Letters

Ben Marcus' short story Cold Little Bird  appeared in New Yorker  magazine in 2015. I was taken by the quality of the writing and nature of the characters he described. Ben Marcus whose work is both mordant and funny, both experimental and conventional, as this story, one of his more accessible. It is taut and compact, complex and scary. The story is of a preadolescent boy named Jonah and his parents. Jonah suddenly, so it seems, withdraws and rejects his parents. Withdrawn, he becomes the titular "cold little bird". Once a sweet, doted upon child he now is distant, caustic and oppositional. Parents see a change while to everyone else in his life, he is the same sweet boy. Mercilessly, he blocks any attempt to communicate Finally, almost sadistically and rather creatively, he reads anti-Semitic literature, that he knows his father will find outrageously objectionable. Of course it is just the thing that would drive his father to fury. Mother takes on a concerned but just...

I shared this with colleage John Auerbach. It is a poem by B. F. Skinner On Saturday, August 24, 2019,  John Auerbach, PhD responded: Psychohistory always has its problems, among them that it is always difficult to say we understand someone’s adult character by what he or she wrote at age 10. Still it must be said that Skinner read Freud and took Freud very seriously and even applied to be an analytic candidate at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute.  The BPI, being full of twits (yes, really), turned him down.  But I mention all this because it gives me an excuse to note something about the mind of the author of this poem.  This author hates people who are pessimists (I think that this is a fairly reasonable inference) and, I suspect, would like to drive them out of the camp—to vote them off the island, to use a more modern expression.  And because I know what my 10-year-old self was like, I suspect that the author of this poem would have hated a ...