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Illuminating
Feb. 23rd, 2014 11:11 amI read Illuminatus!, a volume at a time, as soon as each appeared (1975). I was looking forward to it because I was a fan of Robert Anton Wilson's writings from The Realist, and I was not disappointed. It was a book about sex, drugs, rock & roll, metaphysics, gnosis, liberty, skepticism, conspiracy theories, and wiseass. As I said at the time, if they'd included pro football, they'd have it all.
I didn't agree with all of it. I had (and have) an attitude that goes along with the science fiction I grew up with: seeing the material world as a series of problems to be solved. Illuminatus! is a polyvocal work that doesn't give Right Answers, but my approach was more likely to be associated with the bad Illuminati, while the good guys were more likely to identify with the part of themselves they share with the material world. I thought about that, I learned from it, and I still don't agree with all of it.
The book programmed me in ways that were not obvious for months, even years, just as it had promised. I started something called the Illuminatus! Nut Cult because nobody else had. I joined fanzine fandom and corrupted as many of them as I could. I fell in love with a Lovecraftian, and remain with her. I met the authors, whom I liked, and I read and enjoyed later work by them. They admitted that the book was half bullshit, but they were never sure exactly which half. Me neither.
Tom Jackson has a site called RAWIllumination that will begin an online reread of the trilogy tomorrow. You are all invited.
I didn't agree with all of it. I had (and have) an attitude that goes along with the science fiction I grew up with: seeing the material world as a series of problems to be solved. Illuminatus! is a polyvocal work that doesn't give Right Answers, but my approach was more likely to be associated with the bad Illuminati, while the good guys were more likely to identify with the part of themselves they share with the material world. I thought about that, I learned from it, and I still don't agree with all of it.
The book programmed me in ways that were not obvious for months, even years, just as it had promised. I started something called the Illuminatus! Nut Cult because nobody else had. I joined fanzine fandom and corrupted as many of them as I could. I fell in love with a Lovecraftian, and remain with her. I met the authors, whom I liked, and I read and enjoyed later work by them. They admitted that the book was half bullshit, but they were never sure exactly which half. Me neither.
Tom Jackson has a site called RAWIllumination that will begin an online reread of the trilogy tomorrow. You are all invited.
Our founder
Mar. 31st, 2012 08:03 amNew improved Robert Anton Wilson Web site
Thanx to (who else?) RAW Illumination.
A relevant quote:
Thanx to (who else?) RAW Illumination.
A relevant quote:
The head of the Sinn Fein (shin fayn) party is one Gerry Adams, who is widely believed (I might say universally believed) to be the head also of the I.R.A., although it is libelous to say so explicitly. There is actually a law against interviewing him on television (!) although he may paradoxically be interviewed in newspapers (!!). He says the Church sucks, capitalism sucks, all the other parties suck, and “armed struggle” is the only answer, although he denies that he is involved in it. There is also an Ecology Party and an Ecologist Party, but they get so little publicity that I have not discovered what vital ideological difference distinguishes them.
Whatever one thinks of all this, it is at least less monotonous and more entertaining than the two-party system in the U.S.
Remembering Robert Anton Wilson
Thanx to A Building Roam
Bonus quote:
Thanx to A Building Roam
Bonus quote:
Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ‘progress,’ everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, ‘Disobedience was man’s Original Virtue
