Thing which never fails to annoy me: person drawing my attention to something I've already noticed to take action I'm already in the middle of taking. This morning, had to pull out my pass to wave at new security guy on door ('Don't you know WHO I AM?'); in process my keys fell out, tinkle-tinkle crash onto the marble stair. Person in queue for bag ( Read more... )

Okay, props to Hambly for the early scenes in Sewell's lunatic asylum. I'm not saying Victorian private lunatic asylums are my Mastermind special subject or anything like that, but I know enough about them that my threshold for being jolted out of willing-suspension-of-disbelief (or muttering 'plagiarism! plagiarism!' when spotting where the ( Read more... )

Litfic
( Continuing my slow progress through the oeuvre of May Sinclair )

I give you these gems from the shop at the Freud Museum:
Freudian Slippers!

Brett Kahr has uncovered the fantasies that fuel our sex lives, and what they tell us about ourselves.

I can see that Kinsey is the name that is going to get invoked over this kind of survey, but is it methodologically anything like at all? I think the late Alfred K would have been more than a tad snotty about a survey of a mere 18,000 individuals ( Read more... )

Comment on this entry and I will give you a letter. Write ten words beginning with that letter in your journal, including an explanation what the word means to you and why, and then pass out letters to those who want to play along.

From ruric ( The Letter H )

Have been stimulated by various things out there to consider the mindset that thinks that if you get A Certain Thing, that you only have do once, Right, that's it. Life's problems will be solved and there will be no more of them. The original grit around which this thought started accreting was the report in the paper about the Scientology belief ( Read more... )

Review of Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, by Ariel Levy. But I tend to wonder a) how widespread is this sort of thing, really? and b) how far is it conflating distinct phenomena in order to cry Woe?

Has anyone read any Edward St Aubyn? This review makes his work sound most intriguing.

Psychotherapy debates revisited ( ( Read more... )

I've just started reading Margaret Gardiner's A Scatter of Memories. It begins with the transcript of a conversation between her, Robert Young and Ann Scott (from the group around Free Association Books, the publisher).

Gardiner talks about her experience of psychoanalysis:
I was always hoping for something nice and dramatic, a sort of breakthrough ( Read more... )