BEER Group Read. "introduced as 'friends'"

[Fiona Shnapple]

Survivor's Guilt. Why did I survive? Maybe that Pear Tree is the
answer. Who knows?

Let it Bleed/Be

Spiegelman displays his sense of guilt in many ways. He suffers
anguish over his dead brother, Richieu, who perished in the Holocaust,
and whom he feels he can never live up to.[103] The eighth chapter,
made after the publication and unexpected success of the first volume,
opens with a guilt-ridden Spiegelman (now in human form, with a
strapped-on mouse mask) atop a pile of corpses—the corpses of the six
million Jews upon whom Maus's success was built.[104] He is told by
his psychiatrist that his father feels guilt for having survived and
for outliving his first son,[105] and that some of Art's guilt may
spring from painting his father in such an unflattering way.[106] As
he had not lived in the camps himself, he finds it difficult to
understand or visualize this "separate universe", and feels inadequate
in portraying it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maus

On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 7:29 AM, Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:
> Freud? Why might UWS residents send their kids to a Freudian School.
> To have a friendly talking cure on the couch? Don't they go to the
> Junior Gym, the Mommy and Me Yoga, the Pee-Wee Pilates, the Y, the
> Wonderful Witch, the Gurrooo jiving with that cosmic debris?
>
> So, maybe the kids are all right.  Or could be,  if the neurotic
> parents let them develop before they begin therapy and cures.
>
> I mean, how much consciousness to unconsciousness clogging can there
> be? They're kids!
>
> And, maybe the parents, typical of Manhattan parents, and come to
> think of it, typical of Yupper Parents everywhere, but oh soooo soooo
> UWS, where anxiety about getting into a school that fast tracks the
> kid to a successful career as a dentist, are sending their kids to a
> Freudian School to prevent a clog that isn't there yet, at least not
> in the kids, and to discover the clog in a stage of their own
> development.
>
> These clogs, as we see here, are caused by the WORK the parents do.
>
> The grandparents, and greater parents, many of the victims, have
> caused the parents to be stuck at the clog, for the violence, be it
> the Holocaust. the Wars, the Blacklisting, so on, is inextricably
> connected to the repression, is part of the same sewer system that
> backs up as life in the city engenders more and more insidious
> violence born of the repression.
>
> There's a lot of guilt and anxiety on this UWS.
>
> Another reason to like Maxine in this opening scene, she has to go to WORK.
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 9:46 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I used to ask some of my NYC friends who went to the psych doctors every week,
>> what they provided that a friend who listened did not?
>>
>> Pynchon has Dr. Kugelblitz call his patients his 'friends'.
>>
>> P showing the debasement of the meaning of friend?
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l