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Topic

Notebook

This category is stuff that I come across in stuff I read, or watch, or listen to, and don’t want to forget. It’s also a record of thoughts that make up my head noise.

A Note on Pynchon's Themes

From Upper West Side Story: On ''Bleeding Edge'' and Thomas Pynchon's Tangled Web by Rachel Wetzler. Though their settings have varied wildly, from colonial America to 1970s Los Angeles, Mr. Pynchon’s basic themes have remained remarkably consistent: the dark underside of technological progress,

Democracy, Elites, & Legitimacy

From The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri: The fate of democracy, I believe, is inextricably bound to the fate of elites in democratic nations. The current elite class, having lost its monopoly over information, has been stripped, probably forever, of the authorizing magic of legitimacy. [...] We need to

Pure Psychoanalysis & Pure Punk Rock

From the opening pages of Our, Band Could Be Your Life, by Michael Azerrad. On September 24, 1991, an album called Nevermind by a band called Nirvana came out, went gold in a matter of weeks, bumped Michael Jackson off the number one spot on the Billboard album charts soon

Psychotherapy is About Reclaiming (Investing) in an Identification

In Pure Psychoanalysis, Applied Psychoanalysis, and Psychotherapy, Miller does a deep dive into what makes psychoanalysis different from psychotherapy. Miller highlights many things, but the text below strikes me as very important. (It is also connected to what I posted earlier here.) In terms of psychotherapy, one could say: the

Love & Transference

From Still Life with Woodpecker, by Tom Robbins. Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed,

Existing as an Individual & a Member of a Society

From Using Lacan, Reading Fiction, by James M. Mellard. Various theorists have embraced Lacan because his reading of Freud has placed particular emphasis on several elements that constitute us as individuals and social beings. This stands out to me because it references what I'd call the non-rapport (i.

Reading your work the way you read your student's work

From a Creative Independent interview with Joshua Henkin, regarding the drafting/revising process: CI: What is your revision process like? JH: I try to force myself to go all the way through to the end. I feel like big changes at the roots are much better than lots of small

Jared Elwart in the LRO!

My collaborator Jared Elwart had something published at The Lacanian Review Online. The piece is titled A Falling away of Guarantee, and it is about the film Everything Everywhere All At Once and what this film can teach us about psychoanalysis. From the introduction paragraph: Watching the trailers, one gets

Sally Rooney on Reacting Against the Dominant Narrative as a Subject

From the City Arts & Lectures with Sally Rooney: Sally Rooney City Arts Lectures 12m56s 14m04s 432340:00/1:071× What I liked about this is that Sally Rooney accurately described what it is to be what Lacanians call a subject. As subjects, we are inconsistent, always working out what

Rachel Cusk: The Drift of Language

When I listen to podcasts, I use the Castro app. One of the reasons I use this, as opposed to one of the other many podcast apps, is that it lets me save clips from individual podcasts directly to my desktop. I've amassed a large number of these