Zero Squared

Carl Freedman is the guest this week and we discuss his book The Age of Nixon which came out from Zero Books in 2012. The iconic Grand Master of science fiction Samuel R. Delany blurbed the book. He wrote: Nixon continues to fascinate us, and to haunt our dreams, even these many years after his death. Carl Freedman's compelling book takes the full measure of Nixon the man, Nixon the media image, Nixon the myth, and even Nixon the ideal type, the quintessential expression, and the most capacious representative of the political and economic system under which we continue to live today. I should mention again there are two new Zero Books titles coming next month: Rebel Rebel by Chris O'Leary and No More Heroes by Carl Neville. Chris O'Leary's book Rebel Rebel is a big book on David Bowie, O'Leary runs a blog called Pushing Ahead of the Dame about David Bowie, and he'll be a guest on Zero Squared soon. In this episode you'll be hearing the from Bill Murray, Steve Allen, David Frye, and former President Richard Nixon. You'll also hear the piano music of Richard Nixon, and a clip from Futurama. The music you're listening to right now is Jo Ann Castle on the Lawrence Welk Show playing Piano Roll Blues as heard through the dialectic but in just a moment you'll be listening to Carl Freedman and I discussing the Age of Nixon.

C Derick Varn is the guest this week. Varn is a reader at Zero Books, a University lecturer and teacher currently living in Mexico, and my co-host on the Pop the Left podcast. In this episode of Zero Squared we briefly discuss his new podcast Symptomatic Redness and then discuss the notion of Cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxism is, as Varn puts it, a concept and misunderstanding held by paleo-conservatives and fascists, it's the term the far right deploys to describe a mishmash of often contradictory thinkers and concepts, including thinkers from the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Lukas, and late 20th century feminist thinkers and “stand point” epistemologists. There are several titles in production now for April. Eugene Thacker has two more Horror and Philosophy books coming after his success with “In the Dust of this Planet,” and Justin Barton's book “Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future” is due out as well. Barton's book suggests that the future is always alongside us, sometimes closer, sometimes further away, which I guess means that all six titles due out in April are, in a sense, already here. You'll here the voices of Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Rick Roderick, Suey Park, Laurie Penny, Nikita Kruschev, and Che Guevara. You'll also hear the music of Theodore Adorno, reedited sounds from Mungo Jerry's hit “In the Summertime,”some Calliope Music, as well as the theme from Rick and Morty as run backwards through the dialectic. At the start of the podcast you'll hear a few minutes from a youtube video about the Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism, but it doesn't last too long.

James Morrow is the guest this week. Morrow is a novelist and literary science fiction writer whose most well known work is probably the novel Towing Jehovah and this week we discuss his newest book, out from St. Martin's Press, Galapagos Regained. Publisher's Weekly described this new novel as "a comic blend of Victorian science colliding with Christian faith as greedy folks enter the Percy Shelley Society’s “Great God Contest” to win a hefty cash prize." And in this episode we discuss atheism, humanism, Darwin as well as the death of God, Peter Rollins, Slavoj Zizek (of course), and the difference between symbolism and allegory. In podcast news Jasun Horsley has set sail and taken his liminal corner into its own space and own feed. His new podcast is called the Liminal Criminal. News from Zero Books includes the recent publication of three new titles: Horsley's "Seen and Not Seen," David Winter's "Infinite Fiction," and Phil Knight's "Strangled." Strangled is about the punk band The Stranglers. These three titles arrived on January 30th. The music in this episode includes musical doodles from Dan Lett, a work in progress from Nik Walton, and the music from a 1970s Doctor Pepper advertisement. You'll hear Pete Rollins, a man from a question and answer segment at a Zizek lecture, the death of God theologian Thomas Altizer, Mikey from the Life Cereal advertisementand Negativland's first album Negativlandcirca 1980.

Ashley Frawley is the guest this week. Frawley is a lecturer at Swansea University, her book "The Semiotics of Happiness" is coming out from Bloomsbury in February, and we discuss how happiness was made into a political problem in the UK and how the aim of increasing "happiness" has become a substitute for real progressive politics. In podcast news, I'm hoping to double my workload. I've got a couple Pop the Left conversations in my archive as well as a few other archived interviews meant for Diet Soap, and if I can convince Jim Farris to do it after that long unannounced hiatus I'd like to carry on with the Double Feature Review. So here's the thing: Zero Squared has a feed over at the Zero Books blog and on iTunes, but if you search for Zero Squared on iTunes you'll find two feeds, one is the podomatic Diet Soap feed and has a picture of Philip K. Dick with his, cat and the other shows a painting of Jasun Horsley and a guy who looks like Seth Rogen. The guy is me and that feed is the Zero Books blog feed. So, here's what's going to happen…I'm going to phase out the old Diet Soap feed, the one with the picture of Philip K Dick. By April that feed will be gone. Most of you are probably subscribed to that feed. That's the podomatic feed and for a variety of reasons I think it's time to leave podomatic behind. However, while I am going to phase out the podomatic feed I'll be bringing back Diet Soap, Pop the Left and The Double Feature Review over at douglaslain.com. So, if you want to listen to all of it, to Zero Squared and everything else you can subscribe to douglaslain.com through iTunes or some other podcatcher. If you just want to listen to Zero Squared you can subscribe to Seth Rogen picture feed on iTunes or in another podcatcher. Again, my own blog douglaslain.com is where you'll find every podcast I'll do. This feed is slowly going away. Now, while I'm at it I should mention that there is one other podcast you might look for while you're on iTunes or wherever…actually there are two more. One is the Former People podcast. That used to be hosted on this feed and it features conversations about movies and literature. The other is Symptomatic Redness. That podcast is new and it features my co-host from Pop the Left interviewing theorists and writers from the left. The music in this episode includes pieces from Nik Walton, you just heard his piece Martha on the Move in the new intro, Dan Lett, and the youtube star Christian Grasslin performing a trumpet loop version of Pharrell Williams' hit Happy. You'll also hear a longish excerpt from a American Enterprise Institute talk by Arthur Brooks called "The Secret of Happiness," David Harvey talking about the Zero Growth economy, and Sam Binkley at the Department of Psychosocial Studies talking on "Happiness as Enterprise," and finally Jasun Horsley from his liminal corner will be heard, and the music you're listening to right now is Mark Hosler from Negativland mixing life at the Ghostprint Gallery in Richmond, Virginia.

The guest this week is Holly Grigg-Spall. Grigg-Spall is a women's health activist and the publication of her book "Sweetening the Pill" has made many, many, many people angry. Going against the common wisdom she argues that the pill is overprescribed and even dangerous to women's mental health. Music this week includes the work of Nik Walton. Nik is a contemporary composer from Portland, Oregon, a student of Tomas Svoboda, and a friend of mine. Nik is working composing theme music for this podcast and will be a regular contributor musically along with Dan Lett. You'll also hear a harmonica version of Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines from the you tuber MisterFinkMusic, clips from the 1979 sex education film Am I Normal, as well as clips from an interview with the 20th century birth control activist Margaret Sanger. The music you're listening to right now is Dan Lett's musical doodle Green Sharpie, but in just a moment you'll be listening to Holly Grigg-Spall and I discuss Sweetening the Pill.

Karl Marx and Hegel are the subjects this week as I talk to my friend Andy Marshall about Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy in general. This conversation comes on the heels of a Facebook row with C Derick Varn wherein Varn took the widely accepted position that Marx was a materialist and Hegel was an idealist, while I argued that Marx was too enamored with Hegel's dialectical logic and the unity of subject and object to really escape the Platonic Realm entirely. I'd like to thank Andy Marshall, Penny R, Reagan S, and Shane S, for their generous one time donations to the Diet Soap podcast, and to thank Andy Marshall, Ted F, John Spillane, Jacob L, and John L for their recurring donations. I urge regular listeners to the podcast to find the paypal buttons at dietsoap.podomatic.com. Also, the podcast is available via iTunes and I urge people who enjoy this show to consider leaving a review at iTunes in lieu of a donation. In the words of the Marxist Humanist Raya Dunayevskaya Marx's humanism was neither a rejection of idealism nor an acceptance of materialism, but the truth of both, and therefore a new unity.

Amber A'Lee Frost is the guest this week and we discuss her essay "Bro Bash" which was recently published in Jacobin magazine. The essay created quite a stir in twitter social justice circles as a criticism of Sarah Kendzior was mischaracterized and this led to false accusations. Here's a link to an infographic explaining the debacle. This week I'd like to thank Daniel A and David for their one time donations, and also thank Ted F, Jacob L, Andy Marshall, John Spillane, and John L for their regular monthly donations. And I'd like to urge regular listeners to the Diet Soap podcast to find the paypal buttons at dietsoap.podomatic.com. Also, the podcast is also available via iTunes and I urge people who enjoy this show to consider leaving a review at iTunes in lieu of a donation.

Due to lack of sleep and poor sound quality on a recording for the Avant Garde edition of Former People I am rerunning an episode of a now defunct podcast I created with my son Benjamin. This is episode three and we discussed Edouard Manet's "The Rue Mosnier with Flags," Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann's renovation and modernization of Paris in the mid 19th century, and the notion of a dérive. In the weeks to come on Diet Soap I will be running a conversation with Jason Horsley, David Blacker, Andy Marshall and I hope to talk to Pat Cadigan. I also hope to create podcasts that will track my progress with my book, "How to Watch Star Trek" which I need to write and submit to Zero Books. According to wikipedia: "The Rue Mosnier Decked with Flags depicts red, white, and blue pennants covering buildings on either side of the street; another painting of the same title features a one-legged man walking with crutches. Benjamin and I discuss this second painting in this episode.

The guest this week is Mark Fisher. Fisher is the author of the book Capitalist Realism and Ghosts of My Life (writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures). Fisher is also the author of an essay on the hit television show Breaking Bad for the New Humanist magazine and it's this essay which will be the subject of this week's podcast. I want to thank my subscribers Jacob L and Andy M for their recurring donations and remind you that if you'd like to support the podcast you can find the paypal buttons at dietsoap.podomatic.com. To set up this interview I thought I'd paste in an excerpt from Mark Fisher's essay: Who needs religion when you have television? On soap operas, unlike in life, villainous characters almost always face their comeuppance. TV cops may now be required to have “complicated” private lives and dubious personal ethics, but we’re seldom in any serious doubt about the difference between good and evil, and on which side of the line the maverick cop ultimately falls. The persistence of the fantasy that justice is guaranteed – a religious fantasy – wouldn’t have surprised the great thinkers of modernity. Theorists such as Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche and Marx argued that atheism was extremely difficult to practise. It’s all very well professing a lack of belief in God, but it’s much harder to give up the habits of thought which assume providence, divine justice and a secure distinction between good and evil.

The guest this week is the author and radical Mark Fisher. Mark and I discuss his recent essay for the North Star Blog called Exiting the Vampire Castle. The essay takes on the politically correct reaction to the comedian Russell Brand's recent call for revolution. Many leftists were perhaps overly skeptical of Brand, focusing on gaffes and slips rather than the content of his message (Brand admits to calling women birds, for instance.) Fisher's essay has caused quite an uproar, especially at the North Star Blog itself. There have been six essays written in response and there has been a split causing some editors to resign in solidarity with Brand and Fisher. My perspective, as always, is that Fisher isn't Marxist enough, meaning that his version of class isn't economic enough, or doesn't focus squarely on the way working people are exploited but describes class on the level of appearance only. Otherwise I find myself agreeing with Fisher. I want to thank everyone for listening to this podcast and communicating with me on Facebook, on twitter, and through my blog that's douglaslain.com. Also I want to thank Andrew Marshall, Jason P and Michael P for their one time donations and also thank Andrew Marshall, Ted F, John L, and Jacob L for their continual monthly support.

Professor and author Timothy Morton is the guest on this week's podcast and we discuss his new book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Kim Stanley Robins (author of the Mars trilogy) blurbed Morton's book as follows: In Hyperobjects, Timothy Morton brings to bear his deep knowledge of a wide array of subjects to propose a new way of looking at our situation, which might allow us to take action toward the future health of the biosphere. Crucially, the relations between Buddhism and science, nature and culture, are examined in the fusion of a single vision. The result is a great work of cognitive mapping, both exciting and useful. To come on the podcast: Interviews with Noelle McAfee (friend of Rick Roderick), C Derick Varn, Andy Marshall, and many others. This week listen for a message about Paul McCartney.

This month's Pop the Left features a conversation about Henry Flynt's lecture "An Autopsy of the Left." The conversation, as is typical, wanders, and in the end Varn and I end up mentioning the difficulty of escaping from our current ideology. Henry Flynt is a musician, a member of Fluxus, and the last Communist standing. I wrote to him and asked him onto the podcast, but this email met with scorn and ridicule, which was really too bad. If you know Henry Flynt please tell him that I did not mean to insult him when I called him a commie. For your edification here is a definition of Fluxus as lifted from wikipedia: Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "flow, flux" (noun); "flowing, fluid" (adj.)[1]—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning, architecture, and design. Fluxus is sometimes described as intermedia. In this episode you'll here a song inspired by the Philip K. Dick story "The Electric Ant" and a clip from "The Thirteenth Floor." Here's an essay I wrote for Tor.com about both the short story and the movie.

The guest this week is a university lecturer, a poet, and my co-host on Pop the Left. I tapped C Derick Varn to come on so we could discuss the recent Chomsky/Zizek feud. For those of you who haven't been following the debate let me expose you to it: Noam Chomsky on Zizek: What you’re referring to is what’s called “theory.” And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing–using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying. Jacques Lacan I actually knew. I kind of liked him. We had meetings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential. Slavoj Zizek on Chomsky: What is that about, again, the academy and Chomsky and so on? Well with all deep respect that I do have for Chomsky, my first point is that Chomsky, who always emphasizes how one has to be empirical, accurate, not just some crazy Lacanian speculations and so on… well I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empirically wrong in his descriptions in his whatever! Let’s look… I remember when he defended this demonstration of Khmer Rouge. And he wrote a couple of texts claiming: No, this is Western propaganda. Khmer Rouge are not as horrible as that.” And when later he was compelled to admit that Khmer Rouge were not the nicest guys in the Universe and so on, his defense was quite shocking for me. It was that “No, with the data that we had at that point, I was right. At that point we didn’t yet know enough, so… you know.” But I totally reject this line of reasoning. For example, concerning Stalinism. The point is not that you have to know, you have photo evidence of gulag or whatever. My God you just have to listen to the public discourse of Stalinism, of Khmer Rouge, to get it that something terrifyingly pathological is going on there. For example, Khmer Rouge: Even if we have no data about their prisons and so on, isn’t it in a perverse way almost fascinating to have a regime which in the first two years (’75 to ’77) behaved towards itself, treated itself, as illegal? You know the regime was nameless. It was called “Angka,” an organization — not communist party of Cambodia — an organization. Leaders were nameless. If you ask “Who is my leader?” your head was chopped off immediately and so on. You can find follow-ups from both of these thinkers here. I want to reiterate my thanks to everyone who donated to the Think the Impossible book and podcast tour through Kickstarter. I'd love to meet people who have been listening to this podcast, and if you're hearing this now and you live in NYC, Chicago, or San Francisco I do hope you'll turn up to these events. There are several sound clips in this episode. You'll mostly hear from Chomsky and Zizek, but there is also a clip from the National Geographic special Brain Games Apollo Robbins and perhaps a few other voices as well.

The guest this week is Daniel Coffeen and what starts off as a discussion of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals turns into a debate about the relative merits of Nietzsche's philosophy founded on immanence, affirmation, and positive will as opposed to Hegel's contradictory negativity. I'm unsure as to how to describe the difference between my perspective and Coffeen's except by analogy. Think of Coffeen's Nietzsche as John Cage, a composer who was more interested in discreet sounds than in relationships, whereas my version of Hegel would be Johann Sebastian Bach with his utterly rational fugues that can only be understood as melody set in oppositions like this: subject, countersubject, and episode. Consider these quotes: John Cage once said, “The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accordance with nature, in her manner of operation.” While Johan Sebastian Bach is reported to have said, "The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul." I want to reiterate my thanks to everyone who donated to the Think the Impossible book and podcast tour through Kickstarter. Very soon I'll be purchasing the Amtrak tickets to San Francisco, Chicago, and NYC, and posting my travel schedule online. I have three aims on this tour: First, to put together interesting events in each city and spark discussion on the themes I explore on Diet Soap and in my fiction. Second, to promote the podcast and my novel Billy Moon as best I can. Third, to take in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. There are several sound clips in this episode and you'll hear the voices of Rick Roderick and Slavoj Zizek as set to Wagner, John Cage, Sebastian Back, and music from the video game Portal.

The guest this week is the blogger and critic Foz Meadows and we discuss her ideas on Gender, Race, Detectives, and Space ships, ideas she writes about often at Strange Horizons, The Huffington Post, and her own blog called Shattersnipe. It seems appropriate to talk about race, racism, identity and inequality today, just after the Trayvon Martin murder trial, although the way we go about it in this episode, discussing the cast of characters on Joss Whedon's cult classic Firefly, and how people of color, gays, and women are represented in books about magic pirates and dragons, well, this may not seem very serious. I'll just say, in our defense, that our ephemeral pop fantasies are born out of the harsh realities that structure every day life. Still, I would caution listeners that what's most important to think about aren't the isolated details or the attitudes, but rather the structures and mechanisms that bring these attitudes into being. Every genre has its logic, whether the genre is high fantasy, a police procedural, or a real life instance of racial profiling and murder. My Kickstarter campaign was successfully funded this week. There were 87 backers in all and this week I want to thank Henry W, Derick Varn, Anna W, James G, Cathy K, Kurt O, Aquila H, Jennifer L, Daniel Coffeen, Ray P, my agent Kristopher O'Higgins, James K, John K, Reagan S, Ken Beare, Aaron W, Jason H, William C, Kwame A, Kara B, Jon M, Paul H, Akwhistler, Douglas Lain Sr, Mark B, and Maxx B. The Think the Impossible Tour will be starting in late August, right after my book Billy Moon comes out from Tor. I'll be producing podcasts at each stop and, hopefully, meeting a lot of you who are listening from San Francisco, Chicago or New York. There are several clips in this episode. There are clips of Richard Pryor discussing how blacks and whites behave differently at funerals, a clip from an About.com video about Gustave Courbet, a clip from a BBC interpretation of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, a bit of dialogue and the theme song from the Rockford Files, and finally, at the end, a clip from Doug Henwood's terrific program Behind the News. Henwood can be heard in conversation with Adolph Reed about a movie called The Help.