The Eldritch Evola . . . & Others: Traditionalist Meditations on Literature, Art, & Culture
James J. O’Meara
San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2014
244 pages
Ed. Greg Johnson
About The Eldritch Evola
“James J. O’Meara is my favorite literary and cultural critic. A virtuoso essayist who can reveal the most startling connections, O’Meara brings Traditionalist spirituality and a New Right sensibility to bear on both high and popular culture, showing that Tradition, like Cthulhu, still lives in the depths and can rise to the surface again, if you know what to look for . . . or if the stars are right.”
– Greg Johnson, author of New Right vs. Old Right
“James J. O’Meara is the Camille Paglia of the Alternative Right.”
– Andy Nowicki, author of Lost Violent Souls
Tradition never died. Despite the complacent triumph of Modernity, it lurks, like a never-rotting Gothic revenant, just beneath the surface of our materially bloated and spiritually empty world. In these 16 essays, James J. O’Meara uses the Traditionalism of Julius Evola and René Guénon to bring to light the spiritual and philosophical dimensions of the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Henry James, Mickey Spillaine, Olaf Stapledon, Owen Wister, and Andy Nowicki; the music of Richard Wagner, Harry Partch, and Scott Walker; and the lives and works of architect Ralph Adams Cram and economist Thorstein Veblen.
In O’Meara’s lens, the doomed WASP gentry in the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft and Henry James are on Sufi-inspired vision quests, while Mickey Spillane’s brutal but equally doomed Mike Hammer is an occult detective in the Atom Age. Hobo and microtonal composer Harry Partch is a Dionysian shaman for mid-century America, while the transatlantic Scott Walker enacts Aryan musical archetypes in the 30th century. Even the Episcopal architecture of Ralph Adams Cram barely conceals the hideouts of the Wild Boys, the primal male hordes of culture creators feared by conservative and liberal alike.
The Eldritch Evola . . . & Others firmly establishes James J. O’Meara as one of the most original voices of the North American New Right.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. The Eldritch Evola
2. The Lesson of the Monster; or, the Great, Good Thing on the Doorstep
3. The Princess & the Maggot
4. The Corner at the Center of the World: Traditional Metaphysics in a Late Tale of Henry James
5. “A General Outline of the Whole”: Lovecraft as Heideggerian Event
6. Mike Hammer, Occult Dick: Kiss Me Deadly as Lovecraftian Tale
7. A Light Unto the Nations: Reflections on Olaf Stapledon’s The Flames
8. My Wagner Problem — & Ours
9. Our Wagner, Only Better: Harry Partch, Wild Boy of American Music
10. Ralph Adams Cram: Wild Boy of American Architecture
11. The Eternal Outsider: Veblen on the Gentleman & the Jew
12. The WinkleTwins Win One! Owen Wister’s Philosophy 4: A Tale of Harvard University
13. Light Entertainment: The (Implicitly) White Music of Scott Walker
14. Andy Nowicki’s The Columbine Pilgrim
15. The Huxley of the Alternative Right: Andy Nowicki’s The Doctor & the Heretic & Other Stories
16. Bright Lights, Big Nothing: Andy Nowicki’s Under the Nihil
Index (print edition only)
About the Author
James J. O’Meara is the author of The Homo and the Negro: Masculinist Meditations on Politics and Popular Culture (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012) and (Amazon.com: Kindle Editions, 2013). He currently lives in an abandoned glove factory in Rust Belt, USA but dreams of relocating to a quaint small town like we see on TV.A Review of James Neill’s “The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies”