Starting Sixty Days and Counting, Chapters 21-24

Again we ask the big questions:

Why are we doing this?

When does Frankie say, "relax"?

What if the 14 multinational corporations standing on each other's shoulders wearing an American flag overcoat that claim to be the USA suddenly took off the overcoat?

We have some pre-Uvalde, post-Obama thoughts about Phil Chase's idea that America is the "hope of the world," as well as housing precarity, plastic(!), hiding things in forests, and total information awareness. We don't achieve total information awareness in this episode, but hopefully we're getting close!

(This was recorded on May 15.)

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First, the name of the Buddhist climate activist who self-immolated in front of the Supreme Court was Wynn Bruce. Matt forgets his name when he mentions him, but everyone should know him.

In this episode, we finish volume 2 of Green Earth, discussing "The Cold Snap," "Always Generous," "Leap Before You Look," and "Primavera Porteño"-- in a very freewheeling manner, it must be said!

We talk about the gap between knowing and acting, seeming and being. And ponder the following questions:

Are elections meaningful? 

Is Frank's brain injury the cause of his indecision?

Is the Khembali exorcism ceremony real?

Which of them are theater?

Paranoia, bourgeois individualism, coping, illusion, co-imagining trauma and the everyday, living a whole life--big themes in this episode!

We also mourn the passing of Hilary's cat and frequent podcast drop-in Louise, and look forward to the utopia of feline immortality under communism.

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NOTE: This episode was recorded in early April.

In this episode we focus on “Is There a Technical Solution?,” “Autumn in New York,” and “Optimodal.”

But first we spend some time (as usual) lamenting the state of the world, especially the plight of the unhoused from Maine to Chicago. We decide private property should be abolished, which is also one of the best takeaways from Eric Holthaus’s The Future Earth. We also curse Barack Obama for what the Obama Center is doing to the South Side of Chicago. A bad guy, actually!

This leads us into thinking about public space and the commons, which takes us back into Green Earth and Frank’s experience living in a tree in Rock Creek Park. Here, outdoor spaces have become something more than what they were before the flood and the freeze. In the park, with Frank, the bros, and the frisbee golfers, we can find the novel’s speculative kernel, taking us outside the question of whether science can become political and whether politics can be reconciled to science.

We talk about home and habits, how the everyday lives of the characters are so partitioned and look for the things that hold Frank’s life together, one of which is the economy, indebtedness, insurance–ironically the very thing that, in the novel’s A-plot, may force the world to change course. The uninsurability of property in the face of catastrophic climate change may force capital into a different direction. In this way, Green Earth provides an actuarial imagination that gives a different relationship to the future, in ways that KSR will continue to develop in New York 2140 and The Ministry for the Future.

Meanwhile, Phil Chase is doing his Wizard of Oz routine, and Matt and Hilary reflect on what it looks like when our politics is centered on charismatic leaders. Being beholden to a pseudo-magical figure and the hierarchies and dependencies entailed by that arrangement don’t lend themselves to having a better democracy. Even Frank’s relationship with the bros seems to be one of liberal benevolence, which they do not fail to call him on.

We critique Chase’s speech calling on America to fulfill its “historical destiny” and put pressure on the possibility of threading the needle between the U.S. being a world leader without being hegemonic, “inventing permaculture” without engaging in imperialism. Can we reconcile the idea of the nation-state with the idea of a global civilization? What does “culture” mean in a borderless world?

The whole notion of “permaculture” is a weird one–isn’t culture constantly changing?

The section ends with some hints toward the need for a new global religion, with Frank dipping his toe in Emerson (and then getting beat up).

Hilary pulls a switcheroo, picks a bone with Donna Haraway, demands action, and Matt plugs Tokyo Vice.

It’s all happening.

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In this episode we talk about the first three chapters of Fifty Degrees Below, "Primate in Forest," "Abrupt Climate Change," and "Return to Khembalung."

We discuss the way this novel works within the mode of realism and look for areas where it pushes against that mode to find possibly utopian, possibly fantastical, alternatives. Our focus here is on comparing what we regard as the novel's two main characters, Frank and Charlie, and the way they are negotiating the "new normal" they find themselves in. They each seem to resist the new at the same time they are struggling to build it, whether that be in legislation (writing the book of the future) or in a treehouse (a Swiss Family Robinsonade). We talk about genre, truth claims, rewilding, and lama-grooming.

We'll be back in a couple weeks with our discussion of the next three chapters "Is There a Technical Solution?" "Autumn in New York," and "Optimodal."

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In this episode we talk about the second half of the first volume of Green Earth, Forty Signs of Rain from "Athena on the Pacific" to "Broader Impacts."

We're back! This season we're tackling Green Earth, KSR's revised, single-volume edition of the Science in the Capital trilogy. The trilogy was originally published from 2004 to 2007. Green Earth was put out in 2015.

In this first episode we discuss the (un)likability of the novel's main characters, and the way the book seems to set the table for KSR's agenda for his following novels, particularly Shaman, 2312, New York 2140, and The Ministry for the Future. We talk about how Green Earth feels very much a Bush-era book, when it was still possible to believe that the main impediment to addressing climate change was anti-science attitudes that had infested an entire party in American politics, before the Obama era revealed that the real problem was far deeper, including obviously capitalism itself, but also something far more intractable, an approach to reality that was impervious to "just the facts" or "trust science" platitudes.

One thing Green Earth does that feels very of its moment as we read it from 2022 is its attempt to make palpable the presence of climate change in everyday life. In the early 2000s, it was still possible, on an exceptionally hot day, to joke casually about "global warming," without actually feeling what that meant. From today's perspective, when fires, floods, hurricanes, tornados, bomb cyclones, heat waves, polar vortexes, et al. hit with unprecedented regularity, that attitude feels like it comes from a place of (for lack of a better word) privilege. Green Earth attempts to make those events felt by a very specific kind of historical (fictional) subject: the hyper-productive, uber-educated, scientist-bureaucrat, engaged in the banalities of the everyday in the fields of both domesticity and national politics. What is it like for a person who is raising a child and running a household, and might, at a moment's notice, be face-to-face with the President, to experience climate change firsthand? In part what we see here is KSR's attempt to bring what he had developed throughout the Mars Trilogy home--to Earth, to everyday life, to the mundane, to the United States. In taking the energies of the Mars Trilogy and localizing them, Green Earth feels like a hinge moment in his writing, while still pursuing familiar questions and concerns: what will shock someone out of inaction to action, what is it like to live in a body on a planet, how does politics happen, where are we in history, and how do we move forward?

We hope to be a bit more, shall we say, efficient with this book than we were with 2312, and we're excited to share our thoughts with you!

If you're curious, Matt and Hilary are also now published KSR scholars, having written a review for New Labor Forum, which can be found here. 

Thank you for the gift of your time, and we hope you enjoy this season!

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Our final episode of our 2312 season is here!

First, we talk about the topic on everyone's mind, the New York Times Crossword puzzle and how bad it is. We wrap that up around 6.5 minutes in.

Then, we reveal the topic of our next season, and it's....drumroll....GREEN EARTH! I know this delights many of you and disappoints an equal amount, and then the final third just can't wait for our mellifluous voices to lull them back to sleep. But whatever your reaction, we're going to dive into this 1000-page behemoth starting around February 2022. We'll probably, hopefully, have a movie episode in the meantime tide over the "true heads."

We talk then about resolutions that don't resolve things, closures that leave a lot open, comedy and the marriage plot, and the mode of the novel. Is this a novel? Is it an anti-novel?

We talk a lot about punishment, prison, exile, and the police. Genette reveals another side of Genette-self---and we find some prounouns attributed to "him"! ***ATTENTION STAN, ATTENTION STAN, THERE ARE STILL PRONOUNS ATTACHED TO GENETTE!!!*** We conclude that, in the end, Genette is not the noir detective, in that the inspector does not see Genette as implicated in the rot at the core of the system. Genette is not crushed by the resolution, Genette does not fail in victory. Rather, the Inspector is confident in the Inspector's [holy shit it's hard to write without pronouns!] correctness, righteous in the outcome of which Genette [*pant, pant, pant*] was crucial in bringing about.

We ask an important question: are there qubes in Congress now, and if so, are they of the Marjorie Taylor-Green variety or the Jared Golden variety?

Join us as we collapse some wave functions (make sentences) and make a podcast world.

Happy New Year, from us and Antonio Gramsci (https://viewpointmag.com/2015/01/01/i-hate-new-years-day/), and we'll see you soon! Thanks for listening!

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Back to hot opens, in another episode where we ask important questions like, “what is time? Is it just a number? Is a wristwatch like handcuffing yourself to time? What about neckties? Is it okay when Diane Keaton wears one? Should neurodivergent people join the CIA?”

We chit chat about the demonstrably untrue myth of progress in light of news from Antarctica, pandemic, and American political system, and Hilary bullies Matt into reading The Dawn of Everything. Matt would prefer to hang out and watch Seinfeld, the way social primates should. We settle the rules of subscribing to TIME Magazine before we finally get down to business at

18 minutes

When we start talking about the chapter “Swan and Pauline and Wahram and Genette.” This chapter weaves a bunch of strands together that don’t initially seem to belong to each other, in a way that’s poignant, playful, and action-packed. The team of investigators start to get to the bottom of what’s doing what to whom.

Should the world be more stable than your body? What does that have to do with the structure of feeling? Would it be better if we all lived on houseboats, like Joe Manchin, or would it be better if we all lived on houseboats, like (potentially) Sonny Crockett, or Clint Eastwood in Blood Work? (Matt was thinking of The Rockford Files, but Rockford lives in a trailer on the beach, not a houseboat. But that could be fun, too.)

In any event, we’ll only know in retrospect, just like the structure of feeling is only discernible in retrospect, from a position of difference, or loss, or absence, or mediation.

We end by noting the recurring idea of love as a paying of attention, and as a part of the gift economy.

One more episode (we think) to go!

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Hilary and The Good German are back! We're talking animals, qubes, and consciousness, embodiment and emotion, landscape and economic miracles, long stares of wolves (and tenured professors), utopia of gender, and lawn bowling with Virginia Woolf. 

(Most profanity and profundity has been edited out. For the book.)

Extracts (17) - 16:00

Swan in the Chateau Garden - 37:00

Quantum Walk (2)

Inspector Genette and Swan - 50:00

Titan - 52:25

Swan and Genette and Wahram - 54:25

Matt makes a fart joke with the longest set-up in history, 59:30-1:00:00

(Hi, NSA!)

Lists (15) - 1:11:25

Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Mobile - 1:13:45

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Hello again! First a massive apology for taking so long to get this episode out. As Matt explains in the opening, this was relatively unavoidable and not intentional, and we hope to finish our discussion of 2312 by the end of the year. As you’ll hear, the audio quality of the recording presented big problems for Matt, not an audio engineer, for making a listenable episode. He’s done his best!

In this episode we discuss chapters Extracts (15) to Lists (14), with characteristic rambling, long-windedness, and propensity for spoilers that you’ve grown to know and love. We talk about piloerection (it’s when your hair stands on end, weirdo), nature vs. culture, science vs. art, mammalness, revolution, and playful unresolvability.

Thanks for listening! We hope to be back soon!

30:30 – Extracts (15)

34:30 – Lists (12)

35:30 – Swan in Africa

45:30ish – Swan and the Wolves

56:30 – Lists (13)

58:30 – back to Swan and the Wolves

1:12:45 – Extracts (16)

1:24:20 – Wahram and Swan

1:34:25 – Lists (14)

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