Five minutes a day to roasting the idiot in his ego cage.
A Podcast For You
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Five minutes a day to roasting the idiot in his ego cage.
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🇺🇲
Publishing Since
1/2/2024
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Recent Episodes
February 10, 2024
10. Things I Want Decided
<p>Inspired by Nader, Farritor and Schilliger's recent AI-assisted decryption of ancient texts, <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/ai-helps-scientists-read-unreadable-herculaneum-scrolls/a-68193293" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">netting them the $1m Vesuvius Challenge Prize</a>, I attempt to crack the code of a 1000 year old Japanese poem using Google's Gemini chatbot. </p> <p>I pose to Gemini the four cryptic questions in the form of a poem about love's paradoxes by Izumi Shikibu, whose work was celebrated by Kenneth Rexroth with the following words: “Of all the poets of the classical period, she has, to my mind, the deepest and most poignant Buddhist sensibility.”</p> <p>Can the latest Oogly Woogly Google tech finally solve riddles that have puzzled human readers and thinkers for centuries?</p> <p>--</p> <p><strong>Things I Want Decided </strong></p> <p> Which shouldn’t exist in this world, the one who forgets or the one who is forgotten? Which is better, to love one who has died or not to see each other when you are alive? Which is better, the distant lover you long for or the one you see daily without desire? Which is the least unreliable among fickle things— the swift rapids, a flowing river, or this human world?</p> <p><br></p> <p>-<em>Izumi Shikibu (tr. Jane Hirshfield)</em></p> <p><br></p>
February 7, 2024
9. Sentence
<p>An episode inspired by Tadeusz Dąbrowski's poem "Sentence", Nick Flynn's "Tattoo" and Jack Gilbert's "The Answer":</p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>SENTENCE</strong></p> <p>It's as if you'd woken in a locked cell and found in your pocket a slip of paper, and on it a single sentence in a language you don't know. <br>And you'd be sure this sentence was the key to your life. Also to this cell. <br>And you'd spend years trying to decipher the sentence, until finally you'd understand it. But after a while you'd realize you got it wrong, and the sentence meant something else entirely. And so you'd have two sentences. <br>Then three, and four, and ten, until you'd created a new language. <br>And in that language you'd write the novel of your life. And once you'd reached old age you'd notice the door of the cell was open. You'd go out into the world. You'd walk the length and breadth of it, <br>until in the shade of a massive tree you'd yearn for that one single sentence in a language you don't know.<br></p> <p><strong>TATTOO</strong></p> <p><br></p> <p>You do know, right, that between the no- </p> <p>longer & the still- to-come </p> <p>you are being continually tattooed, inked </p> <p>with the skulls of everyone </p> <p>you’ve ever loved—the you & the you </p> <p>& the you & the you—you don’t sit in a chair, thumb </p> <p>through a binder, pick a design, it simply </p> <p>happens each time you bring your fingers to your face </p> <p>to inhale him back into you . . . tiny skulls, some of us are </p> <p>covered. You, love, could </p> <p>simply tattoo an open door, light </p> <p>pouring in from somewhere outside, you </p> <p>could make your body a door so it appears you </p> <p>(let her fill you) are made of light. <br><br><strong>THE ANSWER</strong><br><br> Is the clarity, the simplicity, an arriving<br> or an emptying out? If the heart persists<br> in waiting, does it begin to lessen?<br> If we are always good, does God lose track<br> of us? When I wake at night, there is<br> something important there. Like the humming<br> of giant turbines in the high-ceilinged stations<br> in the slums. There is a silence in me,<br> absolute and inconvenient. I am haunted<br> by the day I walked through the Greek village<br> where everyone was asleep and somebody began<br> playing Chopin, slowly, faintly, inside<br> the upper floor of a plain white stone house.</p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>TOPICS COVERED:</strong> Alienation; Analytical preparation; <a href="https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/some-trees.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Ashberry's trees</a>; Authenticity; Birth and self-discovery; Boundaries of essence; Communication dynamics; Confinement vs. liberation; Consciousness; Contemplation of existence; Cosmic symbolism; Cultural backgrounds; Daily Mail controversy; Deciphering life's language; Developmental path; Disorientation and discovery; Emotional reactivity; Enlightenment and insight; Estrangement and alienation; Ethical boundaries in therapy; Experience of reading a poem; Exploration of self; Expression and concealment; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magus_(novel)" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Fowles' "The Magus"</a>; Genie metaphor; Gilbert's "The Answer"; Goldilocks metaphor; Human existential trajectory; Identity construction; Illusion of continuity; Individuality vs. collective unconscious; Intercostal nerves and pain; Interpersonal misunderstanding; Interpretation of symbols; Introspection and growth; Kabbalah and symbolism; Language as a cage; Language's role in suffering; Liberation magic; Life-defining tattoos; Linguistic clichés; Locked cell metaphor; <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Final-Analysis-Making-Unmaking-Psychoanalyst/dp/034545278X" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Masson's "Final Analysis"</a>; <a href="https://merwinconservancy.org/2015/04/place-by-ws-merwin/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Merwin's trees</a>; Misunderstanding as growth; Mystic union with God; Narrative construction; Neurological aspects of communication; Personal biases; Physical and mental isolation; Poetic inspiration; Potential for exploitation; Psychoanalytic dynamics; <a href="https://x.com/poetrykoan/status/1175846557108842497?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Ramanujan's trees</a>; Recycled materials of past experiences; Relational nuances; Revelation of self-awareness; Rites of passage; Schiffer's character and influence; Self-awareness dawn; Semiotics of Hebrew letters; Silence and bliss; Social contexts; Spiritual symbolism; <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/garth-greenwell-reads-jean-stafford/id256945396?i=1000455679978" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Stafford's "The Interior Castle</a>"; Symbolic language complexity; Symbolic realm's labyrinth; Symbols interpretation; Tattoo as therapeutic act; Therapeutic boundaries; Transformation through language; Unraveling of human story; Vulnerability and humility.</p> <p>[<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-T2y0vbvfglITU3fdUFWd_lpJ5GBwHqZgJbx3gQgE6k/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Transcript of episode</a>]</p>
February 3, 2024
8. Variatons on the Right to Remain Silent
<p>Being an Anne Carson megafan (looking forward to her new collection <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wrong-Norma-would-anything-Sontag/dp/1787332357/ref=sr_1_3?crid=34YIPZBE50AOJ&keywords=anne+carson&qid=1706972288&s=books&sprefix=anne+carson%2Cstripbooks%2C107&sr=1-3"><em>Wrong Norma </em></a>published this month) I decided to spend an evening with an artefact she created in 2016 called<em> </em><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Float-Collection-Twenty-two-Chapbooks-Freefall/dp/1101946849"><em>Float</em></a><em> </em>comprising 22 chapbooks held together in whatever order you choose to read them in, one of which is an essay that I’m about to read here.</p> <p>This essay, "<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Erc1fPeB-o8Ft7y6nhOXLx2CoibsyuUb/view?usp=sharing">Variations on the Right to Remain Silent"</a>, is also linked to my favourite poem in Float which can be found in the chapbook <em>Candor</em>, written originally for a performance piece with dancer Rashaun Mitchell.</p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>COULD I</strong></p> <p>If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.</p> <p><br></p> <p>I've called "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent" an essay, but I prefer to think of it as An Event, or a kind of Performance - or a weird and delightful lecture.</p> <p>If you’re anything like me, finding such a koan is usually followed by an overwhelming desire to share. Hence. </p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>POEMS REFERRED TO IN THIS EPISODE:</strong></p> <p><strong>Fragment 286 </strong></p> <p> In spring, on the one hand, the Kydonian apple trees, being watered by streams of rivers where the uncut garden of the maidens [is and vine blossoms swelling beneath shady vine branches, bloom. On the other hand, for me Eros lies quiet at no season. Nay rather, like a Thracian north wind ablaze with lightning, rushing from Aphrodite accompanied by parching madnesses, black, unastonishable, powerfully, right up from the bottom of my feet [it] shakes my whole breathing being. </p> <p><em>-</em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibycus"><em>Ibykos</em></a><em> </em></p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>Tubingen, January</strong></p> <p> Eyes talked over to blindness. Their— riddle is the purely orginated"—, their memory of swimming Hölderlintowers, gull- whirredaround. </p> <p>Visits of drowned joiners to these diving words: Came, came a man, came a man to the world, today, with the lightbeard of the prophets: he could, if he spoke of this time, he could, only stammer and stammer, over-, over- againagain. ("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")</p> <p><br></p> <p><em>-Paul Celan</em></p> <p><strong>TOPICS/THEMES: </strong></p> <p><br></p> <p>Adam and Eve, </p> <p>Aphrodite, </p> <p>Artistic representation and interpretation, </p> <p>Authenticity and translation, </p> <p>Bacon, Francis, </p> <p>Catastrophe as a creative force, </p> <p>Celan, Paul, </p> <p>Cliché and its avoidance, </p> <p>Communication barriers, </p> <p>Consciousness and self-awareness, </p> <p>Divine versus human language, </p> <p>Greek lyric poetry, </p> <p>Historical and cultural translation, </p> <p>Hölderlin, Friedrich, </p> <p>Immortality and the divine, </p> <p>Individual versus authority conflict, </p> <p>Joan of Arc, </p> <p>Language's limitations and potential, </p> <p>Madness as a method of understanding, </p> <p>Metaphorical versus literal interpretation, </p> <p>Mythology's influence on art and literature, </p> <p>Nature of reality and perception, </p> <p>Personal identity and expression, </p> <p>Power of silence and absence, </p> <p>Rembrandt, </p> <p>Relationship between language and thought, </p> <p>Role of the translator, </p> <p>Sacred versus profane knowledge, </p> <p>Struggle against conventional norms, </p> <p>Subjectivity of experience, </p> <p>Untranslatability and the ineffable, </p> <p>Violence and its representation</p>
11 total episodes available
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