Happy RAW birthday

From the recently published series of "lost" Robert Anton Wilson photos taken in England.

Today is the 83rd anniversary of Robert Anton Wilson's birth, Jan. 18, 1932 in Brooklyn, N.Y. In other words, he was born on 1-18-1932. If you add those numerals up, you get 25, conforming nicely to the law of fives.

Marking RAW's birthday seems less melancholy than noting his death, which took place on Jan. 11, 2007,  just over eight years ago.

Since his death, there has been all sorts of confirmation that interest in him continues. I couldn't call it a mass movement, but the following is very persistent. Robert Anton Wilson Fans on Facebook had 2,610 members as of Saturday. Discordian Libertarians had 1,260 members Saturday. Daisy Eris Campbell's "Cosmic Trigger" play drew a good crowd and attracted a good deal of attention. This blog — devoted, let's face it, to a cult writer who never sold that many books, and to the subjects he was interested in — has more than 590,000 pageviews so far. RAW's fandom has an active Twitter presence. There are many websites. And so on and so on.

If you wanted to think about RAW's impact, you could go through some of the articles written by a Who's Who of countercultural writers for RAW Week at Boing Boing,  ("RAW Week" actually stretched on for weeks in 2012). Don't miss the "Older Entries" link at the bottom of the page). See also Michael Johnson's remembrance.