book cover

From Overweening Generalist
October 4, 2025

A collection by the Illuminatus! co-writer, edited by Tom Jackson (Hilaritas Press; 2025; 347 pages)

Blessed are the fanatical devotees of minor writers (hey, I’ve been here), for they ensure the unduly neglected don’t fall through the cracks and down the memory holes. Let us sing the praises of the intellectual free thinkers, the anonymous erudites, those toiling researchers who in their spare time seek out obscure periodicals, ephemera and texts, use archives, and remind the reading public: here was someone we ought not forget. Let us at least keep considering their work for now.

With Every Day Is A Good Day, writer Tom Jackson1 has done Robert Shea (1933-1994) this service and, hey: I thoroughly enjoyed being with Shea as I read this book. I like this man. Shea was an interesting thinker and writer and very complex. Unlike his friend Robert Anton Wilson, who quit Catholicism by age 14 if not earlier, Shea stayed to age 30, when he converted to his own thing: an amalgam of Zen, writing, and anarchism.

With the acceleration of data, information, and knowledge, that which more of us should have paid attention to circles the memory holes and goes down. How often do you wonder: how much cool stuff would I be nutsy in love with has escaped my notice completely and basically evaporated? I consider this a Known Unknown. But I knew Shea, as I am one of the crazed fans of his 805 page novel, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, co-written with his dear friend Robert Anton Wilson. I had read a long interview with Shea with Neal Wilgus, which is collected here. There’s another interview with Wilgus, for Science Fiction Review, which I had somehow missed, and that’s included here, too. Wilson’s elegy for Shea, “Horseman, Pass By,” makes it here. I had read that Shea’s wife at his death, Patricia Monaghan, had written a piece about him after he died, but that issue of the Pushcart Winners was missing from my library. It’s here and it’s gripping and just fantastic. I have told others that I derive emotional solace from quantum theories, but almost always this was met with a Are You Putting Me On? look. Monaghan’s piece - “The Physics of Grief” - made me feel less alone.

These pieces are worth the price of the book alone, but there’s so much more. Every unsung writer deserves their own Tom Jackson, who worked on this book for a decade at least, and it arrives 31 years after Shea’s death.Robert Shea wrote quite a lot about anarchism and being an anarchist committed to non-violence. He practiced Zen (he was very much influenced by Alan Watts, and Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing had a big impact) and it appears to have functioned like cannabis did for Wilson. Shea has some interesting observations about the writing process itself and they feel influenced by his practice of Zen.

Illuminatus! fanatics need to realize that it wouldn’t have ever gotten published if not for Shea, who, cooly, approached an old editor friend, Bob Abel, who gave RAW and Shea the contract. While Shea was “easygoing” and rational throughout that insane period, RAW fought Dell’s wish to publish the book in three parts, and, as Jackson’s research interviewing the editors of that book showed, RAW was, according to David M. Harris, “one of the most difficult authors I ever worked with.”

If you’re a fan of Ursula K. LeGuin, as I am, Shea’s review of The Dispossessed is one of the most insightful ones I’ve read. Shea appreciates LeGuin’s intricacies regarding the difficulties of making an anarchist community work within its own ideals. There’s also an essay on Heinlein’s Rules For Writers, and Shea can’t help but take issue with #3: “You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.” Shea thinks this must come from Heinlein’s time as a pulp writer, where the rule was Write Fast, Then Submit It. I am totally on Shea’s side here, and that’s an understatement. Hey, Heinlein was prolific and hugely influential. His own Rules clearly worked for him. Shea admires how Heinlein appealed to audiences that he wasn’t writing for, and might not want to have anything to do with, and Charles Manson is only the most extreme case. Shea finds it necessary to edit, re-write and re-shape, and not just for typos. I agree with Shea here, but take it further. I’m with Robert Anton Wilson at the other extreme from Heinlein’s #3: it’s one of life’s delights to re-write. Especially stoned on cannabis. RAW, Leary, David Jay Brown and a number of others within that particular milieu have called this the Sufi Method, although I have been unable to unearth a direct source for this, despite trying, mightily. (If you have a hot line, please contact me, here!) Basically: you write a new piece either stoned or straight. Then you alternate: if you wrote straight, edit stoned, then write straight again, then edit stoned again. Etc. But I digress…’cuz I’m stoned! (Or I will be, shortly…)My current suspicion is that RAW and Leary and their writer friends made this up; attributing it to the Sufis was a way to take a practice that’s looked at with an askance eye by most other writers, editors and publisher and make it look exotic, esoteric. Which if true I find hilarious! (I also have very strong suspicions that a Sufi Method is far more widespread among writers than most will admit.)There are so many pieces by Shea here that sparkle, and I wish my younger self had read his take on sex. In the 1970s The Inner Game of Tennis was a huge bestseller, followed by other Inner Game books. Here Shea riffs on the zen-like aspect of these Inner Game books and writes “The Inner Game of Sex,” published in Playboy in 1978. We had a sexual revolution the previous decade but Shea says we are still too unconsciously influenced by Puritan and Victorian attitudes. “Sex, of all human activities, should be the one we enjoy most freely, yet it is one of the most ruled and regulated.” We want to be really good at it and we worry and criticize ourselves if we’re not adequate or great and set out ideas for self-improvement, when what we need to do is just be in the moment and not be consumed with worries about outcomes. “It’s as if we had two selves that might be called the player and the spectator. The player is pure action; it does not think in words and it needs to concentrate. The spectator observes and intellectualizes.” Master and Johnson even came up with a term for this: “spectatoring” and more recent sex researchers and therapists think women have fallen prey to this more than men, wondering if they look “right” while fucking.

I was delighted with Shea’s “Martin Gardner Challenge” from Shea’s own anarchist ‘zine, No Governor, which was always a delight when I found it. Gardner insisted that anarchism can’t work because people need to rely on the cops to protect them when bad guys come for their stuff. “Gardner’s critique of anarchism contains an unquestioned assumption: that the present system of governments and governmental law enforcement is effectively preventing robbery, rape and murder.” Indeed, the Supreme Court in 2005 ruled the police have no duty to “protect and serve” (see Castle Rock v. Gonzalez. Or a little nonfiction book that gave me the creeps: Dial 911 and Die, by Richard W. Stevens.) Shea’s reading of all the classic anarchist-libertarian texts is impressive, and there are many terrific short anarchist-libertarian essays collected here, including “Doing Anarchism Yourself,” “Obscenity Laws and the First Amendment,” “Abolish Obscenity Laws,” and “Anarchism and Crime,” co-written with Wilson.

Shea wrote a number of historical novels and he loved to research the middle ages and Japan. There’s an excerpt from his novel Shike here. Shea also wrote The Saracen, Shaman, and my favorite, All Things Are Lights, which takes its title from medieval mystic philosopher Scotus Erigena and has secret societies and other ideas that seem to overlap with material in Illuminatus! Shea thought that a lot of science fiction and fantasy writing posits utopian or dystopian scenarios because, unlike a historical novel, you don’t need to do a lot of research. I’m sure this is true to some degree.

Lastly, I was riveted by a twenty-page essay/review of Barbara Branden’s biography, The Passion of Ayn Rand. I should have mentioned this as among those that make the price of the book worthwhile. Not only does Shea like Rand’s work, he has a deep understanding of her personal and epistemological failings. I remember someone telling me a long time ago that I should read this book, but Rand really bugged me, so why when there are so many books?, etc… This long essay/review shows Shea as sensitive to nuance and…as one who had Keats’s Negative Capability. I was only dimly aware of the cult surrounding Ayn Rand, but the bizarre sexual aspects of it - which seems to have traumatized all involved - is something to behold. Shea, an outsider to this sexual drama, has the correct diagnosis for what what wrong and why and how it could have gone much better for all involved. He even mentions the time when Rand heard Wilson say some positive things about Rand on the radio, and so RAW was summoned into her presence, with other cult members present (I realize that’s a charged term, but I do think it’s apt here), witnessing her grilling RAW to see if he had the Correct Attitudes on Everything (whatever Ayn Rand thought), and he failed, miserably, and was cast out. This piece was breathtaking for me. Read it!With Every Day Is A Good Day, Robert Shea lives on!

Full disclosure: Tom Jackson helped edit my book with Eric Wagner, Straight Outta Dublin, and he was extremely helpful. He’s also been kind to me at his blog, RAW Illumination.net

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