1,530 words
I was using my Spectator-co-uk digital subscription to search for odds and ends in its wonky archive. What, I wondered, did the Speccy have to say about the Angry Young Men in the late 1950s? Better yet, what did they have on Colin Wilson and his friend, the ever-elusive Bill Hopkins?
Not an awful lot, as it turns out. (more…)
547 words
1. Camille Paglia, Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education (New York: Pantheon, 2018).
Paglia is self-recommending, of course. I was a bit let down, as the subtitle seemed to promise a career-wide retrospective, while this is more like a reunion tour, with emphasis on more recent works. The key essays are a vast survey, “Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s,” a liberal education in itself; (more…)
7,981 words
Colin Wilson
The Age of Defeat
London: Aristeia Press, 2018 (reprint; original edition 1959)
“You get to be a superhero by believing in the hero within you and summoning him or her forth by an act of will. Believing in yourself and your own potential is the first step to realizing that potential. (more…)
6,580 words
The following review was published in The European, a journal owned and published by Sir Oswald Mosley and his wife, Diana, between 1953 and 1959, in its February 1957 issue. (more…)
3,820 words
Chuck Palahnuik
Adjustment Day: A Novel
London: Jonathan Cape, 2018
“Ears, gentlemen. Sandinista ears.”[1]
I had almost reached the massive iron door, hidden behind a construction dumpster, that serves as the entrance to the abandoned glove factory that has been my squat for the past several years (more…)
4,188 words / 26:20
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As I have written about previously for Counter-Currents (as well as in a considerably revised and expanded version of this same essay that was included in North American New Right, vol. 2), the English philosopher, novelist, and compiler of eclectic knowledge of all kinds, Colin Wilson (1932-2013), is one of the most unjustly forgotten writers of our time. (more…)
Two of Obama’s mentors, whose imaginations helped to meme his presidency into existence: anti-white Pastor Jeremiah Wright with Bill Ayers, former terrorist leader of the Weather Underground.
4,834 words
“Anything is possible in this world. I really believe that. Dream on it. Let your mind take you to places you would like to go, and then think about it and plan it and celebrate the possibilities. And don’t listen to anyone who doesn’t know how to dream.”–Liza Minnelli
“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”–Antonio Gramsci (more…)
Neville Goddard
4,337 words
Part 2 of 2; part 1 here
Earlier, I noted Wilson’s second thoughts, 45 years later, about Religion and the Rebel as an “overstuffed pillow”; he specifically felt that the early biographical material on Rilke was “unnecessary.” But actually, it supplies us with a remarkable parallel to Neville’s method, as well as a hint of Wilson’s future development.
Wilson says if Rilke had died at age twenty-five, no one would have remembered him. Instead, he willed himself to be a poet. (more…)
6,326 words
Colin Wilson
Part 1 of 2
“What was needed was not some new religious cult but some simple way of accessing religious or mystical experience, of the sort that must have been known to the monks and cathedral-builders of the Middle Ages.”–Colin Wilson[1]
“The serpent said that every dream could be willed into creation by those strong enough to believe in it.”–Eve to Adam, in Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (more…)
107 words / 63:58
Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one above or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.” To subscribe to the CC podcast RSS feed, click here.
Greg Johnson and John Morgan convene another episode of Counter-Currents Weekly. (more…)
6,580 words
The following review was published in The European, a journal owned and published by Sir Oswald Mosley and his wife, Diana, between 1953 and 1959, in its February 1957 issue. (more…)
5,370 words
Camille Paglia
Free Men, Free Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism
New York: Pantheon, 2017
“A very few have thought the problems through to the end and proposed constructive solutions . . . Such men are never popular with their ‘intellectual peers,’ since their very existence is an implied reproach.” – Colin Wilson[1] (more…)
3,008 words
“These,” he pointed around, “are my other guns. The parallel is exact!” — Sherlock Holmes, “The Empty House.”[1]
Having devoted considerable time and attention to the genres of weird fiction and science fiction,[2] it is perhaps long overdue that I should spend some time considering the remaining one of the Three Disreputable Genres,[3] detective fiction. (more…)
5,169 words
Richard B. Spence
Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult
Port Townsend, Wash.: Feral House, 2008
“The great scientists, the artists, the philosophers, the religious leaders — all maniacs. What else but a blind singleness of purpose could have given focus to their purpose? Mania, my dear Mister Bond, is as priceless as genius. (more…)
Michael Pacher, The Devil showing St. Augustine the Book of Vices, ca. 1480
3,892 words
Alan Judd
The Devil’s Own Work
London: HarperCollins, 1991
New York: Knopf, 1994
Richmond, Va.: Valancourt, 2015; with an Introduction by Owen King and an Afterword by Alan Judd
Oh boy, another weird novella unearthed and republished by the folks at Valancourt![1]
Well, not really unearthed, as The Devil’s Own Work is a 1991 novella by Alan Judd which won the Guardian Fiction Award. (more…)
2,464 words
Jonathan Bowden
Demon
Edited by Alex Kurtagić
London: The Palingenesis Project, 2014
The Jonathan Bowden Project is not a progressive rock band, although transgressive might apply. Rather, it is Alex Kurtagić’s project to republish material from The Collected Works of Jonathan Bowden, in something of a respectable and reader-friendly format; the original having been, apparently, something of a self-published mess. (more…)
4,109 words
Part 2 of 2
Bill Hopkins
3. “The corrupt vigour of fascism.”
In early 1958, Time magazine ran a humorous squib titled “Sloane Square Stomp.”[9] It told how Colin Wilson (and presumably Bill) had attended a premiere of their friend Stuart Holroyd’s new play at the Royal Court Theatre. Bill and Colin’s onetime friend Christopher Logue stood up in the stalls with Kenneth Tynan, denouncing Holroyd and Wilson as fascists. During the interval, this led to a shoving match in a nearby bar. The whole thing was a tempest in a teapot, (more…)
3,016 words
Part 1 of 2
Hopkins, around the time of Declaration and The Divine and the Decay (1957).
(Told in the discursive spirit, if not quite the style, of Jonathan Bowden.)
“The evidence of exhaustion stares out from the columns of the daily newspapers. The references to ‘Angry Young Men’ for example, record a general astonishment at the vigour of simply being angry. Another instance is the hero-worship of the late James Dean, who posthumously remains as the embodiment of Youth’s violent rebuttal of a society grown pointless. That the rejection is equally pointless does not appear to matter; the sincerity redeems it.”
— Bill Hopkins, “Ways Without a Precedent,” in Declaration, 1957 (more…)
4,572 words
Isabel Colegate
The Blackmailer
Richmond, Va.: Valancourt, 2014
“If you want to call it God, the divine, the energy in all things, the force that created the universe, nature, whatever you call it, I believe it’s fury not love.” — Jonathan Bowden
“What we feel for each other is really a passion for power,” said Judith. “We want to destroy each other by making the other fall in love with us.” — Isabel Colegate, The Blackmailer (more…)
2,673 words
T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets can be considered amongst the greatest English poetry of the 20th century, and arguably amongst the greatest English poetry ever. The four poems meditate repetitively and brilliantly on man’s relationship to time and eternity, and posit a religious solution to the problem of man’s need for meaning in the face of death. (more…)
1,321 words
Robert Ignatius Dillon
Beyond the Bush: A Hopeless Satire
Chicago: Hopeless Books, 2013
Beyond the Bush is the third release from Ann Sterzinger’s Hopeless Books, and the first not from her own pen. Like Sterzinger’s own The Talkative Corpse [1] it reveals its Chicago origins by the frequent use of various derivatives of ‘jag-off’, and one might be tempted to christen it part of a ‘jag off lit’ movement, did it not sound so entirely like I was dismissing it as desultory and self-indulgent. (more…)
5,216 words
Colin Wilson, the English author of well over a hundred books on subjects as diverse as philosophy, literary criticism, criminology, and the occult, as well as many novels, essays and short stories, passed away last Thursday (December 5, 2013) at 11:45 PM local time, in the presence of his wife, Joy, and his daughter, Sally. He was 82.
706 words
Editor’s Note:
In memory of Colin Wilson, who died on December 5th, we are publishing following excerpt from “Bill Hopkins: An Anti-Humanist Life,” a transcript by V. S. of a lecture by Jonathan Bowden given at the 7th New Right meeting in London on April 8, 2006. We will publish a fuller tribute to Wilson’s life and work as soon as possible. (more…)
Bill Hopkins, 1928–2011
59:34 / 9,640 words
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Editor’s Note:
The following text is transcript by V. S. of a lecture by Jonathan Bowden given at the 7th New Right meeting in London on April 8, 2006 entitled “Bill Hopkins: An Anti-Humanist Life.” (more…)
Bill Hopkins, photographed by Ida Kar, 1955
7,100 words
JB: Were you an angry young man?
BH: Very much. I think everybody was very angry and frustrated during the 1950s and from the end of the war onwards actually. The whole country was in a state of stagnation, everything was pointless and meaningless. It was as though someone had stuck a vast syringe into the arm of the nation and all the energy had been withdrawn from it. We were all in limbo. (more…)
4,766 words
Jack Kerouac
Translated by Bruno Cariou
Part 1 of 2
Editor’s Note:
The following essay, written in 1968, and published in Evola’s volume L’Arco e la Clava (The Bow and the Club, 1968), falls naturally into two parts. The first is Evola’s sympathetic critique of the youth rebellion of the 1950s and the 1960s, with a focus on the Beatniks.
