Tag: Margot Metroland

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Elle Reeve
BLACK PILL: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2024

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A short while ago I wrote about the connections between Willis Carto and the Truth Seeker magazine and its owner Charles Smith, who published the original American edition of Imperium. An equally significant connection there is Frederick C. F. Weiss, who was linked to both the Truth Seeker and the National Renaissance Party (NRP) in New York in the 1950s. Weiss was a longtime friend of Francis Parker Yockey, who sometimes stayed at — or hid out at — Weiss’ farm near Middletown New York, about 60 miles northwest of Manhattan. It was through Weiss that the Truth Seeker’s Charles Smith was introduced to Imperium, and probably to Yockey as well. (more…)

Willis Carto

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A near-forgotten journal of occasional significance, The Truth Seeker, turned 150 years old last September. That makes it, by its own claim, the “World’s Oldest Freethought Publication.” Not that there’s an awful lot of competition there, unless you wish to make mischievous arguments in favor of The Atlantic Monthly or The Economist.

Over the years I crossed paths with the Truth Seeker a few times, yet somehow managed to remain oblivious to key points in its history. For example, I only recently discovered — or was reminded again — that The Truth Seeker Company was the original American publisher of Francis Parker Yockey’s Imperium. (more…)

Robert N. Taylor, Moon Mistress

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I love reading Margot Metroland’s essays and I love when she helps me to remember the various writers and forgotten figures of the American underground of the past. Margot has undoubtedly led a very interesting life and has known many personalities, artists, and interesting people. Judging by her writing, I’d say she’s both smart and sociable, which is a very interesting combination, and at the same time she has an interest in strange things. (more…)

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Colin Wilson
The Angry Years: The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men
London: Anova Books, 2007

When Colin Wilson sat down in 2006 to write his own history of the “Angry Young Men,” it was mainly a matter of settling accounts. There had been at least two other similarly-named books on the subject, and they were informative and entertaining. (more…)

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The following is being published in commemoration of George Orwell’s 121st birthday today.

I’ve been trying to figure out how George Orwell fits into that 1950s literary phenomenon, or cult, called the Angry Young Men. The Angries, as a movement, were partly an invention of the British popular press of 1956-58. Some writers who are included among them, notably Kingsley Amis, rejected the label and got counted in only because they were new young writers with an irksome attitude. Others, such as Colin Wilson, treated the whole concept whimsically or dismissively but used it as a publicity tool. (more…)

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Tom Wolfe
The Painted Word
New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1975 (many editions since)

Long before he died, Tom Wolfe deeded his archives to the New York Public Library (NYPL). When he passed on in 2018, the NYPL put up a little “pop-up” exhibition in commemoration. It would have been bigger, but the Library had just done a slap-up interview and celebration with Wolfe a year and a half earlier, and had mounted another small display of Wolfeiana a year before that. (more…)

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Matthew Dallek
Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right
New York: Basic Books, 2023

A couple of months back I reviewed a biography of Robert Welch (A Conspiratorial Life) that I regarded as superficial and facile.[1] The author, Edward H. Miller, seemed to have no real feel for the issues that motivated Welch and his followers in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. In fact, Miller displayed little sense of that time at all — as a political era, I mean. (more…)

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Dwight Macdonald (ed. by John Summers)
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain
New York: New York Review Books, 2011

Long before Paul Fussell’s Class, or Jilly Cooper’s Class, or such dubious offerings of social criticism as The Preppy Handbook and The Yuppie Handbook, we had Dwight Macdonald’s Masscult and Midcult, a long essay originally written for the Partisan Review and published as a slight volume in 1961. More recently (2011) it was republished as a New York Review Books (NYRB) Classics title, bound together with an Introduction by Louis Menand and a collection of pointed and frothy Macdonald writings from the same era, originally published as Against the American Grain. (more…)

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In the early 1980s I was involved with the startup of a “humor magazine” that never went anywhere after its colorful-but-vague pilot issue. Apart from a couple of National Lampoon veterans, we were mostly post-collegiate types, full of quirky, off-the-wall ideas from our own days at colorful-but-vague college humor mags. It was around this time that one of my colleagues mentioned, as a bit of curious arcana, that he had heard that somewhere out there was a racist humor magazine. (more…)

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Editor’s Note: March 31 marks the 115th birthday of Robert Brasillach, the French journalist, novelist, film historian, and man of the Right who was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad for “intellectual crimes” he was alleged to have committed as a German collaborator during the Second World War. The following translation is offered as a commemoration, and links to other resources regarding Brasillach’s life and work are included at the end. (more…)

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Phil Eiger Newmann, Flannery O’Connor, 2021

Like her near-contemporary Gore Vidal (both were born in 1925), the fiction writer Mary Flannery O’Connor had her first brush with fame via a Pathé movie newsreel. She had a pet chicken whom she’d taught to walk backward. Gore’s fame came a few years later when he piloted an airplane, age ten. (more…)

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Edward H. Miller
A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021

A writer friend of mine, now long ensconced in the Condé Nast glossies, used to regale us with his mother’s nutty ideas on matters of politics and society. For example, when the kids were young and at the Safeway in Palo Alto, mom would loudly refuse to buy Welch’s grape juice or jelly — even the grape jelly that came in Flintstones glasses — because that would be giving money to the John Birch Society. (more…)