Word: obers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Algernon Charles Swinburne, an ardent masochist, rhymed about the pleasures of flagellation. Whippings and alcohol distorted his judgment (as E.E. Cummings put it, "Punished bottoms interrupt philosophy"), but Ober believes that the poet's problems began during the first moments of his life. He recalls Swinburne's own statement about having been born "all but dead," and diagnoses brain damage due to oxygen deprivation. Further circumstantial evidence of neuropathology included the poet's small body and outsized head, his tics and excessively nervous temperament. But his talent was not impaired. Neither was his critical acumen, at least...
James Boswell, whose recurrent gonorrhea gives this book its captivating title was a glutton for debilitating pleasures. The biographer of Samuel Johnson swilled and swived his way through 18th century London and suffered, by Dr Ober's documented count, 19 acute attacks of urethritis. Just how the clap affected his writing is not readily apparent. More comprehensible are the roots of Boswell's reckless social life, specifically his Scots Calvinist origin with its severe strictures against wine and wenching. For Boswell, the embodiment of this authority was his father, the eighth Lord Auchinleck, a straitlaced, unaffectionate parent...
Although tuberculosis killed D.H Lawrence, Dr. Ober is more concerned with the writer's psychosexual disorders. A sickly child and youth who was rejected for service in World War I, Lawrence probably doubted his masculinity. In his last years, illness-related impotence may have compounded this problem. Ober thinks that the novelist was a latent homosexual. He cites incriminating passages from The White Peacock and allusions in Lady Chatterley's Lover that Mellors did not limit himself to ordinary heterosexual acts with Lady C. The difficulty with such speculation is that the term latent covers a long...
Despite a reliance on missionary-poisition Freud, Dr. Ober is rarely dogmatic He is frequently humorous. Commenting on the tribulations of Christopher Smart an 1 8th century English poet with an embarrassing compulsion to pray on rooftops, the author observes that "there was very little need for such a muezzin in Georgian London." Disagreeing with a view that D.H. Lawrence celebrated sex alfresco while Americans kept to bedrooms, the doctor notes the abundance of contraceptives in brooks and rivers and concludes that "if Americans are not sylvan cohabitors, they are at least riparian." On Dr. William Carlos Williams, who Ober...
Quite simply, William Ober, M.D., writes better, more delightfully and with greater flexibility than most professional critics. Borrowing from Wallace Stevens, he readily admits that there is more than one way of looking at a blackbird. The bird, of course, never looks back; the causes of art remain aloof, and there is no known cure for genius...