Comments on: Goldwag: Books that inspire me

By: Keith

Keith — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Illuminatus! and The Crying of Lot 49 are two of my favorites. I read Iluminatus! when I was 16 and it completely warped my brain, but in a good way.

By: dr

dr — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thank you for reminding me of Frank Edwards; my collection of his books mysteriously disappeared sometime in the early 1970s. (I blame armies of telekinetic ants.) I still have all my Velikovsky, however.

By: David Pescovitz

David Pescovitz — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I miss Robert Anton Wilson a lot. He was a big influence on me and was also a contributor to the original bOING bOING ‘zine. He’s one of BB’s patron saints! Fnord!

By: BattyMcDougall

BattyMcDougall — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Who doesn’t miss Bob. Seriously, he would have loved everything that’s going down these days. And I’m quite sure he’d have a great deal to say about it.
Hail Eris.

By: shelby

shelby — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I had definitely been opened up to the ideas of the Illuminatus! trilogy before I read it, one empty finals week in college. It really made everything click into place, though. Not in a ‘we’re surrounded by conspiracies’ sense, but more in a ‘things happen’ sense. I’ve liked to say I was an atheist taoist discordian ever since.

By: bokonon

bokonon — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

neat article! thanks! I’m glad you mentioned Pale Fire…untrustworthy narrators are a gem in fiction. Johnny Truant’s untrustworthiness is called into question several times in House of Leaves. My personal favorite “questionable narrator” is from John Lanchester’s Debt to Pleasure; it reminds me of Pale Fire quite a bit.

By: Hugh

Hugh — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

You and James Randi share a ‘hood? That’s too fantastic a conincidence to be explainable by conventional physics.

By: senorglory

senorglory — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Midnight’s Children is funny. Which I didn’t know to expect.

By: planettom

planettom — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The title IMPOSSIBLE: YET IT HAPPENED! reminds me of another book that fascinated me in grade school, STRANGELY ENOUGH! by C.B. Colby. Relatively recently I learned that the book was a Scholastic Abridged version of a larger book from the 1940s. I’d like to hunt down the longer version.

By: revelshade

revelshade — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

“Conspiracy theory is the sophistication of the ignorant.”

Per Wikipedia the author of that quote, Richard Grenier, was a neocon best known for bashing Gandhi in a film review, but he said at least one smart thing in his life. This remains the single most insightful and concise statement I have ever read about this kind of thinking.

By: fellwalker

fellwalker — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The world just gets smaller.

I logged onto this thread to expound a bit on William Corliss & the Sourcebook Project, a must-visit site for anyone interested in anamolies, & out pops the name of Richard Grenier.

I was Richard Grenier’s literary agent for a time during a much earlier phase of my life. I tried to sell a novel of his about westerners making a movie in the Arab world. It was prescient (which I didn’t realize at the time), completely politically incorrect & wickedly funny. No one would touch it in the 1970s.

I just did some googling, & a version of the novel seems to have been published as “The Marrakesh One-Two” some years after my efforts with it.

Richard was a warm, smart, funny man. We were politically opposed in many areas but I enjoyed every conversation we had. He was the kind of guy who could use his wit & intelligence to make you consider his point of view. I’m saddened to see that he left this world in 2002.

Sorry for wandering off topic, but seeing his name brought back a flood of memories.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Not if you’ve seen Ricky Jay.