Oblomovka

2007-01-16»

So, Robert Anton Wilson died again. I snuck, I hope, an obituary masquerading as a tech column into this week’s Irish Times, documenting RAW’s influence (and, collaterally, drug culture) on tech culture. It should be out on Friday. Jesse Walker did a far broader and finer job on RAW in Reason. His excellent anecdote about Illuminatus!’s banned status in Soviet Leipzig reminds me of a story that typifies the chaos Wilson injected into my own life.

At university, we had one of Britain’s copyright libraries, which meant in theory that they had claim to one copy of every book and periodical published in the United Kingdom. I blew a lot of time trying to probe the library with requests to see what obscure volumes I could pull out from the stacks. One day, I looked up Sex and Drugs by Robert Anton Wilson.

I went up to the nice librarian with my chit to call up the book. She looked at the slip I’d written out, and took me to one side. “You’ve called up one of our restricted set,” she said. “You’ll need your tutor’s permission to read that, and only in a special room we set aside for that purpose.” I said it didn’t matter, and left the desk.

I looked at the piece of paper I’d given her. The shelf mark that I’d scribbled down from the catalogue began with the greek letter ϕ (Phi) and a series of numerals.

The library had recently installed an electronic catalogue, accessible from terminals in the library. I walked over, called up the shelfmark search, and typed “Phi”. There, listed and catalogued, were all the Damned Things anyone might want you not to know about, carefully gathered and presented.

The trick still works, although you have to use the telnet interface to the Bodleian’s OLIS system, and dig down to the extended search screen. I see that the damned now includes books by Norman Lindsay, Elton John, Madonna, the Consumer Association’s 1963 Which? review of contraceptives, Aleister Crowley, Monty Python, Fiesta’s Reader’s Wives special, W.H. Auden’s The Platonic Blow, Razzle, Davey “Wavey” Winder, Henry Miller, Wilhelm Reich, William Burroughs, Sacher-Masoch and Charles Platt.

I find it reassuring that I’ve met four of Oxford’s banned authors since I left. When I met Robert Anton Wilson, I asked him if Father Christmas existed. He told me and I’ll keep that secret until I join him in the grave. See you after the circus, RAW.

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2007-01-05»

Rose snagged me.

1. I got engaged to be married when I was sixteen. Aw, sweet. Her mother was ex-colonial from the isolated heights of the Seventies South American Anglo upper-class, suffering the culture shock that British ex-pats get when they return from abroad and instead of Olde Englande, find 1980s Essex. Her mother used to chaperone us to the movies (I watched Ghostbusters for the first time with her sitting between us), and she spent her remaining money on antiques which she grew to love too much to sell. My girlfriend was desperate to escape, I was very in love, and the nature of her family’s cultural timewarp required that we get engaged and married in secret to do just that. In the end, she ran off with a muslim chap she met on the tube.

   Hi, Alison!

2. I was born in Basildon. It was a home birth, in a self-build house, in a new town. my family didn’t make the house ourselves, but we bought it from someone who had. An electrician, he engineered many many electrical outlets in every room, which I now remember every time I have to string extensions across corridors. It was a fluke of my introverted nerdly childhood that I grew an accent that was more BBC presenter than Basildon cockney. I got bullied over that a lot.

3. I have one of those birth marks that if it were anywhere visible you’d stare at me when you thought I wasn’t looking. Fortunately for me, it covers most of my right shoulder blade instead. I can’t see it unless I really strain around, and I generally forget about it until either I go swimming, or a new love says, politely, “What the hell is that?” It totally ruins the odds of me being James Bond, but marginally increases my chances of being a Evil Master Criminal.

4. I write “please” on my checks. As in “Pay Foo Bar twenty-two dollars only please”. I figure it helps them to clear.

5. I have publically kissed both Pauline Calf and Al “the pub landlord” Murray on the mouth.

I nominate Stef, Begbie, Justin, Seth, and Rachel.

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