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Showing posts from 2015

The Legend of William Hjortsberg

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              It's always a pleasure to meet someone who isn't normally recognized and tell them you know who they are and that you're an admirer of their work. Tell Tom Cruise how much you admire his work and yeah, so what else is new. He's heard it a million times. But I was at a party and the host introduced me to someone named Gatz Hjortsberg. I asked him if he was any relation to William Hjortsberg, one of my favorite writers. "I'm William Hjortsberg," he said, "my friends call me Gatz." Nothing like getting a compliment from someone who doesn't even know that they're complimenting you.             Yeah, we met cute, just like in the movies.             Man oh man, have you ever read Gray Matters ? Takes place in a giant repository of brains, the only remains of the human race. Since no one can move,...

Man Bites Dogma - A Conversation with Robert Anton Wilson about Politics, Religion, Drugs, and Quantum Mechanics

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             He's been called a cult figure to various lunatic fringe groups, Tom Robbins calls him "a dazzling barker hawking tickets to the most thrilling tilt-a-whirls and daring loop-o-planes on the midway of higher consciousness," he calls himself an iconoclastic comedian, and whether Robert Anton Wilson is a philosopher or a public nuisance is now up to you. His books, The Illuminatus Trilogy, Schrödinger's Cat, and The Cosmic Trigger all fall somewhere in between non-fiction and pure fantasy, full of unquestionable facts and quotes that somehow always add up to utterly preposterous conclusions. This devotion to eccentricity and breaking down barriers reaches its zenith in The Illuminati Papers, a book seemingly written by characters from all his other books. It contains, among other esoterica, a whole page of Haiku by Raymond Chandler in which Wilson has simply taken short descriptive excerpts from Chandler's work...