A good portion of my life is spent looking for books. I'll be looking for a book I know I have and it's the only one in the house that's completely disappeared. This, I know, is a mental block. More than that, it's my super-ego fighting a winning war against my ego; aka me. I've recently been thumbing through Bergler, his book that I read a year ago and ruminated about previously in this blog; Bergler; The Super Ego; Copyright 1952, Gune & Stratton, Inc. NYC. :
In that book Bergler makes a good case for the human condition being that of a hopeless victim of a blackmailing super-ego that terrorizes you, me, and everybody, by offering us a plea deal for our guilty ideas with the promise of letting us cop to a lesser crime. The deal of course is constantly re-negotiated, the lesser crime changing like a will-o-the wisp while the original crime becomes hopelessly lost and, anyway, irrelevant. I suppose since he offers no way out, his book should come with a cyanide pill; but instead he just offers the hope that the pain will be eased by understanding. Fat chance.
Another 'search' problem I get into, which, granted I would have even more trouble with but for Google, is looking for articles of the academic variety; those housed in such places as Jstor. I am ineligible for Jstor since I'm not a student or a professor.
This morning though, I stumbled across an article I wanted to read as a result of having read another article, which I had been able to read....., (99+) (DOC) On Blustering: Dwight Macdonald, Modernism, and The New Yorker | Tom Perrin - Academia.edu ....which article I had stumbled across while searching for more stuff by yet another academic, (I'm warm on academics this week), Bernard Schweizer, a Prof. at Long Island University, Brooklyn, and total Rebecca West expert and editor of that book I so love by West, Survivors in Mexico. His introduction to Survivors is enlightening both about Rebecca and how he, Prof. Schweizer, went about his edit.
As to the article I couldn't dig up, except in tease-form where you have to show proof of your academic status and/or pay a fee; that article is Project MUSE - From Vernacular Humor to Middlebrow Modernism: <i>Gentlemen Prefer Blondes</i> and the Creation of Literary Value, by Prof. Daniel Tracy. You may remember that I have my own theory about Middlebrow Modernism which in fact may be related to that of Prof. Tracy's, or not, which had to do, in part, with Dwight MacDonald being a late blooming horn-dog.
At any rate, getting back to the on-going book-ban crisis, and this might be slightly Berglerian; I give myself credit for continuing to look for books on my shelves until my super-ego gets worn down and the book magically appears. But as to those that are stored where only academics can reach them, that calls for meditation, prayer, contemplation and patience, my short suit. ....How am I doing so far? lately? Well, I've bookmarked several books to be bought down the line, as for instance several by Jean Shepard, (the Talk Show Host not the country singer), in particular one or two about George Ade, about whom I thought I might do a blog post, a couple of books by women abstract expressionists, about whom I'd like to further inform myself, and a few other's I might mention as they come to me. ...Lastly I'll say on this subject is that I do sneak in a kindle every now and then, with the thought that a book that only costs $2.99, is almost free.
Changing the subject, there is a woman who writes novels galore, and she's a pretty good writer as far as I can see, but she is independently published, and I discovered her while looking to shore up my faith in self and/or independent publishing during the time I jumped into that world with my solitary effort; her name is Libby Hawker, and the last book of hers I read, a couple of weeks ago, was Daughter of Sand and Stone, about a Middle-Eastern Princess who fights the Roman Empire. I enjoy her writing and it's kind of an escape from my usual focus. I've also been dabbling in William Carlos Williams as a side dish.
But I've really been absorbed in a bio of Cecil Beaton for the last couple of weeks. I just finished reading it this am. Really long, but very enjoyable. I came to the book through my time spent reading about the Cyril Connolly group. Cecil was part of that. Cecil and Cyril went to the same elementary school. A really important connection the two had though, was that the man who backed, and helped edit, Horizon, Cyril's famous magazine, Peter Watson, was the love of Cecil's life. That story is quite interesting. Watson was an early collector of modern art. Between the three of them, Cyril, Cecil and Peter, they knew all the movers and shakers throughout Europe.
The author, Hugo Vickers, spares us the sex scenes, which is O.K. by me, particularly since Cecil, at least in Vicker's telling, seems to count love as more important than sex. Cecil, by the way, seems to have been bi-sexual. In fact, more of the references to Cecil having sex are with women than with men. Was that spin? I'll get one of Cecil's unexpurgated diaries and see if I can tell. I suppose it's prejudice but I find the idea that he was women-positive sort of increases his value in my un-deconstructed psyche. Maybe you'll understand this better when you get to the Garbo part. I haven't said anything here about Cecil's photographs, or his set design, drawings, and paintings. That should have it's own chapter. But just for the record I think that is partly because he makes it look so easy.
