"I think he's crude, I think he's medieval, and I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me."

"I don't have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don't see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons."

So said Vladimir Nabokov, in 1966, answering the question "Mr. Nabokov, would you tell us why it is that you detest Dr. Freud?" I'm reading this now after writing the last post, about the symbolism of Obama and the Marine-held umbrella. The post ends:

If umbrella-holding conveys a message of unmanliness, it is a vivid image of impotence. It's a symbol.

Umbrellas are a famously Freudian symbol, and I was going to embellish that last post with some stray erudition. But the post was already too long. (Too long!!) And here was Nabokov, taking a swipe at the elderly gentleman from Vienna way back in 1966.

Interestingly, Nabokov is also talking about something else that was a topic in the Obama-and-the-umbrella post:

I'm not a good speaker, you see. When I start to speak, I have immediately four or five lines of thought — sort of roads, you know, trails going various ways. And I have to decide which trail I'm going to follow, and while I decide this, hawing and hemming begins, and it may be very upsetting because I hear it myself. I can never understand those limpid, fluid speakers, as my father was, who just deliver perfect phrases, beautifully built, with an aphorism here, you know, and a metaphor there. I can't do it. I have to think it out; I have to take a pencil; I have to write it down laboriously; have it before me. I do things like that. It's probably psychological. I can imagine what old Freud would have said, whom I heartily detest, as my readers know by now.

Ah! What would Freud have said about Obama's endless uh-ing?

Nevertheless, I am downloading Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams." I want it in my Kindle, alongside, among other things, Obama's — ahem — "Dreams From My Father."