Eight reasons to join the 'Widow's Son' reading group

The online reading group for The Widow's Son begins Friday. Here are eight reasons to join us!

1. According to Eric Wagner's An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson, The Widow's Son was Robert Anton Wilson's favorite among his novels. So you'll be discussing a particularly good RAW novel.

2. Our Virgil, serving as our guide as we journey through the book, will be Gregory Arnott, who knows a lot about RAW, magick, literature, history and many other topics.

3. One of the reasons we are having the online reading group (and one reason we did The Earth Will Shake) was to encourage people to purchase the official text of the titles, the new Hilaritas Press editions put out by the Robert Anton Wilson Trust. When you purchase one of those books, the royalties go to Robert Anton Wilson's children. * (I have an old paperback of The Widow's Son but recently bought the Hilaritas ebook -- useful for searching the text).

4. Purchases of The Widow's Son also support Hilaritas Press and contribute to keeping RAW's work in print and available for new readers.  And in fact, our reading group has the imprimatur of Hilaritas Press -- see the above meme, which Rasa created for the new Hilaritas Press newsletter! 

5. Although The Widow's Son is part of a trilogy, in my opinion it works also as a stand-alone. You don't have to have already read The Earth Will Shake, although it's likely a RAW fan will want to read all three works in the  Historical Illuminatus series. RAW used to claim that all three Schroedinger's Cat books could be read in any order, and I lean toward the idea this applies to Historical Illuminatus!.

6. Discussing this book will call attention to the excellent new drawings RAW fandom MVP Bobby Campbell did for the new editions. (For more on that, see this and also this.)

7. The Widow's Son draws on the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln. Many of you probably have read the mega best seller that also drew on the book, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. So if you read both, you can contrast the two. (Also, see this blog post).

8. The Widow's Son also is a favorite book of many RAW fans. See, for example, this blog post, quoting Michael Johnson when I asked about his favorite RAW books: "The Widow's Son seems uber-RAW to me because he's working all (mostbunall?) of his favorite late 20th c. ideas into a novel set in the late 18th century. At the same time he's also doing his "historical novel" with a bit of Bildungsroman added in, PLUS he's got that whole other footnote-world counter-narrative, which captures the mad acidhead postmodernist-cum-surrealist Erisian Wilson. I love that book. He did too. He said when he wrote it — circa 1985 — he was "really hot." He wrote that one in Ireland."

* We recognize not everyone can afford to run out and buy a new book. Please check out a library book (don't overlook interlibrary loan) or get your hands on a cheap used book and join us, anyway.

Another RAW interview

One of our friends over in Albion, Nick Helweg-Larsen, wrote to me to tip me off about a Robert Anton Wilson interview that isn't online.

A book called Inside Angels and Demons, by Dan Burstein and Arne De Keijzer, is a handbook for readers who want to explore what's behind the bestselling Dan Brown novel. It's apparently part of a series; there's a Secrets of Mary Magdalene, and Secrets of Inferno is coming out this September.

Anyway, Inside Angels and Demons has an interview with Robert Anton Wilson, and it's a rather good one. I'm kind of old-fashioned about the copyright thing, so I won't try to reproduce it here, but in the spirit of fair use, here's a brief excerpt to illustration why it's worth hunting up the book.

One of your characters from the Illuminatus! Trilogy begins to see conspirational connections everywhere—in numerology (the law of fives), in history, in literature both high and low, in politics, in folklore, etc. Once you begin to accept the plausibility of a conspiracy, is this sort of free fall inevitable? What can conspiracies tell us about different modes of knowing?

RAW – I suspect a great deal, but believe nothing. After finding the law of fives everywhere, I no longer claim to know anything for certain. This has led me to formulate what I call maybe logic, in which I consider ideas not simply true or false, but in degrees of probabilities. If other conspiracy theorists learned this much, they would sound less like paranoids and people would take them more seriously.
Maybe logic is a combination of general semantics, neurolinguistic programming, and Buddhism—all three as methods of bullshit control, not as dogmas. I joined the Flat Earth Society for a year once, just to challenge myself. I didn’t learn much from that experiment but it was fun. I just preach that we’d all think and act more sanely if we had to use “maybe” a lot more often. Can you imagine a world in which Jerry Falwell hollers “Maybe Jesus was the son of God and maybe he hates gay people as violently as I do.” Or every tower in Islam resounds with “There is no God except maybe Allah and maybe Muhammad is his prophet”?

Copies of the book are available cheap at Amazon. There's a whole section in the book on the Illuminati, with contributions by George Johnson, Michael Barkun, James Wasserman and Alexandra Robbins.

Jesse Walker on conspiracy theories

Jesse Walker has an excellent post at Reason's Hit and Run blog poking holes in a New York Times piece on conspiracy theories (written by Maggie Koerth-Baker, Boing Boing's science correspondent.) A taste of Walker's piece:

Virtually everyone who has any political beliefs at all believes in at least one conspiracy theory. Imagining conspiracies is just part of how human beings tend to perceive the world: It's where our drive to find patterns meets our capacity for being suspicious, particularly when we're dealing with other nations, factions, subcultures, or layers of the social hierarchy. This habit manifests itself across the political spectrum, and it always has. And it is intensified by the fact that conspiracies, unlike many of the monsters that haunt us, do sometimes actually exist. 

Walker has a book about all this coming out soon that I can't wait to read.

Skimming through Koerth-Baker's piece, I got the name of a California history professor who writes about conspiracy theories, Kathryn S. Olmsted. When I Googled her, I found this book. a 2009 tome entitled Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theory and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. Jesse says her book is quite good, and so is her Challenging the Secret Government. 

Bonus link: Jesse Walker reviews the new Dan Brown. Excerpt:

 Brown's been around long enough by now that we should know better than to enter his books expecting graceful language or a reliable guide to the world; we might as well move on to asking if there's anything his new effort gets right. And I have to say that there is. Beneath the Dante-for-dummies lectures and the formulaic plot there's a current of sheer strangeness here: elaborate deceptions; secret clues concealed in ancient objects; science-fiction elements that slowly move to center stage; a bizarre conspiracy that is almost Fantômas-like in its unnecessarily labyrinthine details; the fact that the author clearly sympathizes with the book's nominal villain, marching right up to the edge of endorsing his actions.

Robert Anton Wilson: An influence on Dan Brown?

From SF book editor Jim Frenkel:

"I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Dan Brown, and movies like National Treasure were inspired by the Illuminatus! trilogy and other books that were inspired by some of the same earlier source material."

And Lance Bauscher, director of the "Maybe Logic" movie, says, "This whole DaVinci Code thing with Dan Brown, I mean, that's all Bob's material."

Some background: Dan Brown is of course the enormously successful author of The Da Vinci Code and other books. The Da Vinci Code, which came out in 2003, draws heavily on Holy Blood. Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. Robert Anton Wilson referenced Holy Blood, Holy Grail long before The Da Vinci Code; for example, the book is quoted at the beginning of RAW's 1982 novel, The Earth Will Shake.

Brown's Angels and Demons includes the Illuminati in the plot. The Lost Symbol involves the freemasons. There is a general tone in Brown's works of dealing with secret societies.

Brown was sued for plagiarism by Baigent and Leigh, but not Lincoln. Brown, who had been quite open and honest about the influence of Holy Blood on his own book, won the suit. (The people who sued him can only be described as ingrates, because Brown's book gave a big boost to their own.) I would guess this experience would make it even less likely that Brown would acknowledge Robert Anton Wilson's influence, if there was one.