Word: ackroyd
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Tonight, Cookin', Cabot House's recently renovated nightelub, will sponsor a double-feature, showing the Indiana Jones classic Raiders of the Lost Ark and the John Belushi/Dan Ackroyd hit, The Blues Brothers. If you missed the TV version of Raiders last Sunday night, you can catch it at the Cabot House JCR tonight for $2. Cover is $1 for members...
...Ackroyd sometimes overstates his satire of scholarship and art -- Chatterton's death by poison comes not out of despair but in the hope of finding a cure for the clap. Yet the poet himself is a poignant re-creation, and the supporting cast of irrepressible eccentrics might have tumbled from a chapter of Pickwick Papers. On a train, Wychwood literally devours a novel, rolling the pages into balls and popping them into his mouth...
...fate has added an even more bizarre twist to the story of the poet's death and afterlife. Ackroyd is cited in a new nonfiction work, The Family Romance of the Impostor-Poet Thomas Chatterton, by Psychologist Louise J. Kaplan. Examining the causes of plagiarism, she quotes Eliot's biographer: "As Ackroyd says, there is a 'continual oscillation between what is remembered and what is introduced, the movement of other poets' words just below the surface...
...just as Meredith plays a part in Ackroyd's book about Chatterton, Ackroyd has a walk-on in Kaplan's. If the accretion of historical detail were + all, this would be a superlative evocation of the England of George III. But Kaplan's aim is psychobiography, and her narrative attempts to press a free spirit into a Freudian mold. She rings in a psychoanalyst to testify on mind and motive: "Those who have not been able to project their Ego Ideal onto their father . . . grant themselves their missing identity by different means, creation being one among others. The work thus...
This is not conscious comedy, but at times its humor surpasses anything in Ackroyd's far more appealing and sympathetic work. Yet each author provides the same service: turning the reader back to the damned youth who wrote, "Since all my Vices magnify'd are here,/ She cannot paint me worse than I appear,/ When raving in the Lunacy of ink,/ I catch the Pen and publish what I think." A ghostly presence hovers over both books, and the sound it emits is the ringing echo of the last laugh...