There is something really eerie, Trow-ish about this question I was just asked when purchasing movie tickets online…
A portion of Brown Paper Tickets profits is given back to the communities we serve. You can help decide where the money from this sale goes by choosing a recipient category.
This sale should benefit:
A) Animals
B) Children
C) Environment
D) Human Rights
Why does this frighten me so!?!?
I’m an unabashed Francophile, btw…
BA: I have a boyfriend for you
He is two
He is French and he loves to scream, “DON’T TOUCH ME!”
and he is the grandson of a former French president
ID: YES!
BA: french aristocratic baby soulmate
“Thought Problem”
by Vijay Seshadri
The New Yorker, October 12, 2009
How strange would it be if you met yourself on the street?
How strange if you liked yourself,
took yourself in your arms, married your own self,
propagated by techniques known only to you,
and then populated the world? Replicas of you are everywhere.
Some are Arabs. Some are Jews. Some live in yurts. It is
an abomination, but better that your
sweet and scrupulously neat self
emerges at many points on the earth to watch the horned moon rise
than all those dolts out there,
turning into pillars of salt wherever we look.
If we have to have people, let them be you,
spritzing your geraniums, driving yourself to the haberdashery,
killing your supper with a blowgun.
Yes, only in the forest do you feel at peace,
up in the branches and down in the terrific gorges,
but you’ve seen through everything else.
You’ve fled in terror across the frozen lake,
you’ve found yourself in the sand, the palace,
the prison, the dockside stews;
and long ago, on this same planet, you came home
to an empty house, poured a Scotch-and-soda,
and sat in a recliner in the unlit rumpus room,
puzzled at what became of you.
…or get oh-so-slightly wrong.
Tautology
Teleology
Scatalogical
Trope
Apotheosis
Apotheopesis
Apostate
Apostolic
Polity
Pedagogy
I kind of have a thing for kitschy psych schools of the seventies…kitschy is so not the right word here but humor me.
The Original!
“A thirty-year-old man, whom I shall call Gary Hillard, was relating with great feeling how his parents had always criticized him, had never loved him, and had generally messed up his life. I urged him to call out for them; he demurred. He “knew” that they didn’t love him, so what was the point? I asked him to indulge my whim. Halfheartedly, he started calling for Mommy and Daddy. Soon I noticed he was breathing faster and deeper. His calling turned into an involuntary act that led to writhing, near-convulsions, and finally to a scream.
“Both of us were shocked. What I had believed was an accident, an idiosyncratic reaction of one patient, had just been repeated in almost identical fashion.
“Afterward, when he quieted down, Gary was flooded with insights. He told me that his whole life seemed to have suddenly fallen into place. This ordinarily unsophisticated man began transforming himself in front of my eyes into what was virtually another human being. He became alert; his sensorium opened up; he seemed to understand himself.
“Because of the similarities of the two reactions, I began listening even more carefully to the tapes I had made of Danny’s and Gary’s sessions. I tried to analyze what common factors or techniques produced the reactions. Slowly some meaning began to emerge. Over the next months I tried various modifications and approaches in asking the patient to call for his parents. Each time there occurred the same dramatic results.
“I have come to regard that scream as the product of central and universal pains which reside in all neurotics. I call them Primal Pains because they are the original, early hurts upon which all later neurosis is built. It is my contention that these pains exist in every neurotic each minute of his later life, irrespective of the form of his neurosis. These pains often are not consciously felt because they are diffused throughout the entire system where they affect body organs, muscles, the blood and lymph system and, finally, the distorted way we behave.
“Primal Therapy is aimed at eradicating these pains. It is revolutionary because it involves overthrowing the neurotic system by a forceful upheaval. Nothing short of that will eliminate neurosis, in my opinion.
“Primal Theory is an outgrowth of my observations about why specific changes take place. Theory, I must emphasize, did not precede clinical experience. When I watched Danny and Gary writhing on the floor in the throes of Primal Pain, I had no idea what to call it. The theory has been expanded and deepened by the continuing reports of one patient after another who has been cured of neurosis. This book is an invitation to explore the revolution they began.”
– from The Primal Scream by Dr. Arthur Janov, 1970
I want to be a goldfish!
I just read Welcome to My Country, my first experience with Lauren Slater, and now she’s the narrator in my head. Incredible at descriptive phrases in the way that David Foster Wallace is (“The alley was dark as a pocket”) in the sense that it’s the best and most natural metaphorical example you never thought of (“Snow starts, falling from the dry sky like shavings of bone.”) In any case, she’s the narrator in my head now, which is good for the above reason but bad because there’s something deeply frightening about…well…
(A fat, often-catatonic schizophrenic man named Oscar is slugging soda at a pizza place with residents of the group home and Dr. Slater)
“He takes a long stringy bite from a pepperoni piece, slurps up more soda.
‘I hope at least you’re enjoying your banquet, Oscar,’ I say.
Oscar suddenly puts down the crust he is munching. His mustache is clumped with chunks of tomato paste; a stray piece of pepperoni stays stuck to his chin. For a second his eyes focus, and when I turn around I see he’s staring at his reflection in a pane of glass. ‘I’m not,” he whispers. ‘I am not enjoying myself at all. I never have.'”
We’re all so far down in the well.
I guess this everyone-is-in-the-same-pain thing is good for my currently bruised heart (and ego)…although I think champagne would be one better.
I want to write about a particular reunion but for some reason, feel quite wrong doing so here…
“I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else.” ~Lily Tomlin (writer, Jane Wagner)
For Marguerite Matisse.
“I still think you are the most beautiful woman in the world, past or present. I’ve never considered us a missed connection, but I am turning 30 next week and who knows what muse will lie ahead for me in the next decade. You were all about the 20s for me…will you stick with? or become something else?”
Marguerite
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