Zero Squared

The guest this week is the author and activist Jon Gold. Jon Gold is the man who coined the term 9/11 Truther and he is a self-proclaimed Truther, but I would venture to say that he is a bit different from the image that we've come to associate with that term. Specifically, Jon Gold doesn't talk about or promote theories about controlled demolition. He is not interested in tales of living hijackers seen with Elvis on beaches in Tahiti. He does not make claims about fake cell phone calls. Gold tries not to speculate at all and isn't interested in making a career for himself in what he calls the conspiracy theory industry. Instead he focuses on the verifiable lies that have been told about that day and the hardest facts he can muster. He has written a memoir about his experiences in the 911 Truth movement called 9/11 Truther: The Fight for Peace Just and accountability. I want to thank everyone who is a regular subscriber and participant in the Philosophy Workshop. If you'd like to donate or subscribe to the podcast and Philosophy workshop the buttons are at dietsoap.podomatic.com and at douglaslain.com. Donors of $6 or more in the US or $15 internationally will receive a copy of my book "Pick Your Battle." Also, if you'd rather not receive a copy of "Pick Your Battle" you can get on the list for a copy of "The Doom that Came to LOLcats" which is a novella due out from Eraserhead press later this year. I should tell you all to follow me on twitter and friend me on Facebook. Also you can send me email through my webpage. That's douglaslain.com. For several years now I've held the opinion that there was US government complicity in the attacks of September 11th, but while in previous years I was fairly vocal about that opinion, I no longer feel compelled to speak out on that subject. One reason I don't talk about it much is self serving. Talking about holes in the official story of 9/11 doesn't win you many friends or at least almost none worth having. The so called Truth movement is a circus or a side show for the most part. Today's guest Jon Gold is one of the rare exceptions on that front, but there is a stigma associated with pursuing 9/11 Truth, and to some extent the stigma is deserved. The people whose family members were killed on that day 10 years ago, widows who are still demanding a new investigation and who want answers do not claim to know the Truth about 9/11, and are not Truthers. The other reason I've stepped away from 9/11 Truth is because I think the politics embedded in a movement that focuses on a singular crime is tepid at best and reactionary at worst. As I told Gold during our interview the unstated assumption behind efforts to expose the truth about 9/11 is that the society we're in could be made to work better if the corruption and crimes were to come to the surface, but this position accepts the objective violence of everyday normal life. To focus on the conspiracies and corruption is fundamentally apolitical. There is no systemic critique in the 9/11 Truth movement. Having said all that, I admire Jon Gold and will support anyone like him who has made his stand on this issue in this way. It may not be fundamentally political, but Gold demonstrates that it can be honorable.

The guest this week is the freelance journalist Margaret Kimberley. Ms. Kimberley writes a regular column for the Black Agenda Report and is a regular guest on Diet Soap as well. This time we discuss the death of Occupy, the failure of Wisconsin, and the problem of status quo politics. I want to thank everyone who is a regular subscriber to Diet Soap and to thank Robert M for donating. If you'd like to donate or subscribe to the podcast and Philosophy Workshop the buttons are at dietsoap.podomatic.com and at douglaslain.com. Donors of $6 or more in the US or $15 internationally will receive a copy of my book "Pick Your Battle." Also, if you'd rather not receive a copy of "Pick Your Battle" you can get on the list for a copy of "The Doom that Came to LOLcats" which is a novella due out from Eraserhead press this year. I should tell you all to follow me on twitter and friend me on Facebook. Also you can send me email through my webpage. That's douglaslain.com. Again, this week is another conversation with the journalist Margaret Kimberley, and in future weeks you'll hear from the Pop philosopher Daniel Coffeen, the bizarro writer Bradley Sands, and many others. The music this week includes the Theme to the 1980 film Friday the 13th and an excerpt from Storm Large's hit My Vagina is Eight Miles Wide.

There is no guest this week as Benjamin and I discuss Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit focussing on Hegel's ideas about reason and organic life while pointing to the movies Bedazzled (a comedy starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) and Frankenstein to help us understand. I want to thank everyone who is a regular donor to Diet Soap and to thank everyone who regularly participates in the Philosophy workshop. I didn't receive any individual donations last week, but I did receive help from my regular subscribers. If you'd like to donate or subscribe to the podcast the buttons are at dietsoap.podomatic.com and at douglaslain.com. Donations of $6 or more in the US or $15 internationally will receive a copy of my book "Pick Your Battle." Also, if you'd rather not receive a copy of "Pick Your Battle" you can get on the list for a copy of "The Doom that Came to LOLcats" which is a novella due out from Eraserhead press this year. I should tell you all to follow me on twitter and friend me on Facebook. Also you can send me email through my webpage. That's douglaslain.com. Again, this week is another Hegel podcast with my son Benjamin. Next week we'll hear from the journalist Margaret Kimberley, and I have conversations with Daniel Coffeen, Jason Horsley, Bradley Sands, and many others in the hopper. The music you're listening to is the Vitamin String Quartet's cover of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart, but in just a moment you'll be listening to my son Benjamin and I discuss Hegel's Reason. --- Unrelated Essay: Star Trek, Pong, and Class Struggle One question that came out of John Scalzi’s apt blog post “Straight, White, Male: The Easiest Difficulty Level There Is” is this one: “How might we understand the idea of class through video games?” That is, if using the analogy of an RPG video game can help white male nerds understand institutionalized racism and white privilege, it’s also possible that video games might help nerds of every gender and race understand the concept of class structure and class struggle. In Adam Curtis’s documentary “All Watched Over by Machine’s of Loving Grace” the filmmaker interviewed Loren Carpenter about his 1991 experiment using the game Pong to inspire mass collaboration. In the interview Carpenter explains how a group of 5000 people spontaneously figured out how to collaborate to play pong on a giant screen. The collaborating crowd spontaneously figured out how to cooperate with a minimum amount of communication and no hierarchal structures of power; there were no overt directions nor any chain of command, but the crowd was able to figure out how to collectively move the paddles on the big screen and keep the ball bouncing back and forth. They learned how to run a flight simulator game collectively, and how to solve the variety of other puzzles put to them. They worked together each time in a completely egalitarian way and as a mass. Read More at Tor.com

The guest this week is Paul Shetler. Shetler has a degree in Art History and in this episode we discuss Surrealism and the Abstraction of Modernity. It's Thursday June 28th, 2012 and I'm Douglas Lain, the host of the Diet Soap podcast. I want to thank everyone who is a regular donor to Diet Soap and especially my gang who regularly participate in the Philosophy workshop. Last week I announced that I was to make myself available to talk philosophy and writing on Skype for workshop folks and then promptly forgot about it. This weekend I'll try again. If you'd like to donate or subscribe to the podcast the buttons are at dietsoap.podomatic.com and at douglaslain.com. Donations of $6 or more in the US or $15 internationally will receive a copy of my book "Pick Your Battle." However, as an extra bonus, I'll send an bound manuscript copy of my novel "Billy Moon: 1968" to the first person to donate this week. Also, if you'd rather not receive a copy of "Pick Your Battle" you can get on the list of a copy of "The Doom that Came to LOLcats" which is a novella due out from Eraserhead press this year. I should tell you all to follow me on twitter and friend me on Facebook. Also you can send me email through my webpage. That's douglaslain.com (L A I N). This week I received an email from Tracy V and I thought I'd share it with you. --- Tracy wrote: Hi Doug, I enjoyed listening to your latest podcast. I'm Episcopalian too and my associate minister is a woman. I like my church and I'm trying to understand the magic behind the Christian religion such as the masculine and feminine in the Holy Communion and the fact that I am eating the god when I participate. I think there is more magic than people realize in it. However I agree with you it is very patriarchial and I don't really know how to get around that fact. When our woman priest does Communion some people won't participate, they don't want to accept it from a woman. And that is just the beginning. But I'm coming to the realization I'm never going to get away from the patriarchy in society, no matter how much feminist theory I like and try to put into practice. There are a lot of people, men and women, who just like the patriarchy. What I'm trying to do is to find the feminine in the patriarchal structures and participate that way. We've come a long way but we have a very long way to go. --- Thanks for writing me Tracy, and thanks for donating. I guess my comments about how the Episcopal church could be taken as a criticism, but I didn't mean them that way. At least, I wasn't only criticizing the church. Of course, there was no way anyone could know my thinking on the Nicene creed or what I was really thinking or intending since I didn't elaborate at all. Maybe I'll just take a moment to do that now. My thought was just that there was a tendency to pretend as if Christianity as it was could be made to be non patriarchal simply by changing the words in your head, or pretending the words don't mean what they mean, but I think that if you're a Christian and want to change Christianity towards a feminism you'll still have to start with an understanding of God as a father and see why he's a father. Then you might be able to conceive of what it will take to call him something else and have it stick. To give you another example, after editing this conversation with Paul Shetler I was thinking about mathematics and whether something like numbers could be said to be contingent things or if they were essential. I asked myself why we divide numbers into multiples of ten. Why do we start over and add a zero when we get to 9? That seemed to be an arbitrary choice. Why not count like this, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, chocolate, orange juice, toad, and then, not to go back to roman numerals, we could start over at that point with a base of toad (or a base of thirteen I guess)? Why not? Anyhow, if I really (continued)

The guest this week is C. Derick Varn. This is part two of a conversation wherein Varn, who is a poet and university lecturer working in South Korea, and I discuss the French Philosopher Louis Althusser's essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. I want to thank everyone who is a regular donor to Diet Soap and especially my gang who regularly participate in the Philosophy workshop. The new announcement is that I'm going to start having what I'll call office hours on Skype. This weekend I'll be available for participants in the workshop so we can talk about Hegel or anything else that seems relevant. Eventually I hope to get all of the workshop participants writing and critiquing each others work as well. If you'd like to donate or subscribe to the podcast the buttons are at dietsoap.podomatic.com and at douglaslain.com I should tell you all to follow me on Twitter and friend me on Facebook. Music in this episode includes Money by the Flying Lizards and Artificial by the X-ray Spex. Also clips from Zizek and Ron Strickland. ---- Unrelated essay: Life as a Video Game Called “Class”? Douglas Lain John Scalzi recently posted a blog entry entitled “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is,” and in it he aimed at describing how racism and sexism is played by referring to video games, specifically to RPGs. In most video games, players have the option of playing a harder or easier version of the same thing. In a video game like Guitar Hero, for instance, the difficulty level determines how many notes you have to hit and the complexity of the song you have to play. Scalzi uses this idea of a difficulty level to explain the concept of privilege to his mostly white, mostly male, and definitely nerdy audience. “I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word ’privilege,’ to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon.” Scalzi’s essay works. He drives home how being a Straight White Male is easier than being a Gay Black Woman, and the inequity seems real by the end of Scalzi’s post. However, as is often the case online, the conversation around the essay was just as interesting as the essay itself, and one repeated question that came out of Scalzi’s blog post might be articulated in this way: How should class should be understood through video games? “Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane.” —John Scalzi, “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is,” May, 2012 As a PKD fan and as a Matrix paranoid, I want to believe. That is, I don’t have to imagine that life here in the U.S. is a massive video game like World of Warcraft. Scalzi suggests this possibility and I believe him right away. We really are in a video game, and this game is rigged. Read more at Tor.com

The guest this week is C. Derick Varn. Varn is a poet and university lecturer working in South Korea and this we got together via Skype to discuss Late Capitalism and the French Philosopher Louis Althusser's essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. I want to thank Billy L, Matthew G, and Jason F for their generous donations to the podcast, and to thank everyone who subscribes to the Podcast and workshop and gives monthly. The last three signed copies of my novella Wave of Mutilation have now been spoken for, however you can still get ahold of my memoir Pick Your Battle and I'm working on a couple of other books right now. I'm writing a novella for Eraserhead Press entitled the Doom That Came to LOLcats, working on a book entitled All I Ever Needed to Know About Capitalism I Learned from Watching Star Trek (and you can read excerpts from that at Tor.com) and my first full fledged novel is due out from Tor.com in August of 2013. So there will be plenty of opportunities to get signed copies of my various books in the near term future. Music in this episode includes Yaron Herman Trio covering Britney Spears Toxic. --- Somewhat related Essay: Five Steps For Understanding Althusser’s Concept of Ideology Without Going Insane 1. Skim over Althusser’s book On Ideology after rereading Kapital for Beginners (the comic book). Assuage your guilt about not being truly versed on either philosopher by reminding yourself that Althusser confessed that he’d barely read Marx. In his autobiography The Future Lasts a Long Time he claimed that it was only his knack for catching on quickly, his skill at faking his way along, that made him famous in French intellectual circles. Recall that the point of Althusser’s last book was to explain to the public how and why he’d strangled his wife to death in 1980. The philosopher was apparently in a fugue state brought on by depression when he massaged his wife’s neck until she was dead. Althusser skipped jail and went directly to a mental hospital. He was unfit to stand trial apparently. 2. Buy a Venti Nonfat Latte. Use your iPhone to look up quotes about Althusser while taking gulps of lukewarm latte from your paper cup. “Ideology is a ‘representation of the Imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.’” -Althusser, On Ideology Notice the doubling here. Althusser says that ideology is not the way people use their imaginations to represent the world, but rather is the representation of the way people use their imaginations. This means that ideology is not some false picture of the world but our false picture about our false picture. One ideology might tell us that we have a false picture of the world, that we believe in God for example, because we’ve been manipulated by bad guys. The caste of ancient priests, kings, and queens foisted false stories about the world on us in order to control us. Another ideology might blame the world itself for our false picture. Living under such poor conditions people needed a God in heaven. After all, who wouldn’t fantasize when faced with the plague? It was the reality of living in and off our own filth and debris that pushed us into delusion. But, Althusser isn’t buying these explanations. He says that ideology is simply necessary. Ideologies are fantasies that support our relationships with each other and these false pictures give us our very identities. In fact, we don’t really fantasize about the world, but rather we are the fantasy. Our relationships and thus our very identities are not backed up by anything. There is no true reality being blacked out or denied. Read more at Thought Catalog.

The guests this week are KMO and Olga Kuchukov. KMO is most well known for creating the C-Realm podcast, while Olga is a massage therapist and yoga expert turned co-host of the Z-Realm podcast. While the C in C-realm stands for consciousness, the Z in the Z-realm stands for Zombie. It's Thursday June 7th, 2012 an Douglas Lain is the host of this podcast. I want to thank David B for his generous donation to the podcast and let everyone know that there are currently 3 copies left of my novella Wave of Mutilation. So the next three people who donate or subscribe to the Diet Soap philosophy workshop will be the last people to get signed copies of that book. The music at the outset of this podcast is The Gonk from the 1978 version of Dawn of the Dead. --- Unrelated Essay from Tor.com Dreaming Captain America and Falcon Last week I checked out two very different books from the Woodstock public library with the hope that I could use one in order to understand the other. One of the books was Jack Kirby’s Captain America Bicentennial Omnibus and the other was Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. You’d think that my growing up in the 70s would’ve put to rest any inclination to pursue Freudian theories about childhood trauma and put to lie the notion that repressed wishes from waking life were the stuff of our dreams. After all, everyday waking life in the 70s was a life already populated by dream characters. From the Village People to HR Puffnstuf, the 70s were a dreamtime, so Freud couldn’t have been right with his dream theory about day residues and repression. Growing up in the seventies meant you didn’t need a talking cure; instead the way to understand your dreams was to check the TV Guide or thumb through your comic book collection. On the other hand, some say that Freud didn’t mean that dreams were brought on by substantial real traumas in the world, or that our dreams emerge from our psychic depths in response to the bad stuff or bad desires we encounter in our waking life, but rather something a bit more twisted than that. For example, in his new book Less Than Nothing, for example, the psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek interprets Freud’s description of dream-work from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. “[For Freud] the paradox is that this dream-work [or the mental process that hides the true wish that the dream is fulfilling from consciousness] is not merely a process of masking the dream’s ’true message’: the dream’s true core, its unconscious wish, inscribes itself only through and in this very process of masking…in short, it is the process of masking itself which inscribes into the dream its true secret.” Read more at Tor.com

There is no guest this week and instead I return to the subject of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. In fact I discuss the Hegel's Master and Slave dialectic, the Unhappy Consciousness, and the Charlie Kaufman film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with my lovely wife Miriam and our son Ben. Some of you may remember Miriam and I'm sure you all remember Ben. I want to thank the people who subscribe to the Philosophy Workshop, and here goes. Your regular donations keep this podcast going and keep me reading Hegel. I should also remind you all that you can find me on Facebook still, even though that company's stock has taken a nose dive. I am a twit on twitter also. And my webpage is douglaslain.com. And if you'd like to donate or subscribe you can find the paypal button on the dietsoap.podomatic.com or at douglaslain.com. A donation of $6 or more or a regular subscription entitles you to a copy of my novella Wave of Mutilation and as of today there are five copies left. The starting music is the theme entitled Sentimental Walk from Jean-Jacques Beineix's 1981 film Diva. You'll also hear Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime by the Korgis at the end of this episode. ---- Unrelated essay from Tor.com The Phenomenology of Star Trek The problem any cultural critic faces when attempting to say something definitive about a television show like Star Trek or a pop song like “I’ll Melt With You” is precisely the problem pop songs and science fiction television programs usually aim to solve. That is, how are we to know the world, to stop it and take a good look, once we realize that all we can ever have is “an imaginary grace”? How can we be sure of anything if the certainties that define the human race are “long gone by,” as the song says? The meanings and definitions we find in this televised and now digitized world are just a variety of fictions. All we find are accumulations of problems and a variety of pitches, hooks, slogans, and lyrics that only promise to make us feel good about them. So maybe we should start with that. We should start by looking at the problems and how we usually enjoy them. We all know that Star Trek was just a television show, a fiction. And fictions are really all about setting up problems so that viewers or readers will enjoy them. The writer constructs a hook so the reader will keep on reading, and we know this, but what’s confusing is just how this is done. In a world like ours, a world that thrashes around our face without us ever really knowing it, a world where the norms and rules are in flux, a universe full of strange new world, how does one know what problems to pose? Just what kind of questions will be serviceable as hooks? [Boldly Go On to Tor.com]

The guest this week is the cultural critic Mark Dery whose newest book of essays is entitled I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts and is out from the University of Minnesota Press. This is the second half of our conversation and this week we discuss Facebook, the 70s, and the psychedelic guru Terence McKenna. I want to thank Tracy V and Ted F for joining up for the Diet Soap Philosophy Workshop. When you subscribe to donate to the podcast once a month you also get to join in on a weekly conversation about Hegel's Phenomenology and subscribers and donors both receive copies of either my novella "Wave of Mutilation" or my radical memoir "Pick Your Battle." You can find the subscribe and donate buttons on my website, that's douglaslain.com or at dietsoap.podomatic.com. I should also ask you to follow me on twitter, find me on Facebook, stumble upon me on stumble upon, tumbler for me, take a pinterest in me, link to me in linked in, plus me, and finally invade my space (remember my space?) The music in the podcast includes Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 2, the Bee Gee's Stayin Alive, and Uncle Bonsai's Penis Envy. --- Definition of the term "phallic mother" from answers.com The so-called phallic mother is a mother who is fantasmatically endowed with a phallus. Among the male child's earliest sexual theories, he believes that all people have the male genital. By substituting the phallus for the organ that the child thinks the female is lacking, he tries to protect himself from the castration anxiety that arises from the primal fantasies of the mother. The fear of the phallic mother imago tacitly affirms the threat of castration, while at the same time defensively negating it along with all its oral and anal pregenital foundations. A theory of the phallic mother existed in Sigmund Freud's work from his earliest formulations on the sexual theories of children (1905d, 1908c), and it played a constant role throughout later developments regarding the questions of feminine castration and the maternal penis (1909b, 1910c, 1923b). From 1905 to 1927, these questions were structured by the continuing Freudian exploration of fetishism. The fetishist fears castration excessively, and finds protection from it in a chosen object that serves as an equivalent for the maternal phallus. Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/phallic-mother#ixzz1vnwjvsKD

The guest this week is the cultural critic Mark Dery whose book I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is currently out from the University of Minnesota Press and according to publisher's weekly the book demonstrates that Dery has a keen eye for absurdity, tragedy, and everything in between. This was a hour and half conversation about Late Capitalist Cultural Criticism and so this week we'll just hear Dery explain what it means to be a cultural critic and what it means specifically to be such a critic in the internet age. I want to than Jonathan Y for donating to the podcast. His copy of my novella Wave of Mutilation will be in the mail very soon, along with a few other copies that I still need to send. I also want to thank everyone who has been regularly donating to the podcast as subscribers. Subscribers to the podcast can also participate in the Diet Soap Philosophy Workshop, although one can subscribe and choose not to join the workshop, and a few do just that. If you'd like to contribute you'll find the donate and subscribe buttons at dietsoap.podomatic.com or at douglaslain.com. Donors and subscribers are entitled to a copy of my latest book Wave of Mutilation or my surrealist memoir Pick Your Battle. Right now there are seven copies left of the novella. As always you can connect with me through my website, send an email to douglain at gmail, find me on Facebook, follow me on twitter, plus me on google, link to me through LinkedIn, or just shout my name from the rooftops. The music in and sound clips in this episode includes Ensign in Red singing Catch the Enterprise, the Vitamin String Quartet's cover of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, and Marcel Duchamp's pointing to the difference between aesthetics and taste. Right now you're listening to the Sleeping Bear String quartet covering Sweet Dreams are Made of This by the Eurythmics. --- Unrelated Essay: Star Trek as The Sign It is tempting to set about deconstructing the series, to take it apart and examine each piece of it using various theoretical critical tools that we might have at our disposal (for instance we might turn to Freud or Marx and apply their thought to any given episode or film in the franchise) the better approach is a more passive or receptive approach. Rather than impose various ideas onto Kirk or Picard, rather than place a grid over the Enterprise or on Vulcan in order to dissect the program, we should instead turn to the program itself and simply observe what we find there without the hope that any true understanding will be immediately revealed, but rather just so that we can see what the phenomena of Star Trek is and what happens on the show. Yesterday I suggested that we could be assured that it was Star Trek and not Doctor Who that was the true television show. I said that Star Trek unfolded through history and ultimately divulged real understanding, but I gave no real basis for this assertion other than a circular argument about how Spock never had to borrow Doctor Who’s TARDIS and could time travel on his own. The truth is, however, is that Star Trek is merely another television show like all the others. It came onto the scene, appearing on our TV sets for the first time on September 8th, 1966. Still, this observation is significant in itself and maybe gets us closer to Understanding. If Star Trek was a television show, that means it was made up of images and sounds that presented themselves to a television audience. It appeared as a television spectacle in a culture wherein these spectacles were common. Star Trek appeared, as the philosopher Rick Roderick once said, inside a culture based on spectacle and images. “And a culture based on spectacle and images has a peculiar non-systematic character. It’s like the Fall TV schedule. All you really know about it, right, is that it is going to appear on a kind of grid. But culture in general, we are not even sure about the grid let alone, you know, which dumb (continued)

The guest this week is the blogger, artist, philosopher and musician Jon Meade and we discuss how Henri Lefebvre's book The Production of Space is significant reading in this Late Capitalist moment. However, this episode is also an audio collage. It starts with a conversation with my son Benjamin about The Production of Space in video games, moves from there to a conversation with Ben, Simon and Noah (my three sons) about Jim Henson's experimental television program The Cube, and only then does Jon Meade starts to pipe in as well. This episode is a mash up. I want to thank Jason H and Daniel L for donating to the podcast and let you both know that copies of my book, Wave of Mutilation, will be in the mail very soon. Jason H has already been waiting for over a week. I welcome donations, and subscribing to the podcast will also make you a member of the Diet Soap Philosophy Workshop. Right now there are 16 members of the workshop, although attendance varies. I would certainly welcome four or even five more people aboard, and we're not too far into the Phenomenology of Spirit yet so you could all probably catch up pretty quickly. I should point out that I've started blogging over at my own website again, over at douglaslain.com, and that I'll be blogging for Tor.com again in the weeks to come. You can find my Facebook page, I'm the douglaslain in Portland Oregon, follow me on twitter my handle is douglain (and that's L A I N), find me on linked in, check out my dormant Google plus account, see one or two pictures I posted on Instagram, StumbleUpon me, or just send me an email to tell me what a Netlog is. Again, the guest this week is Jon Meade, however along with Meade you'll hear a clip of singer Eli Mattson performing his own unique cover version of the song My Favorite Things, that's at the 35 minute mark. --- Essay on Henri Lefebvre from Thought Catalog: Henri Lefebvre’s 1974 book The Production of Space argues against the concept of empty or geometric space and in favor of social space. He was a committed Marxist and his idea that space is never truly empty but always filled in or mediated is perhaps just a philosophical refinement of the argument against neutrality or objectivity. Howard Zinn often commented that “one can never be neutral on a moving train” and by this he meant that he, as an historian, could never be objective but was always implicated in the struggle that is history. Lefebvre went a step beyond this observation by suggesting that reality or space itself was bound up in the same historical struggle. Lefebvre’s book argued against the objective world but did not posit a relative of subjective world in its place. What Lefebvre was seeking was a way to conceive of space itself as Howard Zinn. The back cover blurb for his book explains his project this way: The production of space is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). To get a firm grip on what Lefebvre was attempting is to risk depoliticizing his work. We have to consider his work from within the realm metaphysics and to consider his argument within this realm risks reestablishing the dominance of the very “mental space” that Lefebvre is attempting to transcend. Still, if we are to understand his ideas rather than hold to them in a vulgar act of politics then we must risk what might be considered a move toward idealism. [Read More at Thought Catalog]

There is no guest this week, but once again I return to the subject of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in preparation for the Diet Soap Philosophy Writer's Workshop this weekend. This time we cover Part IV: The Truth which Conscious Certainty of Self Realises by taking a look at Charlie Kaufman's first film Being John Malovich. The Philosophy Writer's workshop has so far been a monthly online conversation done about Hegel's great book, and if you'd like to subscribe to the workshop you can find a link at dietsoap.podomatic.com. Subscribers to the workshop and donors to the podcast will receive a copy of my latest book while supplies last. Right now the book is the novella Wave of Mutilation (although copies of my radical memoir Pick Your Battle is also available.) Later this year my next novella, the Doom That Came to the LOLcats will be available, and who knows what will come after that. In any case I want to thank Reagan S and Tracy V for donating to the podcast in the last week and let you both know that your books are in envelopes and will be in the mail in tomorrow's mail. For those of you who are going to join in next week for the philosophy writer's workshop, I look forward to discussing Hegel with you. And if you'd like to join in there is plenty of room in the workshop, so go ahead and subscribe before Sunday the 29th and I'll be sure to get in touch with you on how to participate. -- Excerpt from the Phenomenology: With self-consciousness, then, we have now passed into the native land of truth, into that kingdom where it is at home. We have to see how the form or attitude of self-consciousness in the first instance appears. When we consider this new form and type of knowledge, the knowledge of self, in its relation to that which preceded, namely, the knowledge of an other, we find, indeed, that this latter has vanished, but that its moments have, at the same time, been preserved; and the loss consists in this, that those moments are here present as they are implicitly, as they are in themselves. The being which “meaning” dealt with, particularity and the universality of perception opposed to it, as also the empty, inner region of understanding – these are no longer present as substantial elements (Wesen), but as moments of self-consciousness, i.e. as abstractions or differences, which are, at the same time, of no account for consciousness itself, or are not differences at all, and are purely vanishing entities (Wesen).

The guest this week is Marxist youtube star and pianist Brendan Cooney and we discuss real abstractions, fetishes, the Greek economic crisis, Late Capitalism, and the superpowers of Karl Marx. The podcast has been on a temporary hiatus as I've struggled to revise a novel as quickly as possible, but we return this week despite the fact that I haven't quite finished yet. I've been up to my eyeballs in dreams, Christopher Robin Milne, cats that turn into toys, and the strikes of May 1968, but the podcast continues. I want to thank all of the subscribers to the podcast who are participating in the Diet Soap philosophy writers workshop and urge you to either subscribe or donate. I currently have 12 copies left of my book "Wave of Mutilation" and even more copies of my surrealist memoir on urban foraging entitled Pick Your Battle, and a subscribing or donating $6 or more entitles you to a copy of one of these books. I should point out that this week marks the third year for the Diet Soap podcast. The very first episode was produced on April 16th, 2009. This is also the last week that Diet Soap will feature a Titanic Factoid. Sunday was the 100 year anniversary of the sinking and Miriam has decided to commemorate April 15th, 1912 with a sinking of the factoid. So, this week we say goodbye to the Titanic, but I look forward to seeing what Miriam comes up with next and she promises that she'll continue in some way or another. My conversation with Brendan Cooney went on for a good while and wandered, so this may be a two parter. We'll see. I've currently got at least five weeks of interviews in the archive. So in coming weeks we'll hear conversations with Paul Shetler on surrealism, with KMO and Olga on Zombies, with Ross Wolfe on Taylorism or Fordism, with Jon Meade on the Production of Space, and with the bizarro writer Bradley Sands on why he's Sorry He Ruined Your Orgy.

I'm caught up in the last rewrite of my book "Billy Moon: 1968" which will be out from Tor Books next year, and did not get a chance to edit together an interview of my own, so this week Diet Soap has been replaced by a rerun from another program, the Science Fiction Interview show Hour 25. This is a conversation between Philip K. Dick and Mike Hodel which was recorded In 1977, just before the release of A Scanner Darkly. This interview is also available on youtube. For more information about Philip K. Dick check out philipkdick.com As to Hour 25, here's some information from Wikipedia: Hour 25 was a radio program focusing on science fiction, fantasy, and science. It was broadcast on Pacifica radio station KPFK in Southern California from 1972 to 2000, and is now distributed over the Internet. It has featured numerous interviews with famous authors of science fiction and fantasy, in addition to luminaries of the scientific community. The program was originally hosted by Mike Hodel. Harlan Ellisonwas a regular host for a time in the mid-1980s, as well as J. Michael Straczynski. The show is now hosted by Warren James. On the website, in addition to new programs, there is an extensive archive of older shows featuring interviews with popular authors, including Terry Pratchett, Larry Niven, Laurie R. King, Frank Kelly Freas, and Neil Gaiman.

This week instead of an interview on this or that facet of our Late Capitalist crisis you'll get the next lecture for the Diet Soap Philosophy Workshop on Hegel. This lecture takes the form of a conversation with my son Benjamin about Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as well as two films by the director David Fincher. We discuss "the Game" and "Fight Club" in an effort to understand SenseCertainty, Perception, and the force of the dialectic. Whether we arrive at self-consciousness by the end I can't say, however we do end up shooting ourselves in the face. I want to thank all the current members of the Diet Soap Philosophy Writers Workshop as well as Terry Tapp who donated to the podcast. If you'd like to join next week's workshop, which so far is mostly just a two hour Talkshoe conversation on Hegel as well as membership to a secret Facebook Group, please become a subscriber. I have eight spaces open for paying members, and three spaces open if you feel you can't afford to pay but want to join in. Donations of $6 or more entitle you to a copy of my novella Wave of Mutilation (and I'll continue on reading that book on the podcast if anyone asks me to) and subscribers to the workshop will also receive a copy of that book while supplies last. Next week I hope to be able to put together a podcast on Lefebvre and the Production of Space, however I am currently rewriting that novel for Tor that has been in the works since, hell, 1968 maybe? I promise to put something up next week, something other than another Rick Roderick lecture, and soon we'll be back to the regular flow.