
Colin Wilson, overpriced at nothing - pepys
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/overpriced-at-nothing/
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coldtea
I'm not much of a fan of Wilson (have only read 3 of his books, Outsider
included).

But this is an unbearable, typically provincial, English critique of his work,
complete with class-based explanations and snobbery, attacks on him being an
autodidact and so on.

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pmoriarty
I'm not ashamed to admit it: I like Colin Wilson. He was a great synthesizer
of knowledge. His books contain a wealth of ideas, and have introduced me to
many authors and thinkers who I may have otherwise missed. I definitely
recommend _" The Outsider"_ to anyone interested in philosophy in general and
Existentialism in particular.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Wilson was a very uneven author. Some of his stuff is brilliant. Other works
seem like something knocked out over the weekend to pay the bills (which they
may well have been).

I don't think he deserves to be judged nearly as harshly as this article does.
I strongly suspect that Wilson's gravest sin in the eyes of the author was his
rejection of Marxism (which, of course, automatically makes him a "fascist" by
the standards that seem to prevail in the "literary" community).

~~~
horus_the_cat
Wilson, despite his willingness to take on some really far-out stuff, really
is something of a lesser light and a product of his time... his work seemed
dated when i was interested in it, and that was a long time ago.

Wilson's persistent fascination with the occult and hidden potentials of
"consciousness" (which he accepts as being a sort of fixed thing in all of
history)--and his relative willingness to accept without much criticism the
authoritarian elements of a huge swatch of that milieu--does lend itself to
this explanation.

OTOH his tendency to resort to epicycles in explaining his theories (which are
usually postulating, rather than explaining, something) is more the sign of an
undisciplined thinker. On edit, Wilson seems like the hippie answer to J.G.
Ballard, whose essay on the "half-educated man" seems relevant for what Wilson
stumbles towards. Granted, in the wikipedia era, that's all of us.

Lifeforce is a great movie, though. Definitely better than the book.

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vonklaus
This echoes a conversation I have often with my girlfriend; how art and
qualitative works are ranked in society.

An artist seems to have to be general enough to appeal and be understood by an
audience while original enough to be compared to other genius on method but
not content.

That is abstract but hopefully the point was there. The second piece is
groupthink. For example, what would happen if the first 10 well respected
critics said his follow on novel was so brilliant it outshined his earlier
work. I don't know, but there as a degree of taste shaping, a degree of
originality & and a degree of tradition that make up the "value" and it is
interesting to think about.

