A RAW tribute page

Dylan Fogle is a fan of The Toasters, a ska band with a loyal following. This pleases me, because I like The Toasters, too. But I mention him because Dylan also has a Robert Anton Wilson tribute page at his Discordian Zen Web site. It includes videos, quotations, links, useful lists and other material.

Should ILLUMINATUS! be a movie?

At Pegasus News, apparently a news site based in Dallas, Todd Maternowski composes a list of "11 Books/toys/comics that should be made into movies." ILLUMINATUS! makes the list.

He writes, "#5 - The Illuminatus Trilogy: Robert Anton Wilson's epic counterculture fantasy/detective/occult/mystery/sci-fi novel of drugs, sex, magic, Nazis and intergalactic conspiracies makes The Da Vinci Code look like a barcode on a box of tampons. There's simply never been a more entertaining and enlightening conspiracy story ever made, period."

There's an illustration for the entry, apparently showing a group of devils, which says, "Just think of the marketing toy-ins and Happy Meal toys!"

ILLUMINATUS! seems more of a miniseries to me, given the length and complexity of the work, but I don't pretend to be a movie expert.

RAW on national TV

In his essay, "Ecology, Malthus and Machiavelli," in the book Right Where You Are Sitting Now, Robert Anton Wilson wrote that in 1980 he decided to vote in a presidential election for the first time since 1964. After eliminating other candidates (including the Libertarian candidate, Ed Clark, because "I am not that kind of Libertarian, really; I don't hate poor people"),

"I finally voted for John Anderson, just because his speeches (with which I did not always agree) were so wonderfully weird. 'The Doonesbury Candidate' did not seem to me to be trying to win, but just having a hell of a good time saying what he really thought in front of huge audiences. I identified with him. I have always wanted to get my ideas on television, too; and I figured that that was what was motivating him."

While Wilson never got his ideas on TV in a big way, he did appear on national TV at least once, on "Politically Incorrect," apparently in 1996.

RAW on consciousness

The Robert Anton Wilson Twitter fee (@RAWilson23) keeps coming up with cool quotes. Here's a recent one:

"My hunch is that consciousness is a non-local function of the universe as a whole, and our brains are only local transceivers."

RAW on artists and self-confidence

"You cannot have too high an opinion of yourself because the world will always strive to correct you. The only thing most people hate more than success is self-confidence-a warning signal that you might be a success soon. This is not what they teach you in Sunday School, but it happens to be true: at any evidence that you might be a success, the envious will do every-thing in their power to destroy you. Therefore, there is no chance at all that a high self-esteem will go unchallenged; it will be challenged on all sides, daily. On the other hand, if you have a low opinion of yourself, nobody will ever correct it. You will have it for life unless you correct it yourself."

The entire essay, "Making It As a Writer," is well worth reading.

A chronology on the bloodline of Jesus, the Grail, etc.

Here is an interesting Internet curiosity — The Grailhunter's Timeline 1944-2019, which chronicles "modern day authors and other researchers of the Knights Templar, Oak Island, Rennes-le-Château, The Da Vinci Code, the Gospel of Judas, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the Shugborough Monument, the Newport Tower, Rosslyn Chapel, the Jesus Bloodline theory, and much more: year by year, often month by month, for the last fifty years."

It's put together by George Smart, who wrote a book called The Knights Templar Chronology. Mr. Smart, who evidently has a sense of humor, brags that the book sold "literally dozens of copies."

Oddly enough, although Mr. Smart mentions Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, he doesn't mention the first novel to cover these topics, The Widow's Son by Robert Anton Wilson. These topics also are covered in the essay "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary," in RAW's rather good collection, Email to the Universe.

News on the liberaltarian front

At various times in his life and in various places, Robert Anton Wilson sounds like an anarchist, a libertarian or a conventional Democratic Party liberal. His interests and his emphasis evidently shifted, and it would be misleading to describe him as someone who had fixed, unalterable positions throughout his long life. ("Left and Right: A Non-Euclidian Perspective" is an interesting essay on his political thought at one point.) With those disclaimers in mind, I have argued that the liberaltarian movement comes closest to closest to resembling Wilson's interests in combining liberty, a viable social welfare system, and peace. Liberaltarianism remains pretty much invisible the mainstream media, but it has been growing and taking shape as an Internet movement.

The latest example is Bleeding Heart Libertarians, a new group blog from six academics, which explores issues and definitions in the movement. If you are interested in this sort of thing, see also Will Wilkinson's blog.

Celine's laws on Wikipedia

A posting by Michael Johnson draws my attention to something I hadn't noticed: There's an article on Wikipedia on Hagbard Celine's Laws. There's also a separate entry on Celine himself.

New book on information and quantum mechanics

When I read John Horgan's review in the Wall Street Journal of James Gleick's new book, The Information, I was surprised at how many topics Robert Anton Wilson wrote about that the book discusses -- the nature of information, quantum mechanics, paradoxes, the limitations of reason. I look forward to tracking down a copy of the book.

Left libertarians, model agnosticism and RAW

Some of the material I link to in these blog posts relates directly to Robert Anton Wilson, but sometimes I link to an article because I think RAW would have been interested in it, or because I believe his fans might be.

I am about 90 percent sure that RAW would have enjoyed Jesse Walker's interview with historian Thaddeus Russell, reprinted on Reason.com from the magazine's March 2011 issue. Russell is the author of a new book, A Renegade History of the United States. Walker explains, "The book’s title deliberately echoes A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn’s retelling of the American story from a New Left perspective. But Russell’s book takes a rather different vantage point, celebrating the prostitutes who seized new freedoms for women, the gangsters whose gay bars opened spaces for same-sex liaisons, the lower-class Birmingham blacks who threw bricks at racist cops, and the consumer revolution that expanded American pleasures."

I think RAW would enjoyed Russell's thesis and his provocative ideas, but I think he would have been interested in Russell's politics. Russell is a left-libertarian. I often feel a little bored when I read about the opinions of a conservative, or a liberal, or even a libertarian, because there's seldom any chance of a surprise. The ideology has pretty well been worked out. I can easily guess what George Will or Ezra Klein will say about a given issue. The "correct answer machine" as RAW would put it is ready to provide an answer.

It seems to me that a sense of doubt arises more often with left libertarians, a sense that they may not have all of the answers. Robert Anton Wilson "was" a "libertarian" but he also was a "progressive" who supported a social safety net. (In the Mung Being interview, referenced earlier this week, Wilson advocates "Voluntary taxation: you pay for government programs you want; you don't pay a penny for any programs you don't want." But would that generate the necessary income for the kind of national health program Wilson advocated?)

In the Thaddeus Russell interview, the term "model agnosticism" is never used, but Walker skillfully presses Russell to admit that he hasn't put everything together yet. Russell observes, "You’re really homing in on the stuff that’s the trickiest things for me to deal with, that almost no one else in the world would get. (laughs) I don’t want to defend either one—the welfare state or slavery. But my ideas about them are mixed."

RAW, the Mung Being interview

Thanks to help from Michael Johnson and Mike Gathers, I now know that the interview from which yesterday's quote was extracted is "23 Questions With Robert Anton Wilson," an interview from MungBeing Magazine that can be read here. It's a very good interview.

As I seem to be talking about politics lately, I wanted to reproduce one of my favorite quotes from RAW on the subject, taken from his book Right Where You Are Sitting Now.

To me, it doesn't matter if your scapegoats are the Jews, the homosexuals, the male sex, the Masons, the Jesuits, the Welfare Parasites, the Power Elite, the female sex, the vegetarians or the Communist Party. To the extent that you need scapegoats, you simply have not got your brain programmed to work as an efficient problem-solving machine.

Show me a movement that doesn't hate somebody and I will join it at once.

Robert Anton Wilson on politics

Continuing the political theme of the next couple of posts, the @Rawilson23 Twitter feed (recommended) had the following quote on Friday: "I suspect all lines exist only in our minds — especially political lines. Universe seems more like waltzing chaos than like an account book."

I traced the quote back to this interview. I wish I could tell who did the interview and get other context -- it seems to be poorly formatted.

RAW's two right wing parties

Jesse Walker has a fascinating interview with left-libertarian historian Thaddeus Russell in the March 2011 issue of Reason magazine. More on the interview later, but for a moment I want to focus on a quote from the interview, relating it to Robert Anton Wilson's comments that the U.S. has two right wing parties. Wilson also often said that he usually didn't vote.

Russell says, "Particularly during the Obama campaign, I felt like I was on a raft in a vast ocean. I was just the only person I knew in my whole world who felt that Obama was basically a neocon and just terribly reactionary in every single way. There's not one single thing I like about him. He represents every negative strain in American history I write about."

Yesterday, I posted about how Obama's Justice Department is prosecuting a retired college professor for advocating jury nullification. Here's an article about the Obama administration spying on a New York Times reporter.