Newsletter v.3.3 | Getting Ready for the Seminar

Hello everyone,

Things are busy. (Big surprise, right?)

I’m getting ready to teach a seminar on doing psychotherapeutic/psychoanalytic work with individuals in the modern-day mental health systems. The seminar will last for eight weeks, and the first text the group will be reading and discussing is The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects by Mari Ruti. After that, we will be reading Necropolitics Achille Mbembe. They are both books I’ve not taught before, so I need to do a decent amount of prep work, but it is prep work that I enjoy doing.

However, because I’ve got a lot to do this is going to be a short newsletter.

Podcasts:

The Todd McGowan interview on InForm continues to be super popular! I’ve started to reach out to some other psychoanalytic thinkers who would be great guests on the show. I have no idea if they will have the time or the interest to come on, but if they do, I think listeners will be in for some real treats.

Writing:

Since launching [S][J][P], I’ve taken to posting a few short things that have gotten my attention almost every day.

The posts on [S][J][P] are short reads, very much in the style of Kottke and Daring Fireball. Here is a picture of some recent posts that shows the time it takes to read them along the right. (When there is no time listed, it should take less than one min to read the post.)

Here are a few that I think people who are subscribers to this newsletter would get a kick out of:

If you like this sort of thing, you can check [S][J][P] on the web, or subscribe to the site’s RSS feed. (As I said last week, I’m a gigantic fan of RSS!)

Ghosts of my life:

Earlier this week I heard the REM song Nightswimming. This song is beautiful, and it whenever I hear it I have a reverie experience that transports me back to when I was freshman and sophomore in high school…

The mid-1990s seems both so far away and so close. Since hearing Nightswimming I’m more aware that time (life) goes by so fast, and I worry that I’m wasting too much time on things that don’t matter that much.

Living in the Jackpot:

From the Axios story Institutionalizing Trumpism.

Republican officials are rendering an unequivocal verdict: They want to cement former President Trump's politics and policies into the foundation of the GOP for many years to come.

Why it matters: The debate over Trump's post-election hold on the GOP is over — it has gotten stronger since the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.

House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney, a Trump critic, is expected to get booted from leadership next week for saying Trump's claims of an illegitimate Biden victory are lies and destructive.
Trumpian voting restrictions like Georgia's are now being debated in Texas, Florida, Arizona, Iowa and other states.
The Trump positions on trade and immigration — both of which broke with Bush-era orthodoxy — are now the Republican positions.

There is more evidence in the story than what I quoted above.

This is alarming.

Fin:

That will be it for this week. Back to reading the last few chapters in Ruti’s The Ethics of Opting Out.

Till next time: Make glorious mistakes!

—N