Robert Anton Wilson is an interesting figure I recently discovered somehow. His roots go back to that very seminal time of the 60s, a time who's threads seem to have largely evaporated. I recently watched his DVD, Maybe Logic. He is a figure I would like to explore more - he raises issues and questions about what was at the heart of that strange period of the 60s and 70s. The easy explanation is that it was essentially the result of an unprecedented surge in demographics. Maybe so, but that doesn't have anything to do with the validity of some of the ideas explored at the time - Barthes, Leary, R D Lang, Alan Watts and many others. I feel an urge to go back and look at all of this, to look beneath the caricature and media hype that blew up around all of this like an obscuring dust storm.
The book itself, The Widow's Son, was not a great read. One of those Idea oriented books, with tonnes of footnotes pulled from a rather peculiar early 20th century figure, de Selby (real person...)
I would rather read an open exploration of the ideas themselves.
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