"We look for the Secret — the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever… and all the time it is carrying us about… It is the human nervous system itself."
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger
I first read Robert Anton Wilson in 1985, which also happened to be my Weirdest Summer Ever. After freshman year at college back East, I went to Berkeley and lived with my high school girlfriend in Barrington Hall, the most legendary and notorious of Berkeley's student-run co-ops, already sunk into a long sunset of countercultural haze. — Read the rest
"Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, 'My current model' — or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel — 'contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised.' In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude." — Read the rest
Some time in 1976, I went into this very hip bookstore in downtown Binghamton, New York where I lived and came across two books whose covers screamed for my attention with their flaming psychedelic designs. I picked one of them up and read the blurb on the back cover. — Read the rest
Back in the late '80s, when Gnosis Magazine was just beginning to find its audience, we were lucky enough to have Robert Anton Wilson as one of our contributors. Over the span of six issues he contributed three major articles and one book review. — Read the rest
"More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. — Read the rest
The Summer of 1979; Berkeley California. The back story of how I got here is far and away too convoluted to explain but here I am sitting on a couch in Robert Anton Wilson's living room, dumbfounded by the rapid-fire laughter and brain power of the intelligentsia bouncing off the walls around me. — Read the rest
"Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and 'progress,' everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man's refusal to bow to Authority. — Read the rest
Above: Gareth's original copies of The Illuminatus Trilogy.
"It's not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't understand it until it makes you weep." — Illuminatus!
I first discovered Robert Anton Wilson when I was 18 years old. I'd just moved to a commune in the tobacco fields of central Virginia and was working for the magazine that the community published. — Read the rest
Wilson and Krassner Display Maturity . . . Maybe
Most likely your daily newspaper didn't acknowledge the death of Robert Anton Wilson on January 11, 2007. He was 74. The prolific author and countercultural icon had been suffering from post-polio syndrome. — Read the rest
[Video Link] TubeGnosis has a fantastic collection of esoteric videos, featuring Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Carlos Castaneda, Jacques Vallee, Ram Dass, Alan Watts, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Kenneth Anger, Terence McKenna, Robert Crumb, and many more psychonauts and mutants. — Read the rest
James sent me these photos some time ago, and I just found them again. Robert Anton Wilson would have had a good chuckle seeing these!
bOING bOING was a zine that my wife Carla and I launched in 1988 to
cover comic books, cyberpunk science fiction, consciousness
technology, curious phenomena, and whatever else surprised and
delighted us. That zine, which ran for 15 issues until 1997, evolved
into the very website you're reading right now. — Read the rest
bOING bOING was a zine that my wife Carla and I launched in 1988 to
cover comic books, cyberpunk science fiction, consciousness
technology, curious phenomena, and whatever else surprised and
delighted us. That zine, which ran for 15 issues until 1997, evolved
into the very website you're reading right now. — Read the rest
bOING bOING was a zine that my wife Carla and I launched in 1988 to
cover comic books, cyberpunk science fiction, consciousness
technology, curious phenomena, and whatever else surprised and
delighted us. That zine, which ran for 15 issues until 1997, evolved
into the very website you're reading right now. — Read the rest
bOING bOING was a zine that my wife Carla and I launched in 1988 to
cover comic books, cyberpunk science fiction, consciousness
technology, curious phenomena, and whatever else surprised and
delighted us. That zine, which ran for 15 issues until 1997, evolved
into the very website you're reading right now. — Read the rest
Twenty-three years ago, my wife Carla and I came up with the idea to create bOING bOING, a zine that would cover comic books, cyberpunk science fiction, consciousness technology, curious phenomena, and
whatever else surprised and delighted us. That zine, which ran for 15 issues until 1997, evolved into the very website you're reading right now. — Read the rest
Inspired by the Modern Library's "Top 100" list, Cheryl Botchick over at the Geez Pete blog took a crack at listing his picks for the "Top 50 Essential Non-Fiction Books for Weirdos." Now, of course this is a "fool's errand," as she says, and the word "weirdo" is made of an infinite number of pocket subcultures, but it's still a list of mostly really great, inspiring, or at minimum, provocative, books (not that I've read them all). — Read the rest
Alan Moore, one of the high priests of happy mutants, gives a ringing endorsement to the public library system in this brief clip from last Saturday "Save our Libraries" international event. Moore spoke at the St. James Library in Northhampton.
Save our Libraries: Alan Moore
(Thanks, MindySan33, via Submitterator! — Read the rest
Robert Anton Wilson and his crew set up an online academy for him to teach James Joyce and other subjects to those of us who thrived off his learning and insights. Before he died, he began to invite others to teach courses through the Maybe Logic Academy, and the site has lived on. — Read the rest
