Below is the intro blurb for the following website: http://web.mac.com/philco1/iWeb/Colin%20Wilson/News.html
I don’t know who runs this site, but he knows what he is talking about, unlike the author of the hatchet-job I posted a few minutes ago.
COLIN WILSON
He is the author of Muammar Al Qaddafi’s favourite book. Groucho Marx was an admirer. Mark E. Smith credits him as an influence on his seminal underground band: “if you know what Wilson does…he’ll write a science fiction book but it’s not really about science fiction…which I think is amazing. Or he’ll write a detective novel and tell you who the murderer is on the second page, you know, and then just go off to describe his own theories all the way through the book (chuckling)…it’s very similar to what The Fall do.”
He is allegedly a cult hero in Iraq (read in the Middle East in English translation since the Seventies), he was (is?) one of the most widely discussed authors in English speaking Russia, and has admitted he makes most of his money from Japan where they print literally everything he writes. He has written approximately a hundred and seventy books, from accessible treatises on philosophy (years before Alain de Botton), to studies of violence and deviancy which were once regarded as shockingly deviant themselves yet now seem all too relevant.
He has written novels which manage to be genuinely high/low cultured without having to make an issue about it, and has deconstructed irrationality with a completely rational sceptical mind. Yet Colin Wilson doesn’t receive many critical plaudits from the oligarchy of the British literary establishment (apart from Philip Pullman): a typical cynical Wilson review could be assembled from a rusty, fifty year old template.
Because he can write about recondite ideas in an accessible language that can be understood by non academic readers, because he refuses to accept the assumption - you could call it a tradition - that pessimism is our cultural heirloom, and because he is immodestly prolific and (to add insult to injury) an autodidact he is still capable of releasing a wave of Fleet Street’s finest invective…
This site is an antidote to fifty years of repetitive and very boring/bourgeois critical bile. It attempts to demonstrate how, although Wilson’s writings spring from the same phenomenological root as postmodernism they avoid the latter’s lukewarm patter of anti-subjectivity and diffident misanthropy.
And Wilson’s lucid style is a direct anti-academic road to many forgotten Outsider Artists - you can barely find any information on misfit Juan Butler (author of The Garbageman, etc.) even on the Web, but it’s in one of Wilson’s books.
Far from being a compiler of other people’s ideas (a common and tiresome criticism), his books sit well in the present era of cut n’ paste hypertextuality, and this site makes use of this metaphor with links to relevant subjects and authors within the text.
January 21st, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Dear Frank,
I’ve just discovered this page. Thank you so much for describing my C.W. site as “Wilson by some who knows what he’s talking about” - flattering indeed! I’m so glad you looked at the site and am overjoyed that you used it as a counterbalance to the spiteful piece at The Guardian. That publication was also responsible for one of the most vicious reviews of Mr Wilson’s memoirs, Dreaming to Some Purpose. Never mind though; it was due to that review that I decided to start the site [originally at gerardsorme.com]. So positivity can come out of negativity. I enjoyed your publications The Books in My Life & Shadowlands etc, so it’s rather like the wheel has come full circle with the above pieces! This is as good as Colin himself describing my site as “fascinating”, so thanks again - I’m flattered.
Very Best Regards
Phil Coulthard, Scotland.