I’d planned to write a blog about Max Clifford shooting himself in the foot over Jimmy Savile. I had the idea before I’d seen anyone else covering this but before I finished putting my piece together T_he Guardian_ run a story headlined: Jimmy Savile scandal: ‘celebrity hedonism no excuse for child abuse’ and straplined, ‘Child protection expert criticises Max Clifford for saying celebrities didn’t ask for birth certificates’. Paul Roffey may not say things the way I’d have formulated them but the points are basic and unfortunately still need laying out in this way because there are so many twerps around who can’t grasp the key issues.
There is obviously much greater awareness of paedophilia today but in the 1960s everyone knew about the age of consent and people were regularly tried for breaking the law over it. The fact that someone may have looked 16 or 21 if they were male may be mitigation but it is no defence. (Roffey tells The Guardian)
This is so obvious that it shouldn’t need stating. Nonetheless scumbags like Max Clifford make it necessary to do so since their arrant bullshit on the subject shouldn’t pass unchallenged. The rich and famous remain arrogant enough to think they can defend the indefensible – but we won’t let them get away with it!
Moving on, when I was sixteen in the late-seventies I had a female friend of the same age who a thirty-something photographer persuaded to pose naked. A twenty-something guy we both knew who worked in a punk record shop thought my friend was being exploited, so he told the photographer my friend was only 15. In a panic the thirty-something perv destroyed the prints and negatives he’d made of my friend (who’d actually turned sixteen a week so so before she posed nude for him). The photographer knew he’d get done if he was caught with indecent images of a 15 year-old and he’d asked my friend if she was sixteen, but our older acquaintance was more convincing when he falsely claimed she’d lied. The record shop assistant clearly had a better understanding of the nature of consent than the law – where there is a massive inequality in power relations there cannot be consent.
Around the same time various members of my male peer group (including me) were offered a hundred quid if we’d submit to being bum-fucked on camera. £100 was a lot of dosh to us back then and we were even told that our faces wouldn’t be on the films, only our backsides. We concluded that rather than being for our benefit this was to protect the pornographers making the movies – if we couldn’t be identified then no one would be able to prove that we were beneath the age of consent for gay sex in the UK at that time (as we were). In the late-seventies I found myself constantly proposition by older men as I wondered around London – and I was not only under the age of consent for gay sex, I also looked considerably younger than my actual age. The saddos hitting on me knew having sex with me wouldn’t be legal – but they didn’t care coz they thought they could get away with it. It was more usually men who I had to tell to fuck off as they harassed me, but I’d get just as pissed off with women who did it (and the oldest person to offer me money for sex as I came out of a punk concert was a female in her seventies – the men who did this were more usually in their thirties of forties).
The punk scene was full paedophiles and those attempting to exploit paedophilia for commercial gain. The Guardian may now be carrying on the whole relatively sensible articles about Jimmy Savile, but as recently as 10 April 2010 Alex Needham wrote in a laudatory blog about the punk poser Malcolm McLaren: “After managing the band Bow Wow Wow (and attempting to bring paedophilia into the mainstream via a magazine called Chicken), McLaren decided to make records himself. ” This is in an article with the strap-line: “The punk impressario’s stunts shook up pop music for ever. Here are some of the best.” Doh!
Not that The Guardian should be singled out for criticism on this score. The British tabloid press has way more to answer for since it played a role in turning Savile into an untouchable celebrity. Right-wing hack Garry Bushell has written for a range of the red tops, as well as involving himself with some of the more unsavory elements of the punk rock scene, and fronting his own really bad dumbcore band The Gonads. Bushell may or may not claim the following lyrics from his song I Lost My Love To A UK Sub are a joke, but nonetheless they ought to provide all the tabloids for whom he’s written with some food for thought:
My first love was a virgin only 13 years old/Till Charlie Harper grabbed on his pension day I’m told/He showered her with badges/He bought her lots of booze/And then showed her his warhead/Now don’t you think that’s crude?/He got her in a stranglehold/He got her in the club/Before I bleedin’ knew it I lost my love to a UK Sub…
Charlie Harper was the rather unlikely middle-aged front man to the punk band The UK Subs, and he had a reputation for bedding underage girls. Whether Harper’s unsavory reputation was deserved or not I’ve no idea, but when I hung around the punk scene in London in the late-1970s, Harper was widely perceived to be a dirty old man with a penchant for young girls. Bushell is playing off and celebrating Harper’s reputation for bedding jailbait, as is obvious from the large number of UK Subs song titles worked into his lyric. Towards the end of the song Bushell returns to the subject of grooming underage girls that is first addressed in the words quoted above (viz badges and booze): “Tank her up with vodka till the silly cow is sick/Take her in a stranglehold/Take her out the pub/Get back to your place and you’ll never lose your love to a UK Sub…” And for the benefit of those not familiar with all of the UK slang in the song ‘in the club’ (first verse) means pregnant, so this lyric is a very blatant paean to kiddie fiddling.
I’ll end by noting that while child abuse imagery could be found in various parts of the punk scene of the 1970s, it seemed to have the strongest appeal to those with far-Right leanings. Neo-Nazi punk moron Ian Stuart recorded a song on this subject called Jailbait with his band Skrewdriver in 1977:
Normal hair looks so good / Temptation think I should? / Jailbait, jailbait, jailbait / No one knows you’re sneaking out / Your old man would scream and shout / Jailbait, jailbait, jailbait / Just because you’re just fifteen / They can’t guess the things you’ve seen / Jailbait, jailbait, jailbait / They don’t want you getting pissed / Enjoying things that they have missed / Jailbait, jailbait, jailbait.
Again note the alcohol reference (‘getting pissed’) and the role this plays in grooming underage girls (and also boys in the case of many of those in the Skrewdriver entourage – such as fascist bonehead Nicky Crane who also wrote bad lyrics and drew crap record covers for the group). On a live recording of Skrewdriver performing Jailbat at The Marquee in London on 4 June 1977, Ian Stuart introduces the song by saying” “Right we’re going to do one about little girls….” in a leering voice, just in case anyone misses the fact that he fancies himself as a perv.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Comments
Comment by Julie Butch on 2012-10-28 00:30:25 +0000
Thanks and I’d almost managed to forget Gary Bullshit existed!
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-10-28 09:14:45 +0000
Oh dear-but fascinating. What a rotten bunch!
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-10-28 09:27:09 +0000
It is strange-I got so ‘outraged of Tumbridge Wells’ yesterday by something that Brendan O’Neill wrote about child abuse and a few other commenters trying to insist to me that this sort of behavior isn’t rife-but this post illustrates it is, my own experiences do, my sister was on the end of the unwanted attentions of some goon who got her in a car park (later prosecuted) I think she was about eleven. What planet are these ‘deniers’ on? I did not know that about M M but Annabella thingy was quite young wasn’t she? Hmmm.
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-10-28 10:02:04 +0000
Oh yes and brother-in-law used to get regularly outraged when he was a young man (forty now) about men hitting on him. Hence he hated gays-I used to try and reason with him about his ‘homophobia’ but perhaps it was a case of this older people trying to get it on with younger ones rather than gay people from his age group. I must speak to him about it.
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-10-28 10:13:29 +0000
Getting back to Malcolm McLaren, he is a particularly vile human being who didn’t give a shit about the music or musicians or anyone other than himself. Everything he did was created for the sole purpose of creating a “scene” around him. Johnny Lydon’s work with PiL was much more interesting than the Sex Pistols. When Adam Ant had his band stolen by McLaren, he took McLaren’s ideas and improved upon them, turning out some fun and interesting music. Bow Wow Wow was created as a mouth piece for McLaren’s anti-youth, anti-music tirades. Then there’s how he treated the underage Annabella. From Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again, postpunk 1978-1984:
Vermorel believes McLaren’s master scheme was “to create a child porn scandal implicating as many people as he could.” Not just EMI, who was financing Chicken, but the BBC, too. A documentary crew headed by Alan Yentob had been following McLaren around for a program on the marketing of Bow Wow Wow. Partly impelled by his usual lust for maximum media mayhem, McLaren also wanted to make a serious polemical point, exposing pop music as porn for children…and pop as porn using children to titillate adults.
With typical ruthlessness, McLaren, in his eagerness to embarrass the music and media establishment, showed no concern whatsoever about the youngsters (Annabella and the other teenage models) or old friends (Vermorel) who would have been embroiled in the scandal. When he went to remonstrate with McLaren, says Vermorel, “Malcolm just laughed and said, ‘You should be telling all this to the judge! When the shit hits the fan, I’ll be in South America.’ So I told EMI what was going on. And they told Yentob, and he freaked out, and those tapes have been in the BBC vault ever since.”
…Chicken never hatched. According to Vermorel, the only physical evidence of Chicken’s existence was the rate card for advertising in the magazine.” But Bow Wow Wow’s second release, Your Cassette Pet, continued to exploit the underage-sex angle.
Taken above from a Blog on Malcom MacClaren-I should maybe provide the URL.
I must admit when he died I did not give a toss-but a lot of people seemed to-fan boy cr** again?
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-10-28 10:17:01 +0000
http://45and33.blogspot.co.uk/2007/12/malcolm-mclaren-madam-butterfly.html
The reference for any one who is interested-as to how authoritative-well it’s a blog-and I have no idea who wrote it-but some of the points seems to fit with what Mr Trippy is saying.
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-10-28 10:26:09 +0000
Apparently MacClaren was influenced by the Situationists-as are some strands of Libertarian thinking-as far as I can make out from my not particularly scholarly surfing-but I need to find out more about this. They seem on the whole to be t**ts anyway.
Comment by mistertrippy on 2012-10-28 13:36:42 +0000
Yes there does seem to be a strange fanboy attitude among certian music ‘journalists’ (not Simon Reynolds) that prevents them grasping the issues in relation to this (with regard to McLaren, John Peel, and many others) and many other issues too.
Strange that the Madam Butterfly cover should be used to illustrate the piece you quote. The cover on that uses Eugenie Vincent as the model and in the mid-eighties I shared a house with her and another guy in Kennington. She definitely isn’t underage on that record, she was in her early twenties when I shared a house with her, and that cover was either taken then or shortly after. She worked at Models One at the time so she’d have been hired through that agency. She also did the usual model stuff like Vogue covers etc. but was more bohemian than most of her peers and liked hanging out with artists.
It is harder to judge as you get older because you’re not approached by the pervs., but when I was teenage my impression was that a good proportion of adults over 30 were intereested in having illegal sex with underage kids. Possibly it was because of where I hung out and how I dressed but I regularly had adults trying to pick me up both when I was underage and when I looked underage (I mean in my teens – although I was still be refused service in pubs until I was 30 if I didn’t have ID, because the landlords and bar staff thought I looked to be under 18!).
Being homophobic about the guys who do this is silly. My impression was that most of them were married and were not openly gay – so homophobia preventing them coming out was a part of the problem. I did encounter the odd openly gay man whose behaviour was problematic but it seemed to be much more middle-class married men trying to pick up young boys for sex between leaving work and going home to their families. Older women trying to pick me up for sex happened about as often as openly gay men. By far the biggest amount of sexual harassment for me as a teenager came from the closet cases.
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-10-28 18:55:18 +0000
Garry Bushell has apparently gone from so-called Trotskyist to support for UKIP according to Wikipedia. He is clearly demented.
Comment by Captain Rot on 2012-10-28 19:42:20 +0000
Gary Bushell is sad too!
Comment by Raymond Anderson on 2012-10-29 01:29:36 +0000
Didn’t they all go to Stringfellows?
Comment by The Man in the Iron Mask on 2012-10-29 09:43:05 +0000
Garry Bushell: I had him under observation for some time in the late 1970s. I intended him to be one of the subjects of my photographic study: MEN WITHOUT CHINS: Populists, Fascists and Fart-artists. I aborted the study partly because Crass got there before me with their song HURRY UP GARRY (THE PARSON’S FARTED). The band were trying to nail Bushell and of course that other music journalist Man of the People Tony Parsons who might not have turned out as right-wing as Bushell but is equally adept at playing the populist card – see for instance his racial theories about begging, ie there are no ‘black’ ones. Over the years the Parsons’ former wife Julie ‘the Fat Man’ Burchill has churned out similar tosh, just as you’d expect from a couple who dedicated a book to Menachem Begin, the Israeli Prime Minister whose invasion of Lebanon would lead to the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Chatila camps.
I used to see Bushell at gigs, usually surrounded by his lad admirers tho on one occasion I saw him lounging at the back with a ‘bird’ on his knee. He’d habitually wear his sleeves rolled up, very self-consciously displaying his tattoos which he obviously regarded as his stigmata of proletarian authenticity. ‘Oh, he was hard’, as comic Kenneth Williams would say, ‘but he had no chin, you see, which is why he grew that scruffy beard’. Interestingly Tony Parsons is also lacking in the chin department tho of course Burchill has since over-compensated for her former husband, her persistent gorging of cheddar cheese giving her twenty chins or more.
I can’t say whether Bushell ever went to Stringfellows but if he did he’d certainly have enjoyed doing what he enjoyed doing in the gents: sniffing other pissers’ farts. It’s not recorded whether he ever did get his snout close to Parsons’ arse to indulge in these acts of olfactory connoisseurship but it was good and true of Crass to have put the kink in a ditty.
I hope to turn my attention of McLaren when I am in better shape. The Mask slipped over the w/e and the two of my brothers who are welders have been sorting me out. Their wrought-iron rates are very good if any of you out there have problems with your gates or railings.
Comment by The Man in the Iron Mask on 2012-10-29 11:37:55 +0000
Re Jailbait: there’s a song of this name by Nils Lofgren – see Youtube 1976 live version.
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-10-29 12:01:45 +0000
Oh dear all these champions of the ‘proles’ are getting it in the neck from TMitIM. Very funny.
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-10-29 14:34:25 +0000
My gates and railings are in tip top condition beautifully surrounding my palace in Chigwell.
Comment by mistertrippy on 2012-10-29 15:34:03 +0000
I guess popularism is what led Burchill and Parsons to declare The Tom Robinson Band the future of rock and roll at the end of their book The Boy Looked At Johnny. Unfortunately they were right but obviously not in the way they intended, because from the early eighties onwards rock music ceased to matter and seemed like a sad parody of its former self (just as TRB were a parody of rock). Fortunately there was still electro, hip-hop, house and go go etc. in the eighties, which meant we could hear decent music, there just wasn’t much rock woth hearing….. Instead we had the rubbish championed by the likes of Gary Bushell….
Comment by Ola on 2012-10-29 16:43:49 +0000
Very interesting article, Bushell, doesn’t surprise me in the least. I think there will be continuing outrage about this for a while.
Maybe one or two more celebrity pervs will be exposed with a possible suicide, the BBC will spend a shed load of money on enquirers, a few more resignations will be handed in, but then it all dies down and no long term solutions will come of it all.
Comment by Ruth Howard on 2012-10-29 21:53:22 +0000
I’ve been banging on about Stranglehold by the UK Subs for years, Charlie Harper’s ode to a naughty 13 year old. They changed the line to “only 18 but oh so sweet” for Top of the Pops, Oh the irony…
Comment by Raymond Anderson on 2012-10-29 22:12:33 +0000
we all know about the glam and post glam school disco scene but the “celebrities” surely used Stringfellow’s organisation as one of their conduits..Wyman was in and out of there..the original meaning of celebrity is “a solemn rite”
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-10-29 23:03:11 +0000
Well I was fascinated by Mandy Smith and based a great deal of my GCSE art project around her!
Comment by Mark Darby on 2012-10-29 23:59:26 +0000
I totally agree that there was a nasty peadophilic side to the punk scene. I experienced pretty much exactly what you described myself… not from the people in the scene itself but from older hangers-on who seemed to think because we looked different we were just sexually up for grabs… this was in Bournemouth mainly but London too. Thinking about it, Savile actually owned a club in Bournemouth in the 70s… will have to find out the name of it, I remember the location.
Comment by Raymond Anderson on 2012-10-30 00:25:50 +0000
Back in the late 70s I always joked about the thirty year olds in leather jackets hanging with us 15 year olds. I thought they were open minded old hippy scenesters caring for the next generation. I was always convinced I was independent but my mate said back then we were all being groomed for some mule activity.
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-10-30 07:59:24 +0000
I was a bit too young for punk-five in ’77 so missed all this.
Comment by The Man in the Iron Mask on 2012-10-30 11:56:12 +0000
I think it is worth putting the paedophile streak in punk in a wider context.
Behind the very first Sex Pistols t-shirt which was of a naked boy smoking and behind the later ROCK’N’ROLL SWINDLE image of Mclaren as the Dickensian Fagin corrupting his boy gang of street orphans, lies a set of radical ideas around childhood and learning (see philosophers of education like Piaget, Freire and Illich) which emerged in the post-war years and came to fruition in the ’60s with the Free School movement, AS Neill’s Summerhill, adventure playgrounds etc.
McLaren would have been aware of these currents of thought – ditto Vivienne Westwood in her time as a primary school teacher. But what really got MacLaren going was a Situationist source – not Guy Debord but his intellectual twin Raoul Vaneigem who wrote THE TOTALITY FOR KIDS and THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE (literally TRAITE DE SAVOIR-VIVRE A L’USAGE DE JEUNES GENERATIONS/Life and How to Live it: A Young Person’s Guide).
At the heart of Vaneigem’s work, partly inspired by Huizinga’s HOMO LUDENS, was the idea of the child and of youth, or rather of moulding the young into radical shape by harnessing their instinct for fantasy and play. This idea of play-power took a particularly provocative form in Vaneigem (one book-cover showed a child aiming a gun – a little Sex Pistol?); but regardless of his work specifically, the drift of it was already very much on the ‘60s agenda, this preoccupation with childhood creativity and the utopian notion that the world would be a much better place if the free spirit of childhood could be continued into adulthood.
Hence the title of Richard Neville’s hippy memoir PLAYPOWER – exactly the kind of ‘infantile nonsense’ which critics of the ‘60s, Labour as well as Conservative, are still railing against: it’s been a long old counter-revolution, this ‘60s-bashing…
Many of the ‘60s ideas about childhood had their origins in the late 18/early 19c and in Romanticism: for the Romantic poet, genius was childhood recaptured at will; and for the Romantic philosopher (see Rousseau), children had no natural predisposition towards wrong-doing and were not innately bad or tainted by original sin, and certainly the right education would make children into good adults and sentient caring beings.
But what if the education of the child was to take a more radical and less benign form – one which encouraged children to question the status quo and so eventually as they grew up, to change the world? This utopianism disturbed the Establishment who considered it little better than some kind of pedagogical ‘kiddie-fiddling’. So the full force of the law came down on Richard Neville and the editors of Oz, the underground magazine which in true anti-authoritarian counter-cultural style gave school-kids and teenagers free rein on a special issue.
It was the kind of empowerment that youth movements like the Teds and the Mods and Rockers, had enjoyed at a more instinctive and hedonistic level. But now towards the end of the ‘60s, in the wake of anti-Vietnam War demos, strikes, sit-ins and the Events in Paris in May ’68, Theory came into it all, and big questions were asked: this time the youth-quake was overtly political.
It was the genius of McLaren to adapt many of these political tendencies and ‘60s intellectual currents to music and fashion in the ’70s. He did all this on the ‘canvas’ – McLaren’s self-conscious aesthetic analogy – that was his shop. Sex/Seditionaries was closer to a laboratory than to an artist’s studio because here he could experiment with all those ideas.
There were plenty of guinea-pigs in the shape of all the bored and disaffected teenagers attracted to the shop which offered, as Malcolm put it, ‘a new game in town’. The lab was also a playpen, a dark parody of Summerhill and the ‘60s Free Schools movement – a nightmare nursery where, with Malcolm’s fruity laugh reverberating around a space decked out in bondage and S&M gear, a clone hybrid of the Marquis de Sade and Max Miller was in charge. ‘Chaos is come again’, as William Shakespeare puts it. And Jimmy Savile was coming all over the place too.
What I have written is no justification but an attempted explanation at what lies behind the recent mantra: The Climate Was Different Then….
Playpower footnote…By the way, Hoppy Hopkins one of the prime movers behind underground newspaper International Times, had earlier made his name as a photographer with many of his key images depicting children at play… For a take on MacLaren the perverted money-grubbing pedagogue, see the Luke Haines CD – THE OLIVER TWIST MANIFESTO which quotes Vaneigem’s THE TOTALITY FOR KIDS…
Comment by lknlkn on 2012-10-30 14:14:23 +0000
see “youth uprising” by isou – thats the origin of situationist position – v different from anarcho-tossers like hakim bey…
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-10-30 16:21:43 +0000
Hmmm TMinIM can you recommend any further reading? Illich is an inspiration of mine and Dewey too-it would be interesting to find a critique of this-and the cross over from youth pop culture into educational theory is a fascinating area and something that I would like to look at in more depth (as these seem to be the waters I am splashing happlessly around in…)
Comment by mistertrippy on 2012-10-31 02:18:15 +0000
@ TMITIM – that’s interesting context but I think you also need to see where it led in some of those currents. Vaneigem just comes across like a dirty old man by the time you get to The Book of Pleasures (wanking on about his right to touch beautiful women as he sees them walking down the street as far as I recall – but I haven’t read the book in nearly 30 years). He was however more of an influence than Debord on radical/activist currents in London up to the mid-eighties…. and Revolution of Everyday Life is much better than the later writing like Book of Pleasures.
Neill’s Summerhill I didn’t encounter when he was alive but I know a few people who attended or taught there. Back in the 1990s there was an issue with a teacher downloading kiddie porn but they didn’t deal with it at all well from what I saw. Anyway the school probably doesn’t live up to Neill’s hopes but from what I’ve seen of it I’d advise anyone against sending a kid there….
Oh and I agree with you about Oz of course!
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-10-31 08:28:20 +0000
We were going to go on a ‘field trip’ to Summerhill to check it out.
Comment by The Man in the Iron Mask on 2012-10-31 11:54:51 +0000
I was aware that bad stuff might have happened at Summerhill but not that Raoul turned into a bit of a dirty old man – pity because his earlier work has interesting things to say about women and ‘sororisation’, his take on sisterhood. I have yet to read his later books on Surrealism and the Movement of the Free Spirit: the shelves groan while time runs out…
Comment by mistertrippy on 2012-10-31 15:11:44 +0000
The Book of Pleasures is in English but has never been well distributed in the UK despite having been in print here – and I think you read French so would probably be better to read in the original if you’re gonna read it at all… but I wouldn’t particularly bother, a skim through would probably give you the idea. A quick check shows you can get it for a fiver online in English – probably less if you looked around, but why bother…. I also recall skimming rhrough some of Vaneigem’s books in French that aren’t translated when I was staying with someone who had them and not being impressed by what I could make out with my very limited and imperfect knowledge of the language.
At Lucy – you should still check Summerhill out but I think their liberalism gives them some real weaknesses particularly when it comes to child abuse issues. Not their fault they are targetted by paedophiles since any institution with kids in is a potential target but back in the 1990s they needed to be more robust when dealing with rumours on this matter. Well more than that in many ways since a couple of people who taught there seem to have seen what was on the computer of a guy who was later successfully prosecuted and done nothing about it other than tell a few people what they saw. When this Summerhill teacher was done it seems the cops got onto him because of his online activities – the fact that people involved with the school appeared to known about this for a couple of years before he was busted and yet he wasn’t suspended until his arrest is to me a real shocker.
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-10-31 17:37:48 +0000
Not good I must say…
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-10-31 18:39:52 +0000
My mum said I wouldn’t like Summerville…
Comment by Soylent Greene on 2012-10-31 19:56:59 +0000
Of course, now that all music videos made for young people must by law contain at least 60 seconds of sexually suggestive dancing, underdressing, or simulated sex, and are unlikely to get to #1 unless they contain a bit of all three, society has no need for the likes of Savile corrupting the youth in person.
This inefficient system is now surplus to requirements and can be thrown on the bonfire, now that the prophecies of Huxley’s Brave New World are coming to pass.
Lest we forget, perv pop was once a distinct musical genre with a storied if sordid history, which was memorably blogged about here in 2006: http://www.myspace.com/georgedhenderson/blog/180925594
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-11-01 13:48:17 +0000
Um Summerhill I mean.
Comment by Soylent Greene on 2012-11-01 20:58:18 +0000
Nice use of the Freudian slip there Lucy.
You wouldn’t have liked Summervile one bit.
Comment by The Man in the Iron Mask on 2012-11-01 23:03:29 +0000
The ‘Freudian slip’ can never be ‘nice’ – in fact it can’t be anything other than bogus old bullshit. Sigmund based his theories about the slip on close linguistic and textual analysis of words in German, Latin etc. As Sebastiano Timpanaro demonstrates in THE FREUDIAN SLIP, Freud’s scholarship in the philological department was somewhat lacking, to say the least. Even when he analysed dreams rather than slips, he’s beset by his lack of linguistic knowledge. In his work on Leonardo Da Vinci he mixes up the Latin for ‘eagle’ and ‘stork’ but in a corrective footnote some years later says that it’s not important. Surely this makes the dream a little different – to have an eagle as your night-visitor rather than a stork, or vice versa? And where does all this intellectual shoddiness that leave the Talking Cure? Certainly not ‘Quack, quack!’ (Freud) more like ‘Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!’ (Thomas Nashe). I’d file Freud’s ‘science’ under poetry but there are plenty of poets more profound than him as the Nashe line reveals…
Comment by mistertrippy on 2012-11-01 23:49:57 +0000
I recall one Thomas Nashe line as ‘wine will make you a linguist, it will teach you Greek in two hours’ – but checking for it online can’t find it. Is that my memory or just the ignorance of the internet… And I agree completely with TMITIM about Freud….