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Freud’s Cheerful Pessimism
Peter Gay’s biography of Freud (Freud A Life for Our Time) has provided me with the sweeping arc of the man’s life and especially articulated his often abstract if not abstruse theories in lucid prose. I was a mere lad in my twenties when I picked up Beyond the Pleasure Principle; I don’t recall much of anything about the book except that it did excite my intellectual interest, that life is an elliptical journey back to the womb, that the organic returns to the inorganic, the death wish, etc (leave it to me to pick one of his most dense works). Over the years I…
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I’m Getting Married in the Morning
It is 8:15 or so, Nevada time (Tuesday). I’m dressed, and Jane is “getting ready.” Cameras are at hand, papers for signing at the chapel are about. We need to pick up her corsage at the florist before we head out to the Chapel on the Corner, a nondescript little hut on a nondescript Nevada street near a courthouse. What can you say about the street’s name, “Basic”? (How did I ever end up in Nevada?) Jane, as always, is in good spirits for she is a very optimistic person and given her neanderthalish family it is always remarkable how…
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On Reading Inga Clendinnen’s “Reading the Holocaust”
I think I know, rather, I believe, how my writing mind works, which really means I know shit about it. In any case it goes like this: sink into books about the Holocaust or just this one and let it all percolate and seep through my unconscious filters until it fills up the acquifer. I had read Clendinnen’s book several years back and included a few terms into The i Tetralogy and returned to it for a second read. An Australian historian whose books mostly deal with the Aztec experience in the Americas, for her own reasons she began to…
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“Me and Orson,” A Homage to the Great Welles
Anything about Welles I am attracted to, perversely so. His treatment at the clammy hands of the boors and philistines of his time continues to this day. The twin morons of his time, Hedda Hopper and especially Louella Parsons, gossip columnists, went after him —often at the behest of Hearst and his caged canary, Marion Davies –and savaged Welles. Their malign influence went on for decades. What I find perverse in me is the satisfaction knowing full well how this culture goes after its artists, how we always fear and dread intelligence of a high order. It has been so for…