I am always glad to see writers and critics I respect make the leap from analog to digital ink and it is with great pleasure that I introduce Scott McLemee’s blog Quick Study. I first happened upon Scott McLemee’s writing about 5 years ago via Safety Pin as Signifier, a review of Bernard Gendron’s book Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club (2002). As you may know I am an obsessive Googler and I was probably searching for “high culture” and “low culture” to research my favourite textual category: the nobrow.

That Scott sits squarely in this category of the nobrow is firstly corroborated by the fact that he is often called — in his own words — “a “public intellectual,” which is probably a euphemism — a polite way around the fact that I have no degrees, no institutionally recognizable field of specialization, and, indeed, no credentials of any kind”.

The second ‘proof’ that Scott’s work belongs to this category is that one of his first posts is about one of the most intriguing figures I encountered when I was compiling the history of erotica at Jahsonic.com: Gershon Legman (1917 – 1999).

Scott writes:

Gershon Legman and the now mostly forgotten journal Neurotica have long been interests of mine — so it was probably a matter of time before they ended up, as they did today, in my column. Actually I hope to return to both subjects again in the future.

The column Scott refers to is one published in insidehighered in which he states that Gershon Legman coined the phrase “Make love, not war.”:

Valentine’s Day seems an appropriate occasion to honor the late Gershon Legman, who is said to have coined the slogan “Make love, not war.” Odd to think that saying had a particular author, rather than being spontaneously generated by the countercultural Zeitgeist in the 1960s. But I’ve seen the line attributed to Legman a few times over the years; and the new Yale Book of Quotations (discussed in an earlier column) is even more specific, indicates that he first said it during a speech at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, sometime in November 1963.

Thank you Scott, I hope you will be able to fill us in on the contents of Neurotica. Wikipedia has this:

During this period Gershon Legman also published a little magazine (actually so informally it was rather like a fanzine), Neurotica, which featured notable contributions and had some influence disproportionate to its circulation. Neurotica was published as a collection in a book and had some influence on Marshall Mcluhan.

Some Googling brings up this article: Behind the Beat; Remembering “Neurotica,” the short-lived journal of the Beats by James Campbell.

I quote:

The closest there was to a beat magazine (thought it could only be seen that way in retrospect) in the late 1940s and early ’50s was a slim, eccentric journal whose contributors moved among the bases of art, sex, and neuroticism. Neurotica was owned and edited by a young gallery owner from St. Louis, like Burroughs, called Jay Landesman. In the first issue, Spring 1948, he set out the magazine’s aims:

Neurotica is a literary exposition, defense, and correlation of the problems and personalities that in our culture are defined as “neurotic.”

It is said that if you tie a piece of red cloth to a gull’s leg its fellow-gulls will peck it to pieces: and Neurotica wishes to draw an analog to this observation and the plight of today’s creative “anxious” man.

We are interested in exploring the creativeness of this man who has been forced to live underground.

The magazine’s most prolific contributor was a maverick psychologist called Gershon Legman, described by John Clellon Holmes, who was a friend of Landesman and provided the conduit for beatness, as a “small belligerent facsimile of Balzac.” The general theme of Legman’s articles for Neurotica was that the American public’s increasing appetite for violence and sadism in fiction (Legman did not condescend to study film) stemmed directly from the puritanical suppression of the libido in everyday life.

Neurotica was owned and edited by called Jay Landesman who also contributed to Dutch Suck (magazine) and British Oz (magazine).