Robert Liss
Contributor
BSR Contributor Since September 9, 2006
Robert Liss ([email protected]) is a psychologist and former basketball player who lives in San Francisco.
Like my fellow Broad Street Review contributor Dan Coren, I am a high school classmate of Dan Rottenberg, and was, again like Coren, also a frequent contributor to Dan’s old weekly magazine, the Welcomat. After completing psychoanalytic training at NYU’s Postdoctoral Program In Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in 1984, I moved from Manhattan to San Francisco a year later. My practice is both in San Francisco and Marin County.
So I am a psychologist-psychoanalyst by profession, but a critic and basketball coach by nature, and am very pleased that Dan re-affirmed his commitment to cronyism and invited me to become a contributor to Broad Street Review.
Over the past decade, my writing has been more experimental and less focused than it was when I wrote essays for the Welcomat. I am currently engaged both in trying to compile a group of my poems, stories, and essays into book form, and working on a long memoir revolving around my own relationship to my son’s just-completed high school basketball career.
Although I stopped playing organized basketball after my freshman year at Columbia, (where Dan Coren was again my classmate), I have played and coached in a broad variety of contexts over the succeeding four and a half decades, and continue to love the game, when it is played well, on all levels.
Basketball has always been the prism through which I filter my reflections and insights into the wider surround, although I often question which is really wider for me. In any case, the sport has become my storehouse for metaphors and analogies at every turn, and, however jaded commercialized sports are these days, the advent of a LeBron James is capable of appealing to my aesthetic sense in like fashion to great art of all sorts.
It is not for this reason alone that I urged Rottenberg, years ago, to expand his focus in Seven Arts magazine to eight and include basketball. Had he listened to me, environmentalists of all stripes would bemoan the needless waste of precious paper that Dan has saved us by adopting the Internet as his new medium. I am proud to be part of his exciting new endeavor.
So I am a psychologist-psychoanalyst by profession, but a critic and basketball coach by nature, and am very pleased that Dan re-affirmed his commitment to cronyism and invited me to become a contributor to Broad Street Review.
Over the past decade, my writing has been more experimental and less focused than it was when I wrote essays for the Welcomat. I am currently engaged both in trying to compile a group of my poems, stories, and essays into book form, and working on a long memoir revolving around my own relationship to my son’s just-completed high school basketball career.
Although I stopped playing organized basketball after my freshman year at Columbia, (where Dan Coren was again my classmate), I have played and coached in a broad variety of contexts over the succeeding four and a half decades, and continue to love the game, when it is played well, on all levels.
Basketball has always been the prism through which I filter my reflections and insights into the wider surround, although I often question which is really wider for me. In any case, the sport has become my storehouse for metaphors and analogies at every turn, and, however jaded commercialized sports are these days, the advent of a LeBron James is capable of appealing to my aesthetic sense in like fashion to great art of all sorts.
It is not for this reason alone that I urged Rottenberg, years ago, to expand his focus in Seven Arts magazine to eight and include basketball. Had he listened to me, environmentalists of all stripes would bemoan the needless waste of precious paper that Dan has saved us by adopting the Internet as his new medium. I am proud to be part of his exciting new endeavor.
