Hugo House

The Hugo House is a crusty, inside-voices old house in Capitol Hill that teaches writing courses—flash fiction, poetry, journalism, etc. Last week I took a class called “Going Under: Successful Sumbersion in Journalism and Beyond.” Next week I’m taking “The Art of Interviewing.” You should too.

One-day courses cost about $94; 4-week courses are about $360.

http://hugohouse.org

School of Visual Concepts

If you want to learn anything about writing, designing or developing for the web (or print) and you’ve got limited time and budget, SVC is the place to go. All classes are taught by practicing pros, and the material is very practical and hands-on. I took a course called “Writing for the Web” a few years ago; I may be teaching a course this winter.

Prices range from $100 for a half-day workshop to $495 for a 10-wk course.

http://www.svcseattle.com/

Town Hall Seattle

I go to Town Hall for inspiration, and I regularly go by myself. I’ve seen Jonathon Saffron Foer, Ingrid Betancourt, Margaret Atwood, Gloria Steinem and more—at least one of these has cried on stage. One-hour lectures are held around 7pm in a grande roman-revival hall.

Lectures are 5 DOLLARS. Go support this awesome place.

http://www.townhallseattle.org/

Elliot Bay Books Events

The Elliot Bay Books Cafe is the only one in Seattle where I can work done, but I mostly go for the books and lectures. Famous writers are always giving intimate book readings in the basement.

FREE.

http://www.elliottbaybook.com/node/events/current

AIGA Seattle

The American Institute of Graphic Arts hosts studio tours, schmoozing parties, design contests, lectures by industry peeps, and more—all the time. I was a member for a while, and I liked the discounts and publications I got.

http://www.aigaseattle.org/

Seattle Arts & Lectures

I’ve never been, but their mission is to connect ‘people and ideas’ and folks like Jonathon Franzen and Wendell Berry show up there.

$15-70 for single tickets; much more than that for a subscription.

http://www.lectures.org/about_us/

Northwest Film Forum

I think I saw Art & Copy, Objectified and a handful of other internety movies there, but NWFF offers the best independent films and documentaries I have ever found in one place—the one where thousands of people get plastered on Willie Nelson’s lawn, for example.

Tickets are $9 and there’s cumin for your popcorn.

http://www.nwfilmforum.org/

The next time you watch a movie or a TV show, ask yourself the following questions:

- Are there at least two women in this movie?
- Do they talk to each other?
- Do they talk to each other about anything besides a man or men?

In another version of the test, an additional question—Do the women have names?—is added.

I didn’t spend a lot of time putting the test to work, but the hour I did spend piqued my blood pressure. A little labor over questions like these, and you’re forced to conclude that Hollywood is a long way off from creating complex, self-actualizing female characters with a wide variety of concerns—much less placing them in leading roles and building movies around them. Certain indie films and movies like The Kids Are Alright prove the exception more than the rule. And even shows that technically pass the test seem to fail; take Sex and the City, which is dominated by an overriding concern for men despite its smattering of career talk.

Duh me in the face if you must, but new iterations of little horrors like these still catch me off guard.

Anyway, here’s a good NPR story from 2008 about the test.

And here’s a video of a precocious young woman talking about it:

I love this quote by [Lacanian](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacan) philosopher [Slavoj Žižek](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek), taken from an interview between him and Astra Taylor during Taylor’s film, [*Žižek!*](http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/film.php?directoryname=zizek):

What is philosophy? Philosophy is not what some people think. Some crazy exercise in absolute truth and then you can adopt this kind of skeptical attitude. Where some, the scientists, are dealing with actual, measurable solvable problems, whereas philosophers just ask stupid metaphysical questions and so on and play with absolute truth, which we all know is inaccessible.

No. I think philosophy is a very modest discipline. Philosophy, the true philosophy, asks a different question. For instance, how does the philosopher approach the problem of freedom? It’s not: **are we free or not?** It’s not: **is there God or not?** It asks a simpler question, which would be called a hermeneutic question: **What does it mean to be free?** So this is what philosophy basically does.

It just asks: when we use certain notions, when we do certain acts and so on and so on, what is the **implicit horizon of understanding**? It doesn’t ask these stupid ideal questions, is there truth?. No! The question is: **What do you mean when you say this is true?**

So you can see, it’s a very modest thing, this philosophy. Philosophers are not the madmen who search for eternal truth and so on and so on.

Check out the entire interview segment here: Zizek on Philosophy

Just saw [Astra Taylor's](http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/film.php?directoryname=examinedlife&mode=filmmaker) newest documentary [Examined Life](http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/examinedlife/), and man. Feeling the vindication. For going to grad school to study philosophy, and for liking to waste my free time thinking about ethics and art. Amazing film.

Taylor manages to humanize some of the most renowned philosophers of our day, by taking them out of both the written and academic contexts where we find them so opaque, and interviewing them on the streets, in environments that have meaning to them. The result is incredible: you’re able to get a much more personal and grounded vision of the philosophers’ theories, as well as a palpable sense that these ideas do in fact come from *embodied human beings thinking about the meaning of life*. Even in grad school, when I studied with or closely read these peoples’ books on a daily basis, I didn’t often feel like the ideas had a weighty reality to them. Taylor’s job is helping philosophers shed their ivory tower bad rep.

One of the dominant themes in the film, which each of the interviewees hit on in his/her own way, is the idea that there is value in what’s ugly in the world. Suffering, garbage, immorality–Cornel West summed it up in a great talk about why Romanticism (in his rendering, the idea we should all strive for what’s ideal) doesn’t cut it. He hits hard on the notion that people with the “right idea” start with a respect for imperfection–and try to focus on how we do beautiful things despite nastiness in the world.

The lineup includes some zingers: [Cornel West](http://www.cornelwest.com/), [Martha Nussbaum](http://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/nussbaum/), [Peter Singer](http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/), [Slavoj Zizek](http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek.html), [Judith Butler](http://rhetoric.berkeley.edu/faculty_bios/judith_butler.html), [Avital Ronell](http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/Ronell.html), [Sunaura Taylor](http://www.sunaurataylor.org/), [Michael Hardt](http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/Literature/faculty/hardt), [K. Anthony Appiah](http://www.appiah.net/). They perform beautifully. I’m particularly fond of Appiah’s discussion of [cosmopolitanism](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmopolitanism/), which you can get a sense of by listening to this [interview with him](http://cdn3.libsyn.com/philosophybites/Appiah1MixSes.MP3?nvb=20090430205902&nva=20090501210902&t=0504f803400216504f5fe).

Astra Taylor’s eye is subtle, caring, and smart. It’s rare to leave a discussion of philosophy lead by philosophers feeling relaxed and more human, but she leads us (and her subjects) gracefully in that direction. I’ve found myself a new muse. Can’t wait to see her [other films](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2025391/).