Thirteen Influences

Over time we accumulate influences; people who, for good or ill, have helped to shape who we are and what we stand for in measurable ways.

These people, or at least our perceptions of them, can help us to understand more of ourselves; our motivations, our strivings. The majority of these kinds of influences are close to us; family, friends, neighbors, but for some of us, they are also complete strangers — people whose words and ideas were transmitted to us, not directly, but through their writings, their music, their stories.

So, I give you thirteen influences on my life so far.

1. Bertrand Russell: My interest in philosophy, and in looking at the world in a philosophical way, is entirely due to reading Why I Am Not A Christian. I was so impressed with his way or reasoning and writing that I decided then and there that I would do what he did.
2. Robert Anton Wilson: Anarchist, Surrealist, Pope Bob was the author of The Illuminatus! Trilogy, among many many others. My favorite quote: “My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.”
3. Charles Bukowski: The poet laureate of the wrong side of town. If it weren’t for Bukowski, I would have probably entered adulthood thinking poetry was the exclusive province of the Wardsworths and Tennysons of the world. Instead I discovered that poetry could, and should, be primal, small, close to the ground.
4. Terence McKenna: Variously a butterfly catcher in SE Asia, fugitive from interpol, enthnobotanist, complete loon! It was through Terence McKenna that I discovered many of the means to directly question reality…
5. Flannery O’Conner: Perhaps the only Southern writer that truly wrote about the South as it was, instead of how they thought they could sell it (Faulkner, I’m looking at you here). I’ll let her speak for herself: “anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic”
6. H. P. Lovecraft: There is probably not any other writer with as fertile an imagination as Lovecraft. The bizarre, brooding New England of his fiction overshadows his career as a general man of letters; his literary criticism and correspondence are as, if not more, important.
7. Hakim Bey / Peter Lamborn Wilson: political writer, essayist, and poet, perhaps best known for first proposing the concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), based on a historical review of pirate utopias.
8. William S. Burroughs: Hands down the greatest writer of the twentieth century; Naked Lunch is one of the landmark publications in the history of American literature, and the center of the last major literary censorship battle in the United States.
9. Aleister Crowley: chess player, mountain climber, poet, painter, astrologer, hedonist, drug experimenter, and social critic, and, last but not least, occultist. You have to admire someone who is dubbed The Wickedest Man In the World mostly for being unapologetic for his vices.
10. William Gibson: There is this genre of fiction know as cyberpunk, filled with marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body. Many of the key ideas and iconic characters of the genre came from William Gibson, who was born in a tiny SC town not far from where I last lived.
11. Mary Harris Jones: Called ‘the most dangerous woman in America‘ when she was 82 years old, “Mother” Jones lived an extraordinary life, spanning The American Civil War, The Chicago Fire, helping found the Industrial Workers of the World, visiting rebel Mexico in 1911. ” Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!”
12. David Lynch: Perhaps the only surrealist working in film to ever receive any public acclaim or success. His long list of film acheivements is legendary: Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr.
13. James Randi: James Randi has an international reputation as a magician and escape artist, but today he is best known as the world’s most tireless investigator and demystifier of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Randi has pursued “psychic” spoonbenders, exposed the dirty tricks of faith healers, investigated homeopathic water “with a memory,” and generally been a thorn in the sides of those who try to pull the wool over the public’s eyes in the name of the supernatural.