That Colin Wilson book ("The Craft of the Novel") is a gem of what one might call enlightened amateur criticism: non-academic and plain-spoken, but intelligent and a little eccentric. I learned a lot from it when I read it, many years ago. (And yes, I do in fact like "A Voyage to Arcturus").
I wish I liked A Voyage to Arcturus as much as he does, but I agree with you about Wilson's book, and with his point in general about the potential of speculative fiction.
I've been chewing on the theme of "healing of the Protestant-Catholic schism in the imagination of western Christendom". I'm not sure what that would solve exactly, but it seems like a step in the right direction. The far bigger schism to be healed is surely the one between gnosis and belief. The more I think about it, the more I see the "Platonic" mandate as an exploration of the development of consciousness, about which neither neuroscientists nor white shamans waving at quantum mechanics have had much of interest to say.
I completely agree about the development of consciousness—self-servingly, because art has a privileged part to play in that exploration if one is not to succumb to scientism or New Age vapidity. The schism between Catholic and Protestant might be the schism between belief and gnosis, give or take some Catholic mystics and high-church Protestants.
Fair point! I wanted to say the fight was already there in the days of Peter and Paul, or the Babylonian exile for that matter, but Prots vs Catholics can do in a pinch. Of course Anglicanism already exists, but it seems least likely of all to make hay in a countercultural religious revival.
Art may be indeed be our only escape from the diminishment of consciousness to materialism plus woo (or the holy temptation of decreation)
I would blame stuck culture less on the powers that be and more on the way we all got trapped for five years in the dialectic of “angry crowd shouts down the confused and increasingly frightened custodians of culture” even as the polarity of the debate shifted and the crowd came to include a sitting president* of the United States!
* I agree with the spirit of that Tumblr post more or less, but I think your timeline is off a bit-there was an inchoate right wing counterculture in 2014, I was watching it, but it was appallingly nerdy in a real “comic book guy from The Simpsons gets political” sort of way. (What I think was “supposed to happen” if you believe in that sort of thing, is that counterculture was all set to be based and redpilled in response to president Hillary, hence the confused sometimes far left sometimes sometimes far right forms it took under Trump.)
Yes, but right-wing counterculture never stopped being appallingly nerdy and they still managed to get artists, hot girls, queer people, etc. involved by 2021 or so. I think you're right in that only the frisson of the forbidden generated by wokeness, the pandemic, and the deep state created that possibility, but that a smaller version of the same effect might have been the result of President Hillary. There's a Never-Trump neocon version of the argument according to which Romney should have won on the fundamentals but Obama invented wokeness to stop him, thereby stalling culture and leading, sadly of course, to the extreme corrective measure of Trump. Any way you cut it, 2016-2022 seem like lost years.
This is true, but it's stopped being exclusively *male* which it pretty much was in 2014. If Hillary had won the hot girls would've come for sure, not as sure about the queers but who knows! I definitely think a lot is pandemic-specific, there was Bell Curve type stuff going around back then but I don't think stuff like IE; the hot girls being more-or-less open biological racists happens without the various uprisings of that summer, it seems to have really awakened a latent fear for a lot of those people. lol, that's an interesting theory, though I sometimes think it went the other way-"wokeness" was invented in response to Obama's more centrist tendencies and subsequent electoral defeats in the legislature shutting progressives out of the political altogether, hence the turn toward total manipulation of the cultural.
The dialectical resolution of the two theories is that Obama's self-styled respect for certain conservative positions helped to generate the reactionary elements of wokeness.
I cannot discuss Shakespeare. I took a Shakespeare course in college and was a TA for that course the semester after. So scarred and sickened. That much dick riding for that much time. I never spent so much time studying one artist in my life. Truly not his fault that I do not have the passion for him anymore. That said, Sonnet 18 still gets me. Maybe because I had to memorize it in 1997 for class.
I got obsessed with Shakespeare when I was a teen because it was the golden age of Shakespeare movie adaptations and of the now-disgraced Neil Gaiman's Shakespeare-soaked Sandman comics, so pop culture was my way in, but I can definitely see how academe could ruin it!
Speaking of the demand for a higher popular art, Milton seemed to have admired and loved Shakespeare but also viewed with critical eye the mixtures of comic and tragic embodied by Shakespeare and the drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. So Milton, instead of writing a critical piece at length of why Shakespeare sucked in this or that way, wrote the great tragic drama Samson Agonistes, which may be one of the successful transpositions of Ancient Greek tragic form into English verse at once supple, clipped, intense, stark, Miltonic (if not always to the intense lushness of Paradise Lost’s periodic sentences stacked with allusion and pregnant with meaning down to the diction), sublime.
Thanks, definitely an instance of artistic correction! Not to dare to criticize Milton, but I think that's the most misguided critique of Shakespeare, that he mixes up too many disparate things; I share with the Romantics the idea that he's the ideal forerunner of the novel as the genre that can contain all styles, moods, genres, and contents.
That Colin Wilson book ("The Craft of the Novel") is a gem of what one might call enlightened amateur criticism: non-academic and plain-spoken, but intelligent and a little eccentric. I learned a lot from it when I read it, many years ago. (And yes, I do in fact like "A Voyage to Arcturus").
I wish I liked A Voyage to Arcturus as much as he does, but I agree with you about Wilson's book, and with his point in general about the potential of speculative fiction.
I've been chewing on the theme of "healing of the Protestant-Catholic schism in the imagination of western Christendom". I'm not sure what that would solve exactly, but it seems like a step in the right direction. The far bigger schism to be healed is surely the one between gnosis and belief. The more I think about it, the more I see the "Platonic" mandate as an exploration of the development of consciousness, about which neither neuroscientists nor white shamans waving at quantum mechanics have had much of interest to say.
I completely agree about the development of consciousness—self-servingly, because art has a privileged part to play in that exploration if one is not to succumb to scientism or New Age vapidity. The schism between Catholic and Protestant might be the schism between belief and gnosis, give or take some Catholic mystics and high-church Protestants.
Fair point! I wanted to say the fight was already there in the days of Peter and Paul, or the Babylonian exile for that matter, but Prots vs Catholics can do in a pinch. Of course Anglicanism already exists, but it seems least likely of all to make hay in a countercultural religious revival.
Art may be indeed be our only escape from the diminishment of consciousness to materialism plus woo (or the holy temptation of decreation)
I would blame stuck culture less on the powers that be and more on the way we all got trapped for five years in the dialectic of “angry crowd shouts down the confused and increasingly frightened custodians of culture” even as the polarity of the debate shifted and the crowd came to include a sitting president* of the United States!
* I agree with the spirit of that Tumblr post more or less, but I think your timeline is off a bit-there was an inchoate right wing counterculture in 2014, I was watching it, but it was appallingly nerdy in a real “comic book guy from The Simpsons gets political” sort of way. (What I think was “supposed to happen” if you believe in that sort of thing, is that counterculture was all set to be based and redpilled in response to president Hillary, hence the confused sometimes far left sometimes sometimes far right forms it took under Trump.)
Yes, but right-wing counterculture never stopped being appallingly nerdy and they still managed to get artists, hot girls, queer people, etc. involved by 2021 or so. I think you're right in that only the frisson of the forbidden generated by wokeness, the pandemic, and the deep state created that possibility, but that a smaller version of the same effect might have been the result of President Hillary. There's a Never-Trump neocon version of the argument according to which Romney should have won on the fundamentals but Obama invented wokeness to stop him, thereby stalling culture and leading, sadly of course, to the extreme corrective measure of Trump. Any way you cut it, 2016-2022 seem like lost years.
This is true, but it's stopped being exclusively *male* which it pretty much was in 2014. If Hillary had won the hot girls would've come for sure, not as sure about the queers but who knows! I definitely think a lot is pandemic-specific, there was Bell Curve type stuff going around back then but I don't think stuff like IE; the hot girls being more-or-less open biological racists happens without the various uprisings of that summer, it seems to have really awakened a latent fear for a lot of those people. lol, that's an interesting theory, though I sometimes think it went the other way-"wokeness" was invented in response to Obama's more centrist tendencies and subsequent electoral defeats in the legislature shutting progressives out of the political altogether, hence the turn toward total manipulation of the cultural.
The dialectical resolution of the two theories is that Obama's self-styled respect for certain conservative positions helped to generate the reactionary elements of wokeness.
I cannot discuss Shakespeare. I took a Shakespeare course in college and was a TA for that course the semester after. So scarred and sickened. That much dick riding for that much time. I never spent so much time studying one artist in my life. Truly not his fault that I do not have the passion for him anymore. That said, Sonnet 18 still gets me. Maybe because I had to memorize it in 1997 for class.
I got obsessed with Shakespeare when I was a teen because it was the golden age of Shakespeare movie adaptations and of the now-disgraced Neil Gaiman's Shakespeare-soaked Sandman comics, so pop culture was my way in, but I can definitely see how academe could ruin it!
Speaking of the demand for a higher popular art, Milton seemed to have admired and loved Shakespeare but also viewed with critical eye the mixtures of comic and tragic embodied by Shakespeare and the drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. So Milton, instead of writing a critical piece at length of why Shakespeare sucked in this or that way, wrote the great tragic drama Samson Agonistes, which may be one of the successful transpositions of Ancient Greek tragic form into English verse at once supple, clipped, intense, stark, Miltonic (if not always to the intense lushness of Paradise Lost’s periodic sentences stacked with allusion and pregnant with meaning down to the diction), sublime.
Thanks, definitely an instance of artistic correction! Not to dare to criticize Milton, but I think that's the most misguided critique of Shakespeare, that he mixes up too many disparate things; I share with the Romantics the idea that he's the ideal forerunner of the novel as the genre that can contain all styles, moods, genres, and contents.