One of Sigmund Freud's more disturbing insights was the intimate psychodynamic connection between the toddler's manifest pleasure in and fascination with his or her feces and the tendency of creative artists or intellectuals to lavish attention on their own adult cultural and intellectual productions. Which is my extremely circuitous way of reporting that I have decided to create a series of e-volumes of the occasional posts that have appeared on this blog in the last five years. My multi-part Tutorials, Mini-Tutorials, Micro-Tutorials, and Appreciations have already been made available as Volume IV of my Collected Published and Unpublished Papers, titled A Head in the Cloud, available on Amazon.com. It would be disingenuous, not to say downright false, for me to claim that there has been any demand for this new undertaking. But I am old enough and shameless enough to acknowledge that in re-reading my previous posts [i.e., playing with my feces], I experienced a certain pleasure, and on the off chance that anyone beside myself would like a convenient way to re-visit those old words, I am now undertaking to make a selection from the flood that has poured onto this page.
My plan is to create a series of volumes, each of which is devoted to the selected posts from a single year, in the order in which they appeared. As each volume is completed, I will archive it on box.net, where it will be available to any and all. I figure this should keep me out of trouble for a couple of months.
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ReplyDeleteAnd playing with someone else's feces isn't even more disturbing?
ReplyDelete(which is, on reflection, a nice example of Yiddish inversion: A truck you want me to drive?)
I believe I am correct that playing with someone else's feces is a perversion that develops at a later time, hence, in some bizarre sense, is more mature. Once you go down this rabbit hole, things become quite confusing.
ReplyDeleteGiven the caliber of your recent posts, Professor Wolff, your ability to generate incisive, lucid material which serves as a springboard for serious discussion belies your age. So your generous plan to make the cream of the cream of older posts available to all hardly seems narcissistic. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteI am hard at work on it!
ReplyDeleteOh dear! And I spend a fair amount of time enjoying the smearing, dragging, pushing, and plopping, with staccato-like attacks, a goopy substance on canvas. Horror of horrors!
ReplyDeleteJerry, like all true artists, you are in touch with your inner child. Carry on!
ReplyDelete