Free Thinking: Outsiders and Colin Wilson. Norse sagas. The Vulgar.
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 11 October 2016
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What is an outsider? Gary Lachman and Suzi Feay discuss the writings of Colin Wilson with presenter Matthew Sweet 60 years on from the publication of Wilson's best-seller which analysed literary characters in works by Camus, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky and figures including Van Gogh, T.E. Lawrence and Nijinsky. The Vulgar is the title of an exhibition of fashion on display at the Barbican - Linda Grant and Sarah Kent discuss the messages our clothing choices send out. And New Generation Thinker Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough on Norse gods.
Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson by Gary Lachman is out now. He has also written the introduction to a new edition of The Outsider published by Penguin.
Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough has published Beyond The Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas. She was selected as one of the New Generation Thinkers in 2013 in a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which works with academics who want to turn their research into radio.
The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined runs at the Barbican Art Gallery from October 13th to 5th February 2017. Linda Grant's new novel The Dark Circle is out in November.
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps |
| 0:21.2 | it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds. Hello and welcome to |
| 0:33.4 | the arts and ideas download from the free-thinking team at the BBC. |
| 0:42.7 | We're at the very edge of things on tonight's free-thinking at the limits of the Viking world, |
| 0:47.1 | where there are trolls and half-trolls and the skinless Queen Eaglebeak, |
| 0:52.5 | at the limits of good taste where we'll find pink inflatable hats and slippers that look like Donald Trump's hair. The novelist Linda Grant and the |
| 0:55.5 | critic Sarah Cantor here ready to map out the borders of the vulgar. And here's your trigger |
| 1:00.6 | warning. We're going to play some Liberacee. But we're going to begin at the edge of consciousness, |
| 1:06.0 | which may be closer than you think. When I was very small, I always had these peculiar feelings |
| 1:10.1 | of a sudden complete total happiness, |
| 1:13.6 | what G.K. Chesterton calls absurd good news. And there was always a feeling that it was so close and so |
| 1:19.6 | easy that anyone could do it at any time. The American psychologist Maslow caused them peak experiences. |
| 1:24.6 | And I was sure from a fairly early age that anyone could have peak experiences any time they wanted just by turning the mind in that direction. |
| 1:33.6 | Now, as soon as I began to read a great deal in my teens, I could see that most of the culture of the modern world is totally miserable and pessimistic. |
| 1:40.8 | We seem to take it for granted that man is ultimately defeated and so on. |
| 1:45.0 | And in a certain sense, all of my work has been an attempt to flow against that current. |
| 1:49.3 | The author Colin Wilson interviewed in 1985. |
| 1:52.9 | Wilson wrote about philosophy, he wrote about telepathy, he wrote about Reich and Rasputin, |
| 1:58.0 | Dostoevsky and Blavatsky, orgasms and ectoplasm. He was considered one of the angry |
| 2:03.3 | young men, though he wasn't really that angry. And in the late 1950s, his book The Outsider, |
| 2:08.9 | a study of artists and writers who lived and thought apart from the rest of us had him hailed |
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