Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Blog, Internet resources, online reading groups, articles and interviews, Illuminatus! info.

Sunday, October 1, 2023

A RAW home, and a mailing comment

 


Above photo posted on X by Adrian Legg,  who writes, "Bob's old residence address in Dalkey, County Dublin, looking splendid @RAWilson23."

Unrelated: 

I've been plugging away on my Robert Shea anthology, and part of that work is going through old issues of "Tlaloc Grinned," the fanzine Shea wrote for The Golden APA. (The title of the zine is an Illuminatus! reference; early in the trilogy a woman named Sasparilla "either saw, or imagined she saw, a sinister kind of tight grin, or grimace, cross the face of the gigantic statue of Tlaloc, the rain god.") Much of Shea's zines consisted of mailing comments, i.e. comments about zines written by other members of the apa (such as Arthur Hlavaty, founder of The Golden APA). (For more on the Golden APA and Shea's and Wilson's participation in it, please see this interview.) In one zine, Shea refers to "Tlaloc Grinned" as "The apazine of Pre-Columbian Pan-Secular Pagan Humanism." 

Anyway, when Shea died and Wilson wrote about him in Cosmic Trigger 3, Wilson recalled his visits to Shea's home in Illinois after Wilson had left Chicago.

So I thought I would share a mailing comment Shea wrote to Wilson in the January 1988 issue of "Tlaloc Grinned": "Chicago seemed more like home to us, too, with you visiting. I get more interesting, new ideas in a few hours of talking with  you than I get in six months of my day-to-day life."

3 comments:

supergee said...

Bernadette’s family also lived in the Chicago area in the 80s, so we would see him every time we visited them. In 1984 he performed an unofficial wedding for Bernadette and me, complete with reading from Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders. It took.

Spookah said...

Do you mean that you are putting together a Robert Shea anthology?
If so, would that be just for yourself, or are there plans on getting it published somehow?

One can only appreciate the efforts you make in keeping Bob Shea's work and memory alive, Tom.

Cleveland Okie (Tom Jackson) said...

Thanks, Spookah, more soon!