Author: hyperrhiz

Hello. My name is Eliza. What’s yours?
My name is Ida Bauer.
All right, let’s get started. What’s on your mind, Ida?
Where is Dr Freud?
Come on, Ida. Where do you think?
I think he is avoiding me.
What was going through your mind when you began to believe he is avoiding you?
I wonder if he has given up on me.
Don’t you also have given up on you?
That is why I came to him. To get help. Or was I forced? I don’t remember.
You do too remember.
My father…

Continue reading Dora and Eliza converse

My friend JH tells me there are two kinds of writers/critics: clumpers and splitters. She is a splitter: she looks for cracks and holes in arguments, seeks to define within terms by examining critical differences. She has an eye for nuance: a born deconstructor. I, on the other hand, am a clumper. I want to draw similarities between the disparate, construct elaborate histories based on tenuous relationships. If this is any indication, my favorite television show growing up was the BBC show Connections, in which James Burke would wander through history drawing together the most unlikely ideas and technologies to produce a magical story (here’s a sample episode).

So, in my clumping mode, I’m going to be working on a series of ideas that are only really related through my telling of them. Here’s the starting point: What do Sir Walter Ralegh, Sigmund Freud, and the Emacs editor have in common? This is going to be a convoluted and not particularly apropos piece of history, but I promise it will be clear by the end. Maybe.

Continue reading Debugging Dora