Life Itself: Messiness Is Next to Goddessness and Other Essays

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"We all do and think funny things every day, only most of us edit them out of our consciousness, we don't share some of the most interesting things we think and do. For example, in 1981 I heard that my wife was expecting our third child, and I was suddenly filled with the archetypal need to make money."

John Boe continues with the anecdote of how he came to be teaching English at the University of California at Davis, offering one of many delightful and personal snapshots of his humorous and often revealing approach to living. In these short, witty essays, he slices life along the lines of Jungian psychology applied to such everyday topics as holidays, palmistry, Shakespeare, movies, astrology, and more, while behind the humor is a satisfying glimpse of wisdom and experience. John Boe is a lecturer at the University of California at Davis, editor of Writing on the Edge, a newsletter about teaching writing, and a frequent contributor to such publications as East Bay Express, Unte Reader, the San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, and Psychological Perspectives.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Looking for the Meaning of Life

Messiness Is Next to Goddessness

Mistakes Were Made: Philosophy in an Off Key

For Me and My Anima

Religion and Basketball

The Holidays of Darkness

In the Palm of My Hand

Don't Dream It, Be It: The Rocky Horror Picture Show as Dionysian Revel

Marie-Louise von Franz and The Way of the Dream

Pleasing and Agreeable: An Interview with John Freeman

The Age of Pegasus

Part II: Looking at Literature

The Wolf in Jack London

Simenon, Apollo, and Dionysus: A Jungian Approach to Mysteries

To Kill Mercutio: Thoughts on Shakespeare's Psychological Development

The Introvert in Shakespeare

Cats and Dogs: A Theory of Literature

Part III: Looking at Life Itself

On My Back

Papa Was a Gamblin' Man

A Time to Be Born

Notes: My Mother at the Piano

Life Itself