2312 Episode 13: "Swan and Pauline and Wahram and Genette," and Diane Keaton and Joe Manchin and Sonny Crockett and Jerry Seinfeld

Marooned! on Mars with Matt and Hilary

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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Music by Spirit of Space