{"id":3172,"date":"2023-06-24T15:06:57","date_gmt":"2023-06-24T23:06:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3172"},"modified":"2023-06-24T15:06:57","modified_gmt":"2023-06-24T23:06:57","slug":"review-high-weirdness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3172","title":{"rendered":"Review: High Weirdness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I heard the author, Erik Davis, interviewed on Desert Oracle Radio<\/a> and realized I’d want to read this if I ever saw a copy. The Los Angeles Public Library<\/a> eventually acquired an electronic copy, and away we go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now the question becomes, “does anyone else need to read this?” That’s seems like a thornier proposition. High Weirdness<\/em> is a scholarly look at some of the writings and experiences of the McKenna brothers, Robert Anton Wilson, and Phillip K. Dick. Davis is approaching these from a position somewhere between curious skeptic, literary critic, and biographer. To me it looks like he’s trying to explore the way these outsiders expressed themselves in the middle of turbulent lives. There’s a lot of mysticism, black humor, and recreational chemistry involved that leads the subjects of Weirdness<\/em> to produce the kind of off kilter writing that seems to hint at a universe run by divinities with unknowable senses of humor. I’m consistently amazed by the sorts of belief systems people use to navigate the world and enjoy thinking too hard about trivialities, so I quite enjoyed this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But back to the question of anyone else enjoying it. If you’d plow through a well-footnoted tome and get a chuckle out of discovering that the author cited work that seems to constrain the founding of Discordianism<\/a> to one of two bowling alleys in Whittier, I’d have a look at this. That’s a small set of people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I heard the author, Erik Davis, interviewed on Desert Oracle Radio and realized I’d want to read this if I ever saw a copy. The Los Angeles Public Library eventually acquired an electronic copy, and away we go. Now the question becomes, “does anyone else need to read this?” That’s seems like a thornier proposition. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3172"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3174,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3172\/revisions\/3174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}