Showing posts with label Bruno Bettelheim. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bruno Bettelheim. Show all posts

Saturday 28 April 2012

The habit of collecting (4)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


28 April

Few - not even Bruno Bettelheim's adherents, acolytes, agents, and (they think) apostles - would doubt that the (core) impulse is something of the order of:


There's one that I haven't got!


Mrs President Marcos [I'm calling her that just to be flippant] knew that feeling well, but what did the possessor (as I cannot well speak for ownership) and person displaying this number-slave have at the forefront of his or her mind to have collected it?


GD15 SIX


Which one has to translate into GD IS SIX, as well as postulating that there must be many, many others in the series (in fact, as the whole aphabet isn't used, it must be 23 or 24 squared, some of which might mean more than others):


DD IS SIX (for Dating Direct*)

BB IS SIX (I need not explain that one, I fear)

GG IS SIX (good old Germaine**!)

BJ IS SIX (now that is rating something...)

CJ IS SIX (for those flagging already, just skip to the closing homily!)


All of which, though, assumes that the proposition talks about an age, anniversary, or score, whereas there could be something else going on...

x = 2

x x y = 6


y = ?



Back with the proposition GD IS SIX, could it, itself, be a known acronym, maybe for:

* Gross Diameter

* An open source code library for the dynamic creation of images by programmers (according to www.boutell.com/gd/)

* Graeme Dixon

* The ethical URL shortener with no registration required (according to v.gd/)

* Grand Designs

* Great Dunmow

* Gérard Depardieu (or, to extend him to his full height, Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu)


The end is listless, I believe


But it must really be to do with the spirit of North by Northwest (1959), one of the craziest, but still best, Cary Grant films ever - we are being (or feel that we are being?) set this puzzle to work out, who - or what - 'GD' is, and what it means for it to be 'six', or '6'.

But maybe it's a metaphor for what we make of life, and could mean no more than the title of that Hitchcock film - a big confusion about nothing (where people get killed - or do they?).

Maybe God's Design for Richard Dawkins, maybe Dawkins' message to a God (whom he states is fictional) - God Deficiency is Six?



In closing


Personally - if I can be intimate and private for this closing moment - I don't go along with much of that


We will never know the answer, but that's because it's all wrapped up with


Cheltenham - GCHQ - MI6 - Whitehall - Harry Palmer - hush hush - need-to-know basis - Reggie Perrin and his brother-in-law Jimmy


Amen


Post-Amen (as at 6 May)

In fact, it was GL15 SIX, so please ignore suitable amounts of the above!



End-notes

* Or Deadline Dave...

** Would that be a kind of rating (a bit as for bowed Eric)?


Monday 23 April 2012

What Bruno Bettelheim has to tell us about all sorts of stories

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


23 April

Some people (no names mentioned!) are quite dogmatic about what BB postulated about fairy tales:

It's a bit like being a strict Freudian* and - as Arthur Koestler expressed it in Bricks to Babel (1980) - filtering out everything that is inconsistent with your adopted (to be pretentious) Weltanschauung, so BB (probably quitely kicking and screaming, from what little I know of him) becomes the new God.

Thus adherents say that He Has Spoken, and henceforth Fairy Stories shall be hallowed, imbued with dark meanings, and with the purpose of helping us manage our difficult inner feelings by projecting them onto a story (no quibbles, no refund).

I think of this from hearing Debussy's familiar (though thankfully off the air for a while) L'Après-Midi d'une Faune (1894), and a decent explanation - for once - of its roots in Mallarmé's poem of 1865. It requires little invention to imagine sexual sublimation (of writer, reader or listener, though, for me, the lattermost remains a stretch, as does finding the text behind other works of Claude's): the faun can safely do - or dream of doing - what we can conveniently enjoy in him, and deny as being our desire.

Which brings us to yesterday's screening, accompanied by Neil Brand and Mark Kermode (why else was everyone there?) in The Dodge Brothers, of The Ghost that Never Returns (1929), the penultimate event in the 15th British Silent Film Festival, which was hosted by the Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, this year.

More to come...



End-notes

* Woody Allen's passing quip is my favourite, which goes something like During my time in therapy, my analyst retired - as he was a strict Freudian, it was only six sessions later that I realized.