Final Project

Digital Implementations of the Book of Change: A Personal Exploration

64: Nearing Completion The situation is incomplete, but the chaos of the past is slowly giving way to order, and the goal is in sight. Nevertheless, you are still treading on thin ice – the way ahead is unobstructed, the goal is clear, but a cautious and careful attitude is still essential, lest you slip and fall.

http://divination.com/practice/iching/lookup/64/

Whatever else the I Ching/Yijing (the Book of Change) might be, it is one of the oldest surviving examples of a hypertext document. Upon the undifferentiated expanse of human experience, the Book of Change imposes a framework of sixty four particular situations. Each moment may be characterized by a prevailing situation from within which an emerging situation is beginning to arise. This provides 4096 possible categories into which phenomena may be classified.
Each of these sixty four situations is presented as a six line figure, referred to as a hexagram. Each of these lines may be either broken/open or unbroken/closed and either young/unchanging/stable or old/changing/moving. Moving lines produce a new hexagram which characterizes the emerging situation.
Although hexagrams can be analyzed in terms of their structure, each hexagram is the starting point of an endless flow of text. First of all, each hexagram has been given a name or title. A text is associated with each hexagram considered as a complete figure. Each moving line also has an associated text. The sixty four Judgment texts and the 384 line texts comprise the earliest strata, known as the Zhouyi, the Changes of Chou/Zhou.
The earliest layer of commentary, the Ten Wings, and the Zhouyi together form the basic text of the I Ching/Yijing, the Book of Change. The Third and Forth Wings, the Xiang Zhuan, provide an additional text, referred to the Image, for each hexagram. The Image text interprets the hexagram in terms of its component trigrams. Ever since the establishment of the basic text of the Book of Change, vast numbers of commentaries and interpretations have proliferated.
Many uses have been found for the Book of Change, including providing a framework for structured meditation. However, the Book of Change is usually approached in one of two ways. Scholars of the Chinese language study it as an ancient text and either try to recover the “original meaning” of the text or investigate what the text meant to readers in various historical periods. Other folks use it as a tool for contemplating what might be a favorable course of action in a particular situation. There have always been people who have considered the Book of Change as a predictive prognosticator, a fortune teller, a magic eight ball with 4096 possible responses. However, most folks who find the Book of Change a helpful aid to decision making understand it not as describing the future, but as a tool for exploring the texture and structure of the present moment . The moment is understood as experiential, lived time, as distinguished from the instant of abstract, calculated punch clock time of physics and train schedules. The Book of Change is momentous, rather than instantaneous.
Some people who consult the Book of Change for guidance are strongly attached to the traditional text, or in many cases their favorite translation of the traditional text. Other folks consider the traditional text only one of many possible descriptions of the situation represented by a particular hexagram. These folks are open to considering, or composing, alternative descriptions, as well as considering or composing contemporary commentary or interpretation of the traditional text.

One light hearted example of a contemporary text is I Ching Me! Timeless Wisdom for Modern Cubicles (http://www.ichingme.com). Hexagram 6, Conflict, becomes Change Management. “You are sincere/And are being obstructed . . . It furthers one to see the great man” becomes “A plan of transition to a state of Total Quality Culture. No one knows the goal; no one understands the metric; everyone says ‘proactive’ nine times a day. The wise worker speaks correct buzzwords . . . Seek advice from Quality Assurance and Marketing. Avoid IT and Sales. Call your mother.”
Another example of a nontraditional text is The Portable Dragon: The Western Man's Guide to the I Ching (originally published as The Man of Many Qualities: A Legacy of the I Ching). The editor, Ralph Gun Hoy Siu, chose selections from Western literature to elucidate each of the hexagrams. Dr. Siu's other books include The Tao of Science, and The Craft of Power.

As Aarseth points out:

the I Ching continues to be transformed, specialized and extended (note such titles as “I Ching for the Successful Businessman”). These numerous paradigmatic and syntagmatic transformations and translations of the Book of Changes are not to be regarded as perversions or mutations of the text, since in the case of the I Ching it seems doubtful that any specific and original text ever existed. Rather, we should consider the "text" as an unfinished historical process of system transformation,
the sum of all evolutionary stages and paraphrases" (Aarseth, 177 ).

From oracle bones to iPhones, the Book of Change has appeared in many formats and media. This discussion will consider several examples of how the Book of Change has been adapted for presentation on the computer screen. According to Tom Van Vleck: “The first computer implementation of this ancient text that I am aware of was done in the early 60s on CTSS by C. Tillman. It is documented in the Second Edition CTSS Manual, section AJ.11.03, dated 9/24/65. The program was called ORACLE” which ran on an IBM 7094 at MIT. (http://www.multicians.org/thvv/i.html) Some distributions of Unix included an I Ching/ Yi jing program in the games tree.

In 1987 I was sitting in the staff room of the Iowa City Public Library with a couple of issues of MacWorld reading about HyperCard. In his article “The Challenge of Hypermedia,” David Bunnell, citing Ted Nelson and Doug Englebert described hypertext as “nonsequential writing on screen (p.17).” Considering this, I thought that nonsequential writing would require nonsequential reading. In that case, the Book of Change would be an example of hypertext.
The last paragraph of Danny Goodman 's introduction to HyperCard in the previous issue declared that: “Because it puts powerful programming tools into the hands of nonprogrammers . . . HyperCard should inspire a quick rise in the number and variety of applications available for the Macintosh. We no longer have to rely on the programming skills of big-name software houses for specialized applications. HyperCard is what we've needed all along” (p.129).
When I read this, I took it to mean that HyperTalk made scripting so accessible that it would not be necessary to learn it. HyperCard stacks would be available in such profusion that someone else would have designed the one you needed before you had time to build your own. Proceeding from this assumption, I mail ordered all the Book of Change stacks available from the BudgetBytes catalogue. However, when they arrived I discovered that none of them worked they way I understood the Book of Change to work. Typically, these programs would provide a single hexagram with no changing lines. If any text was provided, it was usually just the Judgment.
What I was looking for was a program which would include the possibility of changing lines, provide the text for the Image as well as the Judgment, and the text for any changing lines and take you to the resulting second hexagram with its Judgment and Image. Of course it would be possible to consult twice to produce two hexagrams, and then consider which lines had to change to produce the second hexagram, but my understanding was that one should not be expected to resort to this workaround. Although there are many methods of casting a hexagram, the two most prevalent are the three coin method and the yarrow stalk method. These two methods result in somewhat different probabilities for the various possible lines. An adequate computer emulation should provide the user with a choice of methods, or at least be explicit about which probabilities it is utilizing.

With some trepidation, I began working on my own version: Disk of Change: yet another I Ching HyperCard stack . Working on this project took me deeper into scripting than I have ever been before or since. At this point I'm not sure I could ever get back there again. Princeton University Press had begun to complain about unauthorized computer versions of the Wilhelm/Baynes version. For the text I freely adapted the 1882 public domain translation by James Legge . For the Image texts, my adaptations leaned very heavily on Thomas Cleary ’s Taoist I Ching.

When I began the project I had no computer of my own. Most of the work was done on machines provided by the generosity of friends who let me wander into their homes unattended. Some work was also done in university ITCs, since these were the olden days when anyone could walk into an ITC and get on a computer without a HawkID login. Dot matrix printing was free, but a punch card was required for laser printing.
When the project was completed I was fairly satisfied with the result, but distribution was quite limited. There might have been a few friends who were persuaded to take a look. Moon Mystique at the Hall Mall agreed to make a few available, but I'm not sure than anyone actually paid the fifty cents to take one home, even though it was a fairly good price just for the disk itself. A few members of the Iowa Student Computer Association agreed to take a look at the scripts. Although I was hoping that there might be some suggestions for how to make the cumbersome kludges a bit more elegant, nothing substantial was offered.
To supplement the meager introductory material I had included in my stack, I asked Willard Johnson and Paul Williams for permission to make HyperCard versions of their articles about the Book of Change. They both agreed. Entering the text was a tedious but fairly straightforward procedure that required no complicated scripting. In the International Center ITC in the Old Law Building I made a few crude MacPaint scan graphics to include in these stacks. My scanning skills have not advanced much since that time. By the time I completed the project, HyperCard 2.0 had arrived. It seemed to me that I would never be able to keep up with the pace of technological innovation.

In addition to HyperCard versions of the I Ching, several standalone programs were available for Apple II, Macintosh, MS-DOS, Windows, and several other computers. For a fairly comprehensive list of these programs see I Ching: An Annotated Bibliography (Hacker, 318-326).
One of the most popular of these programs was Synchronicity, which was developed by Paul O’Brian. Synchronicity portrayed a garden setting for consulting the book of change. A small stream running through the garden was accompanied by the sounds of running water and croaking frogs. The commercial version was fairly expensive. A demo version with fewer features allowed four consultations. If one were careful to work from a copy and save an unused demo, another demo copy could be produced when the copy was expended.
O'Brian first encountered the Book of Change as a freshman at UC Berkeley in 1969.
“He skeptically tossed the I Ching for the first time, and his question was ignored. Instead, he received Hexagram #4: ‘Youthful Folly.’ Chalking it up to chance, he tried again and received a line that ‘questioned the sincerity of the seeker,’ ignored his ego-driven query. He was stunned ... and converted.” (http://www.tarot.com/iching/about-iching/paul-obrien-biography).
After dropping out of Berkeley, living on a communal goat farm, and visiting sourthern Asia to study Buddhist meditation, O'Brian began a career in software development and marketing. In 1988 he left the company he was working for to start Visionary Software to develop Synchronicity, his I Ching program for Macintosh, which became available in 1989.
In 1997 his new company, Visionary Networks, produced an I Ching CD-ROM, Oracle of Changes, and aquired the I-Ching.com and Tarot.com web domain names. In 2002 Visionary Networks won contracts to provide astrology and divination for AOL, MySpace, Belief.net and other web portals. After selling Visionary Networks and the Tarot.com website to Name Media in 2007, O'Brian established the Divination Foundation which publishes his books (Divination: Sacred Tools for Reading the Mind of God and Enlightened Decision Making) and podcasts (http://divination.com/about/paulo/).

In 1994 and 1996, just as graphical browser Mosaic was bringing a wider audience to the web, two major university presses published CD-ROM versions of their translations of the Book of Change. The Multimedia I Ching was published by Princeton University Press in 1996 and was based on their Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Book of Change. Despite the fact that this version is an English translation of a German translation of the Chinese text, Wilhelm/Baynes is generally considered the “standard” English version. The CD-ROM edition presents the text in a context somewhat similar to a computer game. There is a library which can be explored and where the basic concepts of the Book of Change can be studied. To cast a hexagram one must enter a garden pavilion where one is offered the choice of the three coin or yarrow stalk method. The resulting texts are presented in a very readable, elegant fashion.
The Columbia I Ching is based on Richard John Lynn's translation, The Classic of Change : A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi. Although Want Bi lived for only twenty three years (226-249 CE) his commentaries of the Tao Te Ching and the Book of Change continue to be influential to this day. Apart from the introductory screens, The Columbia I Ching is not as elegant as the Princeton version. Each hexagram is illustrated by a photograph of Tibetan Himalayan mountains, with no obvious relation to the subject of the hexagram (with the exception, of course, of number 52, Mountain).
Kidder Smith , professor of Chinese history at Bowdoin College and senior author of Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching, described The Columbia I Ching in at least two reviews. Smith considers Lynn's translation “the single best introduction to the Yijing currently available.” The CD-ROM version has been set up

with a hexagram-generating mechanism, a simple changing line device, and a journal for recording one's results. A mouse click switches one easily from moving line to commentary to related text,and so on . . . Formally, the Yijing seems perfectly suited to this approach. Like a computer, it constructs a huge network out of the simplest bipolar alteration. From within that closed field of possibilities it generates the potential of vast meaning. Since its relationships are ever shifting, its user requires some means to make instantaneous connections to precisely defined objectives located far across the network, a task well suited to the computer's capabilites. And yet I haven't found this approach especially useful, or even that much fun. Perhaps it is best enjoyed by someone relatively new to the text (Smith 1999, 381).

In other words:

We can see how the computer might make a good mate for the I Ching — not just because both are based on binary math. Changing hexagrams and mutating lines necessitate quick connections to material "located" elsewhere in the book . . .True, the I Ching has no beginning, middle, or end, so one might relinquish the linearity of book pages. But those who love the text have learned their way around in it as surely as any computer – and with much richer synchronicity (Smith 1997).

In 1994, when Paul Gilster published his book Finding it on the internet: the essential guide to archie, Veronica, Gopher, WAIS, WWW (including Mosaic), and other search and browsing tools, the web did “not yet have its Veronica, the all-purpose search tool for Gopher that scours a database of collected resources to simplify the search process” (Gilster, 150). In those days I usually found web sites by reading books and magazines. One of the web sites I found in Gilster's book was what might have been the first I Ching server on the web. (Gilster found it at the WWW Virtual Library.) This I Ching website was run by a graduate student, Jonathan Katz, on a spare Sun workstation at the UCLA CAD Lab (http://constantname.blogspot.com/2009/09/i-ching-at-ucla-cad-lab.html). In 1995 I was able to find about a dozen I Ching related web sites and most of them were simply links to this site. This project has evolved into facade.com, where tarot, runes and biorhythms, as well as the Book of Change can be consulted.
Concerning the Book of Change, Gilster wrote that: “As for understanding what the I Ching tells you, you're on your own” (Gilster, 150). My understanding was that on the web one should never have to be on be “on your own.” On the basis of this understanding, I began to work on Old Fogey's Guide to the I Ching , not so much for any wisdom I might be able to impart, but primarily to make the introductory information provided by previously mentioned (HyperCard era) articles by Willard Johnson and Paul Williams available on the web. Again I contacted them, and again they gave me permission to disseminate their words.
After studying The HTML Manual of Style and Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in 21 Days I put together a few pages. In order to find a web host I went door to door to various computer related storefront operations until I found Silicone Prairie, a free public web server provided by GIANT.Net (Global Information Analysis Networking Technologies, Inc) on Burlington Street. This situation did not last for very long. A short time after I put up my I Ching website, Silicone Prairie was no longer available as a free public web server. Several months later (October 1996) I received a postcard inquiring about my web site, which was no longer available. The postcard was from Joseph Morales, who maintains his own I Ching website at http://www.cdmag.us/books/I_Ching.

In those days, consulting the web was, for me, an occasional, rather than a perpetual, activity. After receiving the mysterious postcard I decided to take another look at the I Ching on the web. At that point there must have been some sort of search capability available on the text based Lynx browser that was available on the Iowa City Public Library catalogue terminals. What I found was I Ching Bookmarks (http://zhouyi.com/old) which listed hundreds of I Ching related web sites, including (to my surprise) Old Fogey's Guide to the I Ching on its dead links list.

In addition to compiling links to I Ching related web sites, Lorainne Patsco, the person who maintained the I Ching Bookmarks site, was involved in another project: putting together an bibliography of English language related I Ching material. Sorting through my two I Ching boxes, I sent Lorainne a few things she had not seen before. When I Ching: An Annotated Bibliography was published in 2002 my name was included among the contributors, even though not many of my contributions were actually included. This was probably because the software I submitted was sharware/freeware HyperCard stacks rather than commercial products, and the articles I provided were mostly from obscure countercultural publications rather than from academic journals.
With hundreds of I Ching related sites available, I considered my meager efforts redundant, but Lorraine encouraged me to put my pages back up, so I found a home for them on geocities. While I was updating these pages my login evaporated when yahoo! bought geocities. They persisted awhile, even though I was not able to modify them, before they faded away. Later I was astonished to discover that they had been preserved at the Wayback Machine on archive.org (http://web.archive.org/web/20011217011126/www.geocities.com/heartland/prairie/6015/ofgyj.html).
A web search for “I Ching” or “zhouyi” still brings up I Ching Bookmarks fairly high on the list. However, very few links on the main page are functional. The previous version of the site has active links, but most of the pages they link to are no longer available. Although not as comprehensive as I Ching Bookmarks once was, The I Ching on the Net is one of the most useful directories of I Ching related web sites. Advances in search technology seem to have made hand crafted, subject specific bookmark pages less necessary than they once were. (Google: Results 1 - 10 of about 4,200,000 for i ching.) The I Ching on the Net is maintained by Greg Whincup, author of Rediscovering the I Ching, one of several efforts to recover the “original meaning of the text.”
Searching Facebook, rather than Google, also returns interesting results. There are several applications (I Ching : We have fixed the bugs reported by Steve, Tony, and Rob. Thanks for the input! January 9, 2008 at 3:23pm) and numerous pages and groups. Several of the group discussions are conducted in Spanish or Italian.
A recent new item on The I Ching on the Net is a link to an iPhone I Ching application (http://www.flatearthstudio.com/Apps/Apps.html). Here’s a message from Lorraine earlier this year: “Guess what, I got the iPod touch and downloaded all the I Ching programs! I got a ton of them. Some are kind of hokey though, like they don't have changing lines, that sort of thing. I kind of feel like doing a review of them all so people know which ones have the changing lines available. I just got it this weekend and all I want to do is play with it.” This is a review I'd like to see.
As new communication technologies continue to emerge, the Book of Change will continue to be adapted for them. This ancient text continues to speak to anyone with an interest in considering its wisdom and suggestions. Asking for suggestions for how to bring this discussion to a close I received 18 changing to 7 from Yi Jing, book of sun and moon (http://www.yijing.nl/).
Number 18 Ku / Work on what has been spoiled [Decay ], or as the book of sun and moon has it, can o’worms. It is certainly true that this composition is more of a sprawling ramble than I had envisioned and less of a coherent account than that for which I might have hoped. At this point there is not much time to work on substantial improvement, or to attempt to incorporate any analysis. “Working on what has been spoiled” will consist of proofreading, correcting typos, and formatting so that the what is submitted might have an acceptable appearance, whatever the limitations of its content. Nine in the third place offers some consolation: “ although he may at times have slight cause for regret, he remains free of any serious blame.” Nine in the sixth place is a challenge to set higher goals (including the challenge presented by Our Professor to incorporate more analysis into my writing). Meeting these challenges is something that will need to continue beyond the conclusion of this project.

As Hexagram 18 decays into Hexagram 7, it brings to mind a little story with which I will bring this discussion to a close. On March Fourth my wife and I attended a concert at the IMU performed by Abraham, Inc. , a klezmer/funk/hip-hop fusion music group led by “crackerjack clarinetist and klezmer maniac” David Krakauer. After the performance we had an opportunity to converse with several members of the ensemble.
While chatting with rapper C-Rayz Walz , I noticed that he had an I Ching hexagram tattooed on the side of his neck. When I asked him which hexagram it was he told me that it was number 7, “You know, The People.” At the time I didn't say anything more about it, but a couple of days later I sent C-Rayz an email message: “I was . . . wondering how you chose earth over water for the tattoo. If I remember correctly, you referred to it as The People, which is an interpretation with which I was not familiar. I'd be interested to know about any thoughts you have on that hexagram in particular or the I Ching in general.”
Hexagram 7 is usually referred to as The Army. The Army described by this hexagram is a people's militia rather than a standing army of professional warriors. “In the middle of the earth is water . . . Ground water is invisibly present within the earth. In the same way the military power of a people is invisibly present in the masses. When danger threatens, every peasant becomes becomes a soldier; when the war ends, he goes back to his plow” (Wilhelm/Baynes). Although I have no idea what the precise English translation of “shih” should be, by referring to the peasantry as The People it encompasses their roles as both defenders and producers.
While preparing for this paper I spent some time searching for computerized version of the Book of Change that I had not seen before. One that I found was a Mac dashboard widget called i.ching (http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/reference/iching.html) which appears to be a full color descendant of the old I Ching desk accessories that provided a hexagram and its name, but no other text. As I was browsing through the hexagrams on i.ching (the widget) Hexagram 7 appeared as “Shih — The People .”

Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Aarseth concurs with my understanding that the I Ching is an example of a hypertext. He also concurs with my understanding that the traditional text is just one possible description of the hexagrams and their individual lines.

Bunnell, David. “The Challenge of Hypermedia.” MacWorld, November 1987, p.17-23.

Columbia I Ching. New York: Columbia Univeristy Press, 1994.

A CD-ROM version of Richard John Lynn's book, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi.

Wang Bi (226--249) was a scholar of xuanxue, "dark (or mysterious) learning," sometimes characterized as Neotaoism. Although he lived for only 23 years, his commentaries on the I Ching and Tao Te Ching continue to be influential.

Gilster, Paul. Finding it on the internet : the essential guide to archie, Veronica, Gopher, WAIS, WWW (including Mosaic), and other search and browsing tools. New York: Wiley, 1994.

Goodman, Danny. “The Two Faces of HyperCard: Bill Atkinson serves up a Macintosh software revolution.” MacWorld, October 1987, pp. 122-129.

Most of what I was able to learn about HyperCard and HyperTalk came from Danny Goodman's books.

Hacker, Edward, Steve Moore, Lorraine Patsco, eds. I Ching: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Edward Hacker is Professor Emeritus in the Dept. of Philosphy and religion at Northeastern University and the author of The I Ching Handbook (Paradigm Publications 1993), Steve Moore is the author of The Trigrams of Han: Inner Structures of the I Ching (Thorsons Publishers, April 1989). Lorraine Patsco is Webmaster of I Ching Bookmarks, www.zhouyi.com.

Johnson, Willard. A Beginners Guide to the I Ching. Berkeley: Shambala Publications, 1970.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040113090521/www.geocities.com/heartland/prairie/6015/wj1.html

Johnson wrote this brief introduction to the I Ching while he was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. He continued his study of the I Ching after becoming a professor of religion at San Diego State University.

Multimedia I Ching. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

A CD-ROM Version of the Wilhelm/Baynes translations of the Book of Changes.

This digital version of the Book of Changes provides the user with a computer game like interface. One must enter the Library to study the text of the I Ching (and Helmut Wilhelm's Change: Eight Lectures on the I Ching. It is necessary to go to a special pavilion to cast a hexagram.

Although numerous English translations and interpretations have appeared in recent years, the Wilhelm/Baynes translations remains the "standard English version." Cary Baynes translated Wilhelm's German translation of the Chinese text into English, which Paul Williams (see below) considers “less a good translation than an out and out miracle.”

Stephen Owen, in a review of Richard Lynn's translation (The New Republic, 11-28-94, pp. 66-70) compares it to Wilhelm/Baynes. Although Owen considers Lynn's work a more accurate translation of the Chinese;

“One reason that Lynn may not supplant Wilhelm/Baynes is a scholarly heaviness about his translation; but a deeper reason may lie in what an audience is seeking in the ‘Eastern Religions’ section. For the precise way in which the Wilhelm/Baynes translation twists the Chinese produces a remarkable oracular grace--passages that sound profound, and with sufficient ingenuity on the part of the reader, may even become profound. The combination of Wilhelm and Baynes was a lucky one: Baynes fashioned out of Wilhelm's German a distinct English idiom, compelling by its rhythms, by its biblical echoes, by its skillful choice of words, by its surprising conjunction of abstractions that perhaps owes more to Rilke than to the Chinese. Where the Chinese is clear, Wilhelm/Baynes is often mysterious. After such an encounter with mystery in the translation, the Wilhelm commentary then guides the translation back toward sense, formally embodying the experience of an obscure ancient text interpretable to the modern world.”

Smith, Kidder. “Do Your Own Ching.” Natural History, v. 106, no. 7, Sept. 12, 1997.

Smith, Kidder. "Review of The Columbia I Ching on CD-ROM.” Philosophy East & West.
v. 49, No.3, July 1999, p. 381.

Kidder Smith is Professor Emeritus of Asian Studies and History at Bowdoin College. He studied China's culture at Princeton, Berkeley, and in Taiwan. He is senior author of Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). With other members of the Denma Translation Group he collaborated on a new translation of Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

Synchonicity. Portland, OR: Visionary Software, 1989-90.

Williams, Paul. “The Sources of the Nile: The “I Ching’ looks like a book but it isn't, really.” Crawdaddy, April, 1973, p. 10.

http://web.archive.org/web/20011221011202/www.geocities.com/heartland/prairie/6015/pw1.html

Paul Williams founded Crawdaddy magazine (http://web.archive.org/web/20020601080238/www.cdaddy.com/FormatHomePage.cgi), the first journal of rock criticism (as distinguished from teen fan mags like Tiger Beat). After a seemingly remarkable recovery after a fall from a bicycle, Paul developed early onset Alzheimers due to his brain injury.

http://paulwilliams.com/index.html

Here is a video of Paul being interviewed by his son for a school project:

Part one

http://www.youtube.com/user/cindyleeberryhill#p/u/7/DqAhMJTW-Q0

Part two

http://www.youtube.com/user/cindyleeberryhill#p/u/6/8yLpHYFaYPw

Paul's three wives have collaborated on benefit concerts to raise funds for his nursing home care.

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=121382749378&id=80121576515&ref=mf