Coincidance, Week Seven

"The Married Catholic Priests' Convention"

"Self-Reflexive Surrealist Haiku"

"The Godfathers and the Goddess"

As Robert Anton Wilson remarks, the material in "The Married Catholic Priests' Convention" and "The Godfathers and the Goddess" overlaps quite a bit.  I must confess I had different reactions to the two pieces.  The humor in the "Priests" article mostly did not work for me and the satire seemed to me heavy-handed and mean spirited.

"The Godfathers and the Goddess," on the other hand, seemed very sharp and well-written to me, very fair minded and carefully observed. It illustrates one of the points Jesse Walker makes in his new book: That many of the wildest conspiracy theories can in fact be true. Wilson, perhaps out of caution, does not even mention the "strategy of tension" theory that many terrorist bombings in Italy in the 1970s  were carried out by right-wingers who hoped that they would be blamed on the left. If you look up Licio Gelli on Wikipedia, you find a heavily-footnoted article that repeats many of the most interesting allegations made by Wilson. An interesting sentence from the Wikipedia piece: "In 1996, Gelli was nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature."

So many good sentences in the Marilyn Monroe piece. "Nobody had warned her that History is a blood sport, and the only one in which innocent bystanders are the principle victims." And then the next one: "She was as beautiful as the Parthenon by moonlight, as goofy as a surrealist painting and as hard to ignore or forget as a kangaroo in a symphony orchestra."

If you enjoy Wilson's haiku, such as this one, I have a suggestion: Follow Pipzi Williams on Twitter, a RAW fan who is very good at haiku.