OK, so I missed post-modernism a bit. I didn’t realize how much until I started reading this Lyotard. After a long absence, even some of the things that are highly annoying about it seem cute and endearing. The selective use or misuse of terms, the relentless scare quotes indicating ironic detachment, the odd neologistic constructions [...]
One of the things that strikes me about Freud is that the mental universe is a bit Newtonian. There are certain things that don’t work that way — like early in Civilization where he describes two psychic objects occupying the same space (but then admits his city-of-the-mind metaphor is not really useful). Aside from that:
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I had thought by now that reading Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus with an eye to the social and political context, especially the French revolution, would be fairly commonplace. Me, I was wrong.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s letter from Paris about the mob calling for the head of the King. Mary Shelley’s fixation on her absent mother. Percy [...]
Have you ever been in the middle of a group of people who are talking about how ugly they find something — say, a car, or a painting or a pair of shoes – and felt like you were the only one that didn’t agree? Or at other times, feeling alone at a concert or [...]
I had despaired that we had lost our copy of How To Suppress Women’s Writing, by Joanna Russ. Just today I managed to find it in plain sight at the edge of a bookshelf, better late than never. An excerpt from the first section:
” … we find the author of Jane Eyre paid twenty pounds [...]
Tony: All this from a slice of capicollo?
Melfi: Kind of like Proust’s madeleines.
Tony: What?
Melfi: Marcel Proust wrote a seven-volume classic, Remembrance of Things Past. He took a bite of a madeleine — it’s a kind of a tea cookie he used to have as a child — and that one bite unleashed a tide of [...]
Installed in 1987, various locations in downtown eastside, Vancouver.