Friday, May 15, 2020

Dialogic Cinephilia - March 16, 2020

Barkan, Ross. "The Gray Zone Lady." The Baffler #50 (Match 2020)  [The New York Times, "particularly in its approach to national political stories, has clung to a horse race model of coverage that should have been discredited decades ago. The model, long derided but shockingly durable, operates from a rather simple premise: How do we figure out who’s going to win? It is rarely curious about anything else, and it can be applied to political campaigns and governing policy alike. Horse race coverage treats politics as a glorified sporting event, each side reduced to a combatant of equal moral stature, and tries desperately to divine the future, with all the arrogance of science and none of its corresponding rigor. It regards political reportage as theater criticism, diminishing pivotal and thorny questions about policy. The other question horse race coverage may ask: How does this play? Instead of asking whether a certain candidate will support more drone strikes in the Middle East or will pursue a health care policy that makes coverage cheaper and more humane, the horse race paradigm is most concerned about tactics. Will an embrace of x lead to victory or defeat? What is the underlying strategy? Political coverage becomes inseparable from gossip. Such an approach relishes artificial events constructed specifically to make news, like the press conference, the diner visit, or the rally with surrogates, campaign operatives tasked with massaging the truth, repeatedly, for the benefit of the press, who must decide whether to be “spun” or not."]

Emmerzael, Hugo. "Reaching Into History: Radu Jude on Uppercase Print and The Exit of the Trains." Senses of Cinema #94 (April 2020)

Gidney, Craig Laurance. "Weird Beauty: The Weird Fiction of Tanith Lee." Weird Fiction Review (September 19, 2017)

Jordan, Waylon. "Horror Pride." Hellbent for Horror #86 (June 28, 2019) ["Horror is an emotion first and a setting later. It’s the only genre that is directly named after an emotion, and that gives horror a universal appeal. It also makes each person’s experience and interpretation personal. We close out June, Pride Month, with a celebration of the contributions the LGBTQ community has brought to the horror genre since the creation of the Gothic novel. My guest is Waylon Jordan, the Associate Editor for iHorror.com, one of the largest online horror resources in the world. Waylon writes Horror Pride Month, a series of articles that chronicle the history and the present of queer horror and he graciously comes onto the show to expand on the discussion."]

Maude, Kit, Rob Prouse and Sam Pulham. "The Naked Woman by Armonía Somers." Sherds Podcast #27 (February 8, 2020) ["The Naked Woman by Armonía Somers was originally published in Spanish in 1950. The translation was made by Kit Maude and the book is published by The Feminist Press. On her thirtieth birthday, the main character, Rebeca Linke undergoes a violent physical and mental transformation. She leaves her home in only an overcoat and wanders through the local forests and fields. When she is spotted in broad daylight, divested of her clothes, the event sends tremors through the rural village, penetrating the hearts, bodies and minds of its inhabitants. Some view her as the return of Eve, some as a malignant curse. In either case, the village must confront this happening, and undergo its own transformation. Over the course of the episode, we discuss the author’s violent expression of feminine autonomy, consider it in the context of the gothic, and examine the response of a staid patriarchal society to the concept of feminine desire. The readings in this episode are by Gaja Hajdarowicz."]




Page, Lewis. "An Inconvenient Animal: Rodents of Unusual Size." BLARB (January 9, 2019)

West, Stephen. "Carl Schmitt on Liberalism, Part 1." Philosophize This! (July 1, 2019) ["When John Dewey and Antonio Gramsci show up with their lunchbox the first day at the new job…this is the first order of business that people like them are going to have to deal with. Now, it’s right here that we can understand why the two of them went in the respective directions they did…because like we talked about the beginning of the 20th century can be broadly understood in terms of three major branches of political discussion, three primary conversations…that are going on…we’ve already talked about two of them and understanding all three of them is absolutely crucial because the contents OF these conversations is going to go on to dictate the direction of almost all subsequent political philosophy all the way up to the present day…when a philosopher sets out to contribute something to the political discussion of the 20th century they are almost without exception doing so in consideration to one of these three major critiques of the way we’ve done things in the past. Once again, what we’ve done in the past is Liberal Capitalist Democracy…the three major critiques are going to be John Dewey and his critique of traditional Democracy…Antonio Gramsci and his critique of Capitalism…and the guy we’re going to be talking about today…the philosopher Carl Schmitt and his critique of Liberalism."]

---. "Carl Schmitt on Liberalism, Part 2." Philosophize This! (July 1, 2019) ["So maybe the best place to begin our discussion today is just to say that the fact that the sovereign still exists at some level in our Liberal societies shouldn’t come as an enormous surprise to people. I mean, after all what exactly are systems of norms like the constitution trying to normalize? Carl Schmitt would ask if the constitution is a regulatory document…what exactly is it regulating? He would say that what it is regulating is the more fundamental, underlying political process that has been going on since the dawn of civilization. Liberalism’s been tacked on after the fact…makes us feel good…helps us FEEL like the world is a lot more peaceful and tolerant than its ever been…but once again, the reality of the world to Carl Schmitt, the reason we haven’t seen a respite from dictatorships, bloodshed and political instability is because we are still engaged in the exact same political process we’ve always been engaged in…one ROOTED in intolerance…to Carl Schmitt the foundation of the political lies in a distinction between friend and enemy."]








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