And while the presence of pimply-faced teens wearing Topstone masks was enough to scare me at that tender age, I wish I’d realized that what I was actually seeing was one of the last manifestations, at least around these parts, of the ghost show, or spook show.
The real ghost shows, dating back to the early days of the 20th century and usually held in hard-top, or indoor, theaters, were much more elaborate than just kids recruited to wear rubber masks at this drive-in.
Wilding, who is writing a biography of Galileo, has uncovered forged Galileo works before: he previously found evidence that a copy of Galileo’s 1610 treatise “Sidereus Nuncius” (“Starry Messenger”), with several watercolors, was a fake. He became suspicious of the Michigan manuscript in May while examining an online image of it. Some of the letter forms and word choices seemed strange to him, and even though the top and bottom were supposedly written months apart, the ink seemed remarkably similar.
“It just kind of jumps out as weird,” Wilding said. “This is supposedly two different documents that happen to be on one sheet of paper. Why is it all exactly the same color brown?”
If any dish were a poem, oyakodon would come pretty darned close. Preparation begins by slowly warming up dashi and sending sliced onions for a tumble into a savory broth. Eggs are lightly beaten and poured gingerly over chicken thighs and mellowed-out onions. You can’t rush oyakodon — patience rewards the cook with pillowy eggs, juicy chicken and a fistful of onions soft to the bite. All the while, the sweet aroma of dashi envelops the kitchen like a cozy, weighted blanket.
In 1953, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott began writing about the idea of “good-enough” parenting—a term he coined, and one he’s still famous for today. According to Winnicott, after infancy, babies do not need tirelessly responsive or self-sacrificing parents. In fact, he wrote, it is developmentally key for parents to lessen their “active adaptation” to their children’s needs over time. In doing so, they teach their kids to “account for failure” and “tolerate the results of frustration”—both necessary skills at a very young age, as anyone who’s watched a baby learn to crawl knows.
In his recent book The Good-Enough Life, the scholar and writing lecturer Avram Alpert radically broadens Winnicott’s idea of good-enoughness, transforming it into a sweeping ideology. Alpert sees good-enoughness as a necessary alternative to “greatness thinking,” or the twin beliefs that everybody has the right to embark on “personal quests for greatness” and that the great few can uplift the mediocre many. Adam Smith’s invisible hand of capital is an example of greatness thinking; so is its latter-day analogue, trickle-down economics. So are many forms of ambition: wanting to win the National Book Award, to start a revolution that turns your divided and unequal country into a Marxist utopia, or to make a sex tape that catapults you to global fame.
“Animal Joy” is at once prose poem, manifesto, sociological study and therapy session. Poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir’s first nonfiction book advocates the liberating power of spontaneity, curiosity, humor. The book practices what it preaches. The exposition jumps for intellectual joy, hopscotching from literary criticism to philosophy and psychology to political analysis. Collectively these parts amount to an inspiring endorsement of shredding the filters of propriety wherever they are applied — personally, socially, creatively. Encouraging readers to play, the text’s discrete segments become a game of connect the dots. The completed picture shows how humor, like any instinctual act, is fundamentally subversive. If ever we needed a reminder of laughter’s transformational ability to upend expectations and disappoint the status quo, now is the time.
Why was Freud so convinced that he didn’t need to worry? Partly because he had spent a lifetime claiming that he didn’t do politics, apparently unaware that politics might still insist on doing something to him. The sturm and drang of Bolshevism and nazism and everything in between struck him merely as a noisy sideshow, the outward manifestation of various individuals’ ragged inner lives. Sort out the oedipal complex, the death drive and other bits and pieces, and international common sense would return. So the old man clung on in Vienna, the city where he had lived for all but the first three years of his life, convinced that things would come right in the end.
They didn’t, of course, and this thrilling book, as edge-of-your-seat gripping as any heist movie, tells the story of how a “rescue squad” was marshalled to get Freud out of danger before it was too late.
We know that the people loved beautiful things.
From their earliest kind they were fools for shine
and order: necklaces strung with tiny seashells,
amulets of amethyst and chalcedony. The people
loved tall buildings with many gleaming windows;
from these they would survey the land below them,