Word: crankish
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...those documentaries that tells you everything you already know about its subject. It features many talking musicological heads, falling back in insight-free awe at the composer's apparently genial genius (a refreshing exception is the crankish Jonathan Miller, who has directed many a Mozart opera). Since Mozart traveled endlessly in search of gigs - 25,000 miles all told - the director, Phil Grabsky gives us many useless out-the-window shots of his own car chugging along modern European highways as he duplicates those journeys, many sequences of contemporary citizens wandering aimlessly and inelegantly in front of buildings Mozart visited...
...feel; perhaps she believed she could heal. Watching her on television, jolting with tears as she listened to a speech praising and defending her work, one saw signs of an almost delusional inner drama. If power corrupts the self, then absolute fame must surely distort it. Her enthusiasms were crankish, hypochondriac, self-obsessive: aromatherapy, colonic irrigation, the fool's gold of astrology. Diana, I repeat, was "soft" news. She caused sensations by wearing a party dress or by gaining a kilo of weight. She made headlines with every wave of her hand, every twitch of her eyebrow. This...
...before amusement. Deep within the volume are less convincing "proofs" of this attitude. The legends of Snow White, of Hansel and Gretel, of Goldilocks are parsed for every psychological nuance. Here the reader leaves the nursery for what Vladimir Nabokov calls "the fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents." To Bettelheim, Goldilocks' peek into the bears' house "evokes associations to the child's desire...
...scathing references to Freud. His basic objection to Freudian theories is that they slight the creative imagination by putting it in a sexual straitjacket and by insisting that dreams and images are determined mechanistically. "I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud," he writes, "with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying from their natural nooks upon the love life of their parents." Nabokov may yet get his wish to see Shakespeare in heaven, laughing at Freud (in hell, naturally...
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