Warm review of supposedly definitive biography.
His Kafka is, not surprisingly, a complex man, tormented by all the well-documented demons, but also someone who liked to have fun and drink beer, a fan of both movie houses and brothels.
C+T Milan
Here are the photos from the Milan conference which was a terrific success. Below is the editor-in-chief David Emanuel Andersson holding a copy of the latest issue of C+T.
Walker Percy Wednesday 111
There is a slight unpleasantness about doing a psychiatric consultation in a small general hospital. Here a psychiatrist is ranked somewhere between a clergyman and an undertaker. One is tolerated. One sees the patient only if the patient has nothing else to do.
*****
“Very interesting. Okay, okay. Let’s skip the metaphysics. You get into the prefrontal, you get into metaphysics. In any case it’s academic when it comes to managing her. ”
*****
A small matter certainly, especially in Louisiana, where name changes were commonplace to accommodate whatever nation prevailed. German Zweig and Weiss often became La Branche and Le Blanc. Le Blanc and Weiss have been known to become White. No one cares. I know a man named Harry Threefoot whose family changed their name from Dreyfus. From French-Jewish to Choctaw. Why? Who knows? And in Louisiana who cares?
*****
“You know, Doctor, you and I might just be the ones to achieve a meeting of minds over the old mind-body problem, that ancient senseless quarrel. What do you think?”
“Our minds might.”
The Ozark Mountain Daredevils
While traveling through the beautiful Ozarks I was reminded of this band’s compelling sound, at least manifest in their most famous number “Jackie Blue”.
You like your life in a free-form style
Sharon Jones
The Jewish Confederates
I picked up this unusual book in a wonderful book store, Buxton Books, in Charleston. If ever you are in Charleston, it’s well worth popping in and supporting them and maybe even get chatting to the charming and knowledgeable owners.
The Undiscovered Peter Cook
Hopefully this will find its way onto youtube. “Following the death of Britain’s greatest satirist in 1995, Peter Cook’s widow Lin locked the door of his house and refused all access to the media. Until this year, when she invited her friend Victor Lewis-Smith and a BBC crew inside to make a documentary about the man she knew and loved, with unprecedented access to Peter’s private recordings, diaries, letters, photographs and much more”. Peter would have relished taking on the humourless and censorious regressive left castrati.
Susan Haack’s Five Answers on Philosophy of Logic
As some will know Susan is my other philosophical “based mom”. (click image for pdf)
Bittersweet Nitro
If ever there was a “comfort” brew, this is it. Looking forward to working my way through Left Hand’s other beers.
Walker Percy Wednesday 110
I am straddling them, trying to wedge them apart. Good God: a New York-New Orleans Democrat Jew fighting it out with a Birmingham Italian Confederate Republican.
*****
A discovery: A shrink accomplishes more these days by his fecklessness than by his lordliness in the great days of Freud.
*****
Time was when I’d have tested their neurones with my lapsometer. But there’s more to it than neurones. There’s such a thing as the psyche, I discovered. I became a psyche-iatrist, as I’ve said, a doctor of the soul, an old-style Freudian analyst, plus a dose of Adler and Jung. I discovered that it is not sex that terrifies people. It is that they are stuck with themselves. It is not knowing who they are or what to do with themselves. They are frightened out of their wits that they are not doing what, according to experts, books, films, TV, they are supposed to be doing. They, the experts, know, don’t they?
Then I became somewhat simpleminded. I developed a private classification of people, a not exactly scientific taxonomy which I find useful in working with people. It fits or fitted nearly all the people I knew, patients, neurotic people, so-called normal people.
According to my private classification, people are either bluebirds or jaybirds. Most women, it turns out, are bluebirds. Most men, by no means all, are jaybirds.
*****
It is not for me to say whether one should try to be happy—though it always struck me as an odd pursuit, like trying to be blue-eyed—or whether one should try to beat all the other jaybirds on the block. But it is my observation that neither pursuit succeeds very well. I only know that people who set their hearts on either usually end up seeing me or somebody like me, or having heart attacks, or climbing into a bottle.
*****
B. F. Skinner, the jaybird of psychologists, put it this way: The object of life is to gratify yourself without getting arrested. Not exactly the noblest sentiment expressed in two thousand years of Western civilization, but it has a certain elementary validity. True jaybird wisdom.
