Reviews and News:
Revisiting The Great Brain: “Of the many things that a young fellow, barely knee-high to a grasshopper, might aspire to be when he grows up, one that doesn’t often come to mind is ‘grifter.’ Yet in my early 20s, intoxicated by the demimonde allure of pulp novels by Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford, I was reminded of a time in early childhood when it was not firefighter, police officer, or astronaut but dirty rotten swindler that felt like my true calling. The bad influence in my case was Tom Fitzgerald, the antihero of one of the finest, most durable series of children’s novels ever written. John D. Fitzgerald’s The Great Brain, the first of seven books about the exploits and exploitations of a ‘junior-grade confidence man’ in late-19th-century Utah, appeared 50 years ago, in 1967. It is junior-grade Twain, a vivid, delightful tribute to American childhood.”
Over at Aeon, M. M. Owens argues that some of Freud’s seemingly outdated ideas may not be that outdated after all: “In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote that ‘the demise of Freudianism can be summed up in a single word: lithium’. The American author described how in the early 1950s, after years of psychoanalytic ineffectiveness, rapid physical relief for sufferers of bipolar disorder arrived in the form of a pill. Wolfe’s example is microcosmic of a wider state of affairs. The waning of psychoanalysis corresponds precisely to the rise of modern neuroscience, whose physicalist approach now drives psychiatry. Today, almost anyone could have a go at describing serotonin, or dopamine, or Prozac. Few of those same people could define the primal scene, or the super-ego. As the American author Siri Hustvedt puts it in The Shaking Woman, or a History of My Nerves (2010), Freud is now seen by many if not most as ‘a mystic, a man whose ideas bear no relation to physical realities, a kind of monster of mirage who derailed modernity by feeding all kinds of nonsense to a gullible public until his thought was finally shattered by a new scientific psychiatry founded on the wonders of pharmacology’. But in recent decades, this picture of philosophical antagonism has been complicated. Around 20 years ago, there emerged a new field, bearing the predictably cumbersome name of neuropsychoanalysis. Adherents to this amorphous research programme – spearheaded by the South African neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms of the University of Cape Town – are keen to rehabilitate Freud’s reputation for the age of the brain.”
Chaïm Soutine’s servants: “Soutine came to Paris just before World War I to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. His impoverished childhood meant he was well prepared for the life of a penniless artist in Montparnasse (he shared lodgings with his good friend Amedeo Modigliani, where they took turns sleeping in the room’s single bed, or so the story goes). Soutine’s early works tended more toward still lifes—bloody animal carcasses à la Rembrandt were a particular favorite—and vivid, swirling, dream-like landscapes, notably of Céret in the South of France, where he spent some time from 1919. Given his lowly background, it’s no surprise that when Soutine turned his hand to portraiture, he took Paris’s humble service staff as his subjects.”
Is Matthew McIntosh’s 1,600-page “novel,” theMystery.doc, which includes “photographs, text messages, plagiarisms, discussions about itself and a whole ‘drawerful of jpegs, tifs, pdfs, mp3s,midis, wavs, aiffs, mpgs, movs, and all other accounts we keep of our / de::: / cline:::’,” worth reading? Probably not: It’s “not that very different from many other infatuated avant-garde attempts.”
Quebec’s geodesic domes: “Buckminster Fuller’s domed dreams live on.”
Essay of the Day:
In Literary Review, D. J. Taylor wonders what Evelyn Waugh would make of his complete works being published in 43 volumes by Oxford University Press:
“Some of the most incongruous moments in literature come when the fancifully extravagant collides head on with the soberly punctilious, and brightly coloured butterflies are plucked out of the sky to be broken on pedagogy’s slowly turning wheel. John Gross once suggested that the idea of a graduate seminar on the novels of Ronald Firbank would itself be Firbankian – a net flung over soap bubbles, a nail hammered through gossamer threads, or rather, in strict procedural terms, an attempt to interpret something that can occasionally seem to be written only to defy interpretation. Much the same, you suspect, can be said of Evelyn Waugh (1903–66). The appearance of his collected works, monumentally assembled in forty-three stout hardback volumes at £65 apiece, offers the same bewildering spectacle of scholarship running amok through material that, in the majority of cases, was expressly designed to keep scholarship at bay.
“None of this, naturally, is to disparage the work of the series’ general editor, Waugh’s grandson Alexander. And neither, if it comes to that, will any self-respecting Firbank fan be able to keep his or her hands off Richard Canning’s long-promised critical biography of the author of Valmouth. It is merely that the gap between the circumstances in which a novel like Black Mischief (1932) was written and the conditions in which a 21st-century critic sits down to evaluate it can sometimes seem an unbridgeable abyss. Most of Waugh’s early writings were, as he readily conceded, produced on the hoof. Some of the journalism from this time was so desperately ad hoc that the editors who had commissioned it wrote to his agent, A D Peters, to protest. Selina Hastings’s 1994 biography quotes a letter from Mark Goulden of the Sunday Referee, describing what had been vouchsafed as ‘one of the most uninteresting and uninspired contributions it has ever been my misfortune to publish’.”
Photo: Alpine Superga moonset
Poem: Caroline Clark, “Odysseus Is Gone”
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