Language, Music, Memory with Writer, Philosopher PATRICK HEALY

Language, Music, Memory with Writer, Philosopher PATRICK HEALY

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Writer · Philosopher · Independent Scholar

You have all the different languages interplaying with each other. Little scraps of Irish languages and idioms have stories that have been told, but how Ireland actually comes about as an idea, as to where the Irish come from. A lot of these kinds of debates are just placed, you know, in day-to-day conversation, and then they trail off. People start something; they trail off and might come back to it later. That phenomenon of speaking over each other, tales that are known and not known, I always found very interesting. It was literally like a radio that was kept on all day in the kitchen.

You would come in and out, and you would hear certain things, and you'd have to work out the context and the conversation and the speakers. In some way, one of the big personalities in the book is just a radio that’s playing, and some of these conversations are not actually taking place between characters in real-time. They're just snippets that have been overheard on radios.

The Art of Writing w/ Neil Gaiman, Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, E.J. Koh, Marge Piercy & Max Stossel

The Art of Writing w/ Neil Gaiman, Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, E.J. Koh, Marge Piercy & Max Stossel

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This episode explores the enduring power of storytelling to shape our world and illuminate the human experience. Writers Neil Gaiman, Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, E.J. Koh, Marge Piercy, and Max Stossel discuss creativity, resilience, and the power of words to heal and bring people together.

Travel, Literature & Identity with INTAN PARAMADITHA - Author of The Wandering

Travel, Literature & Identity with INTAN PARAMADITHA - Author of The Wandering

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Author of The Wandering · Apple and Knife
Editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets · Co-ed. The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas

The Wandering is a choose your own adventure novel, and the reader is situated in the shoes of this brown woman from the Global South. She's 27 and in a way, she is stuck with her life. She aspires to be middle class, but her job doesn't allow her to achieve this social mobility. In her condition, she makes a deal with a devil, a reference to the story of Faust and Mephistopheles, finally getting a pair of red shoes that will take her anywhere. But that means she will never be able to find home—that's the curse of the shoes. The title in Indonesian is Gentayanga, which is a word used to describe ghosts who exist in a liminal state.

ANIL SETH - Author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness - Co-director of Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science

ANIL SETH - Author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness - Co-director of Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science

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Author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
Co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science · Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program on Brain, Mind & Consciousness

This is a point in philosophy that the world as it is can never be directly apprehended by our minds. We are shielded from it by what's called a sensory veil. There are, for instance, no such thing as colors that are out there. As the artist Cezanne said, "The colors are where the brain and the universe meet." And color is, I think, a really good example because it is, in a sense, less than what's there because our eyes are only sensitive to three wavelengths of this huge electromagnetic spectrum, which goes all the way from x-rays and gamma rays to radio waves. And we live in a tiny, thin slice of that reality. But then out of those three wavelengths we experience our brains generate many more than three colors and almost an infinite palette of colors. So there's no sense in which our perception could ever reveal the world as it really is, that it reveals the world in a way that's very useful for us as organisms hell-bent on continuing to live and to survive. 

IAN BURUMA

IAN BURUMA

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Ian Buruma is the author of many books, including A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill Complex,Their Promised Land, Year Zero, The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism and God’s Dust. He teaches at Bard College and is a columnist for Project Syndicate and contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. He was awarded the 2008 Erasmus Prize for making "an especially important contribution to European culture" and was voted one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals
by the Foreign Policy magazine.

Ian Buruma · Public Intellectual & Erasmus Prize-Winning Author of A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill...
The Creative Process Podcast · Arts, Culture & Society

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Lexi Kayser with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Digital Media Coordinator is Phoebe Brous.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

ANTE CHENG & MATTHEW CHUANG

ANTE CHENG & MATTHEW CHUANG

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Cinematographers Ante Cheng & Matthew Chuang
Blue Bayou starring Justin Chon & Alicia Vikander

The search for identity is something I think everyone goes through in their lives. It’s a constantly evolving answer. I think all of us can relate to the sense of belonging and what is home. Alicia Vikander’s scene was memorable to me. One of the rare times I cried while operating the camera.

There’s not really many stories about people who look like me in Australia, so I was just making films. How do I be invisible in a way and transcend whatever I’m shooting? It wasn’t until I came to the U.S…it was the first time I had to think about me being Asian and my experiences and how does that relate to what we’re telling in this film.