 Red Room Writer Profile
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Brenda Webster's Blog
February 3, 2010
- Psychoanalysis is in many ways like a religion. People trace their lineage as it were from the Prophet Freud and from his early disciples. Sitting on stage in front of an audience of 130 people at the Austrian Cultural Forum, I wondered what the analystsin the audience would say about what could be perceived as my deviance. I tried not to think about it as I sketched out the two triangles in my ...
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January 7, 2010
- I just got asked to be on the Leonard Lopate show and wanted to share. Jan. 14th at 1:00 Eastern timeI've long been a fan of his. Love his brisk intelligent questioning.And after feeling grim about the world and the fate of books, am cheered.So off to New York on Saturday and after the Lopate show, I'll be on a panel at The Austrian Cultural Forum on Freud as a Fictional Character, 6:30-8:00. ...
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December 16, 2009
- In just a few short weeks I'll be talking about Freud as a fictional character to a group of people who either belong to the Austrian Cultural Forum or the American Psychoanalytic Association. Will they bombard me with tomatoes? Or have they--the analysts in particular--gotten more mellow, perhaps open to ideas of once banished disciples? To a less that totally idealized view of their founder? I ...
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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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