Word: geismar
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...exception. My colleague and ex-partner, Ivan Chermayeff, was credited with having "conceived the symbol and identity program for the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission," when in fact I was responsible for conceiving and designing the Bicentennial symbol and identity program during the time I was with Chermayeff and Geismar Associates...
...Some of the projects credited solely to Chermayeff were created by him and by other members of the design firm he heads with Thomas Geismar...
...Geismar gives no coherent explanation of how the popular view of Twain came to be so unbalanced. Instead, he feuds shrilly with Justin Kaplan, author of the excellent 1966 biography Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, and with a succession of editors of Twain's posthumously printed Autobiography. Kaplan's supposed offenses are hardshell Freudianism (Geismar is an adherent of Freud's dissident disciple, Otto Rank, whom he peddles as if Rank were a mutual fund), and undue susceptibility to influence by the CIA. It is Geismar's fantasy that "cold war critics," including Kaplan and Charles...
...reader must do Geismar's real job for him. If he is familiar with Kaplan's study and the Autobiography, he can pick his way through this book and arrive at a reasonable explanation of the strange shape of Twain's career. Twain's outlook darkened and grew harsher in the last half of his life. During much of the same period he endured a harrowing succession of business catastrophes and deaths in his family. At the same time, as Geismar points out, U.S. society-Twain's raw material -was also changing. The young agrarian...
...Geismar quotes great caustic batches of Twain's later prose, to show that he was an angry prophet who saw his republic choked by the corporate state. But Twain never did arrive at a consistent view of his world. As early as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, his feeling toward the technological society was widely ambivalent. He admired technology; he despised it. The U.S. was corrupted; it was the hope of the world. Man was a splendid fellow; man was changelessly evil. His own life reflected these inconsistencies. He delivered a fine speech lampooning accident...