An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson
by Eric Wagner
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Book Summary Information
Author: Eric WagnerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2004-12
ISBN: 156184165X
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: New Falcon Publications
Book Reviews of An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson
Book Review: Somewhat Worthwhile But Bob Deserves Better
Summary: 3 Stars
I would have to describe this book as a (very) mixed bag. It is very frustrating and yet, at the same time, there is definitely enough "good stuff" in it to make it worthwhile reading even for the seasoned Robert Anton Wilson fan (in my case about 27 years seasoned).
On the down side, there are an incredible number of typos, grammatical errors, and other mistakes. Although Wilson always advised people to avoid absolutes, I must say that I was absolutely astounded. The quantity of errors would be extemely high for your average Internet post, let alone a book from a reasonably established publisher such as New Falcon. I found it hard to get through a single page without finding at least one error of one sort or another and often more than one, and I wasn't really looking that hard.
It is doubly amazing to find such a plethora of errors in a book by a poet who has also worked as a computer programmer, a technical writer, and a teacher of English! You might imagine that a poet would be even more sensitive to each word and to punctuation than even an accomplished prose writer. And programmers sweat every single character when they're coding, which, again, might lead one to expect a certain level of attention to detail. But, no, in this case the universe chooses to surprise us.
I should note that the sections at the beginning of the book which are written by Wilson himself are noticeably free of the errors which are endemic throughout the rest of the work.
I find it ironic that a product this slipshod could come from a publisher whose overriding emphasis could be described as trying to enable its readers to achieve states of higher human functioning!
Some errors include:
The German phrase "Ewige Blumenkraft!" which means "Eternal Flowerpower" (and is translated as such by Wilson in the Preface) comes, in the lexicon, to be "Hail Flowerpower!" (Page 65.)
The character Mao Tsu-Hsi sometimes becomes Mao Tu Tsi. (E.g., page 82.)
Likewise Sufi writer Idries Shah becomes Idris Shah and also is listed as still being alive although he died in 1996. (Page 103.)
"H.M., S.H." (as in "Hagbard Celine, H.M., S.H.") becomes "S.H., H.M." Perhaps Eric has a lower opinion of Hagbard than many of the rest of us and therefore puts the S.H. first. ("H.M., S.H." comes from a story in Camden Benares' hilarious Zen Without Zen Masters and stands for "Holy Man, S*** Head".)(Page 100.)
There is an entry for one of Wilson's characters "Stella. Or, as she sometimes calls herself, Stella Only." But no mention is made of her full name as given in the Illuminatus! trilogy, Stella Maris: "Her name is Stella. Stella Maris. Black star of the sea." The name Stella Maris relates both to Catholic tradition and to a D.W. Griffith movie in which Mary Pickford plays two different characters, facts which might have been of interest to fans of Wilson. (Page 104.)
The entry for "Swift, Jonathan" somehow gets alphabetized between "Taming of the Shrew (The)" and "Tantra." The entry on Swift also refers to a book by Wilson called Nature's Law. Except that he never wrote such a book, although he did write both Nature's God and Natural Law. (Page 106.)
Speaking of Nature's God, in the bibliography it gets a 1986 edition published by Loompanics Unlimited, which is five years before it was actually published and it was never published by that particular company. Apparently Wagner is again confusing it with the book Natural Law. (Page 236.)
The definition of tantra reffered to above states that it involves "prolonging the sexual act to achieve radically altered states of conscience." While that well may be sometimes an effect of the practice, I don't think that is quite what most are aiming for. (Page 106, again.)
The definition of tantra is followed immediately by a definition of the tarot deck, which is said to be "A collection of cards used for mediation and fortune telling, etc." Yes, of course. That is how labor and management usually work out their disputes isn't it? It would be cool I grant you, and might work better than much that they do now. But still, you may be sure, this is not what the author intended. (Yes, believe it or not, yet again page 106.)
(If nothing else, these last few examples make it clear why spellchecking your work is no substitute for proofreading it!)
John Lilly's famous tome Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer becomes Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Metacomputer. (Page 164.)
H.L. Mencken becomes H.L. Menken, the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles become the Historical Illuminati Chronicles, County Kerry in Ireland becomes, apparently, its own country, Country Kerry, and so forth.
Lest I seem to be nitpicking, let me just say that while I could overlook two or three -- or even a dozen -- errors like these, the sheer quantity of them (and I have barely scratched the surface here) simply becomes stupefying after awhile. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I tend to like my reference works to actually be more or less correct!
Another issue is that sometimes the selection (or exclusion) of items in the lexicon, and the amount of text devoted to them, seem arbitrary. For example, Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati, a secret society which much of Wilson's work revolves around, gets only eight lines of text, but the Faulkner inspired "Yoknapatawpha diet," essentially irrelevant to Wilson's writing, gets 27 lines.
The book also seems in places very repetitive. One reviewer called it "severely repetitive"! In some cases this works, in that you really absorb the point or information in question, but often it just seems a waste of space that could have been better used for other material (such as, perhaps, elaborating on the parallels between the structure of Illuminatus! and D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, a connection which Wagner mentions in passing, but never pursues further).
Then there are textual analyses carried almost to the point of absurdity. One hopes that this overinterpretation is being done intentionally and for humorous effect, but I really don't think so.
A wise man once wrote, "[W]e are seeing what we believe nearly all the time and only occasionally seeing what we can't believe." But An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson is an exception to that rule. You'll see what you can't believe a whole lot more than occasionally.
As a previous reviewer here notes, this book is written in E-Prime, i.e. English prime (English without the "is" of identity), as were some of Wilson's own works. However, perhaps it would have been better had Mr. Wagner paid more attention to his E and less to his E-Prime.
Still, one cannot deny than Mr. Wagner, despite his egregious grammatical shortcomings and other lapses, is very knowledgeable and well read in many areas, and has many interesting and sometimes surprising things to say about the works of Robert Anton Wilson.
And, certainly, whatever my reservations about the book, I am glad that someone, namely Eric Wagner, took the time and effort to write a guide to Bob's oeuvre.
However, this is a book only for the diehard -- and very forgiving! -- Wilson fan. It is most certainly an "Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson" and not an "Introduction to Robert Anton Wilson"!
The best introduction to the man and his work, in my opinion, is either Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati (his autobiography) or his fictional Illuminatus! trilogy written with Robert J. Shea.
Summary of An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson
This work provides a fair and balanced look at Dr Robert Anton Wilson's writing and its relationship with the "Kaballah", "Finnegans Wake", "General Semantics", "Ezra Pound", "The Wizard of Oz", and the zillion other people, places and things that whirl through Wilson's life and his work. It will educate and amuse both those familiar with Wilson's work as well as newcomers to the Wonderful World of Wilson, and gives you deeper understanding of the fields which have shaped Dr Wilson's world-view.Reference & Collections Books
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