Böcker av John James O'Loughlin

John O'Loughlin's first real collection of poems, written on and off during 1973-75, reflects the lyricism and formal simplicity of youth, showing the influence of poets like Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, Adrian Henri, and The Doors lead singer Jim Morrison on his formative years as a writer of, at least initially, poetic tendency, which began pleasantly enough in Merstham, Surrey, before progressing first to Finsbury Park and then to Crouch End in north London, where he got the inspiration for the poem 'Dosshouse Blues', which should intrigue those who have personal experience of solitary life in cheap lodgings. Appended to the poetry proper are a group of prose poems, a series of aphoristic observations of a light-hearted nature, four one-act plays, or playlets (two of which are straightforward dialogues), together with a couple of short stories which he wrote at about the same time as the dialogues (1976), and which have a loosely poetic quality and deserve, for stylistic reasons, to be included, along with the playlets, in this little collection of disparate literary creations, which were among the very first things the author ever wrote and are certainly the only writings to have survived from the early 1970s, when he first began to regard himself as a writer. - A Centretruths editorial

This substantial literary project, originally dating from 1982 but extensively revised in 2019, is comprised of some sixteen short-prose pieces with subjects ranging from musical evolution to Christmas trees, Black Holes to Esperanto, and space travel to modern art. Of this number, the author's most outstanding work is undoubtedly the title piece, a fantasy projection into a millennial future in which we enter the mind of a 'superman' who is preparing to undergo an 'acid trip', view life in what is called the 'post-human millennium' from a spiritual leader's standpoint as he grapples with his counselling responsibilities vis-à-vis the superhuman flock, and sample a controller's perspective on post-human life from the administrative sidelines. One could argue that this is John O'Loughlin's equivalent to 'Brave New World', but it was with a view to rejecting Huxleyite cynicism that he set out to fashion so positive a futuristic projection. - A Centretruths editorial

A 'double-decker' novel comprised of 'Changing Worlds' and 'Fixed Limits', both of which, originally dating from 1976 and also published separately, feature Michael Savage as, in the first book, a disillusioned clerk eager to try his hand at writing and, in the second book, the author - à la Sartre - of a literary journal which he hopes will serve as a springboard to greater things, even though it is not without literary merit in itself. This reissued version, however, is much more than the sum of its parts, since it is structurally very different - and we think technically better - than the earlier independent publications. - A Centretruths editorial

Following on from his title 'So There', this work also takes the form of a mixture of aphorisms and maxims, or brief discursive observations on a variety of subjects of interest or concern to the author, coupled to numbered sequences of systematically-structured conclusions about salient aspects of the overall philosophy which, in this book, succeed those parts (1 and 3) specifically given to the aphoristic material, as though to sum-up or clarify, on a more philosophically intensive basis, what had already been more discursively observed. Of course, there is more to it than that, and John O'Loughlin would be lying if he didn't also add that this title both refines upon and extends beyond some of the observations and conclusions of the previous one, thereby in a sense bringing this phase of his philosophy closer to what he holds to be a 'summational peak', beyond which it would be difficult though not perhaps impossible to go. Therefore it would seem that Mr O'Loughlin has reached, or almost reached, the end of his long intellectual journey, summing up what it has taken him the best part of four decades to arrive at, experience coupled to observation leading to conclusive results, the logical credibility of which here attains to a kind of philosophical apotheosis in the numbered maxims of parts 2 and 4.

Originally dating from 1981, this collection of essays is thematically more homogeneous than anything previously written by John O'Loughlin in the genre, and reflects a newly-acquired optimistic outlook on evolutionary progress as something that should culminate in a future paradise having nothing whatsoever to do with the cosmic inception of life. Art, literature, music, sex, gender, history, technology and religion are the principal themes under consideration here, and they are generally treated in relation to the author's philosophy of evolution, which owes not a little to the estimable likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, and Teilhard de Chardin. As usual for Mr O'Loughlin's writings of this period, 'The Way of Evolution' ends with an appendix in the form of aphorisms, which both summarize and encapsulate its overall philosophy. - A Centretruths Editorial.