There's a really good new interview out of Bobby Campbell at Critical Hit Parader, a Substack newsletter written by Matt Thompson, a fellow Maybe Logic Academy alum of Bobby's.
Bobby refers to Robert Anton Wilson as "the Velvet Underground of writers," riffing on the old joke that only 100 people bought the first Velvets album, but they all went out and started a band. I often think about this analogy, too. Did I come up with it independently or did Bobby put in my brain?
In the interview, Bobby goes into a lot of interesting detail about his Tales of Illuminatus project, so if you recently pledged to the Kickstarter you'll want to read that. (It's not too late to pledge and get your own goodies.)
But my favorite part of the interview is toward the beginning, when Bobby talks about the kinds of people who like to read RAW, the readers who can deal with "this zen koan quality that requires imaginative speculation and interpretation," and with "the info-density, this embarrassment of memetic richness in his work." Bobby also talks about RAW's relationship with Discordianism and similar groups and "the context within which many people find themselves discovering RAW, which typically tends to be at some sort of crisis or transformation point." A really good discussion.
I think maybe I fall more into the first group, the ones who can deal with relatively difficult prose and lots of information. I discovered Illuminatus! when I was in college, reading mainstream writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and the more challenging, interesting science fiction writers such as Roger Zelazny and Brian Aldiss. I thought Illuminatus! was one of the best novels I had ever run across.
Critical Hit Parader is "focused on the intersection of rock music and tabletop roleplaying games."
No comments:
Post a Comment