Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Reason Magazine - Illuminated Manuscripts:

The novelist, satirist, journalist, and philosopher Robert Anton Wilson passed away last Thursday, just a week shy of his 75th birthday. When he was alive he sometimes complained -- or maybe it was a boast -- that his books were never reviewed in The New York Times. The paper of record did pay its respects when he died, though, with a brief piece about his life and work. It wasn't entirely accurate, but the author of Illuminatus! would have enjoyed that. When a rumor of his death spread on the Net in the early '90s, complete with a fake Los Angeles Times obituary that got several details of his life wrong, Wilson wrote that he "admired the artistic verisimilitude of the Gremlin who forged that obit....Little touches of incompetence and ignorance like that helped create the impression of a real, honest-to-Jesus LA Times article."