I teach blogging workshops for the Writer’s Center and four of them are coming up. They all have spots still available. On Thursday, March 1, I teach Blogging Basics at Glen Echo from 7:30PM-10PM; Blogging Basics at Arlington Arts Center on March 6 from 11AM-1PM; Advanced Blogging at the Arlington Arts Center on March 13 from 11AM-1PM; and Advanced Blogging at Glen Echo on March 15 from 7:30PM-10PM. Come join me.

I am teaching a Blogging Basics class for the Writer’s Center at Glen Echo this Thursday from 7:30PM-10PM, “writing for online consumption is much different from writing for the page. Learn how to write for the Internet and the blogosphere in this one-day class focused on the unique and powerful way the blogosphere communicated and how you can best leverage your own personal passion, your own personal artistic voice, and your unique perception of the world into an online organ that very well could change the world.” There is still room! Come join me!

I am probably the last to know, but “Cosmic voyager, writer, cyber-shaman… Robert Anton Wilson died January 11 at his fnord by the sea in southern California. He was 74.” Via Burning Taper

Robert Anton Wilson From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Anton Wilson or RAW (January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was a prolific American novelist, essayist, philosopher, psychologist, futurologist, anarchist, and conspiracy theory researcher.

His writing, which often shows a sense of humor and optimism, is described by him as an “attempt to break down conditioned associations–to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models (maps) and no one model elevated to the Truth.”[1] And: “My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.”[2]

Life

“”Is,” “is.” “is” — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don’t know what anything “is”; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.”Wilson was born Robert Edward Wilson in Methodist Hospital, downtown Brooklyn, New York, and spent his first years in Flatbush, moving with his family to Gerritsen Beach around the age of 4 or 5, where they stayed until he turned 13. He suffered from polio as a child, the effects of which remained with him throughout his life.

He attended Brooklyn Polytechnical College and New York University, studying engineering and mathematics.

He worked as engineering aide, salesman, and copywriter and was associate editor for Playboy magazine from 1965 to 1971. He adopted his maternal grandfather’s name, Anton, for his writings, at first telling himself that he was saving the “Edward” for when he wrote the Great American Novel and later finding that “Robert Anton Wilson” had become an established identity.

In 1979 he received a Ph.D. in psychology from Paidea University in California[3], an unaccredited institution that has since closed[4]. The reworked dissertation was published in 1983 as Prometheus Rising.

He married the freelance writer Arlen Riley in 1958; they had four children. Their daughter Luna, then fifteen years old, was beaten to death in an apparent robbery in 1976. Her brain was preserved by the Bay Area Cryonics Society.[5] Arlen suffered a stroke and died after long illness in 1999.

Death

On June 22, 2006, Huffington Post blogger Paul Krassner reported that Robert A. Wilson was under hospice care at home with friends and family[6]. On 2 October 2006 Douglas Rushkoff reported that Wilson was in severe financial trouble[7]. Slashdot, Boing Boing, and the Church of the SubGenius also picked up on the story, linking to Rushkoff’s appeal[8][9]. As his webpage reported on 10 October, these efforts succeeded beyond expectation and raised a sum which would have supported him for at least 6 months.

On the 6th of January, he wrote on his blog that according to several medical authorities, he was likely to have only between two days and two months left to live[10], closing his message with “Please pardon my levity, I don’t see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd.” He died five days later, at 4:50 AM[11].

Writings

Over his life, Wilson wrote 35 books[12], and innumerable other pieces.

His best-known work, the cult classic[13] The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), co-authored with Robert Shea and advertised as “a fairy tale for paranoids,” humorously examined American paranoia about conspiracies. Much of the odder material derived from letters sent to Playboy magazine while Shea and Wilson worked as editors of the Playboy Forum.[14] The books mixed true information with imaginative fiction to engage the reader in what Wilson called “Operation Mindfuck”; the trilogy also outlined a set of libertarian and anarchist axioms known as Celine’s Laws, concepts Wilson has revisited several times in other writings. It also popularized the use of the term “fnord.” Although Shea and Wilson never partnered on such a scale again, Wilson continued to expand upon the themes of the Illuminatus! books throughout his writing career. All of his later fiction contains cross-over characters from the Illuminatus! Trilogy, which won the Prometheus Hall of Fame award for science fiction in 1986, has been reprinted in many countries, and was adapted by Ken Campbell into a ten-hour epic drama. It has been adapted into a Steve Jackson role-playing card game and a trading-card game, both called Illuminati, and a comic book version was produced first by “Eye N Apple Productions” (headed by Mark Philip Steele), then by Rip Off Press.

Wilson also wrote a play called Wilhelm Reich in Hell, which has been performed at the Edmund Burke Theatre in Dublin, and an illustrated screenplay called Reality is What You Can Get Away With.

In Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977) and other works, he examined Discordianism, Sufism, Futurology, Zen Buddhism, Dennis and Terence McKenna, the occult practices of Aleister Crowley and G.I. Gurdjieff, the Illuminati and Freemasons, Yoga, and other esoteric or counterculture philosophies. He advocated Timothy Leary’s eight circuit model of consciousness and neurosomatic/linguistic engineering, which he also wrote about in Prometheus Rising (1983, revised 1997) and Quantum Psychology (1990), books containing practical techniques for breaking free of one’s “reality tunnels”.[citation needed] With Leary, he helped promote the futurist ideas of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension (SMI2LE).

Wilson also supported many of the utopian theories of Buckminster Fuller and the theories of Charles Fort (he was a friend of Loren Coleman)[15], as well as those of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Neuro Linguistic Programming co-founder Richard Bandler, with whom he had taught workshops. He also admired James Joyce, and had written commentary on Finnegans Wake and Ulysses.[16]

Ironically, considering Wilson long lampooned and criticized new age beliefs, his books can often be found in bookstores specializing in new age material. He claimed to have perceived encounters with magical “entities”, and when asked whether these entities were “real”, he answered they were “real enough”, although “not as real as the IRS” since they were “easier to get rid of”. He warned against beginners using occult practice, since to rush into such practices and the resulting “energies” they unleash can lead people to go “quite nuts”. Instead, he recommends beginners start with NLP, Zen Buddhism, basic meditation, etc., before progressing to more potentially disturbing activities.[citation needed]

In a 2003 interview with High Times magazine, RAW described himself as a “Model Agnostic” which he says “consists of never regarding any model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial. Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes… My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory.”[17] More simply, he claims “not to believe anything,” since “belief is the death of intelligence.”[citation needed] He has described his approach as “Maybe Logic.” Wilson wrote articles for seminal cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000.[18]

While he had primarily published material under the name Robert Anton Wilson, he had also used the pen names Mordecai Malignatus, Mordecai the Foul, Reverend Loveshade [citation needed], and other names associated with the Bavarian Illuminati, which he allegedly revived in the 1960s.

Wilson’s writings connect to the madcap satirical fiction of Flann O’Brien in several ways, including his free use of O’Brien’s character De Selby. The views of De Selby, an obscure intellectual, are the subject of long pseudo-scholarly footnotes in Wilson’s novels as well as O’Brien’s. This is entirely fitting, because O’Brien himself made free use of characters invented by other writers, allegedly because there are already too many fictional characters as is. O’Brien was also known for pulling the reader’s leg by concocting elaborate conspiracy theories, and for publishing under several pen names.[citation needed]

Other activities

Wilson had a long-standing relationship with the Association for Consciousness Exploration, beginning in 1982. He was the keynote speaker for their center’s open house in 1984, and appeared at many Starwood Festivals. Both Illuminatus! co-author Robert Shea and Wilson’s wife Arlen Riley Wilson have appeared with him at the WinterStar Symposium.[19] They served as his American lecture agency while he lived in Ireland, and hosted his first on-stage dialog with his life-long friend Timothy Leary in 1989 in Cleveland, OH, entitled The Inner Frontier.

Wilson was also a member of the Church of the SubGenius, who refered to him as Pope Bob[1]. He was a contributor to their literature, and shared a stage with Rev. Ivan Stang on several occasions.

He and his wife Arlen Riley Wilson founded the Institute for the Study of the Human Future.

As a member of the Board of Advisors of the Fully Informed Jury Association, he worked to inform the public about jury nullification, the right of jurors to nullify a law they deem unjust.[20]

RAW held the post of American director of the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON) and appeared at Disinformation events.[citation needed]

He was a supporter of E-Prime, the elimination of the verb “to be” from the English language, preferring instead a “maybe logic”.[21]

A lifelong experimenter with drugs and strong opponent against the war on drugs, he participated in the weeklong 1999 Annual Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam[22]. He was photographed receiving medical marijuana at a 2002 demonstration in Santa Clara to curb his chronic pain from post-polio syndrome.[23]

Wilson was a founder and primary instructor of the Maybe Logic Academy, named for his agnostic approach to all knowledge. Fellow instructors include Patricia Monaghan, Rev. Ivan Stang, Philip H. Farber, Antero Alli, Peter J. Carroll, Starhawk, R. U. Sirius, Douglas Rushkoff and David Jay Brown.

“Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, the only writer in Arabic to win the Nobel Prize for literature, died on Wednesday in Cairo aged 94, doctors said.” :( Via the Post

As part of the support material I offer my students for my Washington, DC, blogging workshops, I have a website, The Applied Blogging Workshop, that gives everything I teach away for free. A “steal this curriculum” site.

I started with the lecture I taught at Columbia and have gone from there.

The site sometimes goes fallow between classes, but since I have the “Starting a Blog” blogging class to teach this Tuesday, I am probably going to spend a lot of time updating it.

If you want to start a blogging class, blogging course, or blogging workshop, please contact me and I will help in any way I can.

If you need a Blogging 101 class, an on-site training session of how to blog, a blogging consultant; if your company needs executive blog training or corporate blog training, I would be happy to oblige as well but it’ll cost you.

Contact me at either (202) 352-5051 or cja@well.com

I have two upcoming local Washington, DC, workshops on how to blog that I teach for the Writer’s Center. The first is Starting a Blog on Tuesday, June 13th and A Blog of Your Own on Tuesday, June 27th — both of which will be at Glen Echo Park in Maryland from 7:30-10PM. Still some room for both classes! Come join me!

Workshop: Starting a Blog
Description: Writing for online consumption is much different from writing for the pae. Learn how to write for the Internet and the blogosphere in this one-day class focused on the unique and powerful way the blogosphere commuicates. Learn how you can best leverage your own personal passion, your own personal artistic voice, and your unique perception of the world into an online organ that very well could change the world.
Date/Time 6/13/2006 to 6/13/2006 [7:30 PM to 10:00 PM]

Workshop: A Blog of Your Own
Description: Okay, you have a blog and consider yourself a blogger. The next step is how to build your prestige, your readership, and your reputation. This class will demystify the process of taking your personal blog and developing it into a popular resource. Being brilliant, funny, insightful, and inspired is just the beginning; learn how to help your hungry audience find you.
Date/Time 6/27/2006 to 6/27/2006 [7:30 PM to 10:00 PM]

“In the bitingly funny, razor-sharp I Love You, Nice to Meet You, platonic friends Kevin Bleyer (“The Daily Show with Jon Stewart???) and Lori Gottlieb give the no-holds-barred low-down on coupling up from the both the male and female points of view. Or as they like to put it, “Twice the perspective, half the insight??? (after all, what do they know – they’re still single).”

“Like romance anthropologists, Lori and Kevin deconstruct every key moment in the lifecycle of a relationship, from what the fake purse-grab really means when the check comes (how hard is it to find your wallet in a purse the size of doughnut?) to fighting etiquette (Is all fair when love is war?) to who gets “home couch advantage??? in couples therapy. Based on stories from their own dating experiences (funny for you, mortifying for them), I Love You, Nice to Meet You is a hilarious and eye-opening collection of “anecdates??? from a guy and a girl who just want to find the one but – lucky for you – haven’t.”

What People are Saying about I Love You, Nice to Meet You : A Guy and a Girl Give the Lowdown on Coupling Up

“The best new funny book about dating on planet Earth, perhaps in the entire universe, and certainly in the Milky Way. Even Tolstoy and God together couldn’t write something as funny and cool and weird and wonderful as this.”
—Molly Jong-Fast, author of Normal Girl and The Sex Doctors in the Basement

“I Love You, Nice to Meet You is funny, affecting, blunt and useful. Kevin and Lori are generous to old flames (well, most of them) and unsparing on themselves. This book may or may not help you find true happiness. But it will give you good, sound advice about what not to talk about over that first cup of coffee, or what items that are best not displayed in your medicine cabinet. Their alternating interpretations make us laugh at the gaffes we have all committed in hope of love. But they still hold out hope for love.”
—Scott Simon, host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday

“For lonely urban singles, here–finally–is a warm, witty companion to crawl into bed at night with. The bad news is it’s a book. The good news is, “I Love You, Nice to Meet You” is very funny, only costs a low one-time fee, and won’t call you regularly at 1 a.m. ‘just to say hi’ (I forget in which chapter, but it’s covered). Shake up a cosmo for one and enjoy.”
—Sandra Tsing Loh, author of A Year in Van Nuys“The funniest book about dating to date. Gottlieb and Bleyer guide us through the twists and turning points in every relationship, providing insight, fresh perspectives, personal anecdotes and hearty laughs along the way. Read it in one big gulp, or savor slowly, bite by bite.”
—Valerie Frankel, author of Hex and the Single Girl and The Girlfriend Curse

“It’s amazing that this is a funny book because this is one exhaustingly detailed compendium of everything that could ever go wrong in every stage a love relationship. At long last, you, the book buying public, will never again have to actually participate in this barbaric uncivilized ritual to become the grizzled cynical veteran of bad love you were destined to be. For this we all owe Kevin Bleyer and Lori Gottlieb a debt of gratitude.”
—Merrill Markoe, original head writer of The Late Show with David Letterman and author of It’s My F—ing Birthday: A Novel.

“Sure, chivalry died. But it got replaced by something much funnier–and luckily Lori Gottlieb and Kevin Bleyer are here to describe it. In dueling essays, the authors spar, match wits, and reveal startling truths about contemporary relationships.Whether you’re searching for the soulmate you have yet to meet, or getting increasingly irritated at the one you found already, this book provides the antidote: pure laughter.”
—Jenny Lyn Bader, co-author He Meant, She Meant: The Definitive Male-Female Dictionary

Reviews of I Love You, Nice to Meet You : A Guy and a Girl Give the Lowdown on Coupling Up

“Knowing that bad dates make good stories, Gottlieb (Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self) and Bleyer, a writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, share a collection of “anecdates” in this he-said she-said guide to “coupling up” that has not infrequent flashes of true hilarity—a rarity among the ever swelling ranks of humorous dating guides. The authors, good friends who have never been an item (“not now, not then”), provide individual interpretations on the standard fare of relationship topics, but cleverly; chapter titles include “Venue Ask Her Out – Is ‘location, location, location’ the key to getting a second date?” and “I’ll Show You Mine, If You Show Me How – Is there any civilized way to get naked with a new lover?” Insights such as “If you cry about anything less than the death of a mother…you’re doomed,” “Oprah is pornography for women” and “a week of uninterrupted physical presence isn’t a sign of love. It’s a stakeout,” make Gottlieb and Bleyer’s stiff shots of wisdom go down more like a fizzy summertime cocktail, helping to make the dating game, if not always fun, at least fun to read about.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Citizen journalism and professional journalism are not mutually exclusive concepts,” says Dan Gillmor via the BBC and Smart Mobs.

I created the Applied Blogging Workshop as a support blog, a syllabus site, and a library to support my blogging classes at the Writer’s Center. The blog might be for my students, but the slogan is, “Teaching Blogging to my Class, my Students and to You,” so I am trying to package it as a general “how to blog and why to blog” resource. I hope you enjoy ABW.

I just checked and I currently already have six students for my April 11th blogging and blog-writing strategy course, Blogs, Blogging and the Blogosphere, so there are only nine space left. Via Applied Blogging Workshop.

Check out the course outline for my previous class, Starting a Blog.

Our focus will not be technical (how to set up a blog) so much as strategic and tactical (how to effectively leverage your blog to influence world opinion).

Marketing strategies, word-of-mouth marketing strategies, search engine strategies, and simple and effective (read powerful) tactics you can use the very next day to turn your passions, your business, your art, your interests, and your words into an influencial part of the first global conversation.

Blogs, and their effect on the blogosphere, are the first online medium that can “jump the tracks” from being just insulated “online discussion” to actually influencing not just the blogosphere but the mediasphere as well: main stream media, public affairs, politics, the academy, your community, and the real world, not just the “online world.”

Worldwide PR firms, marketing firms, law firms, lobbying firms, multinational corporations, associations, consulting firms, local governments, and federal governments are taking to blogs and the blogosphere in droves because they realize the power and true influence online conversations can and do have.

And since blogging has just about a zero barrier to entry (it can be absolutely free, short of your sweat equity), you need to start reading, writing, and influencing the conversation being had on blogs and in the blogosphere.

Be sure to sign up for Blogs, Blogging and the Blogosphere today and I look forward to training you up on April 11th between 7PM and 9:30PM. See you there.

There is still a little time to sign up for my next blogging class, Blogs, Blogging and the Blogosphere, hosted by the Writer’s Center and taking place at the Arlington Arts Center from 7:00pm-9:30pm.

That’s a Tuesday night. Learn how to blog effectively.

How to Blog Workshop Blogs, Blogging and the Blogosphere

Description Blogs are no longer just online personal diaries. Blogs and bloggers have become powerful influences in world culture. Blogs have uniquely been able to jump the rails into traditional media and bloggers are now routinely being quoted in the news and on television. This one-day class will explain why blogs have changed the balance of media power and how you can cheaply, easily, and powerfully take advantage of it. There has never been a time when it is so easy and possible to become part of a global conversation.

Instructor CHRISTOPHER J ABRAHAM – Chris Abraham is the blog strategist and technologist for New Media Strategies, Inc., a Washington, DC, area public relations firm. He is an expert on corporate blogging, the blogosphere, online social networks, virtual communities, online brand promotion, online brand protection, online brand intelligence, online buzz marketing, online guerilla marketing, and online viral marketing. Chris has been a technologist for over a decade, focusing on online education, virtual community building, online social networks, web publishing, viral and buzz marketing, and blogging. Chris is especially interested in memetics and emergence and how they direct culture.,

Date/Time 4/11/2006 to 4/11/2006 [7:00 PM to 9:30 PM]

Meeting Days Tuesday

Proficiency Level All Levels

Genre(s) Mixed genre Blogging

Venue/Room Arlington Arts Center, Room: TBA

Capacity 15 seats

Price $40.00 (Member) $55.00 (Non-Member)

I admire Lori Gottlieb because she can write boldly and honestly. Start with The Penis Diaries. Then, move on to Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self. She is brilliant.

I totally have a crush on Lori Gottlieb. Haven’t seen her since Labor Day last year. Too too long.