Category: Psychoanalysis

I have long been a fan of Shirley Jackson’s unnerving fiction, which never fails to unsettle me. From the creeping sense of dread running through her short stories to the magical but disturbing world of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson excels at stripping back the surface veneer of seemingly polite society, exposing […]
Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson
Categories
An aspect of narcissism?

It’s not every month that a poet—let alone a simple versifier like yours truly—gets to see his work in print in not one, but two major journals of thought. Yet this is the precisely the catbird seat on which I have alighted. The May 29 issue of The New York Review of Books carries “The […]
“The Dybbuk” and “The Whole Shebang”
Categories
Repression and Transgression

I’ve let many weeks slip by without posting here, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been idle. What I wouldn’t give for a stretch of idleness just about now… Teaching at the University of Tulsa has been wonderfully rewarding and inspiring, but between preparations for class, childcare, and an occasional conference—even an energizing one, like the […]
Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna and the Light of Childhood