Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything: (or Old Bob Exposes His Ignorance)

I had heard of Wilson, but I have never read any of his books. This is a good introduction to him as he speaks about just about everything under the sun and shows an amazing range of learning from science to literature of all types. (He must have spent all day reading.) His ideas, theories, and opinions of others' ideas and opinions are always interesting and reasonable. You don't have to agree with everything he says to get a lot of insight and discover a lot of fascinating stories you aren't familar with. He is not a rabid conspiracy theorist, but rather someone who uses conspiracy theories as part of his work, and as he points out, after he skewers everyone else's theories, he skewers his own. Recommended.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1249985.html

I was really prompted to get this because LibraryThing kept recommending it to me. But I loved Robert Anton Wilson's fiction and non-fiction in my late teens and early twenties, and so was delighted to discover this audiobook of interviews and lectures - most of it a series of five long interviews from about 2000, and then a couple of lectures delivered in Boulder, Colorado, in earlier years. I'd heard or read most of it before, and have outgrown some of it, but his humorous, cynical, sceptical take on life, politics, literature, religion and the nature of reality was a refreshing break for me over the last few weeks (switching between this and the much less interesting METAtropolis). His show more Brooklyn drawl seemed to sharpen the humourous but deadly serious points he was making beautifully. (Though I was perplexed by the way he pronounced "monotheism" as "m'NŌTHyism"!) show less