RAW Bookplate

I don't know if his library ever actually got cataloged, but I was asked to scribble this up way back when (Late '06),  in anticipation of the project. 

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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

Occupy Thyself!

Other Tales

The new dynamic 'looks' for Blogger do have a tantalising way of revealing old posts, so it seems worth a try. It does seem a shame to lose all the great links we accumulated down the right hand sidebar - of like-minded sites, interesting places to visit, etc. For some reason the dynamic views shed all that, in their desperation to get rid of the linear blog format.

You may find this week that the blog occasionally displays with the new dynamic templates.

Here's Uncle Bill, who I guess might encourage the cutting up and re-mixing of the site....

 

Myles from Dublin

"I considered it desirable that he should know nothing about me but it was even better if he knew several things that were quite wrong."     Flann O'Brien

This coming weekend, if you can find your way to Dublin, you would have a chance to attend a talk on Flann O'Brien and 'Pataphysics - @ Flann100.   It forms part of a celebration of that notional 100th birthday that dead people seem to celebrate these days.   [I still find it a bit strange to celebrate a day when someone 'would have been' 71 - John Lennon - or 100, say].  Perhaps a subjunctive birthday?  - [Later: Nah, I had to look it up...'would have been' looks like the 'perfect conditional' of the verb 'to be'. Ahem]

Although Flann O'Brien's work can prove an acquired taste, and varies in quality quite wildly, I guess readers of this blog might well enjoy The Third Policeman.  Whether the strange take on Atomic Theory has anything to do with Erwin Schrödinger spending his time in Dublin at the Institute for Advanced Studies - hard to know.

And his best known work At-Swim-Two-Birds still bears re-reading. It amused James Joyce.

Find all his books at The Dalkey Archive Press
Myles na gCopaleen, aka Flann O’Brien, aka Brian O’Nolan

Robert Anton Wilson references him fairly frequently, as also his creation de Selby - see, for instance,
The Celtic Roots of Quantum Theory - and footnotes throughout The Widow's Son.

And for something about De Selby and the link to 'Pataphysics, check out Borsky's piece written for the Maybe Quarterly, written in memory of Bob.

Patapsychology and Maybe Logic

The dubious ascend of Mount Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson made the gesture of dying [2] on the 14 décervelage 134 E.P. Phlegmatic as ever, the last comment on his Blog five days previously was: "Please excuse my levity...but I just can't take dying seriously".

2. 'Pataphysicians only lose their earthly shelf when dying; as such a physical death is considered an illusion, a pure formal matter; and it is said they 'make the gesture of dying' as if saluting when leaving the stage.

The Third Policeman appears in Lost

 

Updike in The New Yorker 2008

 

Recent article in TLS

 

Scriptorium on O'Brien

 

The Guardian on Flann O'Brien

 

100 Celebrations on Facebook

 

IFOBS celebration - July 2011

The Atomic Theory of Bicycles


“The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles...when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.”

                                                                                                     - Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

And all that, long before Albert Hofmann's fateful bicycle ride...                           Jarry on a bicycle   

Asynchronous links

Could be well off the pace here, but just noticed that DeOxy seem to have re-arranged their RAW page.

Full of interesting links to pursue.                                                                                               FNORD