Word: goldfein
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...ALAN GOLDFEIN...
...wretches whose inadequacy takes this direction (the reviewer is admitting nothing), Alan Goldfein's waggish collection of dubious moments from lofty lives is just the thing. We learn that Jean Jacques Rousseau put his pants on one leg at a time and the pants were unpressed and greasy. Also, Rousseau lived with a waitress who, Goldfein lies, was allowed to keep her job on the condition that Jean Jacques stayed away from the restaurant. He would show up anyway, time after time, restaurant after restaurant, haranguing the patrons, "a shaggy, dark Swiss freak." As he was kicked...
That settles Rousseau's hash. Goldfein is no kinder to Freud. The great alienist, he imagines, met his rival Jung one day while strolling in Vienna. Freud felt faint, swooned, and sat down in the dust. Jung, much concerned, offered analysis: "We clear the air, eh, Sigmund? Ah yes, your passing out was a good thing. Hysterical. Yes. Hysteria neurosis. But a good thing." Freud blamed the fall on slippery leaves. " 'You passed out!' Carl insisted. 'Admit it. I know a shlip when I see one ... believe me, it was a healthy thing.' " Freud, much...
...Goldfein's comedy manages the odd trick of being broad and donnish at the same time. He does Hegel with a sauerbraten accent: "Veil, now, vot ve got here? Ve got, for shtarters, ve got Descartes. Him and his Cogito, ergo sum ... Dot's an insight?" Not every one of these brief sketches works. But the author does a fine turn on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and he perceives, in an epiphany whose correctness is apparent, that Economist John Maynard Keynes wrote not only The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, but also The Myth of Sisyphus...
...Goldfein, a former teacher of history and economics, is also a highly gifted mimic, and this fact permits a discovery whose triviality cannot be exaggerated: all the great thinkers of history (except maybe Hegel, dot krautkopf) talk and think in exactly the same speech and prose patterns! A further discovery is even more exciting: These patterns are also those of Alan Goldfein! Naturally it is for philosophers to decide the implications of this. In the meantime, we are greatly in Goldfein's debt...