I chortled recently reading about a US novelist whose novel was published in a UK edition and somebody at the UK publisher apparently used search and replace to change all the American English terms to their British equivalents, resulting in a reference (that made it into print) to a building and it’s occutrousers. (https://twitter.com/AprilynnePike).
"Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic" by Glenn Frankel
This was the first "film biography" I've read. I didn't even know it was a thing. They might not even be called film biographies. This is a favorite movie of mine. I only learned about the book because I've started buying DVDs again and this book came up as a search result. I couldn't have been happier with the purchase.
The book is way way more than just a behind-the-scenes accounting of the actual film shoot. It goes into the backgrounds of the director, producer, writers, various film and studio personnel, and actors. It provides societal context, both in the backgrounds of those written about and the cities the movie and the original book was filmed/written in. Frankel lays it out in a very pleasant narrative flow. It's a non-fiction work, but the book has a storybook (or filmic, I suppose) arc. It never becomes a tedious recitation of biographical facts and industry minutia.
I'm curious to see if there are any other film biographies that might interest me. My initial reaction is its gotta be about a movie that's as precious to me as Midnight Cowboy. Like, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a Godfather version out there, and while I did very much enjoy both the first and second Godfather movies (and esteem both movies very highly), they don't affect me enough that I'd find a peek under the hood as magical as the movie itself. I'm not a film buff. But if it were a non-fic about "Local Hero" or "Blade Runner," then that would be a different story I believe.
P.S. The hardcover version, new, is on sale at Amazon for five bucks.
I first heard of the 23 enigma from William S Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.
Burroughs began collecting odd 23s after this gruesome synchronicity, and after 1965 I also began collecting them. Many of my weird 23s were incorporated into the trilogy Illuminatus! which I wrote in collaboration with Robert J Shea in 1969–1971. I will mention only a few of them here, to give a flavour to those benighted souls who haven’t read Illuminatus! yet:
In conception, Mom and Dad each contribute 23 chromosomes to the fœtus. DNA, the carrier of the genetic information, has bonding irregularities every 23rd Angstrom. Aleister Crowley, in his Cabalistic Dictionary, defines 23 as the number of “life” or “a thread”, hauntingly suggestive of the DNA life-script. On the other hand, 23 has many links with termination: in telegraphers’ code, 23 means “bust” or “break the line”, and Hexagram 23 in I Ching means “breaking apart”. Sidney Carton is the 23rd man guillotined in the old stage productions of A Tale of Two Cities. (A few lexicographers believe this is the origin of the mysterious slang expression “23 Skiddoo!”.)
Some people are clusters of bloody synchronicities in 23. Burroughs discovered that the bootlegger “Dutch Schultz” (real name: Arthur Flegenheimer) had Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll assassinated on 23rd Street in New York when Coll was 23 years old. Schultz himself was assassinated on 23 October. Looking further into the Dutch Schultz case, I found that Charlie Workman, the man convicted of shooting Schultz, served 23 years of a life sentence and was then paroled.
Prof. Hans Seisel of the University of Chicago passed the following along to Arthur Koestler, who published it in The Challenge of Chance. Seisel’s grandparents had a 23 in their address, his mother had 23 both as a street number and apartment number, Seisel himself once had 23 as both his home address and his law office address, etc. While visiting Monte Carlo, Seisel’s mother read a novel, Die Liebe der Jeannie Ney, in which the heroine wins a great deal by betting on 23 at roulette. Mother tried betting on 23 and it came up on the second try.
Adolf Hitler was initiated into the Vril Society (which many consider a front for the Illuminati) in 1923. The Morgan Bank (which is regarded as the financial backer of the Illuminati by the John Birch Society) is at 23 Wall Street in Manhattan. When Illuminatus! was turned into a play, it premiered in Liverpool on 23 November (which is also Harpo Marx’s birthday). Ken Campbell, producer of Illuminatus!, later found, on page 223 of Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, a weird dream about Liverpool, which Campbell says describes the street intersection of the theatre where Illuminatus! opened (Jung, of course, was the first psychologist to study weird coincidences of this sort and to name them synchronicities). Campbell also claims that Hitler lived briefly in Liverpool when he was 23 years old, but I haven’t found the reference for that.
Recently, I was invited to join an expedition to the Bermuda Triangle. I declined because of other commitments, but “the crew that never rests” (Sir Walter Scott’s name for the Intelligence – or idiocies – who keep pestering us with this kind of phenomenon) refused to let me off the hook that easily. A few days after the expedition left, I turned on the television and caught an advertisement for the new film, Airport 77. The advertisement began with an actor shouting “Flight 23 is down in the Bermuda Triangle!”
A week later, Charles Berlitz, author of The Bermuda Triangle, claimed he had found a submerged pyramid “twice the size of the pyramids of Cheops” in the waters down there. You will find that monstrous edifice described in Illuminatus!, and it is specifically said to be “twice the size of the pyramid of Cheops” – but Shea and I thought we were writing fiction when we composed that passage in 1971. In 1977, Berlitz claims it is real.
I now have almost as many weird 23s in my files as Fort once had records of rains of fish, and people are always sending me new ones.
Euclid’s Geometry begins with 23 axioms.
As soon as I became seriously intrigued by collecting weird 23s, one of my best friends died – on 23 December.
My two oldest daughters were born on 23 August and 23 February respectively.
According to Omar Garrison’s Tantra: The Yoga of Sex, in addition to the well-known 28-day female sex cycle, there is also a male sex cycle of 23 days.
Burroughs, who tends to look at the dark side of things, sees 23 chiefly as the death number. In this connection, it is interesting that the 23rd Psalm is standard reading at funerals.
Heathcote Williams, editor of The Fanatic, met Burroughs when he (Williams) was 23 years old and living at an address with a 23 in it. When Burroughs told him, gloomily, “23 is the death number”, Williams was impressed; but he was more impressed when he discovered for the first time that the building across the street from his house was a morgue.
Bonnie and Clyde, the most popular bank-robbers of the 1930s, lived out most American underground myths quite consciously, and were shot to death by the Texas Rangers on 23 May, 1934. Their initials, B and C, have the Cabalistic values of 2–3.
W, the 23rd letter of the English alphabet, pops up continually in these matters. The physicist who collaborated with Carl Jung on the theory of synchronicity was Wolfgang Pauli. William Burroughs first called the 23 mystery to my attention. Dutch Schultz’s assassin was Charlie Workman. Adam Weishaupt and / or George Washington, the two (or one) chief source of 18th-century Illuminism, also come to mind. Will Shakespeare was born and died on 23 April.
(I have found some interesting 46s – 46 is 2 x 23 – but mostly regard them as irrelevant. Nonetheless, the 46th Psalm has a most peculiar structure. The 46th word from the beginning is shake and the 46th word from the end, counting back, is spear.)
Through various leads, I have become increasingly interested in Sir Francis Bacon as a possibly ringleader of the 17th-century Illuminati (Some evidence for this can be found in Francis Yates’s excellent The Rosicrucian Enlightenment). Bacon, in accord with custom, was allowed to pick the day for his own elevation to knighthood by Elizabeth I. He picked 23 July.
Dr John Lilly refers to “the crew that never rests” as Cosmic Coincidence Control Center and warns that they pay special attention to those who pay attention to them. I conclude this account with the most mind-boggling 23s to have intersected my own life.
On 23 July 1973, I had the impression that I was being contacted by some sort of advanced intellect from the system of the double star Sirius. I have had odd psychic experiences of that sort for many years, and I always record them carefully, but refuse to take any of them literally, until or unless supporting evidence of an objective nature turns up. This particular experience, however, was especially staggering, both intellectually and emotionally, so I spent the rest of the day at the nearest large library researching Sirius. I found, among other things, that 23 July is very closely associated with that star.
On 23 July, ancient Egyptian priests began a series of rituals to Sirius, continuing until 8 September. Since Sirius is known as the “Dog Star”, being in the constellation Canis Major, the period 23 July – 8 September became known as “the dog days”.
My psychic “Contact” experience continued, off and on, for nearly two years, until October 1974, after which I forcibly terminated it by sheer stubborn willpower (I was getting tired of wondering whether I was specially selected for a Great Mission of interstellar import, or was just going crazy).
After two years of philosophic mulling on the subject (late 1974 – early 1976), I finally decided to tune in one more time to the Sirius–Earth transmissions, and try to produce something objective. On 23 July 1976, using a battery of yogic and shamanic techniques, I opened myself to another blast of Cosmic Wisdom and told the Transmitters that I wanted something objective this time around.
The next week, Time magazine published a full-page review of Robert KG Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which claims that contact between Earth and Sirius occurred around 4500 BC in the Near East. The 23 July festivals in Egypt were part of Temple’s evidence, but I was more amused and impressed by his middle initials, K.G., since Kallisti Gold is the brand of very expensive marijuana smoked by the hero of Illuminatus!.
The same week as that issue of Time, i.e. still one week after my 23rd experiment, Rolling Stone published a full-page advertisement for a German Rock group called Ramses. One of the group was named Winifred, which is the name of one of the four German Rock musicians in Illuminatus!, and the advertisement included a large pyramid with an eye atop it, the symbol of the Illuminati.
Of course, the eye on the pyramid was a favourite symbol of Aleister Crowley, who called himself Epopt of the Illuminati, and subtitled his magazine, The Equinox, “A Review of Scientific Illuminism”. And 2/3 equals .66666666 etc. – Crowley’s magick number repeated endlessly. Readers of this piece might find it amusing to skim through The Magical Revival and Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, two books by Kenneth Grant, a former student of Crowley’s (and note the initials K.G. again!). You will find numerous references, cloudy and occult, linking Crowley in some unspecified way with Sirius.
The actor who played Padre Pederastia in the National Theatre production of Illuminatus! informed me that he once met Crowley on a train. “Mere coincidence”, if you prefer. But the second night of the National Theatre run, the actors cajoled me into doing a walk-on as an extra in the Black Mass scene. And, dear brothers and sisters, that is how I found myself, stark naked, on the stage of the National Theatre, bawling Crowley’s slogan “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”, under the patronage of Her Majesty the Queen.
As a fortean, I am, of course, an ontological agnostic and I never believe anything literally. But I will never cease to wonder how much of this was programmed by Uncle Aleister before I was ever born, and I’m sure that last bit, my one moment on the stage of the National Theatre, was entirely Crowley’s work.
If you look up Crowley’s Confessions, you’ll find that he began the study of magick in 1898, at the age of 23.
Pretty cool memoir of a woman trying to find her place in the music industry. This isn't a tell all of the Go Go's, although it does go into their drug use, but ultimately the book avoids subjects that might prove to be sensitive with the other band members. Valentine's youth is central; on the verge of dropping out due to her mother's boundary-less parenting, making music became central to her identity. She bounces around from project to project, looking for other women play with as much as she looked for women musicians to idolize. The most devastating part of the book comes the period post breakup. Clearly, she was overindulging and ruining her relationships in the process. However, having been the rock star overrode how she saw herself and how others saw her. She was a guitar player, but music people kept wanting to make her the singer at the head of the band. When it comes to the Go Go's themselves, Valentine goes a lot into the disputes over royalties and the partying. The story suggests that there may have also been arguments about musicianship. She mentions how she had taken a more prominent role in recording, playing guitar leads in Charlotte Caffey's absence. There's also an interesting discussion about Jane Wiedlin's desire to sing lead. Valentine admits that she wished that the band could be more flexible when it came to the roles of individual members. Reading between the lines, it seems like she was frustrated playing an instrument she had only played for four years when she was the best guitar player in the band. Ultimately, the book shows an industry that expects very specific things of women.
Visual art, not music, but this is the catalog of a terrific exhibit we stumbled into at the National Museum of the American Indian in NY this summer. Decades of brilliant work by a "modern artist" who came out of a (then-constricted) Indian art tradition. A good number of images here: https://warholfoundation.org/grants/archive/oscar-howe-project/ The exhibit is currently in Portland OR, if you happen to find yourself there...
Dave Eggers - "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"
I liked it well enough, but Eggers' style (at least, in this book) can get tiresome, so I did have to dig in and commit myself to finishing it. I didn't have any pre-knowledge of the story or its history and context going in, so it's been interesting to see some of the original reviews and some of the retrospectives written over the last handful of years. Glad I read it. Kind of interested to check out one of his fiction works.
This was my intro to Abe. Just one of those books I pulled off the shelf during an afternoon spent browsing a favorite bookstore, chosen for no particular reason, a chance thing, but after reading the first few pages, I added it to the stack I'd bring home with me. This is going to be one of those books that keep my sense of reason and imagination generating epiphanies, even if, ultimately, they have nothing in common with the author's intent. It was slow reading (not in a bad way). Took me over a month to finish, and it's a short novel. But every sentence seemed to have meaning, and his kaleidoscopic explosions of vocabulary invited a pleasant, luxurious pace to drink it all in. I've got a few other Abe books lined up, and if the next one affects me not unlike The Box Man, I am certain I'll be buying everything he's got with his name on it.
This was my intro to Abe. Just one of those books I pulled off the shelf during an afternoon spent browsing a favorite bookstore, chosen for no particular reason, a chance thing, but after reading the first few pages, I added it to the stack I'd bring home with me. This is going to be one of those books that keep my sense of reason and imagination generating epiphanies, even if, ultimately, they have nothing in common with the author's intent. It was slow reading (not in a bad way). Took me over a month to finish, and it's a short novel. But every sentence seemed to have meaning, and his kaleidoscopic explosions of vocabulary invited a pleasant, luxurious pace to drink it all in. I've got a few other Abe books lined up, and if the next one affects me not unlike The Box Man, I am certain I'll be buying everything he's got with his name on it.
Thanks for the heads up, this sounds like just the thing for my book club. That's a nice edition but for my eyes' sake I've just bought the kindle version of the Peguin Classic. Is that analogous to streaming vs. buying vinyl I wonder?
LATE EDIT - And the book group chose it as their next read - what will they think I wonder?
This was my intro to Abe. Just one of those books I pulled off the shelf during an afternoon spent browsing a favorite bookstore, chosen for no particular reason, a chance thing, but after reading the first few pages, I added it to the stack I'd bring home with me. This is going to be one of those books that keep my sense of reason and imagination generating epiphanies, even if, ultimately, they have nothing in common with the author's intent. It was slow reading (not in a bad way). Took me over a month to finish, and it's a short novel. But every sentence seemed to have meaning, and his kaleidoscopic explosions of vocabulary invited a pleasant, luxurious pace to drink it all in. I've got a few other Abe books lined up, and if the next one affects me not unlike The Box Man, I am certain I'll be buying everything he's got with his name on it.
Thanks for the heads up, this sounds like just the thing for my book club. That's a nice edition but for my eyes' sake I've just bought the kindle version of the Peguin Classic. Is that analogous to streaming vs. buying vinyl I wonder?
My eyes are pretty bad, too. Plus, I always take a book with me to the restaurants or bars, and in the evenings, the lights are (understandably) quite low. So, what I've begun doing is, in addition to buying the paperback (which I will always do because I love holding the paperback and seeing it on my shelf), I've also purchased a tablet and use my local library's digital license to legally download a digital copy of the book. That way, if I know I'm going somewhere where the light will be difficult to read (or, similarly, if the paperback edition has tiny print), then I've got the tablet/digital option.
I'm not sure if the digital payout for books is equatable to that of streaming music. My basic understanding is the digital book market is kinder to authors than musicians. My own opinion is, if you're buying the digital version of the book, it's more akin to buying a digital download vs. a CD. Musicians make money off of digital downloads. If, instead, you read the book for free because it came as part of an Amazon Prime account, in that instance, the author might be (probably is) getting screwed. Getting it free under those conditions seems more comparable to Spotify streaming.
I would think "The Box Man" will inspire a lot of open conversations in a book club setting. Even after I finished the book, I'm still not sure if my interpretation of what happened and why is what the author intended or simply a reflection of how I'm wired and how life has shaped me in the interim. I've got "The Ruined Map" targeted as the Abe book I'll dive into next.
If, instead, you read the book for free because it came as part of an
Amazon Prime account, in that instance, the author might be (probably
is) getting screwed. Getting it free under those conditions seems more
comparable to Spotify streaming.
To get "free" e-books you have to subscribe to "Kindle Unlimited" (for $10 a month) which pays authors by individual pages read. The idea is that if you have a 100-page book and 100 people read the whole thing, the author gets somewhere around $1,000 — which is probably a lot better than Spotify, though I guess it really depends on how much effort the author/musician puts in.
In other words, the idea is to not reward fake/talentless authors for writing terrible books that people only read one or two pages out of before moving on to another one. So what the fake "authors" tried for a while instead was to format their books with only ~25 words per page instead of 250, but it looks like the Amazon folks have gotten that mostly under control now. I'm sure there are other ways to game the system, but I haven't studied it myself.
Spotify, meanwhile, has 3,000,000 "creators" but 90% of their streams are generated by just 50,000 of those creators (i.e., better-known recording artists). It'd be fair to assume that those 50,000 get a better per-stream deal, but it's a black box so nobody really knows. As you've already indicated, Spotify has been terrible for musicians — in fact, the only ones who have (arguably) benefited from it are people who record soft, pleasant background music, especially piano stuff. If you can get a few tracks of that into a popular playlist, you can make a fair amount of money because so-called "lean-back listeners" will just run those things on repeat, all day long, and they don't really care who the musicians are.
Supposedly Kindle Unlimited doesn't have a multi-tiered payout system, but I guess they could always be lying.
A quick, breezy read. More like an expanded character sketch than a plot-driven narrative. As someone who has spent most of my life confused by and struggling to grapple the basic laws of living a life, it was very easy for me to connect with the main character right from page one.
"Posthuman Dada Guide is a how-to book on practical living in our posthuman society, all by way of analyzing an imagined 1916 chess game between Tristan Tzara, the father of Dada, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. There has been an epic game going on in Zurich’s Café de la Terrasse for more than 100 years, even if communism looks to have died and Dada is stronger than ever. Both the poet and the communist aren’t aware that they’re playing for the entire globe as they face off on a chessboard."
I just wrapped up two books. I tend to read one fiction and one non-fiction concurrently. I like the non-fiction first thing in the morning for some reason.
"Junkie Business" by Lee Hoffer is brief ethnography of homeless and drug culture specific to Denver's LoDo transformation in the 90s. Basically my home turf during those times.
"Why Did I Ever" is my first read of Mary Robison. She landed on my radar because I discovered Jenny Offill's "Dept. of Speculation" and looked into other writers who utilize the minimalist style, and this book was pretty much the unanimous recommendation. Pretty much planning on scooping up everything else by Robison.
I was playing a board game a couple of weeks ago - https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/192153/pandemic-reign-cthulhu which I recommend, it's fun - and the "who starts" condition was "who has most recently read a horror novel", which reminded me it was on my wishlist after a recommendation from a friend.
Not sure if this was my first Bukowski. Maybe I read something of his way back in the day, perhaps it was a novel or maybe I gave his poetry a spin. "Post Office" was fine. Not really sure why it's been lauded as much as it has. Perhaps there's some significance that is specific to the time it was released and the fiction novel environment at the time. But there really didn't seem anything special about the book. I enjoyed it just fine, but, thankfully, it was a quick read.
A young man, fresh out of school, needs a job as one does. Most people gets a job working for the state. He hooks up a gig working for the Ministry of Dreams, one of the Ottoman Empire's more curious and mysterious government branches.
One of the best things I've ever read. Plus, he's bird-of-feather writer for me personally, bringing together a confluence of grim fatalism and absurd comedy, while also toying with cadence and delivery.
The synopsis isn't quite accurate, though it definitely addresses a component of the book. The story is about carrying trauma with us, and how we (we = both characters and readers) are able to simultaneously connect with its horror while safely detaching sufficiently from it so as to acknowledge the nuanced effects cast out into life, and perhaps even identify moments of humor.
Difficult to find a copy, but if you happen upon one, you should scoop it up.
Man sitting at home on a normal evening. A woman enters. The woman looks exactly like his wife, smells like his wife, sounds like his wife, behaves like his wife, but he's absolutely certain this is not his wife.
Man sitting at home on a normal evening. A woman enters. The woman looks exactly like his wife, smells like his wife, sounds like his wife, behaves like his wife, but he's absolutely certain this is not his wife.
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Clbuttic!
23 enigma
The 23 Phenomenon
By Robert Anton Wilson
May 2007
I first heard of the 23 enigma from William S Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.
Burroughs began collecting odd 23s after this gruesome synchronicity, and after 1965 I also began collecting them. Many of my weird 23s were incorporated into the trilogy Illuminatus! which I wrote in collaboration with Robert J Shea in 1969–1971. I will mention only a few of them here, to give a flavour to those benighted souls who haven’t read Illuminatus! yet:
In conception, Mom and Dad each contribute 23 chromosomes to the fœtus. DNA, the carrier of the genetic information, has bonding irregularities every 23rd Angstrom. Aleister Crowley, in his Cabalistic Dictionary, defines 23 as the number of “life” or “a thread”, hauntingly suggestive of the DNA life-script. On the other hand, 23 has many links with termination: in telegraphers’ code, 23 means “bust” or “break the line”, and Hexagram 23 in I Ching means “breaking apart”. Sidney Carton is the 23rd man guillotined in the old stage productions of A Tale of Two Cities. (A few lexicographers believe this is the origin of the mysterious slang expression “23 Skiddoo!”.)
Some people are clusters of bloody synchronicities in 23. Burroughs discovered that the bootlegger “Dutch Schultz” (real name: Arthur Flegenheimer) had Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll assassinated on 23rd Street in New York when Coll was 23 years old. Schultz himself was assassinated on 23 October. Looking further into the Dutch Schultz case, I found that Charlie Workman, the man convicted of shooting Schultz, served 23 years of a life sentence and was then paroled.
Prof. Hans Seisel of the University of Chicago passed the following along to Arthur Koestler, who published it in The Challenge of Chance. Seisel’s grandparents had a 23 in their address, his mother had 23 both as a street number and apartment number, Seisel himself once had 23 as both his home address and his law office address, etc. While visiting Monte Carlo, Seisel’s mother read a novel, Die Liebe der Jeannie Ney, in which the heroine wins a great deal by betting on 23 at roulette. Mother tried betting on 23 and it came up on the second try.
Adolf Hitler was initiated into the Vril Society (which many consider a front for the Illuminati) in 1923. The Morgan Bank (which is regarded as the financial backer of the Illuminati by the John Birch Society) is at 23 Wall Street in Manhattan. When Illuminatus! was turned into a play, it premiered in Liverpool on 23 November (which is also Harpo Marx’s birthday). Ken Campbell, producer of Illuminatus!, later found, on page 223 of Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, a weird dream about Liverpool, which Campbell says describes the street intersection of the theatre where Illuminatus! opened (Jung, of course, was the first psychologist to study weird coincidences of this sort and to name them synchronicities). Campbell also claims that Hitler lived briefly in Liverpool when he was 23 years old, but I haven’t found the reference for that.
Recently, I was invited to join an expedition to the Bermuda Triangle. I declined because of other commitments, but “the crew that never rests” (Sir Walter Scott’s name for the Intelligence – or idiocies – who keep pestering us with this kind of phenomenon) refused to let me off the hook that easily. A few days after the expedition left, I turned on the television and caught an advertisement for the new film, Airport 77. The advertisement began with an actor shouting “Flight 23 is down in the Bermuda Triangle!”
A week later, Charles Berlitz, author of The Bermuda Triangle, claimed he had found a submerged pyramid “twice the size of the pyramids of Cheops” in the waters down there. You will find that monstrous edifice described in Illuminatus!, and it is specifically said to be “twice the size of the pyramid of Cheops” – but Shea and I thought we were writing fiction when we composed that passage in 1971. In 1977, Berlitz claims it is real.
I now have almost as many weird 23s in my files as Fort once had records of rains of fish, and people are always sending me new ones.
Euclid’s Geometry begins with 23 axioms.
As soon as I became seriously intrigued by collecting weird 23s, one of my best friends died – on 23 December.
My two oldest daughters were born on 23 August and 23 February respectively.
According to Omar Garrison’s Tantra: The Yoga of Sex, in addition to the well-known 28-day female sex cycle, there is also a male sex cycle of 23 days.
Burroughs, who tends to look at the dark side of things, sees 23 chiefly as the death number. In this connection, it is interesting that the 23rd Psalm is standard reading at funerals.
Heathcote Williams, editor of The Fanatic, met Burroughs when he (Williams) was 23 years old and living at an address with a 23 in it. When Burroughs told him, gloomily, “23 is the death number”, Williams was impressed; but he was more impressed when he discovered for the first time that the building across the street from his house was a morgue.
Bonnie and Clyde, the most popular bank-robbers of the 1930s, lived out most American underground myths quite consciously, and were shot to death by the Texas Rangers on 23 May, 1934. Their initials, B and C, have the Cabalistic values of 2–3.
W, the 23rd letter of the English alphabet, pops up continually in these matters. The physicist who collaborated with Carl Jung on the theory of synchronicity was Wolfgang Pauli. William Burroughs first called the 23 mystery to my attention. Dutch Schultz’s assassin was Charlie Workman. Adam Weishaupt and / or George Washington, the two (or one) chief source of 18th-century Illuminism, also come to mind. Will Shakespeare was born and died on 23 April.
(I have found some interesting 46s – 46 is 2 x 23 – but mostly regard them as irrelevant. Nonetheless, the 46th Psalm has a most peculiar structure. The 46th word from the beginning is shake and the 46th word from the end, counting back, is spear.)
Through various leads, I have become increasingly interested in Sir Francis Bacon as a possibly ringleader of the 17th-century Illuminati (Some evidence for this can be found in Francis Yates’s excellent The Rosicrucian Enlightenment). Bacon, in accord with custom, was allowed to pick the day for his own elevation to knighthood by Elizabeth I. He picked 23 July.
Dr John Lilly refers to “the crew that never rests” as Cosmic Coincidence Control Center and warns that they pay special attention to those who pay attention to them. I conclude this account with the most mind-boggling 23s to have intersected my own life.
On 23 July 1973, I had the impression that I was being contacted by some sort of advanced intellect from the system of the double star Sirius. I have had odd psychic experiences of that sort for many years, and I always record them carefully, but refuse to take any of them literally, until or unless supporting evidence of an objective nature turns up. This particular experience, however, was especially staggering, both intellectually and emotionally, so I spent the rest of the day at the nearest large library researching Sirius. I found, among other things, that 23 July is very closely associated with that star.
On 23 July, ancient Egyptian priests began a series of rituals to Sirius, continuing until 8 September. Since Sirius is known as the “Dog Star”, being in the constellation Canis Major, the period 23 July – 8 September became known as “the dog days”.
My psychic “Contact” experience continued, off and on, for nearly two years, until October 1974, after which I forcibly terminated it by sheer stubborn willpower (I was getting tired of wondering whether I was specially selected for a Great Mission of interstellar import, or was just going crazy).
After two years of philosophic mulling on the subject (late 1974 – early 1976), I finally decided to tune in one more time to the Sirius–Earth transmissions, and try to produce something objective. On 23 July 1976, using a battery of yogic and shamanic techniques, I opened myself to another blast of Cosmic Wisdom and told the Transmitters that I wanted something objective this time around.
The next week, Time magazine published a full-page review of Robert KG Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which claims that contact between Earth and Sirius occurred around 4500 BC in the Near East. The 23 July festivals in Egypt were part of Temple’s evidence, but I was more amused and impressed by his middle initials, K.G., since Kallisti Gold is the brand of very expensive marijuana smoked by the hero of Illuminatus!.
The same week as that issue of Time, i.e. still one week after my 23rd experiment, Rolling Stone published a full-page advertisement for a German Rock group called Ramses. One of the group was named Winifred, which is the name of one of the four German Rock musicians in Illuminatus!, and the advertisement included a large pyramid with an eye atop it, the symbol of the Illuminati.
Coincidence? Synchronicity? Higher Intelligence? Higher Idiocy?
Of course, the eye on the pyramid was a favourite symbol of Aleister Crowley, who called himself Epopt of the Illuminati, and subtitled his magazine, The Equinox, “A Review of Scientific Illuminism”. And 2/3 equals .66666666 etc. – Crowley’s magick number repeated endlessly. Readers of this piece might find it amusing to skim through The Magical Revival and Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, two books by Kenneth Grant, a former student of Crowley’s (and note the initials K.G. again!). You will find numerous references, cloudy and occult, linking Crowley in some unspecified way with Sirius.
The actor who played Padre Pederastia in the National Theatre production of Illuminatus! informed me that he once met Crowley on a train. “Mere coincidence”, if you prefer. But the second night of the National Theatre run, the actors cajoled me into doing a walk-on as an extra in the Black Mass scene. And, dear brothers and sisters, that is how I found myself, stark naked, on the stage of the National Theatre, bawling Crowley’s slogan “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”, under the patronage of Her Majesty the Queen.
As a fortean, I am, of course, an ontological agnostic and I never believe anything literally. But I will never cease to wonder how much of this was programmed by Uncle Aleister before I was ever born, and I’m sure that last bit, my one moment on the stage of the National Theatre, was entirely Crowley’s work.
If you look up Crowley’s Confessions, you’ll find that he began the study of magick in 1898, at the age of 23.
If or When I call - by Will Johnson (solo, Centro-Matic, South San Gabriel, etc.)