Freud and Books

Three words create the title. The first a name, a proper name. What then to evoke a proper name? In naming, in the proper name there is a death of sorts, but also a remembrance, an ethics of memory in the proper name that is only possible through death. Next word, a coordinating conjunction. Useful and necessary, but why here, why not any other conjunction. To decide it to limit, is to shut out possibilities, but then it is necessary, no? Finally books. That is to come.


That first paragraph was just my Derrida-esque evaluation of the artificiality of titles. Kidding, but seriously.

Went to my favourite bookstore yesterday. It is my favourite simply because it is within walking distance and the people are great. An old building with oddly tudor-style archetecture. Very out of place in my town. Rows and rowds of shelves housing books there is, everything jam packed on the shelves. I walk in, and the first thing I hear is Bob Dylan on an old radio. Sitting at the nesk, one of the owners of the door, the sign out front baring his name. He is a wiry oild man, late 50s or early 60s perhaps. The colour draining from the tips of his black hair, creating a crown-like effect on his head. He was speaking to a patron of the stoor. The man translated books from German, or so he says. Mr MClure bag nto indulge him, then started to talk about music. First Ray Charles, then to New Orleans style jazz...but then the conversation of which I was privy took a turn. Mr. McClure brought up the fact that we forget so easily our past, that the racial tensions of the 1960s is not dead, but rather forgotten under the auspice of every street named after Martin Luther King, every high school, every award. They don't remind us, they force us to forget the tension that is our past. The thought of John Kennedy, a war hero, battle harden, having to call the Gov'ner of Alabama to get him to allow a single black girl into a public school, his voice trembling in terror, that is what is forgotten. What is forgotton is the need that many black americans felt, to arm themselves against hatred and terror wrecked by felow citizens. How soon we forget.

I bought The Imposible by Georges Bataille. Brilliant book.

T.I. seems to be acting symptomatically on his new album. Why? How? What do you mean? Acting symptomatically because of the trauma of his early life. The song, "Dead and Gone" seems to demonstrate this point very well. On the track he seems to want to kill off his "old" self, to represent a break with the past and thus acreate a new idenitty for which the issues of the old self are not a problem. This is simply a method of cooping. He cannot come to terms with the past and thus create a new me which is exempt from the past. The abuses of the past didn't occur to this new me, that was the old me. This break with the self is a near schizophrenia of sorts. How can we come to terms with our idenity if we seek to create a new one each time something bad happens?