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Saturday, July 12, 2014

Michael Johnson on Tom Robbins

Michael Johnson has a blog post up about Tom Robbins and David Foster Wallace. I still haven't gotten around to trying DFW, but I did read Robbins, although it was something like 30 years ago! But I remembered liking him.

Michael writes,

TR put in with unalloyed Tibetan-tinged "crazy wisdom" long ago, even before he met Joseph Campbell and toured Mexico and Central America and later even more far-flung regions of the globe. He still celebrates July 26, 1963 - the day he first did LSD - as the most important day of his life, so much so that it actuated him to quit his job by "calling in well" and saying he was staying home, and that prior to that day he had been ill.

I am holding back on willy-nilly speculations about naivete, "belief" and especially, the albatross of Ego...

Don't hold back Michael! But he writes enough to make me wish I still read Robbins.

Here is Tom Robbins talking about Robert Anton Wilson:



And there's a RAW mention in this interview, suggest that TR and RAW were friends. "Robert Anton Wilson has mentioned to me that he thinks the Illuminati were behind the scenes in 'Still Life with Woodpecker.' He thinks that the Illuminati has historically been engaged in maintaining and circulating the pyramid symbol through both the dollar bill and the Camel pack design. Thomas Jefferson and a nameless lithographer were two redheads selected in carrying out the tasks.

1 comment:

michael said...

Thanks for the nod, Tom.

Tom Robbins puts RAW in the non-African faculty at Timbuktu University in _Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas_:

(Larry Diamond is giving a slide show about the University):

"The faculty?" you ask.

"Yes and no. Yes and no. That's Robert Anton Wilson, front row, left end, and on _his_ left is Terence McKenna, Diane di Prima, and, I believe, John Lilly. You can recognize Timothy Leary in the back row next to Carlos Castaneda - only extant picture of him, by the way - and there's Andrei Codrescu, Ted Joans, uh, Rupert Sheldrake, Fritjof Capra, Gary Snyder, and, well, several mathematicians, quantum physicists, and artists you probably never heard of." (p.240)