Astral Codex Ten

Teach

4 min read

Teach

Article

Teach is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 16, 2022 and April 20, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Teach’s earlier work centers around Christopher Lasch’s idea of narcissism”; “Teach fits this same mold”; “Some of them, on closer inspection, are fictional - not in the sense of being works of fiction, but in the sense where Teach made them up”. It most often appears alongside Coke, Freud, Lacan.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: February 16, 2022
  • Last seen: April 20, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Sadly, Porn
February 16, 2022 · Original source
The author - the pseudonymous “Edward Teach, MD” - is a spectacular writer. Your exact assessment of his skill will depend on where you draw the line between writing ability and other virtues - but where he’s good, he’s amazing. Nobody else takes you for quite the same kind of ride.
He’s also impressively erudite, drawing on the Greek and Latin classics, the Bible, psychoanalytic literature, and all of modern movies and pop culture. Sometimes you read the scholars of two hundred years ago and think “they just don’t make those kinds of guys anymore”. They do and Teach is one of them.
Teach’s earlier work centers around Christopher Lasch’s idea of narcissism. Sadly, Porn adds a layer of Lacanian psychoanalysis (I wasn’t smart enough to recognize this myself; other people pointed it out). I’ve been wanting to learn more about Lacan for a while. Partly because I never understood him in school. Partly because Slavoj Zizek is into him and everyone seems to think Zizek is smart. And partly because I recently realized that Kleinian psychoanalysis, which I also never understood, actually has useful insights (hint: compare Part III of this post with the theory of part objects) and for all I know Lacanian psychoanalysis might be the same way.
Inline links: this post
Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn"
April 20, 2022 · Original source
It feels like this whole review, and to a large extent the comments, are carefully tiptoeing around an obvious conclusion, occasionally glancing sideways to look at it edge-on, but carefully avoiding confronting it directly. That conclusion is: Teach/TLP is a bad writer, and has therefore written a shit book.
Writing any review of this book does it injustice. I would urge others to read this book themselves, entirely and immediately, but I hate my contemporaries and care little for the next generation, quite contrary to this Teacher.
Seems like an interesting book. Teach's interpretation of "The Giving Tree" feels right to me, actually. It doesn't matter what Shel Silverstein intended it to mean; the point is that there's another reading that actually makes more sense, that gets behind the book's saccharine sentimentality to reveal a deeper and more credible psychology. Art is like that, if it's worth anything at all; it says things the artist didn't know he was saying. That the tree is less a mother than an idealized fantasy of motherhood with no correspondence to reality seems obviously correct, at least, and Teach makes some very good points about the relationship between love and obligation.