Julie Powell, the World Cup Draw and Freud

What do the above three have in common? I’m tempted to say that the best answer wins some delectable prize but I think I should save the giveaway for a more deserving question. (And no, I won’t accept that they’re all a fraud. You’ll find an answer at the end.) The more mundane truth is that I felt like blogging about all three and so have lumped them together.

First up, Julie Powell. Are you feeling cheated that the feel-good image you had of Julie Powell is now having to be revised with the news that her latest book (Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession) carves up, you guessed it, her marriage (as well as meat)?

I’m not a regular Village Voice reader but I enjoyed Rebecca Marx’s excellent carve-up of Cleaving here.

I liked this paragraph:

How much you’ll enjoy Cleaving depends on how sympathetic you are to Powell’s dilemma, which, when it comes down to it, is a bit much to swallow: the act of trying to choose between one’s bottomlessly loving husband and one’s snakey-sounding lover, all while having the financial freedom to hang out with butchers just for the hell of it, is accompanied by the sound of the world’s most miniscule violin.

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Friday’s Fifa 2010 World Cup Draw in Cape Town was a big deal. Huge street party with 50,000 people and the TV event was pretty good to my relatively untrained eye. I did wince a little when Sepp Blatter told the presenter Carol Manana that it was easy to fall in love with Africa when he looked at her. No, really – he said something as inane as that.

And then there were the countless repetitions of how wonderful the World Cup is going to be next year in South Africa and how historic it is that Africa is hosting the event. Granted. But given that hot air is one of Africa’s biggest exports, I could have done with less hype and more analysis. Some practical discussion of which game will be played where and which ones are likely to be the most popular.

For witty commentary you can’t beat Barney Ronay of the Guardian who was live-blogging the event. After commenting on Charlize Theron’s ditzy blonde routine and observing that her accent went quite mad he notes:

“Yes, Charlize, four teams in eight groups. Where has she been? Doesn’t she read the papers? Oh. It’s a kind of act. I see. Jerome is now explaining what a ball is and how you kick it and what “a goal” means. Or something. Who do they think is watching this? Martians?”

Nice. The best headline I’ve seen on the draw so far was from the Sun newspaper in the UK: Best English group since the Beatles.

England are apparently brimming with confidence after drawing Algeria, Slovenia and the USA. By contrast, South Africa “have a mountain to climb” after drawing Mexico, Uruguay and France. I wonder if the South African public will let Thierry Henry forget about his “Hand of Frog”?

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And then, since this is supposed to be partly a psychology blog, I will add in a quote I read yesterday on Freud by Joan Raphael-Leff, a psychoanalyst at Unversity College in London.

My thesis is that for Freud Egypt plays an ambiguous and complex role as (unconscious) representation of the ‘dark continent’ – repudiated realm of the uncanny archaic mother / primordial ‘eternal feminine’. I suggest that his periodic preoccupation with ancient Egypt constitutes a particular form of unconscious repetition, which he called ‘return of the repressed’, and today we would link with revival of a filigree of implicit configurations, or dissociated memories. Association with traumatic events relating to his own earliest years induced avoidance of the Isis / Osiris / Horus myth with its evocative reminders of generational confusions, incestuous passions, fragmentation and fratricidal violence. This terrifying narrative rooted not in the phallic supremacy Freud chose to privilege but in maternal magic and integration of feminine powers of intuition as aspects of the masculine self. (from the journal parallax, 2007)

I know this is probably difficult to read without the surrounding context and discussion but I found it fascinating to read how Raphael-Leff uses Freud’s prehistory to explain his subsequent neglect of the feminine and the development of his (in)famous Oedipal theory.

Incidentally, one theme which brings all three together is that of Africa. Julie Powell visits Africa towards the end of Cleaving, the World Cup is being staged in Africa next year and this article was about Freud’s obsession with Egypt (which is still in Africa).

Freud, low schlurp threshholds and the Election

I was planning to review In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm today but it will have to wait. Not quite in the mood after a typically rushed Monday and with general moodiness about. Some bullet points instead:

• South Africans will be voting in our fourth post-1990 general election on Wednesday. I am hoping that the ANC doesn’t get a two-thirds majority and that their support drops to below 60% for the first time since 1994. It’s rather depressing knowing that 60% of the electorate have a totally different political outlook to me, but encouraging perhaps that 40% are unhappy with the idea of Jacob Zuma as president. (I could add that I voted ANC in 1994 but that since then I’ve been rather disappointed with the lack of progress on a number of issues including crime, corruption, healthcare, Zimbabwe and others. I’m voting for the opposition.)

• On the reading front it felt almost surreal to begin reading The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot in election week. With so much buzz around Jacob Zuma and the ANC vs the rest, it was also refreshing though to step into George Eliot’s 19th century England where attention to detail is everything. I was not really expecting to get pulled into the story so quickly but I’m admiring Eliot’s subtle humour, her keenly-observed dialogue, her long descriptions and her gently meandering plot. I also like the way that she deftly blends the individual and the social with subtle reflections on the position of women. I’m interested to see how the story of Maggie and Tom develops but I’m already frustrated that the bright Maggie apparently won’t be getting the advantages of her older (and duller) brother.

• I really enjoyed In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm this weekend. Malcolm writes so well and so thoroughly that even if I wasn’t interested in the history of psychology I would have been fascinated with the inner goings-on of the Freud inner circle. I’ll hopefully review this later this week but in the meantime here’s a quote:

“To be an analyst and to be certain – they don’t go together. You have to have doubts. You have to be capable of certainty, too, but it has to be hedged with doubt.” — Leonard Shengold

• My dear and slightly demented dog had me losing my temper this weekend with her obsessive licking. Unfortunately we share a room and she got it into her brain to lick her paw obsessively (with insistent schlurpy sounds) at 3am on Sunday morning for about three hours. I know I shouldn’t have smacked her nose and shouted at her to “Just Stop It!” before grabbing her collar and marching her downstairs but in mitigation I was tired and I’m really not at my best at 3am on a Sunday morning. P was not impressed and I also felt bad for not having more patience.

• The irony of the situation was that I was feeling pretty good before that. I’d been to the gym and I’d found good books to read and P and I were having a relaxing weekend. Perhaps Joschka felt left out or just anxious or something. Maybe she’s worried about the approach of Winter and her arthritis was playing up. I don’t know, but the schlurping felt like Chinese water torture. I clearly have a low schlurp-threshhold. (How does one work on that?)