automatic script ranges widely over innumerable topics; it is often tedious; it calls on vast reserves of esoteric knowledge. But one theme is constant: if the conversations are to continue, the medium (or “interpreter,” as George preferred to be called) must be satisfied. And when the interpreter is not satisfied, the script shouts it out loud and clear:

     I dont like you
     You neglect me
     You dont give me physical symbols
to use

Despite the aura of possible chicanery that inevitably surrounds such an enterprise, George emerges from it as the same brilliantly capable person who managed her husband’s career while also raising two children and electing to spend her summers in a castle with no electricity, no indoor plumbing, jackdaws nesting in the chimneys and a first floor that regularly flooded to a height of two feet.
http://www.thenation.com/article/160781/imperfect-life-george-and-wb-yeats?page=0,1

FIENDISH PLOTS (RAW thought of the Month)

2011-05-07T04:29:00.000-07:00

FIENDISH PLOTS
21 SHa`baan 1422 A.H.

Fu who?
-- THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU

Last night I looked at THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU on TV, partly because it starred Peter Sellers as both Dr. Fu and his enemy Nayland Smith of Scotland Yard, and partly because I wanted to compare the epic battle between Fu and Smith with the current rumble between Dubya and Osama bin Laden.

I have long regarded Dr Fu as both archetype and stereotype -- the incarnation of British fear of Oriental revenge for imperialist invasions. Osama fits that role very well indeed, and the Dubya/Smith parallel came across with almost synchronistic shock:

"The difference between Fu and me," Smith sez, "is that I'm Good and he's Evil."

Have Dubya's speech-writers read the original Fu novels or just seen this film?

Unlike the novels, the film does not portray Dr Fu as driven by "motiveless malignancy" [like Dubya explaining Osama: "He is a man who is an evil man."] On the contrary, Fu has a personal grudge we can understand: as a boy he had to work in his father's laundry at Eton, and starching all those white collars drove him bonkers. That makes more sense to me as a novelist than the unmotivelated malice of Osama, as portrayed by Dubya, CNN and the other corporate spin doctors.

Fear not, O true believers: the film didn't mention imperialism, any more than the novels -- or Dubya's speech-writers.

Meanwhile, another of my favorite villians has resurfaced:

THE FIENDISH PLOT OF MING THE MERCILESS

Adapted from the Irish Times 5 Nov 2001

The cannabis campaigner, "Ming the Merciless", has been arrested in Dublin this afternoon in connection with posting what is believed to be cannabis too close to 300 politicians and journalists.

He was detained while attempting to hand deliver a potted cannabis plant to the offices of a senior Government Minister,and taken to Pearse Street Garda station where he is being held under Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act.

Earlier today, several letters containing what is believed to be cannabis and addressed to politicians at their offices were discovered by officials checking the post following recent anthrax scares.

"Ming the Merciless", whose real name is Luke Flanagan from County Roscommon, is a well-known campaigner for the legalisation of cannabis. He ran in Galway West on a legalise cannabis ticket during the 1997 general election and also ran on the same platform in the European Parliamentary elections in the constituency of Connacht-Ulster.

Every country gets the villians it deserves. And as Joyce would say, there's lots of fun in Flanagan's work.

Bit By Bit, 'The Information' Reveals Everything

2011-03-20T07:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=134366651&m=134371366

March 8, 2011

The Information, written by James Gleick, covers nearly everything — jungle drums, language, Morse code, telegraphy, telephony, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, genetics and more — as it relates to information, which he describes as the "fundamental core of things." Information theory can now be seen as the overarching concept for our times, describing how scientists in many disciplines see a common thread to their work.

Gleick's book spans centuries and geographic locations, but one person stays throughout the story for almost 400 pages: Claude Shannon, an engineer and mathematician who worked at Bell Labs in the mid-20th century. Shannon created what is now called information theory, Gleick tells Robert Siegel on All Things Considered:

"He was the first person to use the word 'bit' as a scientific unit of measuring this funny abstract thing that until this point in time scientists had not thought of as a measurable scientific quantity."

Bits are more commonly recognized as the 1s and 0s that enable computers to store and share information, but can also be thought of in this context as a yes/no, either/or or on/off switch. Gleick describes the bit as "the irreducible quantum of information," upon which all things are built.

Just like Isaac Newton took vague words like "force" and "mass" that had fuzzy contemporary meanings and turned them into specific mathematical definitions, "information" now can refer to a specific scientific definition similar to a bit.

"Binary yes or no choices are at the root of things," Gleick explains. The physicist John Archibald Wheeler coined an epigram to encapsulate the concept behind information theory: "It from bit." It described the idea that the smallest particle of every piece of matter is a binary question, a 1 or a 0. From these pieces of information, other things could develop — like DNA, matter and living organisms. The field of information theory, in addition to creating new meanings for words like "information," also builds upon knowledge from other scientific disciplines such as thermodynamics, even though the result may be a little tough to understand.
James Gleick also wrote Chaos: Making a New Science, which popularized the idea of the butterfly effect. His books have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Phylis Rose

James Gleick also wrote Chaos: Making a New Science, which popularized the idea of the butterfly effect. His books have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

"When Claude Shannon first wrote his paper and made a connection between information and the thermodynamic concept of entropy, a rumor started around Bell Labs that the great atomic physicist John von Neumann had suggested to Shannon, 'Just use the word entropy — no one will know what you're talking about, and everyone will be scared to doubt you.' "

Though it may be a difficult subject to conceptualize, entropy does have a deep connection to information science, Gleick says. Entropy is associated with disorder in thermodynamic systems, and analogously so in informational systems. Though it may seem paradoxical to link information to disorder, Gleick explains that each new bit of information is a surprise — if you knew what a particular message contained, there would not be information in it.

"Information equals disorder, disorder equals entropy and a lot of physicists have been both scratching their heads and making scientific progress ever since," Gleick says.

In the everyday — not scientific — sense, an object like the moon only seems to contain information when we perceive it and develop thoughts about it, whether that's the man in the moon, the moon being made of cheese or the moon driving people to madness. But Gleick says that even without our perceiving it, the moon is more than just matter — it still has its own bits of intrinsic information.

"It sounds mystical, and I can't pretend that I fully understand it either, but it's just one of the many ways in which scientists have discovered a conception of information that helps them solve problems in a whole range of disciplines."

We can see now that information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel, the vital principle. It pervades the sciences from top to bottom, transforming every branch of knowledge. Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing. What English speakers call "computer science" Europeans have long since known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik. Now even biology has become an information science, a subject of messages, instructions, and code. Genes encapsulate information and enable procedures for reading it in and writing it out. Life spreads by networking. The body itself is an information processor. Memory is stored not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level—an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being. "What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a 'spark of life,'" declares the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. "It is information, words, instructions. . . . If you want to understand life, don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology." The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.

"The information circle becomes the unit of life," says Werner Loewenstein after thirty years spent studying intercellular communication. He reminds us that information means something deeper now: "It connotes a cosmic principle of organization and order, and it provides an exact measure of that." The gene has its cultural analog, too: the meme. In cultural evolution, a meme is a replicator and propagator—an idea, a fashion, a chain letter, or a conspiracy theory. On a bad day, a meme is a virus.

ALAN MOORE READS FROM "MASKS OF THE ILLUMINATI"

2011-01-02T06:07:00.000-08:00

Bucky Living Through Chemistry and Planetary Synergy

2010-12-25T06:24:00.000-08:00

Bucky Living Through Chemistry and Planetary Synergy

Buckminster Fuller developed a game he called 'world game' that gives the players the opportunity to manipulate and 'play' with the global 'planetary' life-support systems, putting players in the most powerful positions of world power and sharing the agency to change policy and trade and spending within specified territory. Players can experiment with various strategies for creating a healthy co-operative relationship with other players, and with luck a 'planetary synergy' of shared, interconnected resources and intelligence.

Alternatively you can play a more realistic and popular strategy of secretive deals and even 'war' if you like, a strategy including force, coercion, and massive waste of resources, and often severe injury and loss of human life, civilian casualties, torture, rape and pillage. But in a virtual physical-game space.

The world game allows individuals and/or groups to play with various strategies, to promote 'Killingry' or 'livingry' to a greater or lesser degree. From playing the game, and with luck, the players can learn by experience that co-operation and sharing of resources and intelligence makes for an efficient and 'synergetic' planetary system.
Private, secretive and closed systems lead to conflict, miss-communication and often 'war'. I hope this defines a punch line that leads me into a specific glossing and focus for a possible 'future world game' scenario: i.e. world-around drug tolerance and 'legalization', and an end to the failed and failing war on some people who use some drugs.

Using the Global Internet to collect data and statistics we can calculate, through statistical analysis the optimum strategy in any game? But do Governments and major corporations also do this calculating, albeit with a different data 'set' to the average citizen of earth and with the agency to implement their calculations in any specified territory. It seems to me that some have access to secret or private information, and others do not, and therefore the probable outcomes are spoiled by this disproportionate representation of information, and we have an unfair, unbalanced game. At this point I would ask the reader to consult Wikileaks for a huge information update for the Global 'world game' scenario, and consider once more Hagabard Celine's Law: National Security is the chief course of national insecurity" or "The more laws they pass, the more criminals they create."

Steve'fly agaric 23' Pratt
Amsterdam, 25th December, 2010.

OPEN SOURCE HISTORY (3RD EDITION)

2010-12-21T16:46:00.001-08:00

Organization theory and Claude Shannon

2010-12-17T05:07:00.000-08:00

Organization theory

In 1988, on the basis of Shannon's definition of statistical entropy, Mario Ludovico^[19] gave a formal definition of sintropy, as a measurement of the degree of organization internal to any system formed by interacting components. According to that definition, sintropy is a quantity complementary to entropy. The sum of the two quantities defines a constant value, specific of the system of which that constant value identifies the transformation potential. By use of such definitions, the theory develops equations apt to describe/simulate any possible evolution of the system, either toward higher/lower levels of "internal organization" (i.e., sintropy) or toward the system's collapse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negentropy

Finnegans Wake and Banking Bastards

2010-12-17T04:39:00.000-08:00

The bank particularised, the national misery
(now almost entirely in the hands of the four chief bondholders
for value in Tangos), declined to pay the draft, though there
were ample reserves to meet the liability, whereupon the trusty
Coppercheap negociated it for and on behalf of the fund of the
thing to a client of his, a notary, from whom, on consideration, he
received in exchange legal relief as between trusthee and bethrust,
with thanks. Since then the cheque, a good washable pink,
embossed D you D No 11 hundred and thirty 2, good for the figure
and face, had been circulating in the country for over thirtynine
years among holders of Pango stock, a rival concern, though not
one demonetised farthing had ever spun or fluctuated across the
counter in the semblance of hard coin or liquid cash. The jury (a
sour dozen of stout fellows all of whom were curiously named
after doyles) naturally disagreed jointly and severally, and the
belligerent judge, disagreeing with the allied jurors'
disagreement, went outside his jurisfiction altogether and ordered a
garnishee attachment to the neutral firm.
http://www.lycaeum.org/mv/Finnegan/viewpage.cgi?page=574

The Medium is the Massage Part 1 - Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore & Jer...

2010-12-13T06:47:00.000-08:00

Marshall Mcluhan - Right Brains, Linear Thought, and Literacy

2010-12-03T15:13:00.000-08:00

Buckminsterfullerene Documentary - Horizon 3/5

2010-12-03T13:29:00.000-08:00

Buckminster Fuller - Everything I Know - Session 9 - 11/16

2010-12-03T12:51:00.000-08:00

Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century

2010-11-09T03:44:00.000-08:00

Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century

Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers

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ISBN13: 9780195079104ISBN10: 0195079108 Paperback, 240 pages

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$19.99

Description

Extending the visionary early work of the late Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village , one of his last collaborative efforts, applies that vision to today's worldwide, integrated electronic network.

When McLuhan's groundbreaking Understanding Media was published in 1964, the media as we know it today did not exist. But McLuhan's argument, that the technological extensions of human consciousness were racing ahead of our ability to understand their consequences, has never been more compelling. And if the medium is the message, as McLuhan maintained, then the message is becoming almost impossible to decipher.

In The Global Village , McLuhan and co-author Bruce R. Powers propose a detailed conceptual framework in terms of which the technological advances of the past two decades may be understood. At the heart of their theory is the argument that today's users of technology are caught between two very different ways of perceiving the world. On the one hand there is what they refer to as Visual Space--the linear, quantitative mode of perception that is characteristic of the Western world; on the other hand there is Acoustic Space--the holistic, qualitative reasoning of the East. The medium of print, the authors argue, fosters and preserves the perception of Visual Space; but, like television, the technologies of the data base, the communications satellite, and the global media network are pushing their users towards the more dynamic, "many-centered" orientation of Acoustic Space.

The authors warn, however, that this movement towards Acoustic Space may not go smoothly. Indeed, McLuhan and Powers argue that with the advent of the global village--the result of worldwide communications--these two worldviews "are slamming into each other at the speed of light," asserting that "the key to peace is to understand both these systems simultaneously."

Employing McLuhan's concept of the Tetrad--a device for predicting the changes wrought by new technologies--the authors analyze this collision of viewpoints. Taking no sides, they seek to do today what McLuhan did so successfully twenty-five years ago--to look around the corner of the coming world, and to help us all be prepared for what we will find there.

http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/25965/subject/FilmMediaPerformingArts

McLuhan's Dream Solliquoy (Final sequence)

2010-11-07T14:21:00.000-08:00

 McLear Dream Solliquoy (Final sequence) 

The night of the 1st of August 1936, Mclear’s dream.  Mclear’s father drinks some tea from a chalice, and then climbs a ladder set against a house to fetch down the toad that is stuck up high, the pet toad of his cousin, and, while on his way down he slips, on a snake mimicking the wrong of a ladder, falls and crushes his head, and the toad in the process. Brains, Toad slime, jewels and flies merge together.  

Mclear’s cousin turns into Alice through the looking glass, in wonderland, and shrinks down to the size of a small rodent, she begins munching on Lotus petals that have suddenly sprung up around his father/mothers corpse, where a fly swoons and across the body that is now wearing a white gown and has breasts   A bomb comes whistling out of the sky, changing into a figure resembling Cuchulain, a giant with twelve arms, and each hand holding an object: A boomerang, a Robert Johnson 78’ disk, a golden jewel encrusted chalice, a smoking pipe styled into the shape of a toad, a totem pole, A telephone receiver/speaker, a printing stamp-press, a calendar, an Umbrella, A TV set, a Video-Camera.

The smoking pipe was now in the giants mouth and the clouds of smoke drifted up and up to become huge clouds, nebulous, ten miles high or more.   One cloud takes the form of a giant mushroom and descends back to the scene of the accident, pitching itself next to the androgenous corpse. The mushroom then morphs again into a small Santa Claus doll, and proceeds to administer coca-cola to the body, pouring it up the nostrils and letting it fizz all over the face, the body begins to shake.   [due to a disturbance in the dream sequence, ultimately down to an early lecture with G.K Chesterton, but setting his alarm clock one full hour earlier than he needed]

Mclear’s father/mother, his cousin and himself were now up and running from the house, jumping away from the garden on pogo sticks, away from where the toad-corpse ooze had now released a green fog into the air, that set everybody laughing uncontrollably.

Arriving in a wooded area they eventually stop and slump down onto the ground leaning against a birch tree. Suddenly a wheel rolls into the clearing in front of them with a golden apple lodged inside the axis. Then, as Mclear recalls his dream, ‘we all eat a small piece of the apple and go sit down back under the tree again’   In a flash the dreaer has morphed into a Mushroom stood right there in the spot where he once sat.

His Father/mother had transformed into a fly, and his cousin Mary changed quickly from his grandmother, then to a toad who also sits where she once sat in the wooded clearing.   At this point Mclear describes the sense of eternity passing, then a jumping of perceptions between the three shapeshifters, triangulated in their positions.

The mushroom had only single sight, a tiny periscope inside a wart, but it released a constant humming sound that Mclear heard as the sound of a tribal drum in his head when he looked at the fly and the toad looking at him.  Suddenly Mclear experienced total ESP with the others, plus he heard voices from the tress and the foliage and the leaves; a low chatter beneath the canopy, they sat motionless, in awe of the infinite stars above them.  In a flash, the fly lands on the mushroom, licks it, flies off towards the toad, who swiftly, and Ninja like, snatches the drunken fly out of the air, and swallows it in one gulp.

Cuchulain returns and lands in front of the Toad with a drawn sword and slices it in two. Gold and jewels fall-out from the toads head while the fly shakes, buzzes, flinches a little, staggers up to gather itself and flies off, only a few feet to then land on a floating lotus flower upon the pond, and is swallowed by a huge salmon, which then in turn is fished out by Cuchulain and set free, plus Cuchulain discovers a golden ring inside the salmon that fits perfectly with his elaborate zoological breastplate.

Ants came marching into the clearing and gathered up the toads parts, and some Lapis Lazuli jewels and carried them back to their nest, where together with a beetle, a snake and a unknown miniature jellyfish-scorpion creature, they remade the toad with spittle, venom and special green fungus.

The toad jumps out of the nest and leaps back to the clearing, where he spits on the mushroom’s periscope, which then transforms the whole mushroom into a geodesic object, but still bejewelled crystallized and sparkling.

Cuchulain returned from a gap in a nearby tree trunk, plucked the mushroom, put it in his red sack, and sprang off into the air again back to the town, where he fairly divided the crystalized mushroom up between all the towns people, everyone got a piece and said a prayer:  

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coxeter  Chase Ichi Vino 

Steven James Pratt.

TTOTT SITUATION: 23

“Bucky" Ez said to Joyce,
“See you Down the old Vic’ Bucky said to Ez
“You’ll raise Merry Hell" Joyce said.
Narrator on Bruno: “The notion of verbal, spatial, numeric and “figurative” combinatorics.”
 “I slice the heavens and soar to the infinite.” Bruno said.
Narrator “The purpose of Bruno’s lists appears to be satire” In the town of Dalkey, on Vico road stands a man shouting “Where terms begin?”
McLuhan to James Joyce: “Trivialized and quadrivialized.  Ez “A Rhetorical generator?”
  McLuhan: “Madison ave?”
  McLuhan: “The Four part cycle creates the corners of a square!”  “A Cube?” Shouts a voice in the street.  
Bruno: “To whom shall I address my beautiful play?  
James Joyce: “a rhythmatick or other over Browne and Nolan's divisional tables.”  
Yeats: “Sirius?”
  Bruno: “Through sirius’s celestial influence in these sweltering days and nights called dog days.  
RAW: “Sirius seems very important to me.” 
Bruno: “The fixed stars rain down into my brain.  
Ernest Fenollosa: “Stars for the final Asian man” 
Bruno: “Beautiful lights of the firmament shower upon me, the ocean of twelve signs hit me in the head, and the seven wandering lights whisper into my ears.  
Joyce: “And I shall be misunderstord if understood to give an unconditional sinequam to the heroicised furibouts of the Nolanus theory.  
Vico: “There are in fact three lights of divine providence....
Ez to
Joyce: “See you Down the old Vic’

--Steven James Pratt 'TTOTT Situation.

Versus TTOTT Versus

2010-11-07T12:21:00.000-08:00

  This tale begins when the record [1] spins to the days turn of Gio Bruno and his heretical sins. Learn em',  turn em'. Seen by the clergy as a sheen against God and King, no center to things, he said, he said that everything spins (everything spins), they 'everything' sins. had to wait till late for Bucky synergy.    Vico wrote recorso to describe a new course so the rotorio [2]of ages can turn through the pages of man, he made new gauges that span the historical myth of grammar, a geography of man, man as word, word as man.   Nietszche killed ‘god’ in the name of his good and started a flood of eternal returns so that new thinking caps burned   under this very moonlight, and the spider learns to spin a social web and define terms as we move into the Celtic twilight. Billyum Yeats and his Irish mates contact the spirit levels of French Symbolism, perfected synesthesia in times on National Amnesia, of the swift wit and synge'd tongue, Yeats carried Ireland on the tip of his song. And the mighty Joyce trots into the tale, like a Lion, a Lamb and a whale, Joyce enthralls the reading with multiple choice, a quantum prose of the Hermetic nose craft, a smell for the wave particle swell, a feel for the silk satin stockings and the hard stainless steel, hyper-fiction, genius diction, resolution of the contradiction, of life and of time, of love and what's above like that which is below. Yeats living with Ezra Pound in the smoke feet on the ground, Pound helps Joyce find a distributor for his voice, and a nice letter and short stories to better and butter the idle chatter and chortle of Tories. And Ernest Fenollosa's spirit enters the London melting pot, by way of a manuscript most American scholars forgot, handed to Ez by his Widow, a study in Chinese Poetry, a window, into new worlds of imagist beauty, film in translation [3], Noh play a thousand new ways to say amore'. Through the first world war these writers and more struggled against the banking dinosaur threat, and lost friends and would never forget the destruction and suffering war begot. Korzybski developed a science of meaning, a map of the ceiling of language and math, he put the heat on the scriptures, testing sentences for god, for truth, and shows the multiple choice voice of Joyce as a formula, mind body brain control structures and neuro-linguistic systems, to balance the romantics Korzybski helped to create General Semantics. Bucky Fuller did a similar thing with a similar swing, using math and science and philosophy to produce new systems, and Bucky made pistons, nuts, bolts and volts, Bucky made us think outside the box into the Icosa, look at LAW as a hidden variable, to balance the equation, technology versus the will to life of humanity, the science and sanity of Korzybski cast as innovative tools against fools on the war game trip. Bucky tripping up the bad man killers with alternative ideas, the mental resources spill out from Bucky's mind-spray of Synergy like 12 flavors of ice cream sources. Ez said Bucky went in for structure, but consumption is still done by animals. Yes the world should feel lucky to have had an inventor like Bucky, thinking for all of us, all on the bus, on a trip to enlighten us. Shannon shoots 'bits' into the tale like they were fired from a cannon aimed at you. Yes you, dear reader you know who you are by now, your a collection of 'bits' in the information age, a field of 'control' of various 'bits' of information, your the cybernetic navigator, alright mate, see you later. 'What are you doing' said Orson Welles to Marshall McLuhan, and our tale was wrapped up and bound with glue in. 'Keep chewing' Said McLuhan, "Keep going' said Orson. "Awesome" said McLuhan, "Those letters to Harold Innis, innit" said Orson. And internet came.

footnote 1:
Terence and the singularity..... Monk

RAW and Heretic Factor.

I-Ching and foundation for Singularity

Rather than Liebnitz, King Wen?

Software and Hardware. 

Update your reality Operating system.
The Hierarchy of values.

Maybe leftfield scientists Shannon,

Weiner, and Von Neumann Bucky and

McLuhan in the muddle 

And Bruno, Vico, Joyce, Yeats and Ez on the

Rightside of the brain.  

Orson Welles conducting the symphony. 

Dr. Wilson and his Heretic factor 

Hold out for a paradigm shift superior to any

singularity yet proposed

A RAW singularity or

(Non-simultaneously apprehended event) 

Coincidance: A Head Testicle

Information = surprise, Shannon and

Joyce waltz to Kurzweil Pounding the piano

like Frank Bruno with his Weiner.  

footnote 2:

‘V’ co. Said the Fellow Gnosa, Pounding his Weiner down in the Welles Fuller’ McGluon’s Brew.

“Noh, Rejoyce” Said Fried Rick.

“Cor’ Seb Ski?” said Shannanigum.

‘V’ for vicorecorsi." Said Ezybski  

footnote 3:

Philosophers David Chalmers at the Australian National University in Canberra, points out that “consciousness” is an ambiguous term since it can refer to a variety of phenomena. “Each of these phenomena needs to be explained, but some are easier to explain than others,” says Chalmers. “At the start, it is useful to divide the associated problems of consciousness into ‘hard’ and ‘easy’ problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.” Here’s David Chalmers on consciousness:
http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/neuro/are-we-zeroing-hard-problem-explaining-consciousness

I FIRST MET DR. WILSON... (from September 2006)

2010-11-07T11:35:00.000-08:00

Introduction 2010:

Hi, I met BOB a number of times between 2000 and 2005 in the USA, and regret not being allowed back into the U.S due to VISA issues, to see him again before he passed on. While he was still with us I already started a piece of writing that started to describe his influence upon me and how that amplified since traveling to America to meet him and having a most excellent adventure.

The following is what I wrote in mid 2006 while living with my parents at their home near Stourbridge in the West Midlands of England. I thought it was about time I put this up, as its just sitting on my hard-drive gathering moss, enjoy, love, steve.

P.S I now have the audio recording I made from the Prophets conference I can share here.

Universe Contains a maybe monday by rawmemorial

I first met Dr. Wilson on the 17th December 2000 A.D at the Prophets Conference in Palm springs, California, only 4 days after Al Gore said ""This is America, and we put country before party." conceding to Bozo the clown in what might have been the most crooked election in U.S history, although the 2004 election may prove to even topple that. RAW opened his presentation titled "The Universe contains a maybe" with the line "George W. Bush is the president of the United States...maybe?" and continued to keep the audience smiling and in high spirits all throughout his epic, encyclopedic sit-down comedy cornucopia.   

Six years on, and RAW seems as optimistic and cheerful as he ever was, perpetually glossing the world and its "other" with practical and scientific solutions, models, metaphors for our human condition. His alchemical unity of science and mysticism through the lenses of social psychology, humor and poetry illuminates, to me in (2006), the observation that language and the "other" places beyond language will provide us, the stewards of spaceship-earth, with new portals of discovery that can help nurture communication between different people's, nation's and species. His humble wisdom and teachings are an immortal kind of "Timespace capsule" as any bookshop or internet search will indicate his increasing presence throught the mediasphere, to not speak of his rather under acknowledged shadow as countercultural legend and outer head of the inter-galactic super Illuminati.  

I would like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Robert Anton Wilson for his time and patience towards his merry tribes of interacting readers and processing patients everywhere. I will also take this opportunity to thank my family, friends and fellow poets for their critical support and optimistic humour that helped sustain me, as an independent artist within various challenging environments. -- I first met Dr. Robert Anton Wislon in Palm Springs California at the Prophets conference where i was fortunate to have been asked to provide assistance to Bob throughout the conference, we enjoyed dinner together and had a Manhattan or two together with Paul Krassner and his wife.

Later in different company we shared a fragrant bit of Marijuana - a recent cannabis-cup winning weed called Williams Wonder which transformed Bob into the image of Yoda before my eyes, wise, old and green. The wonderful weed was provided courtesy of Richard Metzger.   Earlier that day i had offered Bob some Liberty Cap mushrooms i had carried some 6000 miles with me in my pants, Lovingly picked from the Wychbury hills in the West Midlands of England close to where i grew up, alas Bob turned down my offer but seemed to enjoy my wry smile and laughed with surprise when i produced the mushrooms.

AHA! At the Prophets Conference 2000 A.D in Palm Springs i had gave Bob a copy of a book called the Stargate Conspiracy by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince and he was reading it while at the conference and even talked a little of his initial impressions of the book. I gave this book to him because he was mentioned in the book and i felt an author should at the very least have a copy of any book they are mentioned in.   Two and half years later i gave another text to Bob at his home in Santa Cruz, the book was "The Cosmic Serpent" by Jeremy Narby that i had with me and wanted to leave with Bob when i discovered he had not read it plus the fact that it had recently come up in an e-mail Bob received. Another 2 years later - September 2004, myself and over 50 other critters were exchanging blooks, essays, poetry, art and music with Bob during various courses he led at the new internet based Maybelogic Academy.   

In San Francisco i saw Bob on four occasions, two at the learning annex San Francisco and one of these events i was an assistant in video taping the event for Soundphotosynthesis archive. I also worked upon some editing of this presentation afterwards but am unsure if the recording is finished and available at Soundphotosynthesis. Another in S.F event was called Pantheon conference 2001, held at the Renaissance hotel - i sent a Manhatten to his table as i knew what his favorite drink was.

On september 10th 2002 i travelled to Bob's home in Capitola and spent three or four hours that felt like several days in fascinating conversation with him. A partial textual transcription of the recording from this afternoon has been published in the online magazine (Maybelogic Quarterly Vernal Equinox 2006) co-created by members of the maybelogic academy. Considering that i turned up to Bob's house with no credentials, without flashing an I.D card, or waving a press pass or PHD.

I introduced myself as Fly Agaric on BOB's intercom and he simply asked me if i wanted to come up. He treated me with upmost respect and trusted me in his own personal home space, he allowed me to set up some recording equipment and fiddle with his electric plugs, drink cans of Guinness and smoke weed on his balcony. I mean... What a Giza! And to then continue to entertain me with his razor wit and encyclopedic trademark intelligence, me, a nobody from England, a young cosmic Schmuck with a passion to know more about what the hell is REALLY going on, and a lad who had found the living oracle and was now engaging with him, laughing a lot, feeling comfortable and having fun.

You might ask yourself how many other 72 year old celebrity writers, comedians and philosophers would tolerate such things, i mean imagine tracking down Dan Brown to his house, getting buzzed in and then only 20 minutes later drinking Guinness, smoking pot, eating Marijuana brownies and having a right good chin wag? More reasons to read Robert Anton Wilson, i discovered that day another secret of the Illuminati - be humble.   

The next time i met Bob was at the launch of his first and only biographical Movie premiere in Santa Cruz on the auspicious date 23 July 2003 (30 full years after his first telepathic experiences with doggies from the double star system Sirius.) On this occasion i was also celebrating my own contributions to this movie project and the very generous title given to me by Deepleaf productions of "Associate Producer". I felt ecstatic! After the show i saw Bob briefly while getting into a jaguar and riding off into the Santa Cruz night like the final scene from the Usual suspects. This was the last time i saw Bob in the flesh, he had the physical attributes of a Chan Buddhist monk, an Irish Bard and a witch. He also looked to me like Xavier from the X-men in the year 2023 but with wild Einstein-white hair. Always well dressed in a dinner jacket and a ruffled enbroidered silk shirt, his Celtic spiral ring beaming off his large blue eyes, his speech slightly slurred due to a recent pair of teeth i believe, he must have wore out his last pair on that senator from Washington D.C? Yeah, i suppose Bob was like a grandad figure to me because of his age and appearance but also his influence upon this particular journey (all the way from New orleans) and my current life in America to some extent, having originally came to America to hear his presentation "The Universe contains a maybe" at the Santa fe Prophets conference, but he became Ill and could not make it.

This incident led to me being asked to help Bob at the next conference in Palm Springs - Dec 2000 A.D, and so it goes. My own journey into Chapel perilous had begun. Fortunately i was among kind family in the Bay area and got treated with much love and respect by the inhabitants, i was given food, lodging, access to the internet, gigs and the kind of trust and respect you might expect from close neighbors of fifteen years.

The Utopia i had only imagined was real, San Francisco, Oakland, California, with all the creative forces and cultural waltzing, i was living in a novel, and my friends reflected for me the kind of hero's and positive forces within classic stories and myths, tales - lending a helpful hand, asking you to come to the party, the show, the art opening. I began to feel and tune in the vibe, you know the VIBE, it seemed everybody was from somewhere else on the map, all around the world. I could feel the same kind of optimism and technological embrace and multicultural celebrations that i often get from reading RAW in some sense, although my gloss is skewed or maybe not skewed in a RAW fashion because i read him so damn much. 

Steven James Pratt (September 2006)

Happy Birthday, Ezra Pound!

2010-10-31T05:01:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday, Ezra Pound!

c60 Buckminsterfullerene's and 2012 Geodesic Revolutions

2010-10-24T03:36:00.000-07:00

I have a hunch, a Grunch, about Buckminster Fuller's innovations.

Lets make a new TTOTT football, based on the Buckminster Fuller "Carbon 60" structure, and featuring a new Hologrammic Language... that's what I think, or thought just earlier today after work.

A Football, everybody plays with a football, no? Lets make a TTOTT football and construct a TTOTT team (tribe), place them on a TTOTT field (map) and have them play the kind of games Herman Hesse envisioned for his 'Glass bead game', or.. whatever you like. Just play. Let us play.

The structure of buckminsterfullerene is a truncated (T = 3) icosahedron which resembles a soccer ball of the type made of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons, with a carbon atom at the vertices of each polygon and a bond along each polygon edge. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene

SYNERGETICS: BUCKY BUCKY BUCKY

2010-10-13T16:58:00.000-07:00

The essay Reading Synergetics: Some Tips offers useful help for anyone struggling to read Synergetics.

[From Kirby Urner]

Synergetics: A metaphoric language for communicating experiences using geometric concepts.

Thinking is the tuning in/out of systems. Systems are spherical networks of interrelated points of interest. The density of points is a measure of a system's ``frequency'' -- super high frequency systems approach sphericity.

The minimal system with the fewest possible points is a tetrahedron -- four points make a primitive volume with an inside and an outside. The canonical tetrahedron has a volume of one.

The tetrahedron may be sliced into 24 irregular tetrahedra (12 left handed, 12 right handed) called ``A modules.'' The octahedron is comprised of 48 A and 48 B modules of equal volume = 4 x the volume of the tetrahedron. A and B modules may be used to assemble the cube (3 tetravolumes), rhombic dodecahedron (6 tetravolumes), and the Coupler (1 tetravolume). The Coupler, with the same volume as the tetrahedron (1), is an irregular octahedron that packs together to fill space without gaps.

Please, read on....

Ezra Pound - Canto XLV (With Usura)

2010-10-12T05:47:00.000-07:00

Steve Fly 33.

Buckminster Fuller on "Integrity"

2010-10-10T21:03:00.000-07:00

Ezra Pound - The Four Steps

2010-10-10T20:55:00.000-07:00

Ezra Pound - The Seafarer

2010-10-10T20:54:00.000-07:00

RAW Illumination: "Maybe Logic": The movie For many people who take ...

2010-10-01T18:57:00.000-07:00

RAW Illumination: "Maybe Logic": The movie
For many people who take ...: "'Maybe Logic': The movie For many people who take the time to read this blog, it will not be news that a documentary about Robert Anton Wils..."

email to the tribe: a Maybe Logic Class by Fly Agaric 23

2010-09-06T04:39:00.000-07:00

Fly Agaric 23

September 20 - November 5

email to the tribe
Homogrammic Prose

The tale of the tribe approximates a tale of humanity, or 'tales', a new global epic that must capture illuminating details from humanity and juxtapose them in a special way using special language (Hologrammic prose, the Hermetic style, Ideogrammic method, Joyce's 'epiphany' etc.) Dr.Robert Anton Wilson crafted his tale of the tribe to suit, among other definitions; the architects of post-modem' cyber-culture, reaching back to the renaissance and pulling up-tense to our decentralized--hyper connected--future present.

During a six week period, I-fly will share his open interpretations of the tale of the tribe, performing an on-line multimedia vortex of signals, dialed into James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Giordano Bruno, Marshall Mcluhan, 'Bucky'Fuller, and RAW himself.

email to the tribe will reprocess communications from across time, and produce new maps, new metaphors, and mold new memes that help forward the tale of the tribe and the RAW wisdom oozing out from all quarters.

Each week fly will provide a spread of multimedia for you to process, generally keeping in step with the program, encouraging a wide variety of conversation and focused feedback. Feel free to drop in and drop out, as you like.

EMAIL TO THE TRIBE: WEEKLY PRESCRIPTION.

WEEK ONE - WHEELS AND CYCLES (Sep 20-26)
The wheels of the tribe go around and around.
WEEKLY DOSE: Decentralized and Rotational Map Warfare.

WEEK TWO - GENERAL EPIPHANY (Sep 27-3rd October)
Hologrammic Prose and meaningful common speech
WEEKLY DOSE: RAW-FLY interviews. (Oct 4-10)

WEEK THREE - IDEOGRAMMIC FULLERENE (Oct 11-17)
The synergy of history
WEEKLY DOSE: Vicosahedron and Canto LXVI. Open Source History.

WEEK FOUR - GLOBAL FEEDBACK (Oct 18-24
If its not connected its useless
WEEKLY DOSE: Shannanigums Wave & Future Present.

WEEK FIVE - CINEMA OF UNITY (Oct 25-31)
Moving pictures to TV/Internet
WEEKLY DOSE: Maybe Logic & RAW Multimedia.

WEEK SIX - THE TALE OF THE CYBERNET (Nov 1-5)
My-wiki-face-twitter
WEEKLY DOSE: Work of the tribe. email to the tribe.

COURSE TEXTS: Recorsi by Robert Anton Wilson.

• $Pay-What-You-Can$ - Enroll Now •
[$50 recommended minimum price]

http://www.maybelogic.org/courses.htm

Giambattista Vico vs. Spinoza

2010-08-09T18:18:00.000-07:00

ROBERT ANTON WILSON: UNIVERSE CONTAIN'S A MAYBE

2010-08-09T03:45:00.000-07:00

ROBERT ANTON WILSON:
UNIVERSE CONTAIN'S A MAYBE

December 16, 2000, Palm Springs, CA.
Speaking at the Prophets Conference ~ Palm Springs (number 8) held at the Marquis Resort Conference Center.

Recorded by Steven Pratt using a portable minidisc recorder. Special thanks to Robert Anton Wilson for encouraging me to record and inviting me to his room afterwards for an exclusive recording and some tasty clandestine reefers.

NOTES:
17th December 2000, Dr. Wilson gave a performance at the Marquee Hotel, Palm Springs, as a part of the Prophets Conference, now (Great Mystery) that marked the second leg of my five year travel excursion around the USA, studying his work and forwarding my own. I hope the sharing of this performance inspires like minded individuals.

I was RAWs care-taker during the three days of the conference and helped him around in his wheelchair, opening doors and getting him to his performance on time.

I recorded his presentation on my trusty old mini-disc recorder, that captured hundreds of hours of my American adventures. I only recently found the disc and transferred it to a 'digital format' so I can now share the entire show. Please accept my apologies for the sound quality and my sad state or organization that has led to this ten year gap from performance to distribution.

"I had a manhattan with my lunch" --Bob

Bobs performance was amplified for me by the fact that we were sitting together with Paul Krassner and his wife before the gig drinking Manhattan's and having a jolly good old belly laugh, I think that Bob was a little tipsy going up onto the stage and really let his bullets fly, getting into cock sucking, the Bush Gore election, Bell's theorem and more cock sucking to hilarious effect. I imagined Bob spiced up his act to impress Paul who was sitting at the front, I must admit that I had to hold back my laughter due to making the recording and not wanting to be chuckling throughout.

In retrospect 'The Universe Contains a Maybe' gives an example of RAWs comeback after his first stroke that left him wheel-chair bound, and his first public speech after the now historic turning point in American history, the Florida election and recount, and recount, and recount.

A line that stuck with me from early in his show was '...if the United States wasn't trying to dominate the whole world, we wouldn't be threatened by Terrorism' and Bob goes on to reference the first World Trade Center bombing, just nine months before 911, and when I now hear Bobs typically brilliant, erudite and fact-filled spoken prose on 'foreign policy' 'corporatism' and the 'Military industrial state's' I wish to accent his anarchist pacifism, considering earth 2010 culture, and his general good will to the disenfranchised, the down trodden and innocent victims of Imperialist, and in this case, American greed, ignorance and violence.

"BULLLLSSSSHHHHITT"--Bob.

Add to Bobs 36 books and thousands of unique and ground breaking articles, his spoken freestyle genius and ability to educate and entertain a crowd like no other sit-down comedian (scientific philosopher) who ever lived, and you start to see the distance from the rest Bob was in his prophesy, although, he would probably not use that term, but here, I think it perfectly describes the content of his presentation, only months before something, like something from out of one or two of his fictional epics; became a new reality. 911, the war on terror, more stolen election activity, foreign meddling, and the banking heists, and the continued war on some drugs.

Even with Bob gone we can revisit his wisdom and wit and laugh along with him, at least temporarily, and each time I listen to one of his presentations I feel safer, I feel that the world is a safer place and feel more optimistic about our collective futures, the emergent technology for realizing the hermetic hologram of art, and collapsing the mechanism for centralized control, corporate monopoly and general brainwashing.

Bob wrote on taboo and censored subjects, subjects that still today still only a handful of investigative journalists would touch, perhaps wikileaks? he has been writing about some of the most challenging things to humanity in a caring and yet viral style, for a long long time, 'things' that some suspect might get you killed, harassed and just generally fucked with.

"Live with Integrity" --Bob

Bob taught a resilience and intelligence and that its OK to write about anything, really, even the truth, and to always question authority, the scientific, religious and militaristic, the richest and the most-powerful, the ruthless and the criminal, question authority and think for your self, and to live your life as if this is your duty, as a writer, philosopher and scholar activist. Whoever you are, I hope you can pass it on.

Please visit the following links that embody my thanks to those who have helped forward the life and works of Bob. May these recordings find bright future audiences and RAW scholars alike and tickle them.

For more details on this recording please visit my extended linear notes in progress at http://ataleofatribe.blogspot.com/

Love, steve fly

http://paulkrassner.com/
http://www.ep.tc/realist/
http://www.maybelogic.org/
http://maybelogic.blogspot.com/
http://www.rawilson.com/home.html
http://www.greatmystery.org/history.html
http://www.maybelogic.com/
http://ataleofatribe.blogspot.com/
http://raw.maybeee.com/
http://www.myspace.com/rawmemorial
http://rawillumination.blogspot.com/
http://tsogblogsphere.blogspot.com/
http://photosynthesis.com/
flyagaric23
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Released by: fly agaric 23

Universe Contains a maybe monday by rawmemorial

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Universe Contains a maybe wednesday by rawmemorial

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What Ever Happened to the Book? (Future Present) Mark Pesce, Chu, Fly.

2010-08-01T05:19:00.000-07:00

Mark Pesce - Words.
CHU - Images.
Steve 'Fly Agaric'' - Mixing

What Ever Happened to the Book?

I: Centrifugal Force

II: Schwarzschild Radius

III: Finnegans Wiki

What Ever Happened to the Book?

Line Steppers / Christy

I: Centrifugal Force

We live in the age of networks. Wherever we are, five billion of us are continuously and ubiquitously connected. That’s everyone over the age of twelve who earns more than about two dollars a day. The network has us all plugged into it. Yet this is only the more recent, and more explicit network. Networks are far older than this most modern incarnation; they are the foundation of how we think. That’s true at the most concrete level: our nervous system is a vast neural network. It’s also true at a more abstract level: our thinking is a network of connections and associations. This is necessarily reflected in the way we write.

I became aware of this connectedness of our thoughts as I read Ted Nelson’s Literary Machines back in 1982. Perhaps the seminal introduction to hypertext, Literary Machines opens with the basic assertion that all texts are hypertexts. Like it or not, we implicitly reference other texts with every word we write. It’s been like this since we learned to write – earlier, really, because we all crib from one another’s spoken thoughts. It’s the secret to our success. Nelson wanted to build a system that would make these implicit relationships explicit, exposing all the hidden references, making text-as-hypertext a self-evident truth. He never got it. But Nelson did influence a generation of hackers – Sir Tim Berners-Lee among them – and pushed them toward the implementation of hypertext.

As the universal hypertext system of HTTP and HTML conquered all, hypertext revealed qualities as a medium which had hitherto been unsuspected. While the great strength of hypertext is its capability for non-linearity – you can depart from the text at any point – no one had reckoned on the force (really, a type of seduction) of those points of departure. Each link presents an opportunity for exploration, and is, in a very palpable sense, similar to the ringing of a telephone. Do we answer? Do we click and follow? A link is pregnant with meaning, and passing a link by necessarily incurs an opportunity cost. The linear text is constantly weighed down with a secondary, ‘centrifugal’ force, trying to tear the reader away from the inertia of the text, and on into another space. The more heavily linked a particular hypertext document is, the greater this pressure.

Consider two different documents that might be served up in a Web browser. One of them is an article from the New York Times Magazine. It is long – perhaps ten thousand words – and has, over all of its length, just a handful of links. Many of these links point back to other New York Times articles. This article stands alone. It is a hyperdocument, but it has not embraced the capabilities of the medium. It has not been seduced. It is a spinster, of sorts, confident in its purity and haughty in its isolation. This article is hardly alone. Nearly all articles I could point to from any professional news source portray the same characteristics of separateness and resistance to connect with the medium they employ. We all know why this is: there is a financial pressure to keep eyes within the website, because attention has been monetized. Every link presents an escape route, and a potential loss of income. Hence, links are kept to a minimum, the losses staunched. Disappointingly, this has become a model for many other hyperdocuments, even where financial considerations do not conflict with the essential nature of the medium. The tone has been set.

On the other hand, consider an average article in Wikipedia. It could be short or long – though only a handful reach ten thousand words – but it will absolutely be sprinkled liberally with links. Many of these links will point back into Wikipedia, allowing someone to learn the meaning of a term they’re unfamiliar with, or explore some tangential bit of knowledge, but there also will be plenty of links that face out, into the rest of the Web. This is a hyperdocument which has embraced the nature of medium, which is not afraid of luring readers away under the pressure of linkage. Wikipedia is a non-profit organization which does not accept advertising and does not monetize attention. Without this competition of intentions, Wikipedia is itself an example of another variety of purity, the pure expression of the tension between the momentum of the text and centrifugal force of hypertext.

Although commercial hyperdocuments try to fence themselves off from the rest of the Web and the lure of its links, they are never totally immune from its persistent tug. Just because you have landed somewhere that has a paucity of links doesn’t constrain your ability to move non-linearly. If nothing else, the browser’s ‘Back’ button continually offers that opportunity, as do all of your bookmarks, the links that lately arrived in email from friends or family or colleagues, even an advertisement proffered by the site. In its drive to monetize attention, the commercial site must contend with the centrifugal force of its own ads. In order to be situated within a hypertext environment, a hyperdocument must accept the reality of centrifugal force, even as it tries, ever more cleverly, to resist it. This is the fundamental tension of all hypertext, but here heightened and amplified because it is resisted and forbidden. It is a source of rising tension, as the Web-beyond-the-borders becomes ever more comprehensive, meaningful and alluring, while the hyperdocument multiplies its attempts to ensnare, seduce, and retain.

This rising tension has had a consequential impact on the hyperdocument, and, more broadly, on an entire class of documents. It is most obvious in the way we now absorb news. Fifteen years ago, we spread out the newspaper for a leisurely read, moving from article to article, generally following the flow of the sections of the newspaper. Today, we click in, read a bit, go back, click in again, read some more, go back, go somewhere else, click in, read a bit, open an email, click in, read a bit, click forward, and so on. We allow ourselves to be picked up and carried along by the centrifugal force of the links; with no particular plan in mind – except perhaps to leave ourselves better informed – we flow with the current, floating down a channel which is shaped by the links we encounter along the way. The newspaper is no longer a coherent experience; it is an assemblage of discrete articles, each of which has no relation to the greater whole. Our behavior reflects this: most of us already gather our news from a selection of sources (NY Times, BBC, Sydney Morning Herald and Guardian UK in my case), or even from an aggregator such as Google News, which completely abstracts the article content from its newspaper ‘vehicle’.

The newspaper as we have known it has been shredded. This is not the fault of Google or any other mechanical process, but rather is a natural if unforeseen consequence of the nature of hypertext. We are the ones who feel the lure of the link; no machine can do that. Newspapers made the brave decision to situate themselves as islands within a sea of hypertext. Though they might believe themselves singular, they are not the only islands in the sea. And we all have boats. That was bad enough, but the islands themselves are dissolving, leaving nothing behind but metaphorical clots of dirt in murky water.

The lure of the link has a two-fold effect on our behavior. With its centrifugal force, it is constantly pulling us away from wherever we are. It also presents us with an opportunity cost. When we load that 10,000-word essay from the New York Times Magazine into our browser window, we’re making a conscious decision to dedicate time and effort to digesting that article. That’s a big commitment. If we’re lucky – if there are no emergencies or calls on the mobile or other interruptions – we’ll finish it. Otherwise, it might stay open in a browser tab for days, silently pleading for completion or closure. Every time we come across something substantial, something lengthy and dense, we run an internal calculation: Do I have time for this? Does my need and interest outweigh all of the other demands upon my attention? Can I focus?

In most circumstances, we will decline the challenge. Whatever it is, it is not salient enough, not alluring enough. It is not so much that we fear commitment as we feel the pressing weight of our other commitments. We have other places to spend our limited attention. This calculation and decision has recently been codified into an acronym: “tl;dr”, for “too long; didn’t read”. It may be weighty and important and meaningful, but hey, I’ve got to get caught up on my Twitter feed and my blogs.

The emergence of the ‘tl;dr’ phenomenon – which all of us practice without naming it – has led public intellectuals to decry the ever-shortening attention span. Attention spans are not shortening: ten year-olds will still drop everything to read a nine-hundred page fantasy novel for eight days. Instead, attention has entered an era of hypercompetitive development. Twenty years ago only a few media clamored for our attention. Now, everything from video games to chatroulette to real-time Twitter feeds to text messages demand our attention. Absence from any one of them comes with a cost, and that burden weighs upon us, subtly but continuously, all figuring into the calculation we make when we decide to go all in or hold back.

The most obvious effect of this hypercompetitive development of attention is the shortening of the text. Under the tyranny of ‘tl;dr’ three hundred words seems just about the right length: long enough to make a point, but not so long as to invoke any fear of commitment. More and more, our diet of text comes in these ‘bite-sized’ chunks. Again, public intellectuals have predicted that this will lead to a dumbing-down of culture, as we lose the depth in everything. The truth is more complex. Our diet will continue to consist of a mixture of short and long-form texts. In truth, we do more reading today than ten years ago, precisely because so much information is being presented to us in short form. It is digestible. But it need not be vacuous. Countless specialty blogs deliver highly-concentrated texts to audiences who need no introduction to the subject material. They always reference their sources, so that if you want to dive in and read the lengthy source work, you are free to commit. Here, the phenomenon of ‘tl;dr’ reveals its Achilles’ Heel: shorter the text, the less invested you are. You give way more easily to centrifugal force. You are more likely to navigate away.

There is a cost incurred both for substance and the lack thereof. Such are the dilemmas of hypertext.

II: Schwarzschild Radius

It appears inarguable that 2010 is the Year of the Electronic Book. The stars have finally aligned: there is a critical mass of usable, well-designed technology, broad acceptance (even anticipation) within the public, and an agreement among publishers that revenue models do exist. Amazon and its Kindle (and various software simulators for PCs and smartphones) have proven the existence of a market. Apple’s recently-released iPad is quintessentially a vehicle for iBooks, its own bookstore-and-book-reader package. Within a few years, tens of millions of both devices, their clones and close copies will be in the hands of readers throughout the world. The electronic book is an inevitability.

At this point a question needs to be asked: what’s so electronic about an electronic book? If I open the Stanza application on my iPhone, and begin reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, I am presented with something that looks utterly familiar. Too familiar. This is not an electronic book. This is ‘publishing in light’. I believe it essential that we discriminate between the two, because the same commercial forces which have driven links from online newspapers and magazines will strip the term ‘electronic book’ of all of its meaning. An electronic book is not simply a one-for-one translation of a typeset text into UTF-8 characters. It doesn’t even necessarily begin with that translation. Instead, first consider the text qua text. What is it? Who is it speaking to? What is it speaking about?

These questions are important – essential – if we want to avoid turning living typeset texts into dead texts published in light. That act of murder would give us less than we had before, because the published in light texts essentially disavow the medium within which they are situated. They are less useful than typeset texts, purposely stripped of their utility to be shoehorned into a new medium. This serves the economic purposes of publishers – interested in maximizing revenue while minimizing costs – but does nothing for the reader. Nor does it make the electronic book an intrinsically alluring object. That’s an interesting point to consider, because hypertext is intrinsically alluring. The reason for the phenomenal, all-encompassing growth of the Web from 1994 through 2000 was because it seduced everyone who has any relationship to the text. If an electronic book does not offer a new relationship to the text, then what precisely is the point? Portability? Ubiquity? These are nice features, to be sure, but they are not, in themselves, overwhelmingly alluring. This is the visible difference between a book that has been printed in light and an electronic book: the electronic book offers a qualitatively different experience of the text, one which is impossibly alluring. At its most obvious level, it is the difference between Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia.

Publishers will resist the allure of the electronic book, seeing no reason to change what they do simply to satisfy the demands of a new medium. But then, we know that monks did not alter the practices within the scriptorium until printed texts had become ubiquitous throughout Europe. Today’s publishers face a similar obsolescence; unless they adapt their publishing techniques appropriately, they will rapidly be replaced by publishers who choose to embrace the electronic book as a medium,. For the next five years we will exist in an interregnum, as books published in light make way for true electronic books.

What does the electronic book look like? Does it differ at all from the hyperdocuments we are familiar with today? In fifteen years of design experimentation, we’ve learned a lot of ways to present, abstract and play with text. All of these are immediately applicable to the electronic book. The electronic book should represent the best of 2010 has to offer and move forward from that point into regions unexplored. The printed volume took nearly fifty years to evolve into its familiar hand-sized editions. Before that, the form of the manuscript volume – chained to a desk or placed upon an altar – dictated the size of the book. We shouldn’t try to constrain our idea of what an electronic book can be based upon what the book has been. Over the next few years, our innovations will surprise us. We won’t really know what the electronic book looks like until we’ve had plenty of time to play with them.

The electronic book will not be immune from the centrifugal force which is inherent to the medium. Every link, every opportunity to depart from the linear inertia of the text, presents the same tension as within any other hyperdocument. Yet we come to books with a sense of commitment. We want to finish them. But what, exactly do we want to finish? The electronic book must necessarily reveal the interconnectedness of all ideas, of all writings – just as the Web does. So does an electronic book have a beginning and an end? Or is it simply a densely clustered set of texts with a well-defined path traversing them? From the vantage point of 2010 this may seem like a faintly ridiculous question. I doubt that will be the case in 2020, when perhaps half of our new books are electronic books. The more that the electronic book yields itself to the medium which constitutes it, the more useful it becomes – and the less like a book. There is no way that the electronic book can remain apart, indifferent and pure. It will become a hybrid, fluid thing, without clear beginnings or endings, but rather with a concentration of significance and meaning that rises and falls depending on the needs and intent of the reader. More of a gradient than a boundary.

It remains unclear how any such construction can constitute an economically successful entity. Ted Nelson’s “Project Xanadu” anticipated this chaos thirty-five years ago, and provided a solution: ‘transclusion’, which allows hyperdocuments to be referenced and enclosed within other hyperdocuments, ensuring the proper preservation of copyright throughout the hypertext universe. The Web provides no such mechanism, and although it is possible that one could be hacked into our current models, it seems very unlikely that this will happen. This is the intuitive fear of the commercial publishers: they see their market dissolving as the sharp edges disappear. Hence, they tightly grasp their publications and copyrights, publishing in light because it at least presents no slippery slope into financial catastrophe.

We come now to a line which we need to cross very carefully and very consciously, the ‘Schwarzschild Radius’ of electronic books. (For those not familiar with astrophysics, the Schwarzschild Radius is the boundary to a black hole. Once you’re on the wrong side you’re doomed to fall all the way in.) On one side – our side – things look much as they do today. Books are published in light, the economic model is preserved, and readers enjoy a digital experience which is a facsimile of the physical. On the other side, electronic books rapidly become almost completely unrecognizable. It’s not just the financial model which disintegrates. As everything becomes more densely electrified, more subject to the centrifugal force of the medium, and as we become more familiar with the medium itself, everything begins to deform. The text, linear for tens or hundreds of thousands of words, fragments into convenient chunks, the shortest of which looks more like a tweet than a paragraph, the longest of which only occasionally runs for more than a thousand words. Each of these fragments points directly at its antecedent and descendant, or rather at its antecedents and descendants, because it is quite likely that there is more than one of each, simply because there can be more than one of each. The primacy of the single narrative can not withstand the centrifugal force of the medium, any more than the newspaper or the magazine could. Texts will present themselves as intense multiplicity, something that is neither a branching narrative nor a straight line, but which possesses elements of both. This will completely confound our expectations of linearity in the text.

We are today quite used to discontinuous leaps in our texts, though we have not mastered how to maintain our place as we branch ever outward, a fault more of our nervous systems than our browsers. We have a finite ability to track and backtrack; even with the support of the infinitely patient and infinitely impressionable computer, we lose our way, become distracted, or simply move on. This is the greatest threat to the book, that it simply expands beyond our ability to focus upon it. Our consciousness can entertain a universe of thought, but it can not entertain the entire universe at once. Yet our electronic books, as they thread together and merge within the greater sea of hyperdocuments, will become one with the universe of human thought, eventually becoming inseparable from it. With no beginning and no ending, just a series of ‘and-and-and’, as the various nodes, strung together by need or desire, assemble upon demand, the entire notion of a book as something discrete, and for that reason, significant, is abandoned, replaced by a unity, a nirvana of the text, where nothing is really separate from anything else.

What ever happened to the book? It exploded in a paroxysm of joy, dissolved into union with every other human thought, and disappeared forever. This is not an ending, any more than birth is an ending. But it is a transition, at least as profound and comprehensive as the invention of moveable type. It’s our great good luck to live in the midst of this transition, astride the dilemmas of hypertext and the contradictions of the electronic book. Transitions are chaotic, but they are also fecund. The seeds of the new grow in the humus of the old. (And if it all seems sudden and sinister, I’ll simply note that Nietzsche said that new era nearly always looks demonic to the age it obsolesces.)

III: Finnegans Wiki

So what of Aristotle? What does this mean for the narrative? It is easy to conceive of a world where non-fiction texts simply dissolve into the universal sea of texts. But what about stories? From time out of mind we have listened to stories told by the campfire. The Iliad, The Mahabharata, and Beowolf held listeners spellbound as the storyteller wove the tale. For hours at a time we maintained our attention and focus as the stories that told us who we are and our place in the world traveled down the generations.

Will we lose all of this? Can narratives stand up against the centrifugal forces of hypertext? Authors and publishers both seem assured that whatever happens to non-fiction texts, the literary text will remain pure and untouched, even as it becomes a wholly electronic form. The lure of the literary text is that it takes you on a singular journey, from beginning to end, within the universe of the author’s mind. There are no distractions, no interruptions, unless the author has expressly put them there in order to add tension to the plot. A well-written literary text – and even a poorly-written but well-plotted ‘page-turner’ – has the capacity to hold the reader tight within the momentum of linearity. Something is a ‘page-turner’ precisely because its forward momentum effectively blocks the centrifugal force. We occasionally stay up all night reading a book that we ‘couldn’t put down’, precisely because of this momentum. It is easy to imagine that every literary text which doesn’t meet this higher standard of seduction will simply fail as an electronic book, unable to counter the overwhelming lure of the medium.

This is something we never encountered with printed books: until the mid-20th century, the only competition for printed books was other printed books. Now the entire Web – already quite alluring and only growing more so – offers itself up in competition for attention, along with television and films and podcasts and Facebook and Twitter and everything else that has so suddenly become a regular feature of our media diet. How can any text hope to stand against that?
And yet, some do. Children unplugged to read each of the increasingly-lengthy Harry Potter novels, as teenagers did for the Twilight series. Adults regularly buy the latest novel by Dan Brown in numbers that boggle the imagination. None of this is high literature, but it is literature capable of resisting all our alluring distractions. This is one path that the book will follow, one way it will stay true to Aristotle and the requirements of the narrative arc. We will not lose our stories, but it may be that, like blockbuster films, they will become more self-consciously hollow, manipulative, and broad. That is one direction, a direction literary publishers will pursue, because that’s where the money lies.

There are two other paths open for literature, nearly diametrically opposed. The first was taken by JRR Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings. Although hugely popular, the three-book series has never been described as a ‘page-turner’, being too digressive and leisurely, yet, for all that, entirely captivating. Tolkien imagined a new universe – or rather, retrieved one from the fragments of Northern European mythology – and placed his readers squarely within it. And although readers do finish the book, in a very real sense they do not leave that universe. The fantasy genre, which Tolkien single-handedly invented with The Lord of the Rings, sells tens of millions of books every year, and the universe of Middle-earth, the archetypal fantasy world, has become the playground for millions who want to explore their own imaginations. Tolkien’s magnum opus lends itself to hypertext; it is one of the few literary works to come complete with a set of appendices to deepen the experience of the universe of the books. Online, the fans of Middle-earth have created seemingly endless resources to explore, explain, and maintain the fantasy. Middle-earth launches off the page, driven by its own centrifugal force, its own drive to unpack itself into a much broader space, both within the reader’s mind and online, in the collective space of all of the work’s readers. This is another direction for the book. While every author will not be a Tolkien, a few authors will work hard to create a universe so potent and broad that readers will be tempted to inhabit it. (Some argue that this is the secret of JK Rowling’s success.)

Finally, there is another path open for the literary text, one which refuses to ignore the medium that constitutes it, which embraces all of the ambiguity and multiplicity and liminality of hypertext. There have been numerous attempts at ‘hypertext fiction’; nearly all of them have been unreadable failures. But there is one text which stands apart, both because it anticipated our current predicament, and because it chose to embrace its contradictions and dilemmas. The book was written and published before the digital computer had been invented, yet even features an innovation which is reminiscent of hypertext. That work is James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and it was Joyce’s deliberate effort to make each word choice a layered exploration of meaning that gives the text such power. It should be gibberish, but anyone who has read Finnegans Wake knows it is precisely the opposite. The text is overloaded with meaning, so much so that the mind can’t take it all in. Hypertext has been a help; there are a few wikis which attempt to make linkages between the text and its various derived meanings (the maunderings of four generations of graduate students and Joycephiles), and it may even be that – in another twenty years or so – the wikis will begin to encompass much of what Joyce meant. But there is another possibility. In so fundamentally overloading the text, implicitly creating a link from every single word to something else, Joyce wanted to point to where we were headed. In this, Finnegans Wake could be seen as a type of science fiction, not a dystopian critique like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, nor the transhumanist apotheosis of Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (both near-contemporary works) but rather a text that pointed the way to what all texts would become, performance by example. As texts become electronic, as they melt and dissolve and link together densely, meaning multiplies exponentially. Every sentence, and every word in every sentence, can send you flying in almost any direction. The tension within this text (there will be only one text) will make reading an exciting, exhilarating, dizzying experience – as it is for those who dedicate themselves to Finnegans Wake.

It has been said that all of human culture could be reconstituted from Finnegans Wake. As our texts become one, as they become one hyperconnected mass of human expression, that new thing will become synonymous with culture. Everything will be there, all strung together. And that’s what happened to the book.

Schudio Photo by CHU

Maybe Logic and the tale of the tribe: a no-place place.

2010-07-11T07:47:00.000-07:00

The following 'testimonial' is edited from a post I made at the Maybe Logic Academy some months ago when I was inspired by 'evolver.net' calling for members to make testimonials to their social network, I wanted to write a testimonial to the open learning network encircling the 'Maybe Logic' meme, and dashed something off that I felt on re-reading required some editing, and clarification. Thanks, steve fly.

Maybe Logic and the tale of the tribe: a no-place place.

A no-place place where like minded individuals can share feedback with cutting edge community of bright optimistic and tolerant networkers, a no-place place constructed using blueprints forged by the 'lives' and 'ideas' of Dr. Robert Anton Wilson, with the good doctors assistance.

Closely related to study of humanities and what Bucky Fuller defined as ‘livingry’ I feel that the ‘open source alternative education movement’ with a dashing of dream and pun has been fully realized by the MLA network: a place to study alongside Bob himself, in a Universe next door.

The MLA enhanced my experiences over the last six years and has influenced what I read, write, think and how and where I live today. Seduced by the treasures shared by uncle Bob' and hosted by the MLA, decomposed and recomposed by MLA faculty staff plus the wonderful new network of brave friends and beloved 'hero’s' of this invisible ‘open university’ of RAW studies.

Over the six years of studying classes and contributing to the MLA forums, I guess thousands of people have studied classes here, thousands, but only a relatively small number of people, perhaps 13, are active posters and contributors to the MLA forums today. These characters are now legendary to my mind, when forums v1,2,3,4,5 are combined in their encyclopaedic content concerning the 'lives' and 'ideas' of RAW, his influences, and the varied interpretations of work.

The community of volunteer contributors help define what I view as an exemplary ‘open’ learning environment, in contrast to the weakness of a capitalist corporate structured ‘learning Academy’s’ or other social networks and learning centres often programmed, packaged and branded like soft drinks, a shop front for the super major corporations and mass employers to target, strike and run off. The Maybe Logic Academy, the classes, content, structure and distribution are a model of 'education in the digital age.

A hierarchy of values and individuals who embody the values expressed in their deeds, artefacts and daily speech, help define the ‘things’ under observation. The combination of 'Maybe Logic' and 'the tale of the tribe' present such a system, respectively, I might define them as Principle and Performance, or a 21st century information processing principle and a RAW engineered performance of a hierarchy of values, as expressed through some of the greatest humanitarian thinkers of our time, thinkers scattered throughout the ‘life’ works of uncle Bob, alternative foundation pegs for a connected, equalibrius new 'Global' paradigm that includes the hidden variables of history, the anomolies, minority reports and 'indeterminacy'.

Here are a handful of links to blogs, books, web sites and articles culled from the MLA network that I deem to be of benefit to any reader of Dr. Wilson who finds themselves drawn closer to the fire, with an insatiable hunger for knowledge through experience and experiment, love, steve. flyagaric23 @ gmail . com

In no particular order:

http://www.maybelogic.net/

http://www.maybelogic.org/maybequarterly/

http://maybelogic.blogspot.com/

http://mla-collab.wikispaces.com/

http://www.rawilsonfans.com/

http://taleofthetribe.org/

http://www.bobbycampbell.net/

http://clinamen23.blogspot.com/

http://www.deepleafproductions.com/wilsonlibrary/index.htm

http://tribes.tribe.net/maybebabies

http://raw.maybeee.com/

http://www.maybelogic.org/courses.htm

http://slogger.blogspot.com/

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Insiders-Guide-Robert-Anton-Wilson/dp/156184165X

http://dylanfogle.com/index.php/robert-anton-wilson/

http://raw-data.blogspot.com/

http://www.myspace.com/rawmemorial

TSOG MASH SNARK by STEVEFLY

SEY YES (SOUNDTRACK TO MAYBELOGIC DVD MOVIE 2003) by STEVEFLY

PUTNEY COPENHAGEN by STEVEFLY

The tale of the 'high' tribe

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

The tale of the tribe

High Time and the Counter-cultural hall of fame.

"A ganachakra (Sanskrit: gaṇacakra, or 'gathering circle'; Tibetan: tshogs kyi 'khor lo) is also known as tsog, ganapuja, chakrapuja or ganachakrapuja. It is a generic term for various tantric assemblies or feasts, in which practitioners meet to chant mantra, enact mudra, make votive offerings and practice various tantric rituals as part of a sadhana, or spiritual practice. The ganachakra often comprises a sacramental meal and festivities such as dancing; the feast generally consisting of materials that were considered forbidden or taboo in medieval India, where the tantric movement arose. As a tantric practice, forms of ganachakra are practiced today in both Hinduism, Bön and Vajrayana Buddhism. --TSOG

I like the idea of the Counter-cultural Hall of Fame, as developed by High Times and Steven Hager, and I’m happy that the legendary characters from America’s exulted tradition of counter-cultural revolutionaries, artists, poets, musicians and humanitarian activists in the fullest sense of that term: revolutionary. High Times magazine seem to have developed a good selection process for the Hall Of Fame and the Celebrity Cup judges, besides all the weed, the poetry and scholar activism blooms.

In his essay - T.A.Z - from the book TSOG: The thing that ate the constitution. Robert Anton Wilson writes about being picked to be a celebrity judge for the High Times Cannabis Cup in 1999 and his experiences in Amsterdam. I read this essay again recently and found all sorts of cross links and descriptions of the Cannabis Cup and Amsterdam that I find irresistible to share.

1. T.A.Z or Temporary Autonomous Zone invokes Peter Lamorn Wilson, another brilliant bearded anarchist 'scholar activist philosopher' of the American tradition, who RAW often criss-crosses paths with when musing upon cultural revolution. Peter Lamborn Wilson’s TAZ seems to be used here as the title of Bob’s essay [see excerpt below] to help describe the unique red-light and coffeeshop Zones of Dutch tolerance here in Amsterdam, and some other parts of the Netherlands, and a generally intelligent and exemplary model.

2. William S. Burroughs was inducted into the High Times Hall of Fame in 1999, and RAW participated in the induction ceremony by reading parts from NOVA EXPRESS, a small clip of this event can be found on you tune in a video compiled based on the induction of the Beat generation into the High Times Countercultural Hall Of Fame. It was Burroughs who turned Wilson onto the 23 enigma' and Wilson compared WSB with James Joyce as the two greatest literary entities of the 20th century.

3. The name Simon Vinkenoog was familiar to me by way of Dr. Robert Anton Wilson, like so many things; who noted Simon’s work in his books, such as the tale of the Sage of Dalkey in his last published work – email to the Universe. When I arrived in Amsterdam Simon was active and a strong part of the Dutch resistance to Bullshit, mediocrity and Tsarist Occupation Government. Simon passed onwards into outer-hyperspace July 12th, 2009. Simon was recently featured upon John’s 10 show holiday extravaganza, and for me this fact makes yet another loop between American and European counter-cultural anthropology, bound together by John’s choice of musical artefacts, that continue to delight the air-waves.

4. The current editor in Chief of High Times and Grand Wizard of the Cannabis Cup – Steven Hager – wrote a book called ‘The Octopus Conspiracy’ that for me, brings together much of the work and playful confidence found in RAW’s occasional work with the High Times Magazine. This book helps one enter the process of engaging in counter-cultural information theory, in my humble opinion – the art of social historicism on the furtive cusp of Conspiracy Theory. I’m not going into the area of conspiracy research with this article, but instead I choose to honour research. This may also be translated as independent journalism - thinking for yourself and following your sense for truth and knowledge - no matter which rabbit hole your tricky senses may lead.

The following excerpt brings together James Joyce, Ezra Pound, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and John Sinclair into an Amsterdam synchro-mesh that seems a perfect example of RAW's hologramic prose' - in which every part contains the whole - here we have the Moderns, the Beats, the Post-Moderns, and, the sense of ambiguity that has haunted the 20th century, all in a paragraph that could equally be in resonance with "the tale of the tribe'.

Temporary Autonomous Zone, TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution. by Robert Anton Wilson, [excerpt]

“John Sinclair started talking about his days with the MC-5, a great Rock group of the 1960’s. My brain did a quantum jump and reorganized the whole world. This was not the John Sinclair I once knew, who wrote a brilliant column for the Village Voice. No wonder he didn’t look like ‘himself’: he wasn’t ‘himself’ at all. He wa the other John Sinclair, from Detriot, who founded the White Panther Party and served a few years in prison for generously giving a joint to an undercover narc. (Under Michigan law at that time, giving somebody a good high for free was punished with the same imprisonment as selling it.) I had mixed up two different John Sinclair's. I felt relieved. Mixing all that fucking pot hadn’t fucked up my fucking brain after all. They led me to the stage. (Was it the same day or another day?) I was giving a speech, inducting William S. Burroughs into the Cannabis Hall of Fame. I told them reasons I consider Burroughs the greatest writer since Joyce, but they seemed restless, so I quoted them a bit of unpublished Burroughs:

“A coprophile named Scott
Who lived in Aldershot
Said, “I’m unbeatable-
My shit is eatable!
Perpetual motion I’ve got.

”I went into a flashback...... November 1968, at the Playboy Club in Chicago, having lunch with Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. We had been Demonstarting against the War all week, but now we were enjoying a pleasant meal, and Allen was telling us about his recent meeting with Crazy Uncle Ezra Pound in Rapollo. He had told Ez he considered the Cantos the greatest poem of the 20th Century, and Ez said, “But it is all vitiated by that stupid, suburban anti-semitism.”
“Suburban,” Burroughs repeated, considering the connotations of the word; I was more fascinated by “vitiated.”
I snapped back to Amsterdam. – Robert Anton Wilson, Temporary Autonomous Zone, TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution.

"Thanks," Dillinger said modestly. "Actually, the Illuminati own the companies that put out most of the rock. We started Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus to counterattack. We were ignoring that front until they got the MC-5 to cut a disc called 'Kick Out The Jams' just to taunt us with old, bitter memories. So we came back with our own releases, and the next thing I knew I was making bales of money from it. We've also fed information, through third parties, to Christian Crusade in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so they could expose some of what the Illuminati are doing in the rock field. You've seen the Christian Crusade publications—Rhythm, Riots and Revolution, and Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, and so forth?" - Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, Illuminatus Trilogy, page 78.

“Robert Anton Wilson learns about the significance of the number 23 from William Burroughs:

William Burroughs introduced me to the 23 Enigma while I was still at Playboy. I had said, on first seeing the unpublished manuscript of Naked Lunch in 1956, This man is the greatest prose writer since James Joyce. (I am still rather proud of being the first to make that comparison) I did not meet Burroughs until 1966, and found Bill a more charming and ordinary individual than his books suggest - one had been prepared for a mad genius and found instead a rather prosaic, almost academic, quite gentlemanly genius. His story of the 23 mystery went like this... In the early 60s in Tangier, Burroughs knew a certain Captain Clark who ran a ferry from Tangier to Spain. One day, Clark said to Burroughs that hed been running the ferry 23 years without incident. That very day, the ferry sank, killing Clark and everybody on board. In the evening, Burroughs was thinking about this when he turned on the radio. The first newscast told about the crash of an Easter Airlines plane on the new York-Miami, and the flight was listed as Flight 23. Burroughs began keeping records of odd coincidences. To his astonishment, 23s appeared in many of them.

Sean Halligan tells distant cousin Peter that he has heard that expression somewhere before, in a dream he recalls. It was a dream reported by the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. He had written about the dream in his book Memories, Dreams and Reflections, strangely enough, on page 223: -- http://www.poee.org/living/GetPage.aspx?ID=180

Alice In Amrita-Land Dodgson

2010-07-04T03:49:00.000-07:00

Alice in Amanita Land?

"Alice Pleasence Liddel or ALP, "Finnegan said simply, "is one aspect of Anna Livia Plurabelle or ALP, the superwomen who contains all women, in Joyce's Finnegans Wake."

"Oh," I said. It seemed the only adequate comment.

"I have wondered, "de Selby went on, "if one can equate APL with ALP on cabalistic grounds, since both equal 111, what of PLA? But that is an irrelevance, i've decided. What is important is that in 1932 not only did Alice P. Liddell and John S. Joyce die, but the atom was split for the first time, and the 92nd chemical element was discovered--the last natural element, you see. For the first time in history, humanity had access to the energy of the stars and possessed a full catalog of the basic building blocks of the universe." - Robert Anton Wilson, The Horror of Howth Hill, email to the universe.

http://acrillic.blogspot.com/2008/01/alp-111-and-raws-wake.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland

"Be who,
farther potential? and so wider but we grisly old Sykos who have
done our unsmiling bit on 'alices, when they were yung and
easily freudened, in the penumbra of the procuring room and
what oracular comepression we have had apply to them! --James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Pg 115.

Wall Street Crash and Finnegans Wake: The fall of centralized media humpires

2010-06-26T05:37:00.000-07:00

In response to a recent Wall Street Article,
I'll remind the Wall Street Journal that WALL street features in the Wake.
Page three opens with a WALLSTRAIT falling...

You might want to take the trouble, at the Wall Street
Journal, of reading and re-reading Finnegans
Wake, and Proust,
And Pound, Silvio Gessel, C.H Douglas and even McLuhan
And listening to Sun Ra, Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry
While loking at De Kooning and Pollock,
Flying through oen space and new time
As if ART were a hypertextually interactive show,
Binding with your thoughts.
As you thought, think and drank them.

Thanks for reminding me of the Wall street crash
Right smack bang there at the end of the beginning of
The 'Wake'.... maybe the first example
Of 'hypertext' and a book jam packed full of 'tweets'.

Or listen to lady Gaga and read Dan Brown?
huh...

Steve fly

"Reading demands a greater investment of time than looking at a complicated painting, and the average reader is not prepared to invest that much time in a book, no matter what critics say about it. I feel the same way. I suppose I could get to the bottom of "Finnegans Wake" if I worked at it—but would it be worth the trouble? Or would I be better served by spending the same amount of time rereading the seven volumes of Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past," a modern masterpiece that is not gratuitiously complicated but rewardingly complex?

"You have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence," H.G. Wells complained to Joyce after reading "Finnegans Wake." That didn't faze him. "The demand that I make of my reader," Joyce said, "is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works." To which the obvious retort is: Life's too short. --http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704911704575327163342009080.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

The fall
(bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later
on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the
offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan,
erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends
an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes:
and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park
where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since
devlinsfirst loved livvy.--James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, g. 3

The Tale of the 'Dog' Tribe

2010-06-21T12:31:00.000-07:00

The Tale of the Dogon?
By Steve 'fly agaric 23' Pratt, June 21st 2010. Amsterdam

"First you were Nomad, next you were Namar, now you're Numah and it's soon you'll be Nomon. –James Joyce, FW, pg. 374.

Introduction.
After another 24 hours of reflection on my writing and ideas blogged here, how they were formulated, where they came from, and how much 'value' they have, how much 'truth? I have been cast on a whirlwind journey through memories and some forgotten texts, and landed myself in the thick of the Sirius mystery, Cosmic Trigger, Finnegans Wake and the 'Space' philosophy and music of SUN RA.

This blog is my attempt to track my thoughts and ideas as they grow, and here I'm writing an introduction to navigate and update my ideas. It may help to know that I first wrote out 3000 words describing my thoughts and experiences on the Summer Solstice, and then went back into some reference books and web searching to add exhibits to my thoughts.

This process of sourcing out particular areas of interest 'words' and 'phrases' resulted in a massive influx of new directions and links between my original subject matter. I new of places that I wanted to search because of the words, but the extra information surrounding these investigative nodes, the page numbers and the 'illustrations' help to waft my initial sparks, and fan them--like bellows--into a firey synthesis. --Steve fly, 22nd June, 2010. 2.00P.M

Roots Festival Encounters of the Tuvan kind

Yesterday, 20th June 2010; I stepped outside my front door into the roots festival held just a few meters away from where I live in Oosterpark Amsterdam. I did not plan going to the festival and more or less stumbled upon the band HANGGAI soundchecking while strolling with a friend around the park, early on in the day. I stuck around for their full performance and this led to a longest day epiphany for me. Triggering a flurry of ideas and connections between my favourite things. Let me try to explain.

When I lived in San Francisco I was fortunate to be introduced to Tuvan music and culture from two sources, the first was via a close friend describing the enduring story behind ‘Ghengis Blues: a collaborative album between an American Bluesman and a Tuvan throat singer, the high pitched part of the ‘throat singing’ struck my memory nodes, evoking the Massive Attack tune, Karmacoma.

The second source of my initial interest in Tuvan throat singing and music was Via the great 20th century scientific genius: Richard Feynman, close friends and work associates of mine were friends with Feyman, and I picked up on the ‘Tuvan’ musical interests of his, somewhat. He played drums and had a flare for art, music and poetry that I found attractive for a nanotechnologist and Nobel Prize winning scientist.

My only other encounter with Tuvan throat singing, or Tuvan anything, since my trip to America ten years ago, was just a month back at the ‘Firey Tongues’ festival, held at the beautiful T.A.Z called Ruigoord. Where I believe that along with a stunning ‘Tuvan Throat singing’ solo performance there was a reading from a newly translated ‘text’ from Tuva, as usual I did not pay full attention to that performance, but was instantly struck by the ‘Tuvan’ meme bouncing back into my mind, that got me to thinking and talking a little about ‘Ghengis Blues’ and Richard Feynman and my experiences.

Only a matter of hours ago I was once again confronted with that unmistakable sound of ‘Throat singing’ like a whistle into phase shift resulting in an almost electronic ‘ static’ in the air. The band HANGGAI played a full array of instruments, drums, guitar, bass, flute, vocals and various other stringed instruments I am unfamiliar with.

During the performance I noticed a lady dancing, spinning, leaping and twirling around to the music, who I thought was moving with the music just perfectly, and made me smile, made me think and wish I would have the confidence to get up and dance like that in the early afternoon. When the show came to a close I sat under the Big Top tent, watching the stage and the festival smiles, taking in the good vibes. The dancing lady was close by with her friends and so I said ‘thankyou for dancing and the good vibes’. She kindly then began to explain a little about Tuvan music to me, and that she was from Mali, I did my Ghenghis Feyman rap, and we were sharing our admiration for ‘Tuva’ and ‘Nepal’ and indigenous music in general I suppose.

After a few minutes of conversation I learn that the lady I am talking with was the wife of the great Ali Farka Toure’ (1939-2006) and the people she is with are some of her family, her words suddenly take on an extra richness and ‘truth’ in describing Mali, and the beauty of ‘travel’. But alas, after a few moments we were swept back into the festival and unable to continue our conversation, and unfortunately unable to catch her name, but ‘Ali Farka Toure’ sure stuck with me, I am familiar with his music in part from playing and spending time with Guitarist Fareed Haque of Garaj Mahal, who incorporates much West African music into his playing, and invariably some critters surrounding Fareed and the band turned me onto Ali Farka Toure’.

I did not get chance to launch into my Garaj Mahal rap, or any other rap, and due to this my mind was reeling, thinking I must write, write this out out here in a blog as an introduction to the following synthesis between areas of my ongoing research and study into Myth, Magic and Music.

Shortly after leaving the show I sat alone on a bench rolled a joint and started to read the book I grabbed off the shelf yestermorn’ for any reading opportunities that present themselves: “The Way Of The Sacred by Sir Francis Huxley. Who I once heard lecture on indigenous knowledge and culture at the Prophets Conference, Santa Fe, Ten years ago. While flipping through the book I stumbled upon Dogon, and suddenly right there where I was sitting it all came together in a flash.

Finnegans Wake and the Dogon Nommo Cosmic Trigger fired by Sun Ra and His Intergalactic Arkestra.

(*F26*)I forget to) bolt the thor. Auden. Wasn't it just divining that dog of a dag –James Joyce, FW, pg. 279

Ah, well not yet, I would like to take more caution when entering into these waters, and try to outline ‘why’ the things I write about here are meaningful to me and ‘why’ I feel they are meaningful and worth communicating to others.

I have read Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson as recently as 2009, and several times before that, and I read Finnegans Wake almost daily, and often aloud. Sun Ra and his Arketra can be found throughout my DJ sets from over the last twelve years, and since being fortunate to build a close friendship with Sun Ra scholar and associate; John Sinclair, I’ve taken on an extra literary, cultural and multimedia appreciation of Sun Ra and got into a good chunk of his prolific output as composer, arranger, bandleader, poet and visionary futurist.

“Their cosmology is one of the most complicated ever to be recorded in print, and it begins, as does the Hindu cosmogony, with an egg—the Egg of Amma, the name Amma signifying God and meaning “to hold tight,” “to arrange.” –Sir Francis Huxley, The Way Of The Sacred, pg. 94.

James Joyce, Robert Anton Wilson and Sun Ra are arguably complex individuals of a special genius, and as three individuals I am somewhat familiar with I would like to propose a synthesis of these three artists in the form of a short story. And along the way use extensive footnotes and hyperlinks to exploit some of their ideas, while sticking with my own ‘synchronistic’ encounters and experiments as guides to what to include and what to...

Dogon.

“This stone is an ark because it is the foundation stone on which the earth is created. It has its own number, 60, the number of years that elapse between celebrations of the Dogon foundation ceremony. Upon it, in Dogon cosmology, the House of Amma descends as a granary and as a spinning whorl. The granary has a round base and a square top, associated with the numbers four and six respectively. It is the mirror image of its heavenly prototype, which has a square base and a round top. This reversal, in which the inside also becomes the outside, takes place during the descent, which is made down the rainbow, in a sevenfold spiral. Here the spinning whorl enters the Dogon picture. –Sir Francis Huxley, The Way of The Sacred, Pg 166.

The Dogon are a West African culture with a remarkably refined and celebrated history, mythology, astrology and culture in the west that has led some researchers to propose strong cases backed up by various evidence suggesting that they were visited by advanced beings or that they contacted other intelligences and managed to preserve some of this special advanced knowledge in their language, culture and rituals.

When I visited Berkeley in 2000 AD, I attended an unforgettable and important conference held in the Presidio called Planetworkers: Information technology and Global Ecology. This event was a kind of nodal point for me, a place where I witnessed presentations and presenters that were ahead of their time, I thought, folks like Bruce Sterling, Mark Pesce, Peter Russel, Ralph Abraham, Erik Davis and many more of that genius calibre, a special combination of West Coast intellectual optimism and techno-shamanism. Terence Mckenna was scheduled to be at Planetworkers 2000 but had died only weeks earlier, his life and work were acknowledged and celebrated at the conference that, thankfully made space for the psychedelic components to ‘consciousness’ research and psychedelic studies. Always a good thing I think, especially when combined with intellectual genius and cutting edge technology, such as ‘the world wide web’.

Between presentations were a selection of music al offerings, some of which featured a Bass player called Kai Eckhardt who I shared a conversation with in the foyer only to discover that he was playing a show later that week with a pianist called Jack Perla, who’s name and playing I knew from my collaborative musical partner from back home in Wolverhampton called Surinder Sandhu, who had recently worked with Jack. This cool encounter with Kai led me to the show and a meeting with Jack, and later being invited to Kai’s studio, where I met thunderous drummer ‘Alan Hertz’ and Keyboard player and composer Paul Godwin, who had an electronic outfit called DOGON.

“Because of their preoccupations with the doubleness of things, the Dogon have two signs for each of the four elements. –Sir Francis Huxley, The Way Of The Sacred. pg. 94.

I was familiar with the name Dogon from reading Cosmic Trigger and this mini little synchronicity burnt into my memory right there. I was invited back to Kai’s studio shortly afterwards to perform with Paul Godwin, Rhiannon and Kai in his ‘Modern Fairy Tale’ spoken word musical opera, and thereafter to perform in many other settings with the great Kai Eckhardt, leading to me playing over fifty shows with Garaj Mahal and recording on their first two studio albums: Mondo Garaj and Blueberry Cave.

In an email correspondence with Mark Pesce last week I mentioned ‘Dogon’ and Paul Godwin, who Mark had also collaborated with on a music related project, in the context of remembering the Planetworkers Conference, where Mark gave a speech titled “The Real World”.

Dogon Nommo Hemphill and Roach.

The above sketches out some of the thoughts I was having yesterday while reading Francis Huxley on the Dogon, sitting in Oosterpark, minutes after a remarkable conversation and musical performance that somewhat helped me tune in the West African ‘Dogon’ tribe in Huxley’s book that has led to my current state of excitement in revisiting the ‘Dogon’ tales in 2010, using both ‘Finnegans Wake’ and the music and art performance of Sun Ra and his Arkestra, as contextual ‘spaces’ and ‘times’ for this new analysis, and a basis for my own interpretations of the data.

Comet Kahoutek

A somewhat related theme to the ‘Dogon Mystery’ by way of Cosmic Trigger is the fly by of the comet Kahoutek in 1973 that ties into both the ‘Starseed transmissions’ transmitted by Dr. Timothy Leary from Folsom Prison and with Sun Ra who performed a special concert for the Comet on December 12, 1973. ‘Concert for the Comet Kahoutek’ was the first Sun Ra disk I bought in approx. 1998, in part due to the ‘Starseed’ connection to the Comet.

Kosmic Trigger.

“Have real honest to god extraterrestrials from Sirius been meddling in the affairs of this backward planet? – Robert Anton Wislon, CT, pg, 184.

I should emphasize the impact this book had on me twelve years ago, in my attempt here to record my state of mind and reason back then, when building ‘fly agaric 23’ and navigating my way through the works of RAW and Terence Mckenna, continuing my experimental, Jazz inflected musical journey as a Drummer and DJ, intent on including and sharing some of the wisdom I perceived within these works; the drive that led me to journey to the US and study with Dr. Wilson.

Like Robert Anton Wilson, the Dogon tribe of West Africa demonstrate an interest in the Sirius double/triple? star system. “Sirius is important to you” and “something about time, the future and infinity” are words that Dr. Wilson saw written on a Black Board by a man with a long white beard, like Mr. Natural (or Dr. John Dee) in an important vision/dream he wrestled into his waking life and book, due in part to the fact that he had this dream/vision on July 23rd 1973. Sirius, the Dogon tribe and the 23 enigma collide or give birth at this point in RAW’s life, experimenting with Astral Projection, Magick and psychedelics and experiencing contact, success and breakthroughs in these areas of Occult research and shared feedback.

Finnegans Nommo

Through the cycle of Osiris, Isis plays a number of important roles; she is mother, faithful wife, sister-lover, steadfast widow. The goddess had thousands of names, and many shapes; she might be a divine cow, a bird, or even the star Sothis (Sirius). Her manifest nature is shown at one point in FW as several of these forms, and the search for the parts of Osiris is suggested simultaneously, as a questing crone runs to "sothisfeige her cowrieosity" (14.02). --Mark L. Troy. --http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/jjoyce/mummeries/troybook.htm

So what are the Dogon Tribe all about and why are they so important to us today, what can we learn from the wisdom they have shared, how does it relate to our present situation on earth? These more objective questions are best tackled by invoking my favourite book and mighty not-so-secret secret weapon in the war on some drugs: Finnegans Wake.

It seems that much of the great learning and wisdom gathered by the Dogon can be best distinguished by its relationship to modern ideas, scientific findings, cosmological models, BIG uestions about a singularity, self and becoming, causality, prophecy, the future of humanity and planet earth, the cosmos, spacetime and beyond.

While reading Sir Francis Huxley describe the intricacies and complex ideas of the Dogon I thought of the ‘resolution of opposites’ at work in Finnegans Wake, and in a flash saw every piece of symbolism Huxley mentioned in Joyce’s masterpiece, as if it were itself a tale of the Nommo tribe, or some extraterrestrial multilingual intelligence guiding us into the future of hypertext and hyperculture. Lo.

Sun Ra and Sirius

It seems likely to me that amidst Sun Ra’s extensive literary study into African and world folklore and mythology he came across the practices and traditions of the Dogon tribe. And I imagine would have latched onto some of the themes of possible extraterrestrial contact, but more importantly forwarded, retranslated and represented the music, dance, art and culture of these tribes, Sun Ra performed and recorded music. Something that unfortunately most other extraterrestrial theorists overlook as a means of communication with ‘higher’ beings, if you like to use the ‘higher’ label.

Make it Knu!

The most economical explanation for all of this seems to be that an Earth-Sirius communication has occurred, at least once, probably several times. –RAW. CT, 1pg. 89.

That ‘they’ or ‘it’ travel by way of music seems a given to me personally, if you like to adopt a pretty simple model for extraterrestrial intelligence and communication. Yet, we must agree that any advanced form of communication would work throughout all of our recognized mediums and our spectrum of energy waves. But music, music seems like an ancient and relatively simple mode of two-way communication with ‘it’. Maybe it’s better to call ‘it’ hyper-intelligence’ and maybe at this stage propose that ‘it’ maybe ubiquitous throughout spacetime.

The music and ‘it’ tend to reveal each other on occasion, I think, and something about some music in the Jazz idiom seems to somehow scramble time & space in a way reminiscent of ‘hyperintelligence’ a glimpse into the fututure-presnet-pist side, where everything changes in an instant, and new worlds open up and with them new possibilities, new conversations, new languages and new ideas. Make it Knu!

ET Net

Mark Pesce recently exposed the genius of James Joyce and in particular his book Finnegans Wake, and illustrates how Joyce co-opted the future in some sense, co-inventing ‘hypertext’ before programmable computers and co-ordinating some as yet unknown and undefined ‘Hyperintelligence’ into his book, that has managed to withstand the void of literature created by html Hypertext, internet and twitter. I have collaborated on further illustrating his writing.

To my knowledge Joyce did not report any extraterrestrial experiences in the explicit sense that both RAW and Sun Ra did, 'RA' claiming his first encounter in 1936 went as follows:

… my whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up … I wasn't in human form … I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn … they teleported me and I was down on [a] stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop [attending college] because there was going to be great trouble in schools … the world was going into complete chaos … I would speak [through music], and the world would listen. That's what they told me. --Szwed, John F. (August 21, 1998). Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra.

However, anybody who claims that Joyce did not have an Extraterrestrial experience seems to have missed the point of Finnegans Wake, that for me qualifies as a totally ‘alien’ and certifiably advanced language and/or code. Precisely the kind of thing an advanced civilization would want to communicate to earthly humanity: the wonder and epiphany at the interconnectedness of all things.

For me James Joyce’s FW and the music of Sun Ra and his Arkestra are similar shaped vehicles of extraterrestrial communication, but whereas the music of Sun Ra is explicit and enters through the eye and ear world, Joyce reverses the process somewhat, ringing and jangling songs and tunes, spells and proverbs from dozens of languages, all sensed in the head-space, but with a strange sense of timelessness and transcendence of space, when ‘non-simultaneously apprehended’ with the human eye; jumping about a jungle of earthly hyperintelligence and hilaritas, condensed into nodal clusters of meaning and hyper-connectivity, ringing many bells and scattering connections allwayswords.

SUN RAW

“I might mention that Arthur Young, founder of the Institute for the study of consciousness, was the one who originally turned Robert Temple on to the idea of trying to find out how the Dogon tribe knew so much about the dark companion of Sirius. And Arthur Young, in turn, had first heard of this tribal lore from Harry Smith, a film maker who claims to be the son of Aleister Crowley...) –Saul Paul Sirag, CT, pg. 242.

I am not sure if RAW listened to Sun Ra, but it stand a good chance due to telling me he liked Charlie Parker, Mahler, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Beethoven and Miles Davis, in particular. And Robert first got turned onto the debil’ weed at a Modern Jazz Quintet show, so RAW was certainly Hip to Bebop and jazz, and with his perchance for ‘Classical’ music too one would imagine Big Band Jazz and the sounds of Sun Ra might tickle his fancy.

Who knows, but I want to show here how the music of Sun Ra links directly into RAWs chapter in Cosmic Trigger detailing Dr. Timothy Leary’s experience with extraterrestrial intelligence and the comet Kahoutek earyh flyby in 1973, an event I chose to magnify here as it had a significant ‘woo woo’ effect on me when I first read Cosmic Trigger and encountered the Sirius Mystery. Nonetheless I like to think that RAW might enjoy a SUN RAW comparative essay with a healthy dose of Finnegans Wake stirred in.

For more on this please see my essay 'The Myth Art and Music of Sun Ra' (Headpress, 2010)

Back To Earth Frontear.

“The Dogon believe that everyone is born with eight seeds stored within the collarbones, four coming from the mother’s line and four from the father’s—a prototype, in symbolic terms of modern genetic theory. --Sir Francis Huxley, The Way Of The Sacred, Pg. 166.

Although the ‘outer space’ theme may often be criticised as leaving planet earth and humanity behind in an escapist trip to the stars, yet on the contrary I will show how the outer space theme in the works of Sun Ra, RAW and James Joyce, or the ‘cosmological’ complexity and ‘chaos’ often inherent in their works transmits a message for earth people, right here right now, that this ‘it’ or ‘hyperintelligence’ exists everywhere and nowhere, invisible and staring us straight in the face, neither here nor there but with us. No we are not alone in the Universe, on any level, we are hyperconnected throughout time and space, on many levels, if we wish to tune into them. Tune in, remember, and find the other worlds?

Solstice 2010

"by the tremours of Thundery and Ulerin's dogstar, you alone, windblasted tree of the knowledge of beautiful andevil, ay, clothed upon with the metuor and shimmering like the horescens, astroglodynamonologos, --FW, 194.

Looking back at my experience this Solstice I deduce that the Sun, and the sun behind the sun has gently hinted that ‘Sirius IS impotant” and that the African wisdom found in the Dogon tribe can be teased out from Finnegans Wake and the study of Joyce’s special cosmological ‘tribal’ language.

A New Dogon tale?

I have found that during my research into these three iconoclast multicultural icons the pull to create a new interpretation of current events and the state of the planet earth in 2010. Using my sense for connectivity and mixing media I present the SUN RA SIRIUS SEED TRANSMISSION sampler, enjoy, love, steve.

"An whele time he was rancing there smutsy floskons nodunder ycholerd for their poopishers, ahull onem Fyre maynoother endnow! Shatten up ship ! Bouououmce ! Nomo clandoilskins cheakinlevers ! --James Joyce, FW, 370.

“Circling round Shaun the girls weep, their mourning song echoes, "dosiriously it psalmodied" (470.13). The girls are sadly desirous of Osiris, desirous as Sirius (Sothis). It was in the form of this star that Isis wept for the lost Osiris. The sight of the rising Dog-Star has always coincided with the overflow of the Nile waters, thus it was considered that the tears of the goddess, weeping for her brother-husband, caused the inundation which fertilized the land of Egypt (DRT, p. 22). This idea is expanded at 254.16, "A and aa ab ad a bu abiad. A babbel men dub gulch of tears." In this watery babbling runs the Nile, which flows (after leaving the Nyanzas and Jebel) as the Abiad or White Nile, until it reaches Abu, the area of the first cataract, at which point the Nile Valley begins ("Nile", EB, XIX, 695). Thus, a naturalistic explanation is given for the babbling waters flowing down into the valley, which the ancients saw as a vale or gulch of tears. --Mark L. Troy. Mummeries of Resurrection

Some sources and resources:

SUN RA: Essays And Interviews - Edited by John Sinclair
Cosmic Trigger - Robert Anton Wilson
Finnegans Wake - James Joyce
The Way Of The Sacred - Sir Francis Huxley
Mummeries of Resurrection - Mark L. Troy
Wikiedia

http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/
http://www.vurigetongen.nl/page2/page2.html
http://www.fotuva.org/music/discog.html
http://www.amsterdamroots.nl/index.php?id=517
http://mkzdk.org/francis/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_B#Sirius_B
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sothis

--Steven James Pratt.
First draught June 21st 2010, Amsterdam, 6.30 A.M

A.I AND JAMES JOYCE. Venter and Earwicker Bachwords

2010-06-11T19:22:00.000-07:00

“TO LIVE, TO ERR, TO FALL, TO TRIUMPH, TO RECREATE LIFE OUT OF LIFE.” – from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

"We report the design, synthesis, and assembly of the 1.08-Mbp Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 genome starting from digitized genome sequence information and its transplantation into a Mycoplasma capricolum recipient cell to create new Mycoplasma mycoides cells that are controlled only by the synthetic chromosome.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1190719

"The genome contains blueprints, in which are encoded the names of the researchers, a website address, contact email and quotes from James Joyce, Richard Feynman and a biography of Robert Oppenheimer. --http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/audio/2010/may/21/craig-venter-synthetic-life-form

"a rude breathing on the void of to be, a venter hearing his
own bauchspeech in backwords, or, more strictly, but tristurned
initials, the cluekey to a worldroom beyond the roomwhorld, for
scarce one --James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pg. 100

Synthetic biology is a new area of biological research that combines science and engineering. Synthetic biology encompasses a variety of different approaches, methodologies and disciplines, and many different definitions exist. What they all have in common, however, is that they see synthetic biology as the design and construction of new biological functions and systems not found in nature. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology

http://www.ted.com/talks/craig_venter_unveils_synthetic_life.html

Synthetic Genomics is a company dedicated to using modified or synthetically produced microorganisms to produce the alternative fuels ethanol and hydrogen. Synthetic Genomics was founded in part by J. Craig Venter. Venter's previous company, Celera Genomics, was a driving force in the race to sequence the Human Genome.[1]

The firm takes its name from the phrase synthetic genomics which is a scientific discipline of synthetic biology related to the generation of organisms artificially using genetic material.[2] Currently, Synthetic Genomics is working to produce biofuels on an industrial-scale using recombinant algae and other microorganisms. They are receiving funding from companies like Exxon for this venture. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Genomics

As a development of that ongoing effort, last week Venter announced in the pages of Science magazine that his research team had – by putting together a living and replicating bacterium from synthetic components, inserting a computer-generated genome into a cell – "created life" in the laboratory for the first time. The experiment suggested the possibility of creating bacteria to perform specific functions: as producers of fossil fuels or medicines.

Venter, now 63, is nothing if not a showman and the publication of this revelation and the subsequent press conferences, have polarised opinion in ways with which he has long been familiar. Some authorities, and several newspaper leader writers, have claimed him as our Galileo or our Einstein; others have been notably underwhelmed.

Freeman Dyson, the physicist, captured the full range of academic sentiment in this dry appraisal: "This experiment is clumsy, tedious, unoriginal. From the point of view of aesthetic and intellectual elegance, it is a bad experiment. But it is nevertheless a big discovery… the ability to design and create new forms of life marks a turning point in the history of our species and our planet."

Venter's ego and his preference to turn to corporations rather than research foundations as funding partners (Exxon Mobil is a $600m sponsor of his energy experiments) do not tend to endear him to the academic establishment. Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, and a perennial voice of reason, offered me this verdict on the biologist's latest headlines.

"It's very easy to mock Venter," Jones suggests. "When he first appeared, people just kind of sneered at him. But they stopped sneering when they saw his brilliance in realising that the genome was not a problem of chemistry but a problem of computer power. I don't think anybody can deny that that was a monumental achievement and he has been doing fantastically interesting things subsequently with marine life. Having said that, though, the man is clearly a bit of a prick and one with a serial addiction to publicity." --http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2010/may/23/observer-profile-craig-venter

HIGH RESOLUTION PDF OF NEW SELF-REPLICATING LIFE FORM.

lastly but mostly, in
her genesic field it is all game and no gammon; she is ladylike in
everything she does and plays the gentleman's part every time.
Let us auspice it! --James Joyce, FW, pg. 112

* “TO LIVE, TO ERR, TO FALL, TO TRIUMPH, TO RECREATE LIFE OUT OF LIFE.” – from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
* “SEE THINGS NOT AS THEY ARE, BUT AS THEY MIGHT BE.”- a quote from the book, American Prometheus which discusses J. Robert Oppenheimer and the first atomic bomb.
* *“WHAT I CANNOT BUILD, I CANNOT UNDERSTAND.” – attributed to Richard Feynman (physicist, philosopher, badass) as the last words on his blackboard at the time of his death as described in The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking (physicist, philosopher, badass).

Stephen Hawkings RIVERRUN ENVIRONS.

2010-05-28T07:24:00.000-07:00

Joyce's 'pancosmos'
may still yet send shock waves throughout the physics
Cluster community consciousness...may yet, may yet.
(and the global internet by default)
if we would give equal credit to
the inner-space of mind-like spaces,
& the outer-space and external phenomena: still mind-like in fact,
I guess... see our faulty wonky perception, the
Shadows often mistaken for the 'things' themselves.

LO! to balance the equation of being, of being, of being
Like how James Joyce seems to balance 'being' the equation
With holographic prose, prose writing the tightrope, spun prose;
Innovated, deployed and distributed evenly
Trughout Finnegans Week.

Time flows like a river and it seems as if each of us is carried relentlessly along by time's current. But time is like a river in another way. It flows at different speeds in different places and that is the key to traveling into the future, --Stephen Hawking.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend
of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to
Howth Castle and Environs. --James Joyce.

"Hubbleforth slouch" Finnegans Wake and Hubble's constant

2010-04-24T07:31:00.000-07:00

Google are celbrating the 20th anniversary of the HUBBLE TELESCOPE today. By decorating the google home page with a cosmological landscape. I recently tuned into Hubble and Finnegans wake, and turned up the word Hubbleforth, that I wanted to share on this 20th anniversary.

Furthermore, Hubble's constant plays a part in experimental physics, and experimental theories of consciousness, or 'cosmic consciousness' the distance and velocity of galaxies can be calculated using Hubble's constant, or Hubble's RedShift. Some have tied in the ratio of the expanding Universe with the critical amount of single electron cubits lying at the [bit bottom] of human neurological processing. Hence, in my short and clunky definition, we have a theory of consciousness, rationalized using cosmological principles. Close to the hermetic principle 'as of above, so below'. But with scientific and mathematical principles describing such a relationship. My introduction to this idea was through the maverick experimental physicist, Jack Sarfatti, detailed in the books of Dr. Robert Anton Wilson.

I wanted to share what I perceive to be the general trends (2010) within modern experimental physics, cosmology and psychology (neurology) that include the HOLOGRAPHIC principle. And have blogged about James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and its relationship to the Holographic Principle as defined by 'Susskind and Hooft'. I am still working on a piece about Dr. Wilson, and his 'holographic prose' defined and deployed throughout 36 books, and countless articles over a 50 year period of earth history (1932-2007). Together, I propose that Dr. Wilson, like James Joyce, is at the Vanguard of communicating the 'holographic principles'.

I propose that 'if' the holographic principle, or a new updated version of this theory is found to be a snug fit, a unified theory and general theory of everything, then... James Joyce and Dr. Robert Anton Wilson will seem like 'GODS' who worked out the earth language for describing such a Holographic Theory of Everything, and did this somewhat 'outside' of the traditional institutions and Universities associated with such 'revolution's' and/or 'paradigm shitfs'.

I think it was R.U Sirius who said that when the going gets weird, the weird turn professional', and cutting edge science and technology and culture is getting weirder and weirder. I think, and next to surrealism and the Artists science of the weird, Dr. Robert Anton Wilson stands as a 'standard' of thinking and working creativly with the 'weird'

Why are hardly any of the major learning institutions teaching 'Robert Anton Wilson' and 'Holographic Prose?, when cutting edge experimental physics seems to be suggesting that the Holographic model is very important and relative to 2010 science, technology and culture? Maybe uncle BOB made the fatal mistake of connecting Economics and Politics to his holographic theory, and thereby jumping so far forward that we suffer culture-shock, when we follow the trajectories he maps, using the Holographic Principle, via James Joyce, David Bohm, Stan Grof, Giordano Bruno, Jack Sarfatti, John Archibald Wheeler, Einstein and Timothy Leary.

I look forward to any academic response to this proposition that uncle BOB had it back in the 1970's, and had already plotted how hyperbolic geometry and the 'holographic principle' might impact on humanity, our perceptions and collective futures. Dr. Robert Anton Wilson was largely ignored by Academic establishments, possibly due to his cutting criticism of the 'institution' and 'state-run-education' but still today, after his passing, it seems hardly any academic are presenting Dr. Wilson, and his ideas and principles as worthy sources and resources.

I am fortuate to be a part of the Maybelogic Academy that aims to do all of the above, and provide a forum and hub for RAW related studies. I do feel frustrated at the lack of other learning centres adopting our model, which was set up alongside Dr. Wilson himself in 2004, which I think helps define our advantages as a HUB, we have a single human being who reflects a comprehensive study, a single narrator, a single artist, telling us the tale of the tribe.

My schemes into obeyance for This
time has had to fall: they bit goodbyte to their thumb and, his
bandol eer his solgier, dripdropdrap on pool or poldier, wishing
the loff a falladelfian in the morning, proceeded with a
Hubbleforth slouch in his slips backwords (Et Cur Heli!) in the directions
of the duff and demb institutions about ten or eleven hundred
years lurch away in the moonshiny gorge of Patself on the Bach. --James Joyce, Finnegans Wake: Page 73.

21.00 Alice and Bob. Leonard Suuskind on Cosmology at Stanford, 2009.

The Illuminati Papers
By Robert Anton Wilson

An introduction to black holes, information and the string theory revolution ...
By Leonard Susskind, James Lindesay

Developments in Mathematical and Experimental Physics: Cosmology and gravitation
By Alfredo Macías, Francisco J. Uribe, Enrique Diaz

Psychology of the future: lessons from modern consciousness research
By Stanislav Grof

RAW V.A.L.I.S JOYCE & HOLO-GRAMIC PROSE?

2010-04-18T14:59:00.000-07:00

"One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot. --JAMES JOYCE, Referring to Finnegans Wake in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver (1926-11-24)"

I have a playman's or better yet ploughman's interest in physics, science and the paranormal, once again due for the most part to Dr. Robert Anton Wilson.

I was fortunate to meet many of the bright characters from the Berkeley Based Physics Consciousness Research Institute, where RAW was a somewhat regular alumni, with an irregular illumi.

I recently joined the new and improved http://www.stardrive.org/ a surprisingly interactive website hosted by Jack Sarfatti and friends, and a site I would suggest anyone interested in the physics-consciousness oriented writing of Robert Anton Wilson pay a visit. My interview with equally brilliant and Maverick thinker - Saul Paul Sirag - has been linked from said website to my surprise.

Here I'll simply contribute a number of papers available, or excerpts, that I feel help frame my interpretation of some of the content at stardrive.org and compare with some of the RAW's interpretations, if I may be so bold.

Philip K. Dick writes:

"Someday I'm going to get my artricle 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. --Philp K. Dick, The Divine Invasion.

Robert Anton Wilson writes:

"As Bucky Fuller was quick to point out, the development of Information Theory by Shannon and Weiner enables us to see the human mind as the greatest synergy-machine, the greatest tool for doing-more-with-less, in this part of the universe.

Fuller points out that knowledge can only increase (except for tragedies like brain damage in an individual or totalitarianism in a society.) As our communication skills and information processing improve, human knowledge as a whole accelerates synergistically. Therefore, both hard and soft technologies accelerate – ideas and tools both change faster, faster, faster.--Robert Anton Wilson"

Please excuse the age and mixed context of these google-book I-FRAME presentations. Yet acting as a great resource and hub of helpful footnotes and research, we hope.

Gravitation and cosmology: from the Hubble radius to the Planck scale ...
By Richard L. Amoroso, Jean-Pierre Vigier, Geoffrey Hunter

The singularity is near: when humans transcend biology
By Ray Kurzweil

Developments in quantum physics.
By Frank H. Columbus

Our Superstring Universe: Strings, Branes, Extra Dimensions and Superstring ...
By Jr. L. E. Lewis

Explorations beyond the machine: a philosophy of social science for the post ...
By Ian Trevor King

Extreme Physics
By Scientific American (COR), Rosen Publishing Group

Cosmic catastrophes: exploding stars, black holes, and mapping the universe
By J. Craig Wheeler

And now, what I feel is one of the most important ingrediants to making star Trek real; Finnegans Wake by James Joyce and HOLOGRAMIC PROSE.

The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce's ...
By James S. Atherton

AND FINALLY, FROM WIKIPEDIA:

Holographic principle:

The holographic principle is a property of quantum gravity and string theories which states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a boundary to the region—preferably a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon. First proposed by Gerard 't Hooft, it was given a precise string-theory interpretation by Leonard Susskind.

In a larger and more speculative sense, the theory suggests that the entire universe can be seen as a two-dimensional information structure "painted" on the cosmological horizon, such that the three dimensions we observe are only an effective description at macroscopic scales and at low energies. Cosmological holography has not been made mathematically precise, partly because the cosmological horizon has a finite area and grows with time.^[1]^[2]

The holographic principle was inspired by black hole thermodynamics, which implies that the maximal entropy in any region scales with the radius squared, and not cubed as might be expected. In the case of a black hole, the insight was that the description of all the objects which have fallen in can be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. The holographic principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the framework of string theory. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle

A Tale of A Tribe: Sandpit.

Hearst shows heart after 71 years, black and dry like a stone.

Hearst family forgive Orson Welles for Citizen Kane after 71 years

Cutting a Nietzsche

Bohm Dome Doodles

Ezra Pound's daughter fights to wrest the renegade poet's legacy from fascists

Ez TSOG YALE and SPIES.

Grand Deft Mamalujo and Joycean computer games 2012

Marshall McLuhan at John Hopkins University Part 3/5

CYBERNETICS: WEINER AND VON NEUMANN WIKI

RAW: GENERAL SEMANTICS AT WIKIPEDIA

Connections to other disciplines

Joyce Pound Shaw and Ulysses in Porno-mags

Semanto-phonetic writing systems

Semanto-phonetic writing systemshttp://www.omniglot.com/writing/semanto-phonetic.php

Pictograms and logograms

Ideograms

Compound characters

Semanto-phonetic writing systems currently in use

Semanto-phonetic writing systems used mainly for decorative, ceremonial or religious purposes

Semanto-phonetic writing systems that are no longer used

Please note

Other types of script

The Jumping Jesus Singularity

How drugs helped invent the Internet

McLuhan letter to Ezra Pound Dec.21st 1948

On the run up to the year 2012 (and The tale of the tribe)

These fought in any case" by Ezra Pound

"These Fought in Any Case" by Ezra Pound

Twenty RAW quotes for 2011

'Marshall McLuhan strikes back' and 'the medium is the message'

More Than Ever, the Medium Is the Message: How You Can Celebrate Marshall McLuhan's 100th

"This is the 100th anniversary of McLuhan's birth, and there's been a year-long global celebration of the man -- and his messages. All of this merry-making culminates in a conference and concert in Toronto November 7 - 10th."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julia-moulden/marshall-mcluhan_b_1065015.html

Marshall McLuhan strikes back

Some Joyce/Pound 'News' items...

The Politics of Modernist Poetics: Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell and Imagism:

Great literature will live on with or without a prize

"Poetic possibilities

Review by MARTIN SPICE

Mad about the girl: Tate Liverpool's Alice in Wonderland show

On the many worlds interpretation.

on reading Finnegans Wake

RAW and PHYSICS CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH GROUP (RAW Illumination)

TTOTT in 12 lines or less

Imagism in the Cantos and Vorticism in the Tate

by Brian Sewell.

A vortex, according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary I had at school, is a whirlpool, a whirling mass of fluid, fluid in rotating motion, anything whirling that is capable of swallowing all and everyone drawn into it.

The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World – review

To confuse the newshounds

Vico's age of heroes and the age of men...

W.B Yeats and Avision

FIENDISH PLOTS (RAW thought of the Month)

Bit By Bit, 'The Information' Reveals Everything

ALAN MOORE READS FROM "MASKS OF THE ILLUMINATI"

Bucky Living Through Chemistry and Planetary Synergy

OPEN SOURCE HISTORY (3RD EDITION)

Organization theory and Claude Shannon

Organization theory

Finnegans Wake and Banking Bastards

The Medium is the Massage Part 1 - Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore & Jer...

Marshall Mcluhan - Right Brains, Linear Thought, and Literacy

Buckminsterfullerene Documentary - Horizon 3/5

Buckminster Fuller - Everything I Know - Session 9 - 11/16

Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century

Price:

Description

McLuhan's Dream Solliquoy (Final sequence)

Versus TTOTT Versus

I FIRST MET DR. WILSON... (from September 2006)

Happy Birthday, Ezra Pound!

c60 Buckminsterfullerene's and 2012 Geodesic Revolutions

SYNERGETICS: BUCKY BUCKY BUCKY

Ezra Pound - Canto XLV (With Usura)

Buckminster Fuller on "Integrity"

Ezra Pound - The Four Steps

Ezra Pound - The Seafarer

RAW Illumination: "Maybe Logic": The movie For many people who take ...

email to the tribe: a Maybe Logic Class by Fly Agaric 23

Giambattista Vico vs. Spinoza

Semanto-phonetic writing systems
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/semanto-phonetic.php

"These Fought in Any Case"
by Ezra Pound