We are, and have always been,a part of the world. We do not stand above it. We are "involved' with the world. This word has a sense not just of participating, not just of complication. but also of a curling inward, a coiling we call "involution." We are coiled into the world, nestled inside its processes, wound into its forms (365). - Dr. Ha Nguyen in Nayler, Ray. The Mountain in the Sea. Picador, 2022.
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"Art and the Natural World: An Entangled Life." Bloomsbury Visual Arts (2024) ["Envisioning the artist as a kind of fruit-bearing tree, Dadaist painter-poet and sculptor Hans ‘Jean’ Arp conceives of art as an extension of our bodies. We produce art, he suggests, in the literal sense, as we move and grow, sprouting artworks like berries in season."]
Bogutskaya, Ana. "A Deep Fear of Things Sincere." Talking Scared #209 (August 28, 2024) ["Anna Bogutskaya is one of the UK’s most prominent film critics, with a penchant for horror. She knows her scary onions. And in her new book, Feeding the Monster [subtitled Why Horror Has a Hold On Us], she asks an important question (well, important to the likes of you and me) – Why does horror have a hold on us? In concise but free-ranging essays, she looks at the prominent themes that sets the horror oft the last decade apart, peeling back the skin of the genre to see how it’s muscle flex and grip, and also give you tons of films to watch in the process. We have a similarly freewheeling conversation in this episode, talking about everything from our primal horror movie experiences, to the meme-ification of monsters and why Mike Flanagan is both outlier and heart of the genre." She is also the author of Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You To Hate.]
Flight, Thomas. "Why The Zone of Interest Does Not Let You See." (Posted on Youtube: May 2024) ["A look at how The Zone of Interest uses off-screen space and sound design in one of the most hauntingly powerful ways I've ever seen in a film. Featuring an interview with Johnnie Burn, sound designer who just won an Oscar for his work on this film."]
Gordillo, Gastón. "The Fascist Disposition." Verso (July 18, 2024) ["What does the word “fascism” mean today, when fossil capitalism continues its accelerated march toward a climate catastrophe and the liberal democracies of North America and Europe support and arm Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza?"]
Like Stories of Old. "In Search of Absolute Beauty." (Posted on Youtube: March 26, 2021) ["Media included:A Hidden Life; A Star is Born; Amadeus; Annihilation; At Eternity’s Gate; Baby Driver; Before Midnight; Before Sunset; Black Swan; Cloud Atlas; Days of Heaven; Doctor Who; Dreams; Equilibrium; First Man; For vs. Ferrari; Gravity; Her; Interstellar; Into the Wild; Knight of Cups; Loving Vincent; Nomadland; Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Soul; Sound of Metal; Sunshine; The Thin Red Line; The Counselor; The End of the Tour; The Great Beauty; The Greatest Showman; The Grey; The Intouchables; The New World; the Perks of Being a Wallflower; The Secret Life of Walter Mitty; The Shawshank Redemption; The Tree of Life; To the Wonder; Voyage of Time."]
Valis, Karin. "Divine Embeddings: From the creation dance of Lord Shiva to the multidimensional vector space of word embeddings." Mercurial Minutes (June 26, 2023) ["Language, in any form, is a divine tool, a bridge between the tangible and the ineffable. Not a territory, yet powerful enough to change us to the core, trigger emotional storms or religious experiences. From the creation dance of Lord Shiva, threading the Garland of Letters that constitute the universe, to the multidimensional vector space of word embeddings, the divine essence of language unravels. The dance continues, inside the boney rigs of A100 industrial-grade GPUs, into realms we are just beginning to imagine."]
West, Stephen. "Is Killing Animals for Food Morally Justifiable?" Philosophize This! #71 (October 31, 2015) ["We see this in our culture all the time. Go to the supermarket: there’s beef. There’s chicken. There’s duck, lamb, anything you want. Are we patronizing a cause that is inherently immoral? Not talking about factory farming. Even if you went out and hunted, is it morally justifiable to kill animals for food? Now, I want to say something right off the bat. I don’t know what the answer to this question is, alright? Just because I’m giving arguments as a podcaster refuting people’s criteria does not mean that I think I somehow know the answer and that I’m pompously attacking how other people choose to behave. Really, I have no idea if there is an answer here, seriously. What I want to do is illustrate the games that we play in our heads, how easy it is to keep two sets of books when it comes to these moral criteria that we have. And I want to do it in an interesting context, so this conversation is a good one."]
---. "Kierkegaard on Anxiety." Philosophize This! #79 (March 22, 2016) ["A lot of people are lost. A lot of people find themselves either lost in the finite—conferring their identity onto social conventions or whatever culture happened to fall into their lap when they were born—or lost in the infinite—stuck in a state of analysis paralysis about the truly infinite possibilities that they can choose from, but they never really act on one of them. And as we were talking about last time, truly being a self requires you to have the realization that, yeah, there are an infinite number of things that I can do, but it also requires you to actually make a choice and act on one of those that corresponds with who you truly are. See, when we find ourselves in this balancing act between the two, the finite and the infinite as Kierkegaard calls them, we experience what he calls a state of dizziness, dizziness caused by the fact that we look at the sheer magnitude of possibilities that we have to choose from coupled with the fact that eventually we know we got to choose one of them. As you can probably imagine, in this state our heads get filled with all sorts of questions. We start catastrophizing. What if I’m wrong? What if this is a huge mistake I’m making? What if I wake up one morning a 60-year-old, retired, Navy admiral with a prosthetic hip and I feel like I did everything all wrong. And this is the essence of anxiety, isn’t it? To fear some future outcome that we really have little control over anyway."]
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