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If Freud and Dante held a summit meeting, where would it be?
(a) The Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, 1962.
(b) Greenwich Village
(c) With Ulysses and Diomedes in the Eighth Circle of The Inferno
(d) Stanza 14 of Auden’s elegy for Freud.
(e) AA
(f) In New York City’s war on crime
(g) Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944
and what would they discuss?
(a) penis envy
(b) castration complexes
(c) Oedipal complexes
(d) Beatrice's health
(e) syphilis
(f) why they both hate Derrida
(g) the food
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Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
there meeting would definitely take place in vegas..afterall, "what takes place in the hell of vegas stays in vegas"...since freud was fixated on sexual drives being the prime motivating force in life they would most certainly focus their discussion on the turmoil in the lives of paolo and francesca in the fifth circle...they would also probably make note of the fact that they were both born and died in the same months...may - september as they dined at the "all you can eat" buffet at the sands...
Posted by: bill | June 07, 2011 at 07:53 AM
correction: their meeting....
Posted by: bill | June 07, 2011 at 07:55 AM
...and everyone knows that freud was up for a cameo in "ocean's eleven" until sinatra found out and had him cut
Posted by: bill | June 07, 2011 at 08:14 AM
Yeah, I think Bill's right: the Sands. Where they agreed that Dante would get
Vegas and Siggie would get Miami.
Posted by: jim cummins | June 07, 2011 at 11:51 AM
Hmmmm....I'd *like* to see Freud and Dante hold a summit in Greenwich Village circa the early 1960's, where they'd meet the young Bob Dylan, break a little bread (a long crusty loaf; something's gotta be easily interpreted) with him, then make a few predictions about where Dylan's career might be headed.
Posted by: Leslie McGrath | June 07, 2011 at 12:59 PM
B and F.
Posted by: Laura Orem | June 07, 2011 at 07:15 PM
B and F...????????
Posted by: bill | June 07, 2011 at 10:11 PM
In support of the BF thesis, consider this quotation from "The Meeting of the Titans" by Archibald Goodwin: << In New York City's war on crime, two separate but equal forces combine to turn a Nixon Era silent-majority hay-maker into a ubiquitous television franchise beyond price: the police who apprehend the offenders and the attorneys who prosecute them are known in the trade by the nicknames "Freud" and "Dante," respectively. Spokespersons for the two groups met annually in the Greenwich Village bar where Jack Kerouac set "The Subterraneans." >>
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | June 07, 2011 at 11:03 PM
Isn't Archibald Goodwin Nero Wolfe's Man Friday when he dresses up in his Sunday name? Or was that Joe Friday? Or was that a Welder named Tuesday? In any case, I'm pretty sure Floyd Thursday was shot just after Miles Archibald. Freudo was Al Jolson's brother in The Dogsbody Part II; he shot him in the rowboat. It was terrible; he had to have his rowboat amputated. Henny Youngman was Gary Oldman when that joke first saw what Nabokov calls a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
Posted by: jim cummins | June 08, 2011 at 02:06 AM
the police who apprehend the offenders and the attorneys who prosecute them are known in the trade by the nicknames "Freud" and "Dante," respectively.
Posted by: Anon | June 08, 2011 at 05:24 AM
and speaking of kerouac, let's not forget that dante was
himself "on the road" for 19 years...and word has it that beatrice and dean moriarty have actually been in vegas for years performing under various assumed stage names...doing specialty acts and were , in fact, the first performers to do "slam" events...
and speaking of dante, dylan and freud at the same subterranean table...what can we believe of two poets and a shrink tearing at the same "crusty loaf"?
Posted by: bill | June 08, 2011 at 09:12 AM
In the jungle the quiet jungle the lion sleeps tonight. A whom away a whim away a whim away a swim away. A whim away a him away a hymn of day a room of hay. Hey, harmonica!
I don't care whose BF says otherwise. But I think Jim and Bill have a point.
Posted by: Daisy | June 09, 2011 at 12:13 AM