Dialogic Cinephilia - August 30, 2020

Diresta, Renee. "Online Conspiracy Groups Are a Lot Like Cults." Wired (November 13, 2018)

Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "On Lovecraft." Weird Studies #29 (October 9, 2018) ["Phil and JF indulge their autumnal mood in this discussion of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's work, specifically the essay "Notes on the Writing of Weird Fiction" and the prose piece "Nyarlathotep." Philip K. Dick, Algernon Blackwood, and David Foster Wallace make appearances as our fearsome hosts talk about how the weird story differs from conventional horror fiction, how Lovecraft gives voice to contemporary fears of physical, psychological and political infection, and how authors like Lovecraft and Dick can be seen as prophetic poets of the "great unbuffering of the Western self.""]




LeBrecht, Jim and Nicole Newnham. "Crip Camp Directors on the Overlooked Disability Rights Movement." At Liberty (July 30, 2020) ["July 26th marked the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, or the ADA. The ADA is a federal law that requires businesses, employers, public facilities, schools, and transportation agencies to make accommodations for disabled people, and helps weed out basic discrimination. When President George HW Bush signed the ADA into law in 1990, it was one of the most comprehensive pieces of civil rights legislation in American history.  But the disability rights movement didn’t begin or end with the ADA. In spite of the law’s existence, Americans with disabilities still face discrimination and other barriers to equal rights and opportunities. Today, even though nearly 50 percent of Americans live with at least one disability, few know the history of the fight for disability rights. With Crip Camp, a new documentary on Netflix, filmmakers Jim LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham fill in some of that history through the personal and political stories that started the rise of a movement."]






Louison, Evan. "Forbidden Truths, the Symmetry of Myth, and a Friendship Uninterrupted by Death: Werner Herzog on Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin." Filmmaker (August 28, 2020)

Mahdawi, Arwa. "The WAP uproar shows conservatives are fine with female sexuality – as long as men control it." The Guardian (August 15, 2020)

Martel, J.F. "Consciousness in the Aesthetic Imagination." Metapsychosis (July 11, 2016)




Minervini, Roberto, et al. "Roberto Minervini & Subjects on What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?" Film at Lincoln Center Podcast #240 (August 14, 2019) ["Roberto Minervini’s passionately urgent, lyrical new documentary is a portrait of African-Americans in New Orleans struggling to maintain their unique cultural identity and to find social justice. The film was an official selection at the 56th New York Film Festival, where the director, producer Paolo Benzi, producer Denise Ping Lee, and the film’s subjects, Judy Hill, Krystal Muhammad, and Nat Turner, joined FLC Director of Programming Dennis Lim for a Q&A."]

Oates, Joyce Carol. "On Her Dystopian Novel Hazards of Time Travel." Berkeley Talks (August 7, 2020) ["Joyce Carol Oates, author of more than 70 works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, joined Poet Laureate and Berkeley English professor Robert Hass in March 2019 to discuss her 2018 book Hazards of Time Travel. Set in a dystopian America in 2039, the novel tells the story of a 17-year-old high school student who, after her subversive valedictorian speech, is exiled to rural Wisconsin in 1959. “It seems like dystopian novels are mostly about extrapolating scary political trends in the present into the future,” said Hass. “1984. The Handmaid’s Tale. It felt like you found yourself more interested in exploring 1959.” “Or the sort of foundation for the present,” replied Oates, a professor emerita of humanities at Princeton University who has taught as a visiting professor of English at Berkeley. “… Because when I wrote the novel — I was working on it in 2011 — I had no idea at all, as none of us did, that we would have a different kind of political situation today. “… My novel was written before the campaign of 2016, which was a vicious and wildly divisive campaign from which we will probably never recover. No, I was actually looking ahead toward a surveillance state, which doesn’t have that populist personality demagogue, who’s like a clown, a sadistic clown, who’s very vicious and funny in an ignorant way, playing to the populous. “In my vision, it’s more of a surveillance state, where the government is actually impersonal, and you never see a personality. … It’s more like, it’s just all around us. We’re in a mesh, a web, of being surveyed and recorded all the time.”"]

Schultz, David. "COVID-19 and the Nakedness of the Corporate University." CounterPunch (August 25, 2020)

Zadrozny, Brandy. "With #SaveTheChildren Rallies, QAnon Sneaks Into The Offline World." On the Media (August 26, 2020) ["On Saturday, more than 200 cities from Spokane to Scranton saw modest rallies for a cause so pure, so unifying, that who in their right mind wouldn’t want to join in? "Save the children" was the chant and child trafficking the scourge. But lately it is a movement being hijacked from within, which is just the latest instance of the QAnon conspiracy theory spilling out of its online domain. This we know from reporting by NBC News investigative reporter Brandy Zadrozny, along with reporter Ben Collins. In this podcast extra, Zadrozny explains how these rallies function as "information laundering," and how local journalists have inadvertantly taken part in QAnon's recruitment strategy."]