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The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

Introduction:

My cousin thought it was an interesting book but also pretentious, it confounded him. Made me intrigued about the book.

When people call a book pretentious, I sometimes agree, and sometimes, I guess I'm pretentious and enjoy the book. But that got me curious about this one. 

Also the book is supposed to be about the midwest, Topeka Kansas in particular, not the Madison Wisconsin I grew up in, but you know, maybe I could identify the soft knowledge of what it meant to be a midwesterner. Have I finally assimilated New York? Or am I just an oddball?

Ben Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College. He has an impressive resume with lots of awards. 


Thoughts while reading:

Madonna and Child by Duccio is referred to on p. 46 of the hardback.


The focus is Darren, Adam, Darren, Johnathan (1st person). I tolerate not knowing how it all fits together. I think Johnathan might be Adam's father. 

The Menninger Clinic is a famous clinic that used to be in Topeka Kansas, but moved to Houston in 2003. I wonder how much research Lerner did about the clinic. Menninger died in 1990. He calls the character Thomas Addison. 

Final Thoughts: I don’t see how it’s pretentious.

Quotes: “if, instead of an uncritical faith in money and science, I believed. I claimed to believe, in the liberation of repressed drives and the reorganization of social forces, the contempt communicated by the statues was still overwhelming, their mockery specific to me, my hypocrisy. Your received jargon regarding the mind and its functions; the contradiction between the normalizing force of therapy and your supposed belief in revolution; your use of your mother's death to justify your behavior toward Rachel, behavior you'll just repeat with Jane. I read all this in their eyes and knew I didn't, still saw the unpainted marble underneath my vision; I understood that the drug had tapped and was now externalizing some vein of self-loathing. This isn't real, I repeated to myself, breathing deeply, and I started to calm down.” P48

“…in fact they are emptied out, isolate, mass men without a mass, although they're not men, obviously, but boys, perpetual boys, Peter Pans, man-children, since America is adolescence without end, boys without religion on the one hand or a charismatic leader on the other; they don't even have a father—President Carter!—to kill or a father to tell them to kill the Jew; they have no Jew; they are libidinally driven to mass surrender without anything to surrender to; they don't even believe in money or in science, or those beliefs are insufficient; their country has fought and lost its last real war; in a word, they are overfed; in a word, they are starving. These kids, Klaus said, just need a good whipping and some physical labor; these kids, Klaus also said, are undergoing a profound archaic regression. Boys will be boys, Klaus dismissed them, and spoiled boys will be spoiled boys, but then, handkerchief held to the back of his neck: the abyss of non-belief, the vacuum, cannot be filled with stuff (Klaus loved the word stuff, which sounded German to me, but wasn't; from the Greek stuphein, "draw together"), and the violence will recur periodically--like cicadas. Then we're raked by somebody's rotating sprinkler, pleasant shock of cold water on my shins.” P60

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