To have a great primitive black crag rising up in the middle of populated streets of commerce, stately squares and winding closes’, she wrote, ‘is like the statement of an unmitigated fact preceded by “nevertheless”.
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Nevertheless
2011 in books
These are the books I read in 2011, in order of the date I finished them. 2011 was the year when I renewed my love of fiction, after 5 years of PhD, and will be marked by my first encounter with Muriel Spark, whom I can say is my favourite writer. May 2012 bring me [...]
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A depraved epistemology
Being embodied is a mixed fate for the hysteric, who does not want to be excluded by anyone from anything, and yet, given the shocking secrets of sexuality – revealed by the self’s won developing body knowledge experiences this body and what it knows as a depraved epistemology. This fact is a vital constituent in [...]
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She’s a dancer
Georgina wielded the bigamy in terrified triumph. Her terror lest Eleanor should take public action against the bigamist was partly mitigated by the fact that Eleanor had a reputation to keep free of scandal. ‘But my name would suffer more than hers. I’ve always been respectable whereas she’s a dancer,’ Georgina declared.
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Hysteria, Dora and perversion
Here is a little more of my current jumbled thinking on hysteria and perversion, influenced by what I have been reading. Sharon Kivland’s work A Case of Hysteria is a feminine detective story telling of a dependence to Freud’s case history (which I also suffer from, and I have been trying to avoid speaking of [...]
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Charcot and the Salpetrière
In the Nineteenth Century, Doctor Charcot worked at the Salpetrière in Paris, a hospital dedicated to treat hysteric women through hypnosis and other like treatments. Charcot’s Tuesday lectures were very famous and well attended and Brouillet’s painting shows what was then named ‘La Grande Hysterique’ (believed to be a patient called Blanche Wittmann). Watch her [...]
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The Scene of a Crime
2HB Vol. 10 is in my hands. Lovely as always and the black cover is a nice touch given the mysteriousness of the texts. It fits well with my contribution, The Scene of a Crime. Thank you to Francis McKee and Louise Shelley.
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A woman’s folly
In this oblique way, she began to sense what went to the makings of Miss Brodie who had elected herself to grace in so particular a way and with more exotic suicidal enchantment than if she had simply taken to drink like other spinsters who couldn’t stand it any more. The Prime of Miss Jean [...]
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A Lacanian murder mystery
Something I wrote last year and which, sadly, did not get anywhere. Lacan at the Scene Henry Bond Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2009 256 pp. $24.95/£18.95 ISBN-10: 0-262-01342-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-262-01342-0 Detectives and analysts see more than we do, moving between transference and interpretation with a perplexing ease, and picking up key details about [...]