Reviews and News:
A fascinating history of the Rorschach test: “Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss psychiatrist who started creating personality tests when he was bored during the First World War. In a gorgeous sanatorium by Lake Constance, he would complain to his colleagues that it was ‘the Germans’ duty to kill as many Frenchmen as possible, and the Frenchman’s duty to kill as many Germans as possible, while it’s our duty to sit here right in the middle and say “Good morning” to our schizophrenic patients every day.’ His father, Ulrich, was a painter who spent years writing a treatise on ‘the laws of form’, which he thought would apply to everything in nature, if only he could figure out what they were. His obituary in 1903 reported that he had been depressed and delusional, and that his last years were filled with ‘unspeakable torments’. His son might also have been an artist had he not discovered Tolstoy as a teenager and decided to devote himself to healing men’s souls, or at least, as he told his sister, to finding out whether ‘it wouldn’t have been possible to help Father’. At medical school in Zurich he attended Jung’s lectures and helped to found the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society, but he always resisted being analysed himself. In Searls’s telling, he’s a paragon of mental health – ‘open-hearted and sympathetic, talented but modest’ – and simply didn’t see the need. He also thought the claims for it overblown: ‘in Vienna,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘they’re going to be explaining the rotation of the earth psychoanalytically before long.’ Unhappy foreigners, particularly Russians, might benefit, but he didn’t think it would do much for the Swiss, who were lousy ‘self-observers … or self-devourers, as their saying goes’. They needed prompting. Instead of the talking cure for his sanatorium patients, he opted for art therapy. He also spent years on a study of Swiss phallic cults.”
Is it possible to predict the next pandemic? Probably not.
Leon Wieseltier admits “misdeeds” with female colleagues, putting an end to his plan to launch a new publication with the support of Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. (HT: Emily Esfahani Smith)
Einstein’s “tips” for happiness sell for $1.3 million. What were they? Find out here!
Ah, the traditions of the Halloweens of yesteryear: “Before the pumpkin took center stage as the primary vegetable for Halloween, it shared the limelight with another vegetable….the cabbage. Back in the days when Halloween focused more on causing mischief and playing pranks, rotten cabbages were often used as the perfect instrument to throw at your victims.”
An alternative to formal peer review: “Why does any of this matter? Defenders of formal peer review usually admit that it is flawed, but go on to say, as though it were obvious, that any other system would be worse. But it is not obvious at all. If academics put their writings directly online and systems were developed for commenting on them, one immediate advantage would be a huge amount of money saved. Another would be that we would actually get to find out what other people thought about a paper, rather than merely knowing that somebody had judged it to be above a certain not very precise threshold (or not knowing anything at all if it had been rejected). We would be pooling our efforts in useful ways.”
Karl Marx was “a man with questionable morals and a chaotic private life” who bullied those close to him. Young Marx is a “witty romp” through his first years in London.
Will the books that the famously reclusive J. D. Salinger was supposedly working on before his death ever be published? Who knows?
Essay of the Day:
Was Ezra Pound’s anti-Semitism an “essential and unavoidable element of both his identity and poetry”? Scott Beauchamp takes up this question in a review of Daniel Swift’s new book on Pound’s time at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital:
William Gass’s tediously admonishing 1996 essay ‘Ezra Pound’ begins with associative wordplay on the poet’s name. ‘If used as a verb,’ Gass writes, ‘“pound” means to beat. If used as a noun, “pound” signifies a unit of weight, a measure of money, pressure of air, or physical force.’ This ‘free’ association of Gass’s mind predictably turns to Shakespeare, Shylock, and the infamous ‘pound of flesh.’ It’s unclear what this associative gambit is meant to definitively prove, other than that the word ‘pound’ has multiple meanings. The intended effect, however, is obvious. It’s meant to suggest that Pound’s notorious anti-semitism is an essential and unavoidable element of both his identity and poetry. Gass means to show that evil is baked into Pound’s namesake as a pastiche of associated synonyms, each symbolically resonating with Pound’s obsessions: force, power, drama, and money. It’s an evocative example of Pound as cipher, of his identity as a man and value as a poet being reduced to a series of negative associations. And, ironically, it mirrors the same banal, paranoid tendencies that Pound himself exhibited. Unfortunately, as Daniel Swift shows us in The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound, projecting onto his subject overly simple ideas about politics and art, scapegoating him in the Girardian sense, is de rigueur. And it’s something that was happening long before his death.”
Photo: Lac Bleu
Poem: Benjamin Myers, “My Father on the Diving Board”
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