Science fiction writer and poet Thomas Disch has committed suicide. Disch died July 4 and his body was discovered July 5, according to the New York City Police Department. He was 68.
The author of popular sci-fi novels Camp Concentration and 334, Disch had been openly gay since 1968. Following the 2004 death of his partner, poet Charles Naylor, Disch reportedly began suffering from depression. …
January 9, 1931 - June 9, 2008
Algis Budrys was one of the writers who made his name alongside such luminaries as Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick in the early-1950s boom in science-fiction magazines. …
Budrys’s first novel, False Night, published by the small New York firm Lion Books in 1954, tells of the slow recovery of the world after it has been devastated by a plague. …
March 29, 1915 - March 28, 2008
Novelist Helen Yglesias’s death, a day before her 93rd birthday, recalls “a contented middle-aged couple sat up in bed, seen from the waist up in neatly pressed pyjamas with the piped edge of the lapels wonderfully reproduced in stone, faint smiles upon their modeled lips, their deep-set eyes gazing pleasantly upon the prospect of their buried bodies which became a natural extension of the stone figures”. This graveyard features in Sweetsir (1981), the best-known of her five novels, the first published at fifty-seven: in these, marriage oftens proves rockier than that stone’s depiction. …
October 28, 1926 - May 5, 2008
Park Kyung Ni was one of the leading South Korean novelists of her generation. In her own country and abroad, she was best known for the epic Toji (The Land), widely regarded as the greatest achievement of modern Korean literature. …
December 8, 1932 - May 30, 2008
Mike Scott was one of the foremost producer-performers in commercial television, one of an elite group at Granada whose other members included Bill Grundy and Michael Parkinson. His career on the small screen involved extensive work both in front of camera and behind it. …
Nuala O’Faolain, journalist and writer, was born on March 1, 1940. She died of cancer on May 9, 2008, aged 68
Nuala O’Faolain, then 55, had been writing a current affairs column on The Irish Times for almost ten years and was rather feeling that life had passed her by when, in 1995, a publisher offered to make a book out of the best of her articles. To show where she was coming from, she decided to write a short introduction about her own life. …
The creator of the popular religious children’s television show “Davey and Goliath” has died. …
Along with Gumby creators Art Clokey and Ruth Clokey Goodell, Sutcliffe created the Sunday-morning series to spread a religious message without losing younger viewers with overly complicated concepts …
Robin Moore’s subjects as a writer included Pope John Paul II and the notorious former call girl, Xaviera Hollander with whom he wrote The Happy Hooker. In 1969 he wrote the novel, The French Connection, on which the acclaimed film was based. …
Thriller writer, creator of the private investigator Jacob Asch and author of a study of American satanism …
His satanic interests led to a non-fiction study, The Second Coming: Satanism in America (1970). It inspired his first Jacob Asch novel, The Dead Are Discreet (1974). …
The esteemed Martinique poet and politician Aimé Césaire, a leading figure in the movement for black consciousness, died Thursday, the French president’s office and a hospital said. He was 94. …
LONDON — She was an innocent beauty working in the catering department of a wartime ministry. He was making government films by day and writing poems at night. …
A poem soon followed — and “A Subaltern’s Love Song” became the most popular work of John Betjeman, one of his generation’s most loved poets. Joan Hunter Dunn, the muse who inspired the classic poem of love and longing, died in a London nursing home last week at age 92. She changed her name after she married and was known as Joan Jackson. … Read full obituary
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — Writer Hugo Claus — an artist, poet, playwright and novelist whose books painted a scathing picture of repression and hypocrisy in bourgeois Flanders — died Wednesday by euthanasia, his wife said. He was 78. … Read full obituary
Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and a man considered one of the world’s top science fiction writers, has died.
He was 90. An aide announced his death Tuesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. … Read full obituary
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — David Groh, the handsome, hardworking character actor who was best known as the easygoing man Rhoda Morgenstern married and divorced during the run of Valerie Harper’s hit 1970s sitcom “Rhoda,” has died. He was 68.
Groh died Tuesday of kidney cancer in Los Angeles, his sister-in-law Catherine Mullally said Thursday. … Read full obituary
KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) — Margaret Truman, the only child of former President Harry S. Truman who became a concert singer, actress, radio and TV personality and mystery writer, died Tuesday. She was 83. … Read full obituary
NEW YORK (AP) — Best-selling writer Ira Levin, whose novels included the horror classic “Rosemary’s Baby,” the Nazi thriller “The Boys From Brazil” and the satirical fantasy “The Stepford Wives,” has died. He was 78. … Read full obituary
HARTFORD, Connecticut (AP) — Author Madeleine L’Engle, whose novel “A Wrinkle in Time” has been enjoyed by generations of schoolchildren and adults since the 1960s, has died, her publicist said Friday. She was 88. … Read full obituary
Senegalese movie icon, Ousmane Sembene, died on Saturday evening in Dakar at the age of 84, following a protracted illness. Sembene, who will long be remembered as the “father of the African cinema”, adapted most of his novels for the movie. Some of the novels include: ‘Borom Saret’ in 1963, ‘La Noire de …’ (1966), ‘Le Mandat’ (1968), ‘Xala’ (1974), ‘Guelawar’ in 1992 and his last feature-length film ‘Molade’ in 2004. … Read full obituary
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) — Mark Harris, best known for baseball novels that included “Bang the Drum Slowly,” narrated by the fictional Henry Wiggen, has died. He was 84. … Read full obituary
Killed in a three-car accident in Menlo Park, California.
Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island. … Read full obituary
No mainstream news links yet (although he died yesterday, 1/11), so here’s his bio from Wikipedia:
Robert Anton Wilson or RAW (January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was a prolific American novelist, essayist, philosopher, psychologist, futurologist, anarchist, and conspiracy theory researcher.
His writing, which often shows a sense of humor and optimism, is described by him as an “attempt to break down conditioned associations — to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models (maps) and no one model elevated to the Truth.” And: “My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.”
Life
Wilson was born in Methodist Hospital, downtown Brooklyn, New York, and spent his first years in Flatbush, moving with his family to Gerritsen Beach around the age of 4 or 5, where they stayed until he turned 13. He suffered from polio as a child, the effects of which remained with him throughout his life.
He attended Brooklyn Polytechnical College and New York University, studying engineering and mathematics. He worked as engineering aide, salesman, and copywriter and was associate editor for Playboy magazine from 1965 to 1971. In 1979 he received a Ph.D. in psychology from Paidea University in California, an unaccredited institution that has since closed. The reworked dissertation was published in 1983 as Prometheus Rising.
He married the freelance writer Arlen Riley in 1958. They had four children; their daughter Luna was killed in 1976. Her brain was preserved by the Bay Area Cryonics Society. Arlen suffered a stroke and died after long illness in 1999.
Death
On June 22, 2006, Huffington Post blogger Paul Krassner reported that Robert A. Wilson was under hospice care at home with friends and family. On 2 October 2006 Douglas Rushkoff reported that Wilson was in severe financial trouble. Slashdot, Boing Boing, and the Church of the Subgenius also picked up on the story, linking to Rushkoff’s appeal. As his webpage reported on 10 October, these efforts succeeded beyond expectation and raised a sum which would have supported him for at least 6 months.
On the 6th of January, he wrote on his blog that according to several medical authorities, he was likely to have only between two days and two months left to live, closing his message with “Please pardon my levity, I don’t see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd.” He died five days later, a week before his 75th birthday, at 4:50 AM.
Writings
His best-known work, The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), co-authored with Robert Shea and advertised as “a fairy tale for paranoids,” humorously examined American paranoia about conspiracies. Much of the odder material derived from letters sent to Playboy magazine while Shea and Wilson worked as editors of the Playboy Forum. The books mixed true information with imaginative fiction to engage the reader in what Wilson called “Operation Mindfuck”; the trilogy also outlined a set of libertarian and anarchist axioms known as Celine’s Laws, concepts Wilson has revisited several times in other writings. Although Shea and Wilson never partnered on such a scale again, Wilson continued to expand upon the themes of the Illuminatus! books throughout his writing career.
In Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977) and other works, he examined Discordianism, Sufism, Futurology, Zen Buddhism, Dennis and Terence McKenna, the occult practices of Aleister Crowley and G.I. Gurdjieff, the Illuminati and Freemasons, Yoga, and other esoteric or counterculture philosophies. He advocated Timothy Leary’s eight circuit model of consciousness and neurosomatic/linguistic engineering, which he also wrote about in Prometheus Rising (1983, revised 1997) and Quantum Psychology (1990), books containing practical techniques for breaking free of one’s “reality tunnels”. With Leary, he helped promote the futurist ideas of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension (SMI2LE).
Wilson also supported many of the utopian theories of Buckminster Fuller and the theories of Charles Fort (he was a friend of Loren Coleman), as well as those of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Neuro Linguistic Programming co-founder Richard Bandler, with whom he had taught workshops. He also admired James Joyce, and had written commentary on Finnegans Wake and Ulysses.
Ironically, considering Wilson long lampooned and criticized new age beliefs, his books can often be found in bookstores specializing in new age material. He claimed to have perceived encounters with magical “entities”, and when asked whether these entities were “real”, he answered they were “real enough”, although “not as real as the IRS” since they were “easier to get rid of”. He warned against beginners using occult practice, since to rush into such practices and the resulting “energies” they unleash can lead people to go “quite nuts”. Instead, he recommends beginners start with NLP, Zen Buddhism, basic meditation, etc., before progressing to more potentially disturbing activities.
In a 2003 interview with High Times magazine, RAW described himself as a “Model Agnostic” which he says “consists of never regarding any model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial. Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes… My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory.” More simply, he claims “not to believe anything,” since “belief is the death of thought.” He has described his approach as “Maybe Logic.” Wilson wrote articles for seminal cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000.
While he had primarily published material under the name Robert Anton Wilson, he had also used the pen names Mordecai Malignatus, Mordecai the Foul, Reverend Loveshade, and other names associated with the Bavarian Illuminati, which he allegedly revived in the 1960s.
Wilson’s writings connect to the madcap satirical fiction of Flann O’Brien in a several ways, including his free use of O’Brien’s character De Selby. The views of De Selby, a would-be obscure intellectual, are the subject of long pseudo-scholarly footnotes in Wilson’s novels as well as O’Brien’s. This is entirely fitting, because O’Brien himself made free use of characters invented by other writers, allegedly because there are already too many fictional characters as is. O’Brien was also known for pulling the reader’s leg by concocting elaborate conspiracy theories, and for publishing under several pen names.
Other activities
Wilson had a long-standing relationship with the Association for Consciousness Exploration, beginning in 1982. He was the keynote speaker for their center’s open house in 1984, and appeared at many Starwood Festivals. Both Illuminatus! co-author Robert Shea and Wilson’s wife Arlen Riley Wilson have appeared with him at the WinterStar Symposium. They served as his American lecture agency while he lived in Ireland, and hosted his first on-stage dialog with his life-long friend Timothy Leary in 1989 in Cleveland, OH, entitled The Inner Frontier.
Wilson was also a member of the Church of the SubGenius, who referred to him as Pope Bob. He was a contributor to their literature, and shared a stage with Rev. Ivan Stang on several occasions.
He and his wife Arlen Riley Wilson founded the Institute for the Study of the Human Future.
As a member of the Board of Advisors of the Fully Informed Jury Association, he worked to inform the public about jury nullification, the right of jurors to nullify a law they deem unjust.
RAW held the post of American director of the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON) and appeared at Disinformation events.
He was a supporter of E-Prime, the elimination of the verb “to be” from the English language, preferring instead a “maybe logic”.
A lifelong experimenter with drugs and strong opponent against the war on drugs, he participated in the weeklong 1999 Annual Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam. He was photographed receiving medical marijuana at a 2002 demonstration in Santa Clara to curb his chronic pain from post-polio syndrome.
Wilson was a founder and primary instructor of the Maybe Logic Academy, named for his agnostic approach to all knowledge. Fellow instructors include Patricia Monaghan, Rev. Ivan Stang, Philip H. Farber, Antero Alli, Peter J. Carroll, Starhawk, R. U. Sirius, Douglas Rushkoff and David Jay Brown.
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