OK, wow folks
A few points to touch on.
#1 This is a great example of, in the NOR’s opinion, the difference between an obit from The Guardian and The New York Times. The Guardian’s rendition of Mr. Wilson’s obit reads gracefully, gently – Like a novel from F. Scott Fitzgerald. The NYT’s just looks like its going through the motions – at times even mockingly.
#2 Mr. Wilson was the founder of the Association for Consciousness Exploration and E-Prime, dedicated to the elimination of the verb “to be” from the language in favor of something less definitive.
#3 I love that the Guardian’s obit refers to Mr. Wilson as “A prodigious smoker of marijuana”
If you’re going to do something, do it right
____________________________________________________________________
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I give you….Michael Carson of The Guardian
Robert Anton Wilson (January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007)
He turned Playboy readers’ conspiracy theories into drug-assisted cult fiction
The Guardian, Wednesday 17 January 2007
As 1960s counterculture morphed into the me-decade of the 1970s, part of any hip library was the Illuminatus trilogy, whose co-author, Robert Anton Wilson, has died aged 74. Post-polio syndrome had weakened his legs and a fall confined him to bed. The trilogy – Eye Of The Pyramid, Golden Apple, and Leviathan, all published in 1975 and co-written with Robert Shea, who died in 1994 – grew out of their experience as editors at Playboy, particularly from the Playboy Forum, readers’ letters which they answered and occasionally wrote. The steady stream of conspiracy theories they received inspired them to detail the battle of the Bavarian Illuminati, secret controllers of the world, against the Discordians, whose embrace of chaos may have owed more than a little to the paranoid uses of entropy in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon. Continue
