May 12, 2025 Lectures John Ashbery’s Analyst By Hannah Zeavin John Ashbery, 1975. Photograph by Michael Teague, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. John Ashbery was analyzed by Carlos Carrillo. Jane Freilicher was analyzed by Edmund Bergler. Bernadette Mayer was in analysis with David Rubinfine. Kenneth Koch was analyzed by Rudolph Loewenstein. James Schuyler was hospitalized at Payne Whitney and Bloomingdale, where the day got slowly started. John Wieners was sent to Medfield and then sent us Asylum Poems. Was Barbara Guest analyzed? Someone told me she was, but I couldn’t prove it. Alice Notley told me she was in treatment for a bit after Ted Berrigan died. There is no information about Frank O’Hara being analyzed. No information about Amiri Baraka being analyzed, save for when Vivian Gornick imagined how it might go down, in the Village Voice. We have long known that psychoanalysts love poetry—though I think the jury is out on whether they, as a class, can be said particularly to love poets, whether as patients or otherwise. Elsewhere, psychoanalysis has been found guilty of plundering the poets: we see evidence in the field’s overreliance on Keats’s negative capability, and on Shakespearean drama as illustration of Oedipal conflict. The number of papers on poetry alone that I had to proof, across just a few years’ time as the managing editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, offers us data on the import of poetry to psychoanalysis, and that’s without going to Freud, who basically owned up to the fact that the poets invented psychoanalysis. Read More
March 6, 2025 Lectures Horrific Surrealism: Writing on Migration By Viet Thanh Nguyen Feliks Michał Wygrzywalski, Charon’s Boat, 1917, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. My father has crossed many borders. Born in northern Việt Nam under French rule in 1933, he was educated in a French Catholic school. More than eighty years later, a widower, he could still sing fragments of French songs when we sat together at the dining table. The meal I could prepare which he most enjoyed was filet mignon, medium rare, with a glass of red wine. He had a cupboard full of Louis Jadot Beaujolais, for when he liked something, he bought it in bulk. When he stopped being able to eat meat and drink wine, I took the last two bottles of Louis Jadot and brought them home with me, where they remain untouched. Perhaps I will drink one when he passes away. Perhaps I will open the second decades from now and see what I remember when I taste it, even if all I will taste is spoilt wine. Read More
September 6, 2024 Lectures Les Cinquante Glorieuses By Fredric Jameson A glass of crème de menthe. Photograph by 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
June 25, 2024 Lectures On Wonder By Srikanth Reddy Claude Mellan (French, Abbeville 1598–1688 Paris), The Moon in Its First Quarter, 1635. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. From the Elisha Whittelsey Collection, courtesy of the the Elisha Whittelsey Fund. I. The World Worlds It’s probably not the most promising beginning to this talk for me to observe that my subject, like silence, has a way of disappearing the moment you speak of it. Love, anger, regret, even boredom—wonder’s antipodes—may entrench themselves in us more deeply over time, but wonder, I’d venture, is always already a fugitive affair. Maybe it’s a matter of developmental psychology; in the middle of life, I find myself becoming a nostalgist of childhood wonder. (These days I feel it mostly in my dreams.) Or maybe it’s civilization itself that’s outgrown its wonder years. We start out with the marvels of the ancient world—the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes—only to arrive, in our disenchanted era, at Wonder Bread. Any way you slice it, wonder is ever vanishing. Still, I suspect the occasional sighting of this endangered affect has something to do with why someone like me continues to write poems in the twilight of the Anthropocene. Of course, William Wordsworth said all this more eloquently and in pentameter verse, too. Maybe poetry is a faint trace of wonder in linguistic form. By following that trace for the next hour or so, I hope we’ll come a bit closer to wonder itself. Read More
May 8, 2024 Lectures Book as Enemy By Adania Shibli Adania Shibli. Photograph courtesy of Adania Shibli. Smoking might be banned at book fairs, while one doesn’t expect books to be banned from book fairs. Even if a character in one of the books exhibited at a fair is smoking, this wouldn’t lead to a ban on characters smoking in books, or to a ban on that specific book. The simple, obvious reason is: literature does not equal reality. Fiction, especially, has its own way of working and should be examined on its own criteria. Smoking in real life has negative impacts on one’s health and the health of others, and banning it can prevent people from becoming ill. Smoking in a book can be evaluated only in terms of its relevance to a character and their actions in a text. In 1988, when smoking was still allowed in many indoor places, probably including book fairs, I learned from my schoolteacher about the creation of the first public library in my village in Palestine/Israel. Upon hearing the news, I rushed to the little room where this library was being assembled, offering the librarian my help in labeling the books and arranging them on the shelves. I had a love for books, which I wanted to share with others. Read More
April 19, 2024 Lectures On the Distinctiveness of Writing in China By Yan Lianke Yan Lianke at the Salon du Livre, 2010. Photograph by Georges Seguin, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED. When I talk to non-Chinese readers like yourselves, I often find that you are interested in hearing about what distinguishes me as an author but also what distinguishes my country—and particularly details that go beyond what you see on the television, read about in newspapers, and hear about from tourists. I know that China’s international reputation is like that of a young upstart from the countryside who has money but lacks culture, education, and knowledge. Of course, in addition to money, this young upstart also has things like despotism and injustice, while lacking democracy and freedom. The result is like a wild man who is loaded with gold bullion but wears shabby clothing, behaves rudely, stinks of bad breath, and never plays by the rules. If an author must write under the oversight of this sort of individual, how should that author evaluate, discuss, and describe him? To address this question, we will first consider the distinctive conditions faced by contemporary Chinese authors. Read More