The Unauthorized Biography

[hunter s.durden]

I like that.

I'm not sure what PF wants now, anyway.

[Darth Cupcake]

~~~Payne: Intentionally mis-reading posts since the War of the Roses.

Payne reveals that he is truly very very old ITT

[Forteetu]

any ideas or false-facts about RAW will be greatly appreciated.

As RAW lay on his death bed, his last spoken words were of the realisation that there were actually 9 circuits to the model of consciousness. And due to this, he also said that he now realised that Rice Krispy Treats were way better when made with Coco Krispies.

[P3nT4gR4m]

CHapter 9

It was a little less than a year after the spice rack incident when, probably still reeling from the sudden realisation, Wilson took up residence in a small fishing village just outside Oban, on the west coast of scotland. Using the fish gutting skills he picked up in india he quickly gained a reputation for his dilligent attention to detail. And, within a period of six months, had saved enough money to fully fund a second himalayan expedition, this time doubling the number of sherpas.

So it was that he found himself in the middle of downtown himalia on a wet and windy october morning, with three hundred scottish pounds, 34 sherpas and a suitcase full of rare nicaraguan beetles. His second attempt on the summit was to prove successul but the cost in terms of human life was sufficiently high to ensure that, until the day he died, wilson would never carry foreign insects up another mountain.

[Cramulus]

any ideas or false-facts about RAW will be greatly appreciated.

As RAW lay on his death bed, his last spoken words were of the realisation that there were actually 9 circuits to the model of consciousness. And due to this, he also said that he now realised that Rice Krispy Treats were way better when made with Coco Krispies.

hmm, that's a bit outlandish. I think we're trying for something which could pass as a biography.






Wilson wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards, and has works in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System (lacking only an entry in the 100s category of Philosophy). Wilson's most famous work is the Illuminatus! trilogy; his other major series are the Shrodinger's Cat series and the Principia Discordia, both of which he later tied into the same fictional universe as Illuminatus!. He penned numerous short stories, among them "Nightfall", which was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best of its kind up to 1964. He also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as a great amount of nonfiction. Wilson wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.

Most of Wilson's popularized science books explain scientific concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. He often provides nationalities, birth dates, and death dates for the scientists he mentions, as well as etymologies and pronunciation guides for technical terms. Examples include Prometheus Rising, the three volume set Understanding Quantum Psychology, and Wilson's Chronology of Science and Discovery.





based on: Isaac Asimov

[LMNO]

Wilson was born and brought up in Leicester. He left school at 16 and worked in factories and numerous other jobs while reading in his spare time. In 1956, at the age of 24, he published The Outsider, which examines the role of the social "outsider" in seminal works of various key literary and cultural figures (notably Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, T.E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent Van Gogh) and aspects of alienation in their works. The book was very successful and was a serious contribution to the popularization of existentialism in Britain. Its welcome by leading figures of their day was shortlived and Wilson was subsequently vilified.

Wilson was labelled as an Angry Young Man: he did contribute to Declaration, an anthology of manifestos by writers associated with the movement, and a chapter of The Outsider was excerpted in a popular paperback sampler, Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men. Wilson, along with his friends Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd , was viewed as forming a sub-group among the "Angries", a group more concerned with "religious values" than liberal or socialist politics. Critics on the left were swift to label them as fascistic; commentator Kenneth Allsop called them "the law givers".

Wilson's works include a substantial focus on positive aspects of human psychology such as peak experiences and the narrowness of consciousness. Wilson admired, and was in contact with, for example, humanistic psychologist, Abraham Maslow. Wilson also published in 1980 The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff, a text concerned with the life, work and philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff, which forms an accessible introduction to the Greek-Armenian mystic. Wilson essentially argues throughout his whole work that the existentialist focus on defeat or nausea is only a partial representation of reality and that there is no particular reason for accepting it. In his view normal everyday consciousness buffetted by the moment is blinkered, and should not be accepted as necessarily showing us the truth about reality. This blinkering has some evolutionary advantages in that it stops us being completely immersed in wonder or in the huge stream of events, and hence unable to act. However, to live properly we need to access more than this everyday consciousness. To Wilson our peak experiences of joy and meaningfulness can be seen to be as real as our experiences of angst, and indeed as we seem more fully alive at these moments, they can be said to be more real. Furthermore these experiences can be cultivated, as a side effect, through concentration, paying attention, relaxation and certain types of work. Wilson tends to argue that compulsive criminality is a manifestation of a pathological attempt to gain peak experiences through violence. This effort is bound to fail in the long run, leading the criminal to greater extremes of violence or to a desire to be caught.

Wilson has also explored his ideas through fiction, including many novels, mostly detective fiction or horror fiction, the latter including several Cthulhu Mythos pieces. On a dare from August Derleth, Colin Wilson wrote The Mind Parasites, as another tool to take a look at his own ideas (which suffuse all of his works), putting them in the guise of fiction. One of his novels, The Space Vampires, was made into the movie, Lifeforce, directed by Tobe Hooper.

Wilson has also written extensive non-fiction books about crime and various metaphysical and occult themes. In 1971, he published The Occult: A History featuring exegesis on Aleister Crowley, Gurdjieff, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Kabbalah, primitive magic, Franz Anton Mesmer, Gregor Rasputin, Daniel Dunglas Home, and Paracelsus among others. He has also written a biography of Crowley, called Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast. Wilson's initial theories of the occult focused on the cultivation of what he called "Faculty X" which leads to an increased sense of meaning and possibly to effects akin to telepathy or awareness of other energies. In his later work on this subject he seems to accept the possibility of life after death and the existence of spirits.

Wilson is mentioned in the refrain of The Fall's "Deer Park," on their 1982 album Hex Enduction Hour








Oh, this is the bio fo Colin Wilson.  Whoops.

[hunter s.durden]

RAW in school

Early on in young Roberts life, it was evident that he was afflicted with some sort of learning disability. While "slow" was a popular phrase in that day, his teachers were reluctant to use it. He was rather fast in fact. In the first grade he finished his first math test in only 2 minutes, but all of the answers were wrong. In his fourth grade spelling bee, he was rejected for spelling the word floccinauccinihilipilification, when the given word was actually osmosis. By sixth grade he was writing college level papers on subjects not even discussed in his classes.
This trend continued into his working life. His Illuminatus Trilogy was written after assigned by a publisher to write a book on Canada's liquor industry.

[LMNO]

When Wilson was a young boy, he was attacked by a rabid possum.  The wounds in his leg never healed properly, but shamed as he was about his inability to fend off a possum, he claimed to have suffered from polio.

[Darth Cupcake]

Hunter and LMNO --

and

Those two are brilliant.

[Cramulus]

hxxp://www.discordianism.com/wiki/index.php/Robert_Anton_Wilson

[Triple Zero]

i was hoping to find something about him on http://uncyclopedia.org/ .. but nothing there, it seems.

[Mangrove]

Robert Anton Wilson was an avid paleontologist. His most celebrated find was the remains of two fossilized Pterodactyls in Mexico.

[Darth Cupcake]

Robert Anton Wilson was an avid paleontologist. His most celebrated find was the remains of two fossilized Pterodactyls in the PD.com fora.

Nonetheless, brilliant, sir, brilliant!

[Deepthroat Chopra]

The Polio Years

Unfortunately for the Wilson family, young Robert Anton contracted Polio after polishing off a Seafood Basket at their summer home in Katmandu. His father, Leo "Wilson" Tolstoy, was heard to curse "Never Again with the Fckin' deep fryer! My son! If only they'd included tartare sauce!"

Despite months of grieving, the polio turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the young RAW, socially isolated, withdrew into himself, and developed an alter-ego who took the name "Gabriel Garcia Marquez". At the age of seven, RAW's alter-ego wrote "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and mailed the manuscript to Colombia for publishing. To this day, the entire literary world believes the book was written by a Colombian whonlived on the Carribean Coast, that voluntarily builds hospitals in Cuba and cheers for Atletico Medellin in Colombia's natuional football league.

At the age of eight, after winning the nobel prize for literature, young RAW, or Gabriel to his publisher, wrote "Love in the time of Polio". The release of the book was met with widespread protests throughout Latin America, as angry mobs carried signs reading, for example, "You B@stard! Polio killed my mate, Pedro!", and "If there's going to be books in South America, how about a bit of literacy please!". In a master-stroke of genius, the publisher re-named the book "Love in the time of Cholera", which dissipated the protests; protesters fearing they would catch the contagion from the other shoddily dressed trouble-makers.

Unfortunately for RAW's early Latin American writing career, his mother, Germaine "Wilson" Greer, read about the Sister Kenny method of treating polio. Roughly, this method involves inviting a nun around to the house where the polio victim lay, and getting the two of them to shag each other rotten. In 1940, a Sister was despatched from Sister Kenny's Bordello in Long Island, and RAW became a man. A man whose legs worked. The nun, a Sister Sky, continued to treat Polio from a shop-front on the east-side of Amsterdam. RAW met with her, to prevent a relapse, as often as possible.

To this day, however, RAW has undergone counselling to try and overcome his bizarre habit on insisting he has tartare sauce with every meal. Orgone therapy left him feeling good for a minute, but then he poured tartare over his bacon and egg roll, leaving Willhelm Reich exasperated. During an all-night NLP session, some progress seemed to be made, but some w@nker thought it would be funny to knock RAW out with a bar-stool, so the therapy proved inconclusive. Before his death, he joined a circle of New Age Bach Flower Remedy lunatics, who have taught him to embrace tartare sauce, and any symptoms of Post-polio Syndrome (PPS) that may develop.

When recently stopped limping naked through Berkely, he was heard to mutter "I gotta get me some hot nun action...and where's the Fckin' Tartare!". It is rumoured that before he died, he wrote under the Pseudonym, Barbara Cartland. This may be true.

TBC...

[Iron Sulfide]

[wipes a tear]

more than i could hope for. i'll try to bang some shite up after/during
work today.

Prater Fest -- I have yet to read any RAW, actually. I fully intend to, and I will get back to you. I will most likely like it, since I tend to be rather generous toward the printed word. If that made sense.

I also dig Hunter's idea of everyone doing different chapters without consulting each other. I would be happy to write a chapter, even though I haven't read any RAW. That may actually make me more qualified; I cannot say.

i think, more than anything else, this makes you qualified. you can write whatever you want now, without preconcieved ideas, and your bullshit will be your own, not his.

Hunter- what Denomination/Sect were you steeped in?
i happen to come from a baptist/open bible background.
I have Apostate Cancer, and the only cure is more Lail

LMNO- brilliant, as always. apply to the onion. Now.

Hunter- thanks for fielding the young years.

deepthroat- i've seen deeper throats than that before. keep writing. or not.

Prof Cram- i like the angle of using real peoples' bios and replacing it with his.
i'm going to do the same, with jesus now, and replace with RAW.

and Ghandi. I CALL DIBBS.

in the compiled version (it may be a book, it may be a lengthy article...)
i'm just going to credit everyone who did writing, and not what part tey wrote...

anything i should add?

Slander is the kindest way to repay a Martyr.