Science, at least as we know it, has its limits. In the end, it cannot see into all aspects of reality. One's inner life, personal knowledge, and sense of meaning are mysteries into which science can only partially penetrate. What seems most impenetrable at present is the brute fact of consciousness: the fact that we once were not, and now are, and are aware of being, and are having a first-person experience in the world which is real -- and yet somehow unquantifiable by any means currently available (397). - Dr. Ha Nguyen (Nayler, Ray. The Mountain in the Sea. Picador, 2022)
Upon the surface of the lake's reflective eye, the image of earth and sky are inverted at the water's edge. The lake seems to say, "as above, so below," and turns its image of the world upside down. Similarly, the world is presented through the lens of our own eyes upside down, and perception must be "righted" by the brain to present as reality. But at lakeside, rightness is suspended to bring forth a surreal and imaginal dimension, a "more real" space of psychic fluidity where the soul says, "The world is my representation of it (44)." - The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images (Taschen, 2010)
This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale; the likes in which one has never seen before...The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge...but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly, and I hope that thinking gives the strengths to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down. -- Hannah Arendt in Margaretha von Trotta's 2012 film Hannah Arendt
Loving cinema is a lonely affair, a one-sided relationship. As a film fan (or a cinephile, if you fancy), you are kidnapped by the images a group of mad people have crafted to seduce you. You're absorbed by the faces on the screen, you want to see them loom over you, larger than anyone you've ever known, like titans manifesting before you. To behold them is to be possessed. You become consumed with the need to know everything behind them. You live in Kansas and Oz simultaneously. Images of a film and your memory of it live side by side in your brain and in your heart, seemingly giving nothing back, just taking up brain space and emotional real estate.Loving horror films, meanwhile, is akin to nursing the memory of a secret lover, someone's touch that never leaves the most hidden grooves of your muscle memory, one that makes you feel things you cannot yet name, think thoughts so forbidden they send an exciting chill down your spine. Horror films don't consume you; they infect you. An image, or a sound, or a performance, might worm itself into the deepest crevices of your memory and stay there. Horror is a full-body experience, a full-on possession that we invite. We volunteer our dreams and nightmares for takeover. No wonder horror fans are looked upon as oddballs: we choose, and chase, that possession. We want to relive our anxieties, our fears, our hungers over and over again. And we're never sated (1-2). - Bogutskaya, Ann. Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold On Us. Faber & Faber, 2024.
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"A Serious Man." Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics (November 17, 2024) ["A Serious Man (2009) may seem much different from the Coens’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men, which they released two years earlier. But they both concern a likable man who finds himself posing questions that the universe–or any of its wisest men–cannot answer. And even if there are glimpses of answers to the question “What does Hashem, or God, want,” neither late-thirties Larry or late-sixties Sheriff Bell can read the writing on the wall (or, in the case of A Serious Man, the writing on the teeth). The film begins with a quotation from Rumi, “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” Join us for a conversation about one of the Coens’ best films and a terrific look at people to whom things happen and are forced to receive the will of a God who never tips His hand about His intentions."]
Dorian, M.J. "H.R. Giger: A Beautiful Darkness." Creative Codex #9 (September 2, 2019) ["H.R. Giger is considered by many to be the most evil artist in history. Join us as we take a deep dive into the abyss where Giger's strange ideas are born. In this episode we also explore: how did Giger create a style so distinct that people see it as 'out of this world'?"]
Ecott, Tim. "Sigmundur and the Golden Ring." New Books in Historical Fiction (November 3, 2024) ["Tim Ecott, who is well-known as a journalist and writer, has, in his last several books, turned his attention to the history and culture of the Faroe Islands. High in the North Atlantic, half-way between Scotland and Iceland, the islands' inhabitants remain closely connected to the Viking settlers who established communities on Faroe over one thousand years ago. Tim's most recent book, Sigmundur and the Golden Ring (Sprotin, 2024), offers a compelling re-telling of the Faroese saga. It's a complex Viking revenge tragedy: two teenage cousins are wronged by an older distant relative; they set out to right those wrongs; but their success begs the question of who the story's hero might be. "]
Fontainelle, Earl. "Methodologies for the study of Magic." The Secret History of Western Esotericism #5 (September 20, 2017) [MB - OK, quick, what comes to your mind when you hear the word magic? I'm really grooving on this podcast. I like the way Earl Fontainelle looks at these subjects from multiple angles. Here in order to start off an exploration of understandings/histories of magic, he breaks down the etymology, histories, and disinformation surrounding the word/concept. Highly recommended for those that practice magic, those that think magic is silly/dangerous, those that have deep religious beliefs (especially of a Manichean nature), those that are rigidly atheist (I would say fundamentalist), and definitely those that are wrapped up in fanatical ideologies (the type where whole groups of beings/cultures are the enemy and need to be wiped out). What is good or bad - how do we decide? what are the consequences of those decisions? The overall series is a treasure for artists/creatives/seekers (and Humanities professors like me :) What comes to your mind when you think of magic - what happens when we actually explore a concept and think about the multiple ways it is framed?]
Grasso, Anthony. "Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime." New Books in Political Science (November 11, 2024) ["The United States incarcerates its citizens for property crime, drug use, and violent crime at a rate that exceeds any other developed nation – and disproportionately affects the poor and racial minorities. Yet the U.S. has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. This disjuncture between the treatment of street and corporate crime is often narrated as hypocrisy. Others suggest that the disparity is rooted in a conservative backlash after the civil rights movement and the Great Society or a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the racialization of crime. In Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime (U Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Anthony Grasso interrogates the intertwined histories of street and corporate crime to find that the differences in punishment are more than modern hypocrisy. Examining the carceral and regulatory states' evolutions from 1870 through today, Grasso argues that divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins. During the Progressive Era, scholars and lawmakers championed naturalized theories of human difference such as eugenics to justify instituting punitive measures for poor offenders and regulatory controls for corporate lawbreakers. These ideas laid the foundation for dual justice systems: criminal justice institutions harshly governing street crime and regulatory institutions governing corporate misconduct. Even after eugenics was discredited, criminal justice and regulatory institutions have developed in tandem to reinforce politically constructed understandings about who counts as a criminal. Using an impressive array of sources and methods, Dr. Grasso analyzes the intellectual history, policy debates, and state and federal institutional reforms that consolidated these ideas, along with their racial and class biases, into America's legal system. Dr. Anthony Grasso is an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University Camden. His research focuses on American political development, law, and inequality."]
Hinton, David. "An Ethics of Wild Mind." Emergence (April 30, 2024) ["How would our response to the ecological crisis be different if we understood that our own consciousness is as wild as the breathing Earth around us? In this conversation, poet, translator, and author David Hinton reaches back to a time when cultures were built around a reverence for the Earth and proposes that the sixth extinction we now face is rooted in philosophical assumptions about our separation from the living world. Urging us to reweave mind and landscape, he offers an ethics tempered by love and kinship as a way to navigate our era of disconnection."]
Hochschild, Arlie. "Shame and Pride in Appalachia." Converging Dialogues #583 (November 7, 2024) ["In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Arlie Hochschild about pride and shame in Appalachia. They discuss the political Right in Appalachia and framework of pride and shame, demographic makeup of the population in Appalachia, current challenges in Appalachia, and the emotions of pride, shame, and guilt. They talk about the appeal of the far Right, immigration and nationalism, liberals abandoning the working class, how we repair the politics divides, and many other topics. Arlie Hochschild is writer and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley, where she also earned her PhD. Her main interests have been on social relationships with politics, emotions, and culture. She is the author of numerous books, including Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, and the most recent, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right."]
Mullins, Brody. "How Lobbying Led to Crony Capitalism." Capitalisn't (October 24, 2024) ["Mullins is the co-author (along with his brother Luke, also an investigative reporter) of The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government. Brody joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss how corporations ranging from Genentech to Google participate in the invisible but massively influential lobbying industry to bend government policy toward their favor. Together, the three trace the roots and evolution of political lobbying from the 1970s to now and explore how it penetrates and leverages other spheres of society to abet its operations. How are academia and the media complicit in this ecosystem of influence operations? How has lobbying adapted to the changing attitudes of Americans towards Big Business? How might it change under either a Harris or Trump administration and beyond?"]
Shaviro, Steven. "Anarchism and Principle of Play: Steven Shaviro reviews David Graeber’s posthumous essay collection The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World." Los Angeles Review of Books (November 15, 2024) ["The volume’s title comes from an earlier book by Graeber: in The Utopia of Rules, he wrote that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” Such rhetoric is typical for Graeber: a phrase that sounds grandiose (“the ultimate, hidden truth”) is brought down to earth, since the “secret” really consists of things that we already do on an everyday basis. Graeber is unusually optimistic for an anti-capitalist activist: he seeks to remind us that we ourselves have ultimately constructed the forms and institutions that oppress us, which means that these structures of social and economic life have no necessity to them but can be reorganized in multiple ways. Some of these ways may in fact be substantially better than anything we have now."]
Stockwell, Tim. "What's the Truth About Alcohol's Risks and Benefits." Big Brains #149 (December 19, 2024) ["We have long heard the claims that a glass of red wine is good for your heart, but it turns out that the research that fueled this wisdom was actually skewed. Some studies made it appear like moderate drinkers were healthier than people who didn't drink at all, leading the public to believe that alcohol was healthier than it is. While drinking alcohol occasionally might not have catastrophic effects on your health, the data shows that even moderate drinking will reduce your life expectancy. In this episode, we speak with Tim Stockwell, a scientist at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research and a professor of psychology at the University of Victoria. Stockwell has reviewed hundreds of studies that he claims embellished alcohol's effects, and he explains how the new science of drinking is changing the public perception of alcohol. Today, trends like sober-curiosity and “Dry January” are on the rise, and some countries around the world are even implementing new policies around alcohol regulation."]
West, Stephen. "The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism - Kyoto School pt. 1 - Nishitani." Philosophize This! (November 18, 2024) [MB: This is a fascinating discussion of this thinker from the Kyoto School and don't be put-off by the use of the word nihilism. I find the ideas to be very positive and helpful. "Today we look at the work of Keiji Nishitani. We examine Nihilism in a deeper way than we've ever covered on the podcast before. We talk about The Great Doubt. Zen Buddhism. Sunyata. The self as similar to structural linguistics."]
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