The Salt-Box

This poster is in many of the bathrooms on campus; I think it’s provided by one of the state’s health insurance providers:

Notice: whether you’re sick or you’re well, the best thing to do is to STAY AWAY FROM PEOPLE!

Love it.

Now that the pre-Christmas onslaught of catalogs is in full-swing, it has been amusing to see what kinds of companies think I’d be interested in their products.  The comedic winner, by a wide margin, so far this year is Source Perrier, which makes Levenger look like Wal-Mart.

I particularly admire the wisdom of sending to an English professor a catalog including Worthington Book Panels,  which are a bargain at a mere $950 per panel:

Made of solid wood with hand applied, embossed, and gold tooled leather book spines that emulate the most prized Morocco bindings.  . . . The book “shelves”  appear to hold collector’s editions of such classics of fiction as The Great Gatsby, and The Old Man and the Sea, volumes of political history, and little known period literature like Memoirs of a Cavalier.

Poor Defoe!  I also love the naked class fetishism of the Libris Book Stand.  At least Levenger *gestures* to what’s inside the book!

What kills me about this catalog isn’t even the ludicrous crap it pushes, but rather the appalling copy.  If you’re the sort to drop $765 on a “Sang de boeuf porcelain urn,” then I suspect you probably would care about the usage error and abused quotation marks in the writeup:

Combinations of “complimentary colors” or those that are opposite one another on the color wheel are a hallmark of fine Chinese porcelain.

My other two favorite bits from the catalog:

• “People in South Africa gather these naturally shed porcupine quills, sort, match, and then hand wire them onto an antiqued brass frame to create these intriguing, clip-on lamp shades.”
• “Happy best describes the feeling generated by our red, demi-lune table . . .”

Maybe if they donated $10 from the sale of every Sang de bouef vase they could hire a copyeditor.

Here’s hoping our mailman doesn’t judge us by our catalogs!

The November issue of Bookslut is online, including my column on Freud.  This month, I discuss Studies on Hysteria, volume II of the Standard Edition.  In particular, I’m interested in Freud’s prefaces to his own works–moments when he addresses his readers directly:

The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud runs to 24 volumes: twenty-three volumes of content, plus an index. Its sheer bulk — not to mention the formidable list of concepts, controversies, case studies, and more found therein — is apt to leave any potential reader of Freud slightly overwhelmed. Where to begin? What’s more, since it sometimes seems as if every idea in Freud is vitally connected to every other idea, how can one begin to read Freud, without the project becoming wholly interminable? Conveniently, Freud has anticipated just this turn of events: In several prefaces across the Standard Edition, he directly speaks to readers looking for a starting point in psychoanalysis.

The column winds up in an interesting place, pointing out that the received interpretation of psychoanalysis as providing us with narratives about our lives doesn’t sit well with psychoanalysis as a theory or clinical practice:

Meanwhile, the “coherent narrative” that emerges in an analysis can hardly be the actual truth of one’s life. Instead, an analysis produces an “as if” narrative: “You seem to act as if some part of you believes…” Our “quirks and failures” do not derive from “any number of plot points”; however, we tend unconsciously to act as though that’s true. What psychoanalysis can do is help us realize these unconscious assumptions and fantasies exist, which is an important step toward possible self-transformation. If you stop at the point where you’re blaming your idiosyncrasies on others, then you’re not in analysis, you’re engaged in an expensive sort of self-love.

Read the whole thing!

Next month, Volume III: Early Psycho-Analytic Publications.  (Plus, I fully expect, a Very Cool Interview.)

I’m shocked–SHOCKED!–that, after the first full day of registration, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen course has 9 students, while Digital Literary Studies has zero. How could a comic-based course possibly be more popular than a theoretical introduction to humanities computing, one which fulfills *no* requirements for the major?

A free month’s subscription to this blog to readers who can guess the gender demographics of the 9 (judging by names).

(I’ll freely concede that it’s not healthy to be this interested in my enrollments. Nonetheless . . . )

UPDATE (11/12): One week later: 28 students in League, against 2 (!) in Digital Literary Studies.  *Sigh* . . .

Since it was rainy, windy, and about 40 degrees today in New Britain, and since A was out of town (at a conference! in California! chatting up Helen Mirren in a security line at LAX!), the Little Man and I went to see Bee Movie.  I thought it was . . . ok.  Not as good as a Pixar movie, but what is?  And there was a trailer for Kung Fu Panda, which looks like it will be fun.  To be honest, I was a little distracted by the incredibly irritating family behind me.

But we went because Himself was excited to see it, and so, afterwards, I asked him how it was:

It was great!  It was my most favorite movie ever!  [NB: This does not include Clone Wars, any Star Wars episode, the Chronicles of Narnia, or Cars.  Those are in some alternate-media pantheon, and can be joined, but not supplanted.  There are a lot of rules.]   We should buy it when it comes out on DVD so I can watch it all the time for movie night.

What made it so terrific?

The Pollen Jocks.  They were *so* cool.  Do they exist in this world?

So, there you are.  An idiosyncratic review, perhaps, but he knows what he likes.

(For an explanation of why the answer to the Little Man’s question is NO, see Bug Girl.)

As you can imagine, I’m pretty happy that I spent 85 minutes having my hoodie yanked by a demonic family of 7 while A met Helen Mirren.  Did I mention that, by chance, we have The Queen here from Netflix?  No?

Chelsea House has a new series of reference works aimed at the secondary-ed and undergraduate markets. Called “Bloom’s Classical Critical Views,” they publish contemporary perspectives on 19thC writers (i.e., reviews that are out of copyright). For each review, the volume editor provides a brief headnote indicating who the person was, and, for longer pieces, why a modern student might find the review helpful.

My contribution to this series is a volume on Charles Dickens, out in the past two weeks or so.  Amusingly, the Amazon.com “search inside this book” feature actually offers up a search of Bloom’s *Modern* Critical Views, an altogether different thing.

(Actual question posed by a colleague from outside the department: “What was it like working with Harold Bloom?” [English-types familiar with the Bloom industry will recognize why that’s funny.])

I have a feature-length review + interview today in PopMatters with Michel Faber about his new book of short stories, Vanilla Bright Like Eminem.  Victorianists who read this blog will recognize Faber as the author of the neo-Victorian novel, The Crimson Petal and the White (and as a frequent interlocutor on the VICTORIA-L listserv).  Vanilla Bright Like Eminem isn’t a neo-Victorian work, but neither is it as up-to-the-minute as its title perhaps suggests.  Here’s a sample of the interview:

I suspect that what drives a lot of my fiction is not so much the power of fantasy (in the sense that you meant that word) but the problematical relationship of “subjective” and “objective” reality. I often show my characters constructing the universe around them, transforming the world according to the emotional/ psychological state that informs their perception. I allow the reader to decide whether this world is a gross distortion of what’s “really” out there, or whether it’s close to the “truth”.

As always, read the whole thing!