My Partially Examined Life co-host Wes has figured out how to use AI to generate high-quality transcripts, so those are being added to all our episode postings, e.g. check out the current one on Donald Davidson. To support my staying in the philosophy of mind headspace required for my new class, I’ve gotten the guys to read Dan Dennett’s Consciousness Explained with me, so we’ve got two episodes coming up on that, then one on mind-brain identity theory (U.T. Place, J.J.C. Smart). On Closereads, we relatedly just read an article about panpsychism.

PEL doesn’t pay attention to “seasons,” and neither does Nakedly Examined Music; we just keep on doing what we’re doing. At some point, Apple Podcasts introduced “seasons” as a way to keep things organized and (if desired) take a break between seasons, and so I retroactively deemed Pretty Much Pop, which had by that point existed for two years, as only then entering “season 2,” since both of my co-hosts were at that point leaving the show. The following year, I constructed ad hoc panels from a pool of people, and then with Season 3 (Sept. 2022), we’d pretty much firmed up the current, diverse line-up. Later this week we’ll be recording our first episode of Season 7 on Euphoria and other high-school shows (so it’s a back-to-school episode!).

The big change is with Philosophy vs. Improv: For Seasons 1-4, Bill Arnett was my improviser co-host, but he then left to go to grad school, so I’ve been working with LA improviser Mary Hynes for the last year. The premise of the show is that I qua philosophy trainer and the co-host qua improv trainer teach each other, but Season 5 with Mary was marred by the imbalance that I’d already been doing it for four years, and she hadn’t. So for Season 6, I’m making into an official co-host one of my favorite recurring guests, philosopher Jenny Hansen. So should I call the show Philosophy vs. Philosophy vs. Improv now? Jenny will get to be the improv newbie and will help assuage my reluctance to repeat philosophy concepts on the show that I already taught to Bill. More tentatively, we’re starting the year off with the idea of actually having an assigned reading for (some of ) our episodes: Various chapters from Martha Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (2018). Not only is Nussbaum a grade-A (in fame and quality) philosopher (whom I have interviewed), but this will give us a historically grounded way of exploring the self-help philosophy that Mary (along with most of the general public who has any interest in philosophy) is attracted to: Stoicism, but also Epicureanism, Ancient Skepticism, Aristotle’s thoughts on self-improvement and emotional regulation, and more. When we run out of chapters in that 500+ page book, I’m sure Jenny with her deep knowledge of feminist philosophy, pragmatism, etc. can help me come up with more ideas and texts for us to explore. The extent to which I’ll continue to use that show as my forum to connect with diverse guests remains to be seen.

I’ve always enjoyed using my podcasts as a networking too, and that is of course built into the premise of Nakedly Examined Music, but despite my many shows, we don’t have a really great forum for just talking to interesting people about what they’re into. I suppose this niche is already filled by virtually every interview show, though. I don’t have time to read many modern philosophy books: We periodically have a top-tier professor on The Partially Examined Life, but we’ve found that such an interview often interferes with our format, which is basically a reading group. Having the actual author there typically leads to them monologuing, and there are famous guests that we’d considered and even sought after before determining that were we to talk with them, we’d hardly get a word in edge-wise. This is not a bad thing to have happen on occasion, so if Zizek really wants to come on the show to talk about his latest book, we wouldn’t say no, but we’d surround that with some other episodes discussing his classic works without him actually present.

Now, I am on many lists for publishers and author-publicity-representatives trying to get me to interview people I’ve never heard of about their recent books, and I’ve tried to accommodate some of these via Philosophy vs. Improv, but it’s a bit awkward, in that we’re asking these authors who really just want to talk about their books to come on and instead joke around and act out improv scenes with people who have not spent more than an hour or so skimming through the book. Occasionally, this works out great, but I generally prefer (among our philosophy guests) those that do not come in with a specific agenda, i.e. to sell their book. I’d like to continue to invite on other philosophy podcasters and professionals, as well as more improv guests, but we’ll have to see how to make that work with the new reading-assignment element.

Thanks for catching up with me, welcome to all the new readers, thanks to Stephen West of Philosophize This! for referring most of you to me, and I’m sorry I don’t post these much more often. We’ll see if that changes

…

This is is a pitch to sign up for my new online class on Hegel, Sartre, Arendt, Schopenhauer, and all your other favorite friends. You can learn all about it and get the link to enroll at partiallyexaminedlife.com/class.

If you want to know approximately what these things look like, here’s a past recording (entirely unedited) from one of my other online classes. I give a little intro spiel, and then you, the participants chime in after having read the material or maybe just listened to the past Partially Examined Life episode on the topic. There are no tests, no papers… Just direct engagement with the ideas in a fun format open to all skill levels. Don’t just LISTEN to philosophy: Get into the mix yourself!

Hope to see you in the class!

Many of you are listeners to philosophy podcasts, but there’s only so much you can learn passively. For the past two years, I have been offering online classes: 9 or 10 sessions, given typically every two weeks, with maybe 8-15 people per session.

For three of these semesters, I taught a general intro to philosophy, and you can in fact virtually participate in the first class for that so you see exactly what I’m talking about: The participants gave me permission to share this (completely unedited) video with you.

I’m now teaching an equally introductory class (i.e. no need to have taken the previous one) focusing on political philosophy: Locke, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Freud, Simone Weil, etc. See the full list of topics.

I’ve set up three sessions this time to capture all time zones: There’s a new Wed. 9pm ET/6pm PT session specifically introduced for those of you with busy weekends or who have flexible days but live in Australia or Asia. There’s our classic Saturday morning (11:30am ET/8:30am PT) session, and also our Monday 1pm ET/10am PT; both of those should work for our UK/European participants.

Most of the current participants are repeat customers (which tells you something about the satisfaction people have gotten out of this format); I introduced a new class largely to avoid having to attract a whole new crop of people. But I’m eager to engage more of you in this kind of environment, so consider checking it out at partiallyexaminedlife.com/class, which will give you more information and link you to the page to actually enroll if you’re so inclined.

Thanks!

First, thanks to Stephen of Philosophize This for adding my account here to his auto-recommendation list, such that I now have ridiculously more subscribers here than I did as of my last post. Steve has been a guest on The Partially Examined Life, Philosophy vs. Improv, and even briefly headed up our short-lived Aftershow feature. Check out his appearances with us.

On the musical front, I just played my first live show in a year, which you can watch here. This is a new line-up with just keyboard and percussion beyond my singing/guitar stuff, and it really allows proper focus on the lyrics. The three of us have been rehearsing in this format together since January or so, but we we’ve been together for nearly two years, as we were three members of a seven piece band I was calling Manifest Lint (we recorded a live EP last year). We had gotten all primed to record our album as of last fall when things fell apart, so it’s taken until this weekend to lay down the first tracks of our new recording. Nine out of the ten songs are presented in that live video I just posted (and are all demoed somewhere or other on my Facebook page). It is largely a meditation on aging in the modern world. I anticipate getting some of my semi-famous out-of-state musical contacts to layer some things on after I add my own bass to our trio recordings. Virtually all of my many years of recordings are available to listen to gratis at marklint.bandcamp.com.

I’ve now determined the dates and topics for my fall Political Philosophy class:

Each class is conducted over Zoom on (tentatively) Friday 5:30pm ET/4:30pm CT, Saturday 11:30am ET/10:30am CT, or Monday 1pm ET/noon CT:

1. Sep. 5/6/8: Aristotle Politics

2. Sep. 12/13/15: Machiavelli The Prince

3. Sep. 26/27/29: Hobbes Leviathan

4. Oct. 10/11/13: Locke Second Treatise on Government

5. Oct. 24/25/27: Rousseau Discourse on Inequality

6. Nov. 7/8/10: The Federalist Papers (1, 10-12, 14-17, 39, 47-51)

7. Nov. 21/22/24: J.S. Mill On Liberty

8. Dec. 5/6/8: Freud Civilization and Its Discontents

9. Dec. 12/13/15 Simone Weil “The Needs of the Soul” from The Need for Roots.

I will open formal registration to start accepting payments for this (it’s $310 for the semester) within the next month, but if you’re already interested, go ahead and email me at mark@partiallyexaminedlife.com to tell me which all of the timeslots above you can attend, in order of preference, as I need to determine whether I’m actually holding four classes or (more likely) three or even two. If none of the times work for you, let me know that; I will offer a fourth section if there is sufficient demand. This page on the PEL website will be updated as things progress.

On to the podcast updates:

On The Partially Examined Life, our spring and summer have been spent on ethics, first with some readings about the human capacity for sympathy (Max Scheler, Edith Stein, and then David Hume), and then with a couple more contemporary accounts (Philippa Foot, Christine Korsgaard). We are finishing this unit up by now reading some of Kant’s lectures on ethics. These are more concrete than his famed meta-ethical works, telling us more about what we should and shouldn’t do, and not just in the abstract what grounds morality (though he does that too).

On Closereads: Philosophy with Mark and Wes, we continue to supplement our PEL readings, looking now into articles that Foot and Korsgaard by H.A. Prichard, Derek Parfit, and before that some Spinoza that Hume was reacting to and some Schopenhauer and Husserl that Scheler was reacting to. Unlike PEL, we don’t prep at all for this show, and the editing is very minimal (you can watch unedited episodes on video), so if you want to digest texts along with us, this the show for you.

On Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast, we’re about to release our 200th episode, which will feature the return of one of my cohosts for the first two years of the effort, Erica Spyres (of Broadway fame). I and my usual crew (NY Times film critic and philosophy/African studies prof Lawrence Ware, author and writing prof Sarahlyn Bruck, and British miscreant Al Baker) have had a great time talking recently about the Mission Impossible franchise, Andor, The Pitt (and other medical dramas), Sinners, White Lotus, Adolesence, and Severance. Today we recorded another one on the John Wick films (including the new Ballerina), and we’re starting to prep on Jaws in honor of its 50th anniversary. I also need to get reading on some Superman comics to prep for that upcoming discussion.

On Nakedly Examined Music, I’ve just released an interview I’m really excited about with Jorma Kaukonen, the amazing finger-style guitarist for Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna who at age 84 still plays acoustic (and some electric) shows constantly. He’s very into depression-era songs (e.g. Reverend Gary Davis), and so despite his many albums, my prep was a bit quicker, as I was pretty focused on his originals, which are sometimes only a few per album.

Another recent classic rock veteran I had on was Bill Champlin, the gravely-voiced guy from Chicago who in his youth headed Sons of Champlin, who were Bay Area contemporaries of Jefferson Airplane, but with much more funk to go along with the 60s progressive tendencies. I had a real childhood attachment to Chicago (the band), which I now see through the eyes of Bill and others as a pretty dysfunctional unit, so it was nice to work out some of my mixed emotions about the band in prepping for that one.

In the more “alternative” category, I interviewed (and then saw live) Dean Wareham of Galaxie 500 and Luna, who was a Harvard philosophy major before writing a lot of pretty minimalist but very nice-sounding rock roughly in the tradition of Lou Reed and The Feelies.

I recently interviewed another New Yorker, Willie Nile, whom you may not have heard of (he ran away from his major label in 1981 after his second album and took a break, though he’s been recording very steadily for 25+ years), but he was highly praised by Pete Townshend among others, and his tunes are real classic rock that deserve to be heard alongside Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, et al.

On Philosophy vs. Improv, we’ve released some very fun (and hopefully amusing) conversations with philosophy podcasters (the guys from Invasive Thoughts and one guy from The New Thinkery), the fellow who edits After Dinner Conversations (i.e. philosophical short stories), and we’ve gone into overdrive rapidly recording episodes to finish off our season, including a chat with comedians Mark Schiff and Daniel Lobell from We Think It’s Funny and (yesterday) one with Second City LA improviser Merry Mary Hynes. This spring we introduced a recurring improv setting, Empty Street, which is an idea I originally devised as a scripted audio sitcom (here’s the 2023 pilot I wrote).

My co-host Bill will be going to grad school in the fall to become a schoolteacher, so it’s looking like that show will go on indefinite hiatus in September. My mind is of course racing about possibly of changing up the format of the show to feature various improvisor guest hosts so that I can continue to use the format to meet new philosophers and comedians (Bill has given his blessing to my doing this), but I’m holding fast for the moment; it will help the class I’m teaching this fall to have one less project on my plate. We’ll be recording three more times before the end of August, which will bring us to the nice round number of episode 100, bringing back some favorite guests for a larger group for ep. 99 and then closing out with a reflective, two-man finale.

Thanks for reading, and happy listening!

I see I have three draft posts since I last put something up here, but for some reason have been getting some new folks signing up to this substack, so I thought it was high time I’d checked in.

The last time I attempted to blog here, I was just getting ready for the first Philosophy vs. Improv live show last August. You can watch it here. This was the first time I’d been in the physical presence of my co-host Bill, and it was a nice time, though performing at 6pm on a Wednesday on very short notice with no publicity to speak of was not the formula for generating a vast crowd.

That podcast has in 2025 slowed its output considerably, though we’re still having fun with it. We’ve connected with a couple of philosophers (e.g. Simon Critchley, who edits the NY Times intermittent philosophy section) and podcasters (e.g. srsly wrong, a fun political/humor podcast that I once appeared on) that have long been on my list. Last year around this time, I’d written a script (which, heck, you’re free to read) for a potential narrative podcast, but the folks I showed it to didn’t show much excitement, so I recently decided to repurpose its premise as a recurring “campaign setting” for improv. We discussed and debuted it, and have now used it for the second scene in our last two recordings, the first of which just went up.

On Nakedly Examined Music, I have been revisiting a childhood stomping ground, i.e. the band Chicago, which was probably my favorite band at age 12 (when the poppy Chicago 17 came out), in service of interviewing Bill Champlin, the gravely voiced guy who was much underused and apparently ill-served by the band. This is a guy who’d been constructing complex arrangements for his own band since 1965 and had been an in-demand LA session harmony singer (co-writing two Grammy-winning tunes for Earth, Wind and Fire and George Benson). Despite his bona fides, he was very gracious and even invited me to call him directly on his cell phone as our first contact to tell me about the podcast, which is something that’s rarely happened, much less with someone this famous.

That podcast has also slowed its output to one every 3-4 weeks, so the Champlin one won’t be up for a while, but I did just release one with a guest I’ve long had on my list and have been listening to since college: Peter Holsapple from the dB’s. Really sharp guy, and a great songwriter.

On The Partially Examined Life and also Closereads, we’ve been looking into the foundations of ethics in emotion/intuition. This has been written about by many people in many eras, of course, but we’ve used it as an excuse to get to a couple of early 20th century German phenomenologists that I’ve long wanted to read: Max Scheler and Edith Stein (just recorded on her yesterday for posting in May). We’re next going back to Hume (an earlier sentimentalist), and there are some other figures I’d like to hit before we’re done.

On Pretty Much Pop, we’ve kept up our every-two-weeks schedule and have covered a lot of good topics recently, including Bob Dylan, Saturday Night Live, and Severance. We just recorded on White Lotus and will be this week releasing one on the great Netflix crime show Adolescence. I’m currently watching The Pit to record on medical dramas within the next month.

On the musical front, my 8-piece band that I last wrote about became a 7-piece immediately after we recorded, and then by August of last year, members were regularly dropping out until we took a break for a couple of months and are now down to three of us, still tightening up 10 new (as in since the last album; they’ve all been in rehearsals for over a year now) songs to hopefully get them recorded soon. So I’m pretty darn good at playing them now, have a great keyboardist backing me up with creative parts, and that should be enough of a core so that I can then layer my own bass/percussion over it and then get some of my former compatriots and Internet musical friends to layer some bells and whistles (e.g. guitar solos, violin, other voices, etc.). I’d also like to get this new, shrunken acoustic unit out playing soon. Nearly all of the new songs are demoed as solo performances on my Facebook page, if you’re interested.

I’ve been teaching this semester, for the third time, my Core Texts in Philosophy online course, which will be wrapping up by the beginning of June, at which point I’ll turn to prepping for a new Intro to Political Philosophy course I plan to run in the fall, covering social contract theory (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau), other important theorists for the American founding (Montesquieu, The Federalist Papers), and some older (Aristotle, Machiavelli) and more recent (TBD: maybe Rawls, Simone Weil, and/or Arendt). I welcome your suggestions, and will definitely blog about this again when it’s time to sign up.

I’m honestly a little torn about it; I’m happy to have something more current be the representative of my new music, but it is live, i.e. a bit ragged. The new recording of “I Insist,” is pretty immaculate, but the other two probably don’t surpass my previous recording attempts. Still, the band is very well represented here, and I hope the new songs get recorded as well (or at all; things can always go wrong).

As folks who follow PEL probably know, we put out a book at the end of April, and I think our editor Chris Sunami who put it together has hit on a really great method for taking our transcripts and shortening and rearranging them to make them into something really fun to read, so this is a great introduction for people who might not know about that podcast or be comfortable reading philosophy, but also a great souvenir for long-time fans. I used it myself recently to help prep myself for our return do Daoism via my favorite Daoist, Zhuangzi; we’ve now posted four weeks of discussion of that. To hear us (including Chris) all talk about the book, check out this special discussion.

One of those Zhuangzi recordings served as the formal launch of the public feed of my fifth podcast, Closereads: Philosophy with Mark and Wes, which now has a home at closereadsphilosophy.com. This has been a project I’ve been recording weekly with Wes Alwan since last August, where we purposely do not prepare, but just grab some text and start in on it, generally reading a paragraph, talking for a while about it, reading some more, etc. So we now have almost 50 recordings, all stored on our Patreon site, but we wanted a way for the cheapskates to still be able to hear us via normal podcast apps, and a proposal from the Evergreen Podcast Network (who insisted on reworking our logo) motivated us to create a public version of the feed, which will in part be re-issuing ad-laden versions of the discussions we previously released on YouTube, but interlaced with some newly recorded things, and we’ll be publicly releasing some parts that were previously only for supporters. We’re still recording new Closereads episodes every week, however, not all of which are going immediately in this new feed, so I’m in effect managing a sixth podcast feed, as we have the current Patreon Closereads and the lagging public feed. These should synchronize by the end of summer, at which point we’re trying to figure out how to proceed such that we’ll have a weekly public release but still have material to reserve for the supporters, all without substantially increasing the time we record.

I’ve recorded some exciting Nakedly Examined Music interviews of late, but for various reasons have slowed my release schedule a bit. I hope to release this week my interview with the amazing Richard Thompson, and I have two more in the can already to post over the following month. One interesting twist is the introduction of topical discussions with multiple past NEM guests; I released the first of these in late April, about more programmatic vs. intuitive ways of writing music. I periodically get pitches to feature guests that have already been on the show before, and doing more of these would allow me to accommodate those requests while not having to prepare as much for an episode. It’s actually just a new packaging of what I was doing in the music category for Pretty Much Pop, now that on that show I’m using the same co-hosts for every episode.

Speaking of Pretty Much Pop, we’ve been on a post-apocalyptic binge, recording first on Fallout, and we’ll release our recording next week on the Planet of the Apes series and are recording later this week on the Mad Max franchise, so that’s a lot of fiction about what’ll happen if Trump wins again (kidding)!

We’ve had some great guests of late on Philosophy vs. Improv, including David Peña-Guzmán from the more youthful philosophy podcast Overthink, and a couple of hosts of new-to-me improv podcasts, “Those Who Aunt” and “Hitchhikers and Appetizers.” In the latter case, I actually got to be a guest on their show too, though my appearance will apparently not see the light of day until their whole season drops at once, perhaps at the end of the summer. I played an alien Socrates clone from a planet that perpetrates philosophy scams a la Scientology.

Actually, I am prepping with my ears as I write, as within 30 minutes here, I’m scheduled to talk to the great Graham Parker. If you’re not familiar, he’s a British singer-songwriter who started in the mid ‘70s. Very much in the Bob Dylan vein, with some Bruce Springsteen early on (Bruce actually guested on one of his albums). He’s often confused with Elvis Costello, and they’ve shared some backing musicians over the years, but whereas Elvis veered into, e.g. jazz experiments with Burt Bacharach and playing the Lennon part in co-songwriting with Paul McCartney, Graham has stayed pretty consistent (though eclectic), pumping out many albums and nearly as many live recordings. I saw him playing live solo in Austin in the late ‘90s. Here’s one of the tunes we’re about to talk about, a fun little swing tune with soulful melody.

In other Nakedly Examined Music news, I’ve released my interview with Bruce Hornsby, who is not only (like Graham) a great singer-songwriter, lyrically artful, always exploring new genres, and a deep thinker, but is a piano virtuoso to boot. Today I’ll be releasing my interview with Matt Piucci, whose band Rain Parade offers satisfying psychedelia with a slew of clever guitars on it. In two weeks I’ll release my interview with New Orleans cajun fiddle player Louis Michot, whose band Lost Bayou Ramblers does to canjun music what The Pogues did to Irish music: He makes it rock, and (the 21st century version of this) adds little psychedelic elements. His vocals are all in French, and he’s up for a Grammy.

On The Partially Examined Life, we’ve started recording a four-part series on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. On Dylan’s recommendation, I’m using a translation by St. John’s alum Joe Sachs, which for the sake of literal accuracy is not exactly a smooth read. So I can’t say I’m entranced with the text, but the first discussion went well, and Wes is very into it, so it’s good to see him having fun.

Speaking of Wes, our PEL spin-off Closereads: Philosophy with Mark and Wes has signed with the Evergreen podcast network and will soon (well, within a month or two?) be launching publicly. This was created to be mostly supporter-only, and we’ll keep a strong paywalled element, but we do want to have a weekly public release, perhaps closer to 35 minutes as compared to the 60-minute length of most of our current episodes, which will enable us to record two episodes in a sitting. We just finished a three-part reading of something by Al-Kindi, a 9th century Islamic philosopher whom I’d never read before. He’s considered the father of Islamic philosophy, a student of the Greeks, and in the text we read, the Stoics in particular. He’s a pretty fun writer in how over the top he his in condemning those who indulge in feelings of sorrow as being malignant, ignorant, stupid, and otherwise horrid.

Evergreen also signed Philosophy vs. Improv. Though I’m very happy with Backbeat Media who’s been getting us ads so far (run by an old friend of ours), Evergreen is starting a new philosophy channel which promises to get this podcast some much need publicity. I still don’t know whether this is my most accessible show or my most esoteric. It’s designed to be friendly to those new to philosophy, but of course my existing PEL listenership is not new to philosophy, and the intersection of those open both to nerdy philosophy and perhaps much more nerdy improv comedy is unknown to me. But I think many of our recent shows have been solidly funny. Let me know if you have any reactions.

On Pretty Much Pop, we released an episode on the films of Miyazaki, so prepping for that was pretty trippy. We then just recorded one on docudramas, including the films May December and Reality (about Reality Winner being arrested by the FBI), plus I watched some shows like Dirty John and The Shrink Next Door that dramatically depict true stories of people being victimized. This is related to the true crime genre, but we already covered that (with Lucy Lawless!) years ago, and I didn’t want to be so depressed again by that sort of exploitation.

The big drama in my podcasting efforts has been our audio editing, which has long been rather a single point of failure, with Tyler (PEL’s 5th Beatle) working on four of my shows (and sometimes Wes’ show SUBTEXT). So I’ve been researching backup editors, all of whom seem more expensive and less attuned to my particular needs. So if you have any recommendations in this regard, please let me know!

We’re also excited that the PEL book, which Chris Sunami (who’s been a guest on PMP a few times) is compiling by editing a slew of our old transcripts, is coming together. We’re using lots of our commissioned episode art by Genevieve Arnold, Chris Warr, and Charles Valsechi, and were able to commission a few new portraits for old episodes that didn’t have art. I’ll certainly let you know when a release date has been set.

We were also recently approached by a small British publisher who mostly works with fiction. However, the fellow has been listening heavily to PEL and wants each of us to write an essay about the influences between various philosophers and our own ideas, which he can then package together. This is a really appealing prospect, though we’ve not been able to turn to it in earnest and likely will not until the first PEL book is out the door.

Finally, my new Core Texts in Philosophy class has had its first meetings, and apart from one guy bolting for the door and asking for a refund due to the discussion part of the class (which, after all, is right there in the course description), the new session is immensely satisfying, and given that I taught these exact texts last semester, my confidence level is much higher this time around. We even have two students from the fall who have opted to join us for spring as well. All these texts bear repeated visitations, of course. Plato’s Republic this weekend!

For The Partially Examined Life, we’ve finally finished our five-episode run grappling with Kierkegaard. We’d had one episode about him back in 2010, plus one more in 2019, but had never really come to terms with his philosophy as a whole, which is peculiarly hard to grasp due to his use of various pseudonyms to explore various points of view without actually committing himself directly to any of them. So we knew him as a Christian forerunner of existentialism, but the bulk of our time was spent with Either/Or, a two-volume monstrosity that explores the aesthetic (artistic) point of view, which he was highly critical of, and then an ethical response to the aesthetic position. In our final discussion, we returned to his famed religiosity via Fear and Trembling, but it was difficult for us to directly connect his comments there with his recommendations from these earlier positions. Whereas the second half of Either/Or is a direct response to the first half, Fear and Trembling (published less than a year later!) more or less sweeps the pieces off the board to think afresh about how best to approach life, and his austere picture of the faith of Abraham is very hard to relate to how to actually live your life, though it certainly suggests that those who regard religious faith as a simple matter, an identity to attach to your everyday of living in the world, are sorely mistaken.

At my suggestion, we’ve now moved on to look at a much easier-to-read essay by Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery” (1933), which is influenced by Kierkegaard but is much more in dialogue with Sartre, Camus, and the other existentialists of his time.

For Nakedly Examined Music, I’ve released an episode with Jason Narducy, who plays with one of my musical idols, Bob Mould, as well as writing his own great songs (in a similar genre to Bob’s, i.e. tuneful with loud guitars). After some delay, I was able to speak with Bruce Hornsby and will release that episode in 2-3 weeks, and then I spoke with Matt Piucci, the lead singer and lead guitarist for a “Paisley Underground” band called Rain Parade, which just means they’re from Southern California and were part of a ‘60s throwback scene that happened in the early ‘80s (with The Bangles and Dream Syndicate). I’ve had one of the songs we discussed consistently in my head since the interview.

I’m currently listening to a bunch of cajun music to prepare with an interview with Louis Michot of the Lost Bayou Ramblers. I’ve often been dismissive in the past of “genre” music, whether it be blues or zydeco or reggae or whatever, as the songs tend to all sound the same to me, but I’ve shed some of that attitude, and this may be an exceptional band.

For Pretty Much Pop, I got to get nostalgic and re-visit The Muppets, sending me down a rabbit hole about the history of Jim Henson’s work and trying to come to terms with the continued existence of this property long after his death. We’re still settling our next topic, but I will likely be binging the films of Hayao Miyazaki soon and am also trying to catch up to the present with Dr. Who.

For Philosophy vs. Improv, we’ve gotten an offer to feature one of the cast members of the excellent TV show Jury Duty, but it’s gotten endlessly postponed, first until after the strike, and now a full additional month for no apparent reason. So we’ll see. Generally the pattern has been that we have plenty of potential philosophy guests, but not as many improv comedians as we’d like, and we’ve learned that while standup comics might still make good guests, their improv skills are not necessarily stronger than those of the philosophers. I enjoy making the show but have no real idea how well it’s going over, except when we occasionally surprise an overly serious PEL fan into being annoyed that we don’t give any kind of systematic, organized treatment of a philosophy idea. When I started the show, I at least had something of a syllabus of philosophical ideas I wanted to bring on in a logical order, but now more often the spirit of improv moves me to pick some topic off the cuff to fit the discussion, which is sometimes underdeveloped. So it’s not the most efficient educational vehicle, but hopefully would get some people more interested in philosophy who might not otherwise give it their time. The irony is, of course, that 95% of my audience is PEL fans (I think) who are already interested in philosophy, so perhaps this is doing more good in teaching people that improv is fun.

Happy New Year, everyone!

I assign reading selections as lists of priorities: Focus on these couple of chapters first, and if you have time expand to these others, and the rest of the work is bonus. So it sounds like it might be a mess, with some people absolutely unprepared and some philosophy nerds who are more prepared than I am, but it seems to be working well, and I’ve decided to teach again from late January into June, making sure next time to never have two classes on consecutive weeks, as that doesn’t give as much time for reading as I’d like.

I created three possible lists of readings for a new course which you’re welcome to look at, and if you might want to participate, let me know which one(s) look most appealing to you. I’m leaning at this point toward just repeating the same course I’ve been teaching to a new group, but if all goes well will plan to add a new one to the mix in the fall if not this coming spring.

I’ve been feeling pretty creative of late. My band has continued to work up a good set that will be unveiled to the public some time after the holidays, with new original tunes that will hopefully be recorded in some form in 2024, whether the live band persists or not. In addition, I’ve started recording more Chickie videos, a couple of which have recently gone up, and more of which will go up this week. This is a concept and character that’s been around for well over a decade, and I made a regular activity of it from Dec. 2015 to March 2016 on Instagram. I’m not really sure what the ideal venue for distributing this stuff is, and am not even sure when uploading to YouTube whether to click the “Is this content made for children?” box (I have not done so to date). If I get enough positive feedback on this round, I’ll attempt to figure some fun things to do with my new green screen with it and perhaps get organized enough to start answering more questions from actual people instead of just making them up. As they say: Like and subscribe! (Or don’t.)

In the PEL world, we’ve been reading Kierkegaard, having released the beginning of the series starting with irony, and we’re now in the midst of scanning his massive early text, Either/Or, which is written from the point of view of a couple of characters representing philosophical positions K. wanted to explore and critique. So the first of these, which we just recorded on, is the “aesthetic” or Romantic position, which was what people railing against “kids today!” in his time would be complaining about. All this seizing the day and jumping about according to your passions (whims) makes one very unserious, says Kierkegaard (implicitly), as well as unsatisfied and depressed. At least the God talk that K. is famous for is all just in the background as an implicit critique of the Romantic narrator. We’re just starting the second half of the book, written as a different character who is obsessed with rational ethics, so that will likely be not quite as fun as the first half, but we’ll see.

On Philosophy vs. Improv, we’ve continued to book exciting guests and most recently talked to Kevin Allison of the newly reunited comedy troupe The State. You may or may not recognize Kevin (who’s been more famous of late for his Risk podcast, which I interviewed him about for Pretty Much Pop), but you’ll definitely recognize at least a few of the members (see Reno 911, Party Down, Children’s Hospital, etc.). I’m thrilled to have had Kevin on the show, though I think I inadvertently tricked him into joining us. When I invited him last year, he expressed some trepidation about improv (which is of course not the same as sketch comedy or storytelling, his areas of expertise) and declined. When I brought it up again this year, he said something to the effect of “if we’re just conversing for an hour, sure,” as opposed to my having also asked him last year to join our PEL reading of a full Shakespeare play (which did feature another member of the State, Michael Ian Black). When after 15 minutes of conversation we burst into an improv scene, Kevin was actively surprised, so perhaps his definition of “conversing” did not include pretending to be a demented bellboy at a haunted hotel. Nonetheless, I think he had fun, and at least did not rage quit the Zoom call. The episode should be out within the next two weeks.

On Nakedly Examined Music, I’ve been prepping to interview next week one of my most famous guests yet, Bruce Hornsby (you definitely know this song). I had never heard any of his post top-40 material, but it’s diverse and complex, with some jazz (he’s a member of the extended Grateful Dead family) and interesting pop (like this newer, very pretty tune). Strangely, nothing he has sung since 1990 or so really sounds vocally much like the handful of tunes that he’s famous for, making me think that his original sound was more a result of how engineers electronically thickened his voice in the ‘80s than how he actually sounded even at that time (see also Duran Duran for the same phenomenon).

I’ve also released a very satisfying interview with steel guitarist Tom Heyman, and I have three other NEM episodes in the can waiting for my too-busy audio editor to get back on schedule (he’s my scapegoat; I’m actually happy to have enough backlog to not have to record as much over the holidays).

Pretty Much Pop has also generated a backlog, with recent discussions on Jewish comedy (featuring Daniel Lobell, who has a movie called “Reconquistador” about his doing a stand-up set in Spain and musing about how his Jewish ancestors were kicked out of there). It’s all very relevant given current goings-on in the world, and concerns about identity and racism also show up the Philosophy vs. Improv that I just released that mourns a bit for the humor of funny foreign accents, and more directly in the PEL episode now thankfully behind us (part 1 and part 2) that I spoke about in my last post, where we interviewed a leftie critical of identity politics and received some interesting and very mixed feedback. However, at some point I looked at our guest’s Facebook page, and the comments he’s received about his book have been much more hateful (from Trumpers), whereas we are small enough potatoes not to attract that kind of wrath from anyone.

Due to the editing delay with Pretty Much Pop’s “Fall of the House of Usher” episode (which will post before Jewish comedy), I today posted a free-form Fall Holiday Pretty Much Pop on out Patreon page, which is free without actually donating to us through that site, so feel fee to check it out if you want to hear my current (excellent and diverse!) crew musing about Thanksgiving films, Halloween candy, and other topics.

Finally, Wes Alwan and I are continuing our Closereads series, having just spent five weeks in a row reading David Hume.

On a personal front, we’ve just determined definitively that we’re moving my 92-year-old father from South Carolina to a facility right here in Madison in early January (right after the whole family visits him there), so we’re pretty much consumed with preparations on how to empty out and sell his house, move him (and two cats!) up here, and get his new place secured (done!) and furnished for him. This will be a big and welcome change, from a mere weekly phone call to (at least) a weekly in-person visit, and depending on the religious inclinations of his neighbors in the facility, I may need to become a weekly churchgoer (albeit at the Unitarian church, which does not have the baggage of most denominations, like being invited to believe in anything in particular).

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Immediately upon my return, the Partially Examined Life was scheduled to discuss Yascha Mounk’s book The Identity Trap, and while my original plan was to skip the discussion, I was able to get an audiobook version and listen to it in the three days before we interviewed him. It was a very spirited discussion and will come out on Oct. 30. (You can hear Yascha describe many of his theses in the book in this interview with Coleman Hughes.)

We’ve had mixed success with author interviews, given that the PEL format is designed for cooperative discussion, and the author of course knows much more than we do. We often (as with our recent Michael Tomasello interview) have the author only on the first hour of the recording so that we have the air time in the second half to do our usual analytical sniping without the author there to launch into more speeches recapping the relevant section of the book and/or getting defensive. In this case, we decided we were having a lot of fun with Yascha and invited him to stay, but as a result haven’t yet fully done our jobs. We hope to do this next week in a supporter-only third hour of the discussion, which will also be good to do because my co-host Seth who read the book wasn’t able to attend the interview due to technical problems, so we’ll have a chance to get his take after he (and I) listen back to the interview.

One reason I wasn’t planning on attending was a general discomfort with this type of book, which is a polemic against wokeness, which Mounk renames “the identity synthesis” to avoid the connotations of the word “woke.” He usefully lays out the intellectual origins of this synthesis, pointing out that it is not “cultural Marxism” as illiterate critics claim, but grows out of the legitimate work of several figures including Derrick Bell and Donna Haraway, both of whom we’ve covered on PEL in the past. Our takeaways from those figures were pretty modest: There are undeniable economic disparities that will not just disappear without positive (i.e. affirmative) action, and it sure does seem like a good idea to have members of historically oppressed groups involved in scientific decision making. Mounk, however, goes beyond merely summarizing the findings of these thinkers, but is interested in what their thought has been over-simplified into to create our public discourse. In these cases, the resultant slogans are that racism is permanent, with no real progress being made due to the civil rights era, and that no one outside of an oppressed group is in a position to understand the challenges that group faces, and so we need to simply defer to the judgment of those groups on issues that concern them.

I wouldn’t call these straw man positions, as individuals clearly have them (Mounk documents these), but they’re absurd enough to be unworthy of philosophical rebuttal. While we are not yet in a post-racial place in history, clearly things are not as bad as they were in the 1950’s; it’s not just that the same racism has just become more covert. While it requires effort and participation to understand and act on the concerns of oppressed groups, and of course there are limits to how well any individual can understand any other, suffering is not so private that we simply can never understand each other.

By arguing against these extreme positions that I as someone generally amenable to wokeness (who doesn’t want to be awake to the historical suffering of others?) do not at all hold, Mounk’s book comes off to me as basically a screed against current cultural trends (though a well researched, well written, measured, and entertaining screed!). I have mixed feelings about my podcast promoting such a book, and I’m not particularly comfortable having to argue about such widely aimed and so rather nebulous theses: for example, that the woke generation sees our differences as “more important” than what we have in common. Is that really what they think, or merely that we can’t merely emphasize what we have in common via color-blind/ethnicity-blind policies? Mounk goes out of his way to sympathetically express his opponents’ views, but given that his opponent is “the culture” widely, this is very different than considering the arguments of one philosopher against another.

I initially urged the group to invite a minority-scholar friend of mine so that intellectually and optically our podcast would not come off poorly, given that part of the book’s agenda is telling members of historically oppressed groups to get over their victimhood, which again seems like a mischaracterization of woke views, and is in any case condescending. That plan didn’t work out, and I’m glad I was on the call, but per usual I’m hoping people take the episode in the context of our whole effort: Insofar as we cover politics, we cover both left-wing and conservative figures, though certainly not in similar amounts. All the way back to the aftermath of the 2016 election, were were discussing Richard Rorty’s diagnosis that identity politics is a losing electoral strategy, and we’d do much better gaining support for widespread economic reform to help everyone in need rather than crafting policies to preferentially benefit certain groups, even if social justice demands this. Of course, we’ve tried and failed to pass many more ambitious economic plans (see Elizabeth Warren); those haven’t gained enough support either.

We’ve now turned our reading attention to Kierkegaard’s thoughts on irony via his verbose dissertation. Irony is one of my favorite topics to think and write about, but I’ve seldom gotten to engage with this via a philosophy A-lister. From what I’ve read so far, Kierkegaard seems to agree with my that the best kind of irony is not like sarcasm merely a matter of meaning the opposite of what you say, but a way of being able to experiment with saying things when you’re not quite sure what you want to say or otherwise don’t want to fully commit to something. I use this often in songwriting.

Speaking of which, during my Italian walking, I finally managed to musify a song concept that I’ve had buzzing around for over a year: My own wondering about whether I might have some kind of diagnosable mental illness and which one this might be. Feeling distracted a lot? Maybe ADD! Have to learn skills on how to read people? Maybe I’m on the spectrum. Definitely some highs and lows, but clinically bipolar? I may or may not actually want to know, and things have never gotten so bad that I’ve felt the need to seek a professional opinion. The song that came out of this is called “The Dao of Self-Doubt,” which has some musings in it on whether conceiving one’s behavior through the lens of mental illness might not be trying to abdicate responsibility, and whether this might not necessarily be a bad thing. The song starts out by contrasting forward movement with giving oneself a label, but it ends by concluding that these are compatible. Also, because I wrote this melody-first, in a foreign country without a guitar, the chords inevitably ended up being stupidly simplistic. Tradeoffs!

I am amazed that we actually did get philosophy A-lister David Chalmers to come play our goofy games on Philosophy vs. Improv, and even recorded video of the event. He seemed to enjoy it and immediately recommended some other philosophers to come on with us. His new book Reality+ is a beginner-friendly introduction to philosophy that seems very up to date regarding current technology, and in fact revisits classic problems of knowledge, ethics, and even theology through the lens of the questions of whether we might now be in a simulation and whether future and current simulation technology will rob us of our humanity by allowing us to live in what might seem like essentially dream worlds. To massively over-simplify, Chalmers concludes that a) We can’t know that we’re not in a perfect simulation, but that b) simulated reality is still reality, still meaningful, and objects we currently can interact with via simulations (in video games, Second Life, etc.) are real, albeit digital, objects.

For Nakedly Examined Music, I’ve been long preparing for an interview with Wreckless Eric, who’s sort of like a less commercially successful Elvis Costello, and so he never got to collaborate with Paul McCartney and Burt Bacharach, but instead after losing his record deal in the ‘80s produced some pretty weird, desperate sounding music and now channels some interesting Englishman-relocated-to-the-US sentiments. His work is now closer to that of two of my favorite musician interviews, Robyn Hitchcock or Phil Judd. Check out Eric’s song “Depression,” one of the ones that I picked for our interview, which was postponed from this week to Monday morning.

For Pretty Much Pop, I’ve been boning up on all things Exorcist and now turning to Poe in light of Netflix’s Fall of the House of Usher. Fun stuff! The episode I just released is on the show Reservation Dogs, which is really an exceptional achievement, if you haven’t looked into it. As is very rare on this entertainment-oriented podcast, we actually engaged in some political election discussion during our aftertalk, which while normal restricted to our very small number of Patreon supporters is this time included at the end of the public discussion.

For the Core Texts In Philosophy class I’m teaching online, I just finished a few weeks immersed in Stoicism and have now returned to the ever classic Descartes’ Meditations, which I appreciate more every time I turn back to it. Strangely, while my Saturday morning class has near-full attendance, my Friday afternoon one has shrunk to around half its original size. No one has yet demanded their money back, so I guess it’s proceeding well enough! I need to decide soon whether to attempt to teach the same course with new people next semester and/or pitch a new course to my current students that yet doesn’t require new people to have already taken the current semester’s course. A survey will be forthcoming, but feel free to reach out to me with your preferences, if you’d like to be involved.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for listening.

• On The Partially Examined Life, we are finishing our philosophy of language unit. We’re about to release an episode on Paul Grice, whose seminal 1957 article “Meaning” is a must-read for those interested in analytic philosophy. The group is then scheduled to interview linguistic psychologist Michael Tomasello (whose earlier work we already discussed) to talk about his newest book, The Evolution of Agency. I say “the group,” because I’ll actually be taking a vacation for that episode but will then be back to discuss Harry Frankfurt’s (RIP) famous and relevant 1986 essay “On Bullshit.” We’ll be supplementing it with some critical essays responding to or elaborating on it, and possibly also another Frankfurt essay, so if you any of you has ideas, please let me know!

• Per my previous announcement, my new Closereads podcast project with my Partially Examined Life co-host Wes Alwan has launched. Our headquarters for the project is patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy, where you can listen to several free-to-the-public episodes and sign up to hear more. We’re also recording video for all of these, which is ad-free on Patreon, with some episodes publicly available via a new YouTube playlist. It’s a very fun project, and we welcome any ideas for texts that would be amenable to that sort of line-by-line analysis, i.e. texts that get to the point quickly!

• For Pretty Much Pop, we just recorded on the films of Jonathan Nolan (Oppenheimer was better than I expected) and have now per my request turned to a show that I can’t get enough of: How To with John Wilson. It’s received a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score and is brilliant: short documentaries that set out to answer one question (e.g. how do I track my packages as they’re being delivered) and invariably end up somewhere very different (in this case, cryogenics, which is delivering your body to the future).

• On Nakedly Examined Music, I’ve been listening to the music of Tim Lee of 80s Mississippi indie band The Windbreakers, who connected a lot with REM, the dB’s, Let’s Active, and others of that ilk. Tim has released a lot of great music since those days (like this song), and I’ve been finishing his book I Saw a Dozen Faces… and I Rocked Them All, which started out as very inspirational in terms of someone’s ability to become a competent, respected rock guy through willpower and hard work, but then became depressing, as I’ve reached the part where he realized that his career was likely not going to go beyond a certain point and he needed to stop touring, or else his marriage would fail. Tomorrow I’ll be interviewing both him and his wife, who has been with him for his entire professional life and who has since become his musical partner, so I guess it had a happy ending!

• Relatedly, I’ve gotten together with a band four times now, with a line-up that may just work, playing through many cover tunes and my originals new and old. In addition to the new songs detailed by my last post, I’ve written two more songs which you can see me demo: “Headstone” and “David Simmons.” I’m also working on a song for our other singer Iris to sing, where for the first time she wrote lyrics that I’ve been working with her to set to appropriate music. The whole project should be very upbeat and fun.

• Today I’ll be recording a “fiscal year podcast retrospective” (meaning since last September… perhaps academic year retrospective would be more universally applicable, if less funny?) with my podcast editor Tyler Hislop to talk about how things have gone in the last year… some new milestones with music guests, a focus on a few topics (e.g. philosophy of law, German Romanticism, Chinese warring states philosophy) treated at length on PEL, the solidification of our new, excellent line-up of hosts on PMP, and on Philosophy vs. Improv, the new season will feature TEAM PLAY episodes (meaning one philosopher guest AND one improviser guest, each of them a returning guest, as opposed to taking turns with these types of guest) as well as (we expect) some bigger names: Our next scheduled interview is with David Chalmers about his new book Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy.

• I’ve started teaching an philosophy class on an entrepreneurial basis: Core Philosophical Texts, which as around 30 students divided between two sections. We just finished our second class, covering Plato’s Republic (the first sessions being on The Death of Socrates: Apology, Crito, Phaedo). It’s been a blast revisiting those texts and talking about them with eager PEL listeners who were willing to put down a substantial chunk of change to be online with me. So I’m grateful, honored, and would love to figure out how to keep this going beyond the September-December schedule over which the current class will run. By not working with an academic institution, I was able to schedule the 10 classes in a way that fits with my traveling, choose what I want to cover, not force anyone to take tests or write papers, and I could keep tuition affordable, since I don’t have to split it with anyone.

Since preparing for the class is essentially like preparing for another podcast, this would make six of them on my plate, which is a lot to do on top of still having a day job, albeit one that’s always been very accommodating of my schedule and no where close to full time, by my own design. Thanks for reading!

That Bandcamp site is now pretty up to date with my “catalogue.” Over the last couple of years, I managed to finish up and patch up several long-unfinished and/or never-before-released-in-digital form albums, and so I’ve now got 17 releases up there, at least half of which sound quite good, and all of which, I hope, have their charms. They certainly have a lot of love packed into them. Songwriting has never actually been a habitual activity for me; most of the daily melodies the pop into my head are nonsensical fragments praising my pets that I would not inflict on anyone (though last year I did record these for a couple of weeks on my phone and send every one of them to my sister as a form of comic torture).

But songwriting used to be the thing that I cared about more than probably anything else, the thing that I felt like I had to do as a central part of my life or die trying. It was also a central emotional coping strategy as I navigated my pre-married life, and the songwriters I admired were models for me on how to think and feel, moreso than the philosophers and novelists I was also being introduced to.

The short story: My college band The MayTricks became by the end of our 4-year-run a well-oiled machine with four very strong, distinctive musical personalities (though Steve and I hogged most of the songwriting). With some luck and different career choices (Steve had a conservative mindset and couldn’t see even trying to tour, and eventually I left Ann Arbor for grad school), we could have eventually gotten signed, with poppy/quirky tunes like “Wonderful You” and “Pure As Silk.”

I left for Austin in 1994 fully determined to create something marketable, which started “alternative” with songs like “No Mind” and “I Like Life” and with changing personnel got some more Texas (and funk) in the mix. The R&B element was retained when I moved back north to Madison in 2000 and started Madison Lint, which was stocked with professional quality players backing me up and managed to pick up a booking agent and some good will in town before falling apart in 2004, by which point I was 33 years old and more or less ready to retire from trying to “make it.”

I was fortunate enough to connect with a new musical partner to co-front New People from 2006-2013, finally producing albums with recording professionals involved that I didn’t feel like I had to apologize for. Matt was a great motivation for me to complete and present songs, a real force in challenging me to narrow my vision to what fit his well-thought take on likability, and he did most of the work in actually making the recordings (with his many guitar parts vs. my single bass part), despite my often wrestling for control in deciding what we would play (set lists, album order). But neither of us was up to the task of running a band as a business, and we made very little dent in the Madison scene, and Matt grew tired of our dynamic and lack of a vast, demanding audience.

During that time I was periodically recording either by myself or collaborating with PEL listeners over the Internet, which resulted in two albums worth of material. When the first of these was released, I fortunately had a friend who owned a meadery that was starting to have live music, so around 2016 I re-gathered some Madison Lint bandmates with some new folks to form an acoustic band that recorded my last album (made of about half new songs and half ones that had been hanging around for a while), which was released in December 2018.

Soon after that, some of those bandmates left, though there have been maybe half a dozen reunions, and though we’ve not met up for nearly a year, I never formally broke up that band. I really miss getting together regularly to play music, but I felt like I didn’t want to be just replaying previous shows (or we talked about learning a bunch of covers, which I’m sure would have been fun), so I felt like I should wait until I have a new batch of songs written.

Thus the point of this most self-indulgent post: To present/keep track of the tunes for the next album, which I hope to record within the next year, certainly.

1. Time Between: In 2021 I wrote a nice song about reconnecting with old friends, and 4/5 of my band reconnected to play two shows that featured this song: here it is live. (The other show was for my 50th birthday, incidentally.)

2. Advice from a Songwriter: The band next got together about a year ago, and in preparation for that I wrote an ironic tune about how you shouldn’t listen to advice given in songs. My modus starting at this point is to practice the tune until I could play it decently, record myself on my phone, and that’s all the demo the world will get. Here it is.

3. Spinning Roses: A mid-tempo song about death, written Sept. 2022. Watch it.

4. Brontosaurus: March 2023. Goofy, but easily the catchiest of the bunch: Watch

5. Voicemail from the Earth: May 2023. This one followed me around the most since it was conceived last fall and demanded that I finish it. Watch

6. In addition, I wrote a new final version for “Twitch,” an old MayTricks tune that was recorded particularly poorly the first time, so I’d like to put it on the new album. We played the tune in its newly extended form at the 2021 live shows. Watch

That’s all I’ve got for sure. I also wrote a couple of podcast-specific tunes, like “Structure of a Tragedy” from May 2020 about Aristotle’s Poetics (this could be the solo demo, or maybe just the finished solo song) and “Brave New World” from May 2019 (with a full solo-band treatment, very hastily recorded) which I don’t imagine would make it on to this new release, but anything’s possible.

So hopefully posting this will motivate me to get going and flesh out a couple more tunes from my storehouse of lyrics and/or phone-recorded fragments to complete and get on to laying down guide (or final?) solo tracks with my good microphones so that, for instance, I can get my daughter’s harmonies on them this summer while she’s home from college (she is amazing, and if I can think of a non-gross song to write for or with her that she could sing lead on, I’ll do so).

It was great when I recorded the album several years ago that included my then-newly-enlarged group of Internet friends. I also used the opportunity to reconnect with some of my past musical cohorts from Austin. Well, since that time (2015), I’ve run a podcast interviewing amazing musicians for many years, and now have multiple promo people whom I regularly correspond with that I can get advice from, so that if I actually finish one more album, I can market it property and maybe attach more minor-music-celebrity names to particular tracks, though I will likely record the bulk of it myself and with some trusted personal friends (some remote, some local). If any musicians reading this might want to be involved, do give me a shout!

I suppose I’m theoretically in a much better position than I’ve ever been to get signed to a (minor) label for a new album, but I’m not sure labels are actually a thing at this point. I will for sure have to pay for the album myself, and I’m comforted by the fact that many of the unquestioned professionals whom I interview regularly are likewise recording what some might still called “vanity projects,” i.e. albums they have to pay for which will no doubt not recoup their costs, much less let the artists earn a living from them. But this is the world we live in: I may have broken into the music business not through rising up its ranks but by bringing most of it tumbling down to my level, so that I as an occasionally lauded podcast host who’ve befriended some musicians who are already in “the club” may yet gain some access to said club, if only I can drag myself out of retirement ONE MORE TIME.

Instead, I’ve started recording a bit with my PEL co-host Wes Alwan to potentially create a new show focused on close readings of philosophical texts. We pick a bit of a text, probably one we’ve never read before, but maybe one we just want to brush up on or treat in more detail than we gave to it on the show. We read a bit, discuss a bit, read some more, etc. until we’re tired. These will likely be pretty short, and will include a video component. We’ve only done test recordings so far, but tomorrow should be the first “real one,” and we’ve decided to collect a few before releasing anything (except maybe to PEL $10 Patreon subscribers); this will likely only be available in audio feed form with a paid subscription to something or other, as we’re explicitly doing this to turn some of the time that we can offer beyond what our more gainfully employed co-hosts into philosophy-related cash.

If you’ve got ideas on what texts/passages you’d like us to tackle for this project, speak up!

Here’s part of the text I’ve written for the introductory episode, which conveys the point of this new podcast:

I started The Partially Examined Life in 2009. That is a deep dive reading group that I do with my friends, and while I of course highly recommend it, our discussions there can be easy to get lost in, especially for someone new to philosophy. Thus, this new podcast: Philosophy Gloss. In each short episode, I’ll take a philosophical concept and try to define and explain it for you. So it’s a glossary.

But of course, if you run into a term you don’t know, for instance, while listening to The Partially Examined Life, you could just Google it. You could ask your friendly neighborhood AI what it means and what philosophers have talked about it. So why bother with this podcast? Why not just get your hands on a philosophical dictionary and be done with it?

My hope is that given my many years digging around in texts across the philosophical spectrum, and my own unique outlook, I’m going to have a little extra somethin somethin to add, just for you. Give it a try, see if you find it useful…

Now, I’m going to try to make each of these episodes listenable without you having to listen to any others, but that’s not always going to be possible, because philosophic literacy is something that builds. So many of these first episodes are going to provide some foundation for the rest. As with any podcast, you might want to listen in order. But you can also scan around for episode titles you feel you don’t already know, or that you’re particularly interested in, and if in listening to one of those, I use some other word you don’t know, hopefully there will also be an episode on that, which you can flip back to for more information.

If you hear about an idea and want me to talk about it in one of these, please feel free to reach out to me at mark@partiallyexaminedlife.com.

OK, folks, so what do you think? Is this something I should bother recording some pilot episodes for? Does this podcast sound like it would add significantly to your philosophy listening experience?