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A Freud for Every Season, and Other News

By

On the Shelf

Portrait_de_Sigmund_Freud

Ignatio Garate Martinez, Sigmund Freud, 2012; image via Wikimedia Commons.

  • “I suppose it says something about our era that the Freud we want is Freud the translator, rather than Freud the doctor—the conversational, empathetic, curious Freud, rather than the incisive, perverse, and confident one.”
  • Read to your baby as early as you can, scientists say. If you have a baby, drop everything and go read to him now. It will help “immunize” him “against illiteracy.” Whether some texts are better vaccinations than others remains to be seen.
  • The latest installment of Henri Cole’s Paris diary: “This morning I observed a beautiful, sleeping chipmunk. Animals—like humans—seek a safe, sheltered place to sleep. Deer make a bed out of unmowed grass, rodents burrow in the soil, and apes create a pallet of leaves. In Paris, I sleep alone on a thick foam mattress. Because my dreams are incoherent, I lose any sense of time or place. Often I fly.”
  • A new radio show, Meet the Composer, proves that contemporary composers are neither bland nor square: “My experience with composers is superpersonal,” the host says. “I always do all of my commissioning at 3 a.m. at the bar, after we’ve been hanging out forever.”
  • Seamus Heaney, the man, the poet, the app: “Too often arts organizations and publishers resort to stunts and gimmicks to add some glitz to poetry, and issue terrible statements about how they want to make it ‘relevant’ and ‘trendy.’ If a poem needs digital bells and whistles to become relevant, it’s obvious it wasn’t very good in the first place … this app adds context and insight to the tales without compromising or clouding them with too much technical faff.”