Seven Years On

I find it hard to believe that seven years have passed since I signed up to study the Illuminatus! trilogy directly with one of its authors - Robert Anton Wilson - through the Maybe Logic Academy.

Online study, remote learning, a forum - all new experiences to me, at the time.

It turned out to lead to many more study groups, and subjects, but that going deeply into one text felt like one of the most satisfying and focused of processes.

Very few books seem to warrant re-reading, but this trilogy belongs in that category, for me - like Catch-22 or Joyce's Ulysses.   I doubt I re-read them more than once a decade, as the world seems full of great new stuff - but they beckon me back at times, just as favourite movies can.

We did put up a wiki for the book (after seeing wikis for - say - Gravity's Rainbow) but it didn't really reach critical mass, and attracted a lot of spam, so turned into a high maintenance site with relatively little new input.   We also came across another and 'official' wiki for the trilogy (on Wikia), but that also seemed fairly slow moving.

With a re-read approaching, and Fuzzbuddy working on film scripts of the book(s) it seemed like a good time to review the online material, update the links, etc - so the wiki stuff has got imported into an Illuminatus! trilogy website linked to this blog for review.

It remains a work-in-progress, of course....

looking back over the forum posts, I found this exchange towards the end of the course:

9 Nov 2004    Bogus Magus:  

Little did I know, however, that I would end up treating it the way we are now - poring over the text like a Joycean scholar!

10 Nov 2004   RAW:  

 Dear Bogmag, 

Of course, I wanted at least some readers to 

pore over the text like Joyce scholars....that's
why I made it so Joycean

It has taken 29 years [plus the 5 years
lost in getting it published] but that
dream seems real at last, 

and I thank everybody