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Brenda Webster's Blog
September 7, 2009
- Huang Xiang condemned to death in China, has found asylum here. He is a slender man, always in motion, singing to himself, moving, full of kinetic energy which explodes as he reads his extraordinary poems. You would not imagine, seeing him that he had spent twelve years in prisons and labor camps. But the poems themselves contain the contradictions of his life. He feels himself a life-force, ...
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August 12, 2009
- Muriel Gardiner: Hero Muriel Gardiner was a close family friend. We shared a large house and farm outside of Princeton with her, her daughter Connie and her husband Joe who had gotten out of a French interment camp after heading the Austrian resistance. Her own anti-fascist activities later made Muriel the unwitting model for ...
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May 26, 2009
- I heard a funny war story last night from my cousin George Oppen's best friend JZ who just had his 90th birthday. Apparently during the war, JZ was in Astoria, Queens making films for the army. John Cheever and William Saroyan and Kucor were in his group. Saroyan was generally disliked by the sargeants because during morning marching drill he would stop to pet a dog or give a nickle to a ...
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May 25, 2009
- We know that Freud insisted on sex as the key to neurosis. This led him to some grotesque results such as telling a psychotic patient to divorce his wife, leave his children and re-marry because sexual satisfaction would cure him.Guess what. It didn't. The first wife died in poverty and the second realtionship foundered, the man, broke down.All right. It was a new "science" and Freud ...
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May 12, 2009
- Freud was just plain wrong about the sexual underpinnings of neurosis. I don't know why it took me so long to realize exactly how wrong. Today, sitting on my terrace in Rome reading Lou Breger's biography of Freud, I finally got it.What is strange is that I wrote a memoir ten years ago writing ruefully about my various analysts giving me sexual interpretations. The most ill advised came from the ...
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May 8, 2009
- Here in Rome again getting over jetlag. So many new boutiques between here and Campo di Fiori. It's hard to remember what they are replacing. Can you imagine an Italian Sushi bar. Well, there it is in a tiny cubby hole fresh as can be.Another more significant change. Alfredo, our barista, who has been the soul of Via Guilia for at least thirty years died suddeny two months ago. It isn't the same ...
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May 3, 2009
- Writing a play is sapping my energy to blog. I am so fascinated by this new medium. Already with my last novel Vienna Triangle, I was getting tired of description. Tired, too, of having to move a character in to the dining room for dinner.Now all I have to do is dialogue. I love it. I have a wonderful collaborator with over twenty years theatre experience. I hand her the bare bones and she add ...
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May 1, 2009
- Five days ago I was startled by a bird flying full bore into my picture window. I rushed over to see if he was alright. He was. A beautiful robin with an intent look. I talked to him through the glass, hoping he'd realize that it wasn't an opening.A few minutes later I heard a sharp tap tap tap. It was the robin back again determined to get through. He had a bit of straw in his beak. So maybe it ...
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May 1, 2009
- Five days ago I was startled by a bird flying full bore into my picture window. I rushed over to see if he was alright. He was. A beautiful robin with an intent look. I talked to him through the glass, hoping he'd realize that it wasn't an opening.A few minutes later I heard a sharp tap tap tap. It was the robin back again determined to get through. He had a bit of straw in his beak. So maybe it ...
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April 12, 2009
- Announcing the WOMBA tour! World of Mouth Bay Area, an eclectic cadre of local women authors, will be kicking off the very first WOMBA book tour on Thursday, April 16 at Orinda Books. The tour, Face Books: Social Networking in Real Time, is intended both to bring together Bay Area writers and readers, and to take social networking off the computer and back into the community. ...
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April 8, 2009
- I'm going to be interviewed on West Coast Live this saturday by Sedge Thompson! I hope that some of you will come and others tune in KALW 91.7...(Kathi Goldmark the producer sent out this e-mail with the info: You can come see Brenda live in person at the show this Saturday at the gorgeous Cavallo Point Lodge in Sausalito (www.cavallopoint.com). Tickets are available at www.ticketweb.com or ...
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March 27, 2009
- I was recently asked to talk about my novel, Vienna Triangle at a Psychoanalytic Conference (IFPE) "Daring to Speak:Languages Spoken and Unspoken." The theme of the conference seemed particularly appropriate to my novel. I was in Rome reading Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar when I got the idea for Vienna Triangle. Mann was describing how the great Goethe sucked the life out of people ...
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March 18, 2009
- There is a neat indie bookstore in Danville and Sylvia Brownrigg and I are reading there tomorrow night at 7:00. Rakesstraw Books. I don't know a soul there and would love it if any of you from the area would turn up. I'm partial to the place all ready as the store pronounced Vienna Triangle as perfect for bookclubs because there were so many issues to discuss!
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March 17, 2009
- I am loving my cardio rehab. Something I would never have thought possible when I started. The fact that we share a concern with the mysterious organ in the center of our bodies makes for a sense of connection and easy intimacy. I suppose this happens in many other survivor groups but it is new and exhilarating to me. On one side of me yesterday there was a huge man, I'll call him Joe, who looked ...
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February 27, 2009
- People tend to fall into two camps when they are talking about Freud: wildly partisen and "bashers." So it was particularly refreshing to read the proofs of Louis Breger's new book Dream of Undying Fame: How Freud betrayed his mentor and invented psychoanalysis. In this probing and balanced book, Breger illuminates the way Freud's traumatic childhood shaped his ambitious, detached and ...
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