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Part 6 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 5 here, Part 7 here)
6. Gonzo: Paleocon, Neocon, or Just Con?
I had just begun to doubt some of my strongest convictions when I stumbled upon [Colin Wilson’s The Outsider]. But rather than being wrong, I think that I just don’t express my rightness correctly. — Hunter S. Thompson (more…)
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I have been reading the work of H. P. Lovecraft, who passed away on March 15, 1937, longer than that of any other author. I still own my copy of a book which, appropriate to Lovecraft, is itself a mystery. My name is inscribed on the inside cover, and I would have been about 13 when I read this opening sentence: “North of Arkham the hills rise dark, wild, and wooded, and much overgrown, an area through which the Miskatonic flows seaward, almost at one boundary of the wooded tract.” (more…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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.
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“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
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)