Imperial Nudity


So much of the world is utter undoubting horseshit, one hardly knows where to begin; but let us start with psychology: Sheer, preposterous mind-numbing frauds without merit, interest or insight are (1) Carl Gustav Jung and (2) Sigmund Freud, and (3) all their works and followers

The arts, of course, fairly swarm with humbug: from Andy warhol to Jackson Pollock; not to mention poor old Grandma Moses. And, of course, what are we to say about Schoenberg, Berg, Webern (Stockhausen*, Varese, and Boulez), and the whole nauseous idiocy of dodecaphonic/serialism/tone-row "composition," which has duped musicians as competent, variously, as Glenn Gould and Herbert von Karajan, not to mention the millions of patient concert-goers who are persuaded that there is "emotional beauty" in such excrescences as Wozzeck and Lulu--very like the "lovely shade of green" seen by the admirers of the Emperor's new clothes in the Hans Christian Andersen fable.

* Sir Thomas Beecham: "I don't know that I've heard any Stockhausen, but I may have trodden in some."