September 16, 2024 On Psychoanalysis The Psychopathology of Everyday Café Life in Freud’s Vienna By Deborah Levy Kalamian Walton, Silver Teaspoon. Circa 1938. Donated to Wikimedia Commons by the National Gallery of Art. Licensed under CCO 1.0. Is there a single silver teaspoon that has not stirred up the memory of seduction and rage? Is there a Fräulein in the house without vague, disabling despair? Ah, the fresh and full aroma of hysteria under a constellation of coffee cups! May the waiter (calm, contemptuous, organized) please bring to the table the shivering Sacher torte with its dark, oily cacao. Observe Herr K. in his great coat lined with fur, gazing at Frau K.’s petticoats, white as frothing alpine milk. Is he still in love with his mother? Does he wish to murder his father, who regularly engaged in bestial coitus with the governess? Read More
September 13, 2024 On Books On Nate Lippens By Eileen Myles Paul VanDerWerf from Brunswick, Maine, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. I’ve been reading Nate Lippens for years. I think this is the third time I’ve read My Dead Book and I’m finally getting a grip on what kind of machine his writing is. I think it’s a poetic instrument and also some kind of natural phenomena. I went to Joshua Tree one night in the aughts with a gang of people to see the Perseids. I’ve been thinking about that. We had sleeping bags and some people had drinks and their drugs of choice and then we all laid down flat looking up the sky waiting for the show. There wasn’t much. Like almost nothing. There’s one. And then in maybe about seven minutes another. Then another one. And nothing for a while. Then wham and all of the sudden we were screaming, giddy as kids because we were getting inundated with meteors making the sky like this crazy vibing net and we were ancient people animals lying there looking up in naked awe. It was the best. Start to finish I think that’s what Nate Lippens has done. Let me lay it out here. My Dead Book starts off with a fairly sentimental recitation, a recollection of one of his dead friends from the past. And then another one. I mean of course I like the way he writes. It’s clean, it’s fairly direct, and conceptually I am reminded of how practical friendship is to a lost child which this narrator definitely is. If you don’t know who you are then you make yourself up with bits and pieces of your friends. And losing them means continually losing yourself who never existed except what you got from them and what’s constant in these evocations and recollections is the trashy elegance, swarming and specific bravado of a collection of souls who are lost and living antithetical to the values of the culture itself. Young rent boys and old rent boys and the people who collect them. We have books of course that are memoirs by particular people living in particular times but My Dead Book will have none of that. These are no ones mostly. Self-declared. It’s a midwestern book. Going to New York or LA to trick, even living there for a while but always coming back. Maybe there’s one kind of someone but he doesn’t value that. And it turns out he’s invented. He’s mostly me, Nate said. So we’re on the fringe, the fringe of the fringe. So what we have is loss and a compounding of loss, more and more. People age out, bodies get found in the river. People jump in the river. The cup spilleth over. So what’s the story. It’s a rhythmic trick. Like poetry. Like God is. And a queer one. His narrator tells about Gore Vidal saying that there are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts. So wise in a late-night-talk-show way (and Nate is not from that generation (mine) who stayed up late to see Truman Capote and Oscar Levant and Gore Vidal preen and pontificate on swivel chairs, but he’s entirely of it and Oscar Wilde too, definitely the Oscar Wilde of De Profundis but funnier) but the joke I want is how our narrator finds that quote funny because Gore Vidal was such a faggot. Rich as he was and toney and all he nonetheless handed them that joke. He was one of the boys. So he knew he’d be laughed at when he left the room or when the teevee went off for the night. So imagine reality being that place then. So we retreat into language here. Some of the jokes are just quietly squeezing the repetition. Almost with your fingertips. If money weren’t a factor somebody, a friend with money, begins a speech. What follows is a very conversational sequence of if-money-weren’t-a-factors but thinky, inside oneself. Which is also one of the main soundstages here. The narrator can’t sleep so he’s prone to long conversations with himself. If money weren’t a factor he asks finally (alone in bed) would we even know each other? It’s a quiet laugh followed by further critique of the wealthier friend but he has displayed his sword, his wit so we roll along for the next skein of thoughts. Nate takes huge risks with our capacity to suffer with him. And I like being pushed to that edge which is like watching your single mom clean the house and never knowing (it might take forever) when she is going to say something disarmingly filthy or just informative—something you’d never known about her before. Read More
September 12, 2024 First Person My Childhood Toy Poodles By Tao Lin Binky and Tabby (left to right). Origin In 1989, my brother wanted a dog. He was twelve. I was six. We lived in suburban Central Florida. We found Binky in a newspaper listing. At Binky’s house, I pet Binky’s mom and she ignored me, walking away with straight posture. Binky’s parents competed in dog shows. We chose Binky over his brother because his brother seemed out of control, sprinting through the house, pulling down a lamp. I don’t remember what Binky was like that day. Four years later, I wanted another dog so that Binky would have a companion. When we went to meet Tabby one afternoon, she and her family of six or seven poodles were all lying flat on sofas and the floor, sleeping. Appearance Tabby weighed almost twice as much as Binky, who averaged five pounds. They both looked white to us, but veterinarians labeled Tabby “apricot,” which we found amusing. Binky was elegantly proportioned, like his parents. Tabby was awkward, doe-like, with long legs, a rectangular body, and a small-looking head. Read More
September 11, 2024 History to recover belongings from a wreck By Dionne Brand Ficre Ghebreyesus, Solitary Boat in Red and Blue, ca. 2002–07. © The Estate of Ficre Ghebreyesus. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co. There is a painting by the Eritrean American artist Ficre Ghebreyesus named Solitary Boat in Red and Blue. It is a painting I find utterly compelling, utterly seductive—perhaps because I love the color blue, and who doesn’t? But I find the blue and this painting so luminous, so doubled. Ghebreyesus’s boat drifts on an opalescent bluish green sea along a smoke-bush green, emerald sky. The boat has an ethereal appearance, its reflection drifting below in the water; its destination is everywhere. It gestures to another reality of boats—boats that we know about, distressed in the Mediterranean or the Atlantic. I want to be in Ghebreyesus’s boat and perhaps I am; it has such light in it, and is such an invitation to uncertainty and bounty. I once wrote, “even a wrecked and wretched boat still has all the possibilities of moving.” But Solitary Boat in Red and Blue is not a wrecked boat. It is the spirit of boats that I spoke of in those lines. It is a boat moving with all haste, languor, and possibility. It is two boats, three boats, in combination with one’s own illusive boat: solid, reflective, and imagined. The moths or fireflies that accompany the boat with their own gray-blue translucence almost seem to be floating on water themselves. And where is the boat going, I ask? And the answer, it seems, is to somewhere green. Its lightness and drift indicate its whereabouts and destination. I can’t get enough of the painting. One’s eyes are always rewarded and that is because of its movement. If you glance away, you find it at another place, at a new place. “Solitary” is paradox here. Read More
September 9, 2024 On Things Of Unicorns: On My Little Pony By Lucy Ives Photo by Claire JS, via Flickr, CC 2.0. My earliest memories are of my own interest in perfection. The supreme object of my interest, of my deepest intellectual and sensual love, was a product designed and manufactured with the express aim of capturing the attention of very young girls. I was hardly unusual. I was obedient, even; in some ways unimaginative. Still, I think we can learn something from my thrall: My Little Pony was a figurine copyrighted by Hasbro and first produced in 1982. Based on My Pretty Pony, a larger and clunkier toy with unimpressive sales, My Little Pony was, despite the singularity baked into its name, always plural. There was no “pony,” never a one. Only ponies—many ponies, always proliferating, mutating, re-accessorized. Earth ponies and sea ponies and winged ponies and, of course, unicorn ponies. Each pony with its distinctive not-to-be-found-in-nature shade, its shimmering corn-silk plastic mane, its rump printed with an allegorical symbol, a.k.a. “cutie mark”: ice cream, clover, seahorse, stars, flowering plants, and on and on, emojis avant la lettre. The ponies’ bodies were plastic. For now, the ponies would not decay, although fire might melt them or a car wheel crush them. Their eyes were round and bedecked with long lashes. The irises were illustrated in such a way that each pony eye appeared perpetually brimming. Highlights, as on a meniscus of dew, were standard. The ponies might weep soon. They might cry for joy. They might look in your direction. Read More
September 6, 2024 Lectures Les Cinquante Glorieuses By Fredric Jameson A glass of crème de menthe. M. Lawrenson, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. From a lecture given to students at Duke University on January 21, 2021. In the early years of the fifth century, a famous philosopher visited Athens. You could say that this philosopher, Parmenides, was the inventor of ontology, and thus, in a way, the first real philosopher. Athens was a small town, and everybody knew who he was. Being a celebrity, he met a lot of people, one of whom was the young Socrates, who might have been a teenager. They had a long conversation. That would have been around 450 B.C.E., and if you believe the reports of this, perhaps you could date the beginning of Athenian philosophy from that encounter. Socrates will then meet the young Plato in 407 B.C.E. Plato abandons playwriting and becomes part of Socrates’s circle, and after Socrates’s execution for blasphemy in 399, he starts to write the dialogues, a lot of which are fictional, perhaps including this meeting with Parmenides, which becomes one of Plato’s most complicated works. Did this actually happen? Who knows? In any case, Plato will turn his circle into a kind of school, the Academy. In about 367 B.C.E., a young man from the North—who is not an Athenian and therefore never really enters Plato’s intimate circle—will come to this school to join his group. This man, Aristotle, is from the general area of the Macedonian coast, and in 343 he is summoned by the king of Macedonia to tutor his son, who becomes the king when Philip II is assassinated, the figure whom we know as Alexander the Great. Aristotle then returns to Athens and founds his own school, the Lyceum, which practices a certain critique of Platonism. The Lyceum is founded in 335 B.C.E. Read More