Eric Wagner is the author of An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson. Please note that if you buy it, you want this one, the June 2020 updated edition. Cover by Bobby Campbell.
Bobby Campbell's Maybe Day 2024 offerings include two interviews by Bobby with two Robert Anton Wilson scholars, Michael Johnson and Eric Wagner, about the Illuminatus! trilogy (a great idea which I wish I had thought of). You should read both interviews. I'll blog later about Michael's interview, but I want to highlight a bit in the interview with Eric.
Bobby asks Eric how he came to read Illuminatus!, and Eric explains. (He still remembers which bookstore he bought the three original paperbacks from. I wish I could remember where I bought my three paperbacks. I still have them.)
Eric then says,
"Reading Schroedinger's Cat and Illuminatus! I began to become obsessed by Wilson. I next started Masks of the Illuminati in the beginning of September, and stopped after a few pages. I had a sense that if I continued reading it, my life would change radically. I decided to continue, and my life took a left turn. At that point I considered Robert Heinlein my favorite author. I majored in math in college and I had worked three summers at IBM, planning to work for them after I graduated. I ended up changing my major to English and have spent much of my life teaching English."
Speaking for myself, I read Illuminatus! first before any other RAW books. I read the trilogy in the 1970s, when the three titles first came out, and the experience changed my life, too. Many Illuminatus! and RAW fans seem to feel the same way. But Eric's interview seems like a particularly vivid example of the effect Wilson's writing has, at least on his really serious fans.
2 comments:
Thank you for sharing this.
The question around USSR vs Russia really hit me. I can vaguely remember talking about "Russia" in early grade school, and then it seems like that shifted leading up to the end of the cold war and I graduated from public school shortly after "the break-up of the USSR." A more conspiracy minded might believe they were rebranded as a union so we could break them up. But that's just crazy talk.
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