About

Hello, folks, I’m Brian Dean, the writer of this blog – I also do the graphics. Apologies for the late arrival of this named bio – I always feel a bit reluctant to provide personal details online. But, on balance, I prefer to be cited by name than by “nameless blogger at RAW semantics”!

I’ve been enthusiastically reading and promoting Robert Anton Wilson’s books since the mid-1980s. My 1990s project, Anxiety Culture (a modest zine and ancient website) was very much inspired by Wilson – and, to my delight, RAW commented positively on it in one of his Trajectories tapes (#15). Back then, I attended several of RAW’s talks in London, and enjoyed a brief correspondence with the man himself (more on that in later blog posts, no doubt).

My 23 minutes of fame: I once wrote a regular column for the excellent and pioneering bohemian magazine, The Idler, and I’ve had occasional columns published in the UK’s Guardian and Independent newspapers. A Channel 4 TV show featured my AC project, and I was interviewed by BBC radio. I’ve contributed to a number of books, and authored a book on Frame Semantics (which is also the topic of another blog I write). From all this creative activity, I think I’ve probably made a net loss of around £23.

You can read more biographic info (eg where I come from, what shaped my views etc) in one of my blog posts, ‘My reality-tunnels‘.

Why the blog?

The idea was to set up a modest blog to encourage me to re-read my favourite RAW-related books and write an ongoing commentary on them from a perspective that hasn’t already been tried (to my knowledge).

It would not have a wide appeal, but it might interest a few Robert Anton Wilson aficionados.

I started putting it together in summer 2019, but then soon got diverted to other things. Now, with more time on my hands (lockdown, as of this moment), I’ve started to add more, and will continue.

The HOME page is the place to start – it lists all the blog entries in a nice graphic format.

For more on my particular approach to RAW, please see these remarks.

Note on graphics:  The idea was to convey a plurality of reality tunnels – eg cubist, post-impressionist, ancient Greek, cyberpunk, bureaucratic treaty, conspiracy novel, etc. Some are more involved than others (the idea behind the one for ‘Sum of all minds‘ was an unfolded print on the corrugated cardboard of a disposable coffee cup).

Contact

You can contact me either via the blog feedback facility (see below) or directly at ffbriandean274fff (remove the fs) followed by at followed by gmail and of course dot com. NOTE, September 2022 – I’m temporarily closing the feedback/comments facility below, as it’s attracted a surge of spam recently. I’ll try turning it on again shortly. Meanwhile please use the above email address if you wish to contact me.