Freud, and generations of psychologists, psychiatrists, grief counsellors, and all the lesser mineworkers at the coalface of human sorrow, would say I had not completed my grief work. I had not moved through Kübler-Ross’s five stages of loss. As influential as was Freud’s half-baked paper, it was the book On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross that would lodge in the modern imagination, like a fishbone in the throat, where it has remained for nearly fifty years; the definitive explanation for what’s going on with your feels. In the very first lines of Freud’s Trauer und Melancholie’, he admits that ‘the empirical material upon which this study is founded is insufficient for our needs’. No such admission ever tempered the appeal of Kübler-Ross’s neatly presented five-slices-of-sad-pizza
~On Father, by John Birmingham (Little Books on Big Ideas)
Gin Gin memories of historic shores at Yarra Bay
Leibniz’s notekeeping catalog, organizing slips of paper on which he wrote anything he read or that occurred to him
Alcoholic writers are mythologized — but consider their pain. “Heavy drinking is a substitute for companionship,” Bukowski said, “and it’s a substitute for suicide” Charles
Gin Gin memories of historic shores at Yarra Bay
Leibniz’s notekeeping catalog, organizing slips of paper on which he wrote anything he read or that occurred to him
Alcoholic writers are mythologized — but consider their pain. “Heavy drinking is a substitute for companionship,” Bukowski said, “and it’s a substitute for suicide” Charles
Beware The Literary Scammers
“He would reject work, but praise the writing. His form rejections included a note: “It happens that I am both the editor of the Blue Moon and also the head of a critical revision business. If you have your manuscript revised I, as editor of the Blue Moon, shall then be glad to consider your story for publication in the magazine.” More than 30 writers agreed. Jessup took their money, and kept their stories.” – Literary Hub
Artist Robert Indiana’s Caretaker Left Him Living In Filth While Helping Himself To Indiana’s $13 Million Bank Account, Say Court Filings
We Still Don’t Know How Gravity Works
We can calculate what gravity does — whether to a cup elbowed off the edge of a table or the disk of light bent around a black hole — but we still don’t have a clue what causes it. – Washington Post
'One of the Literary Vices of the Time'
“In answer
to your question of which is the best short poem I have read in the English
language I can only say that I fail to see how there can be a ‘best’ poem, long
or short; that is, one best in all circumstances. This attempt to appraise by
comparison is, if you will allow me to say so, one of the literary vices of the
time, only a little above the inquiry who is the biggest poet, novelist or
prizefighter, although not quite so low down as that deepest deep of literary
valuation, ‘who is the biggest seller.’
The Poem On The Statue Of Liberty Has A Rather Complicated History
“The New Colossus” (“Give me your tired, your poor, …”) was not mainstream American sentiment when Emma Lazarus wrote it in 1883 (one year after the Immigrant Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act). Indeed, it was somewhat radical, and she was inspired by the work she did with the despised refugees who were flooding the U.S. in her day (Jews from the Russian Empire). Slate history maven Rebecca Onion talks with Lazarus biographer Esther Schor about the poem and how its reception has changed over the decades. – Slate
