On this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke, discuss what paranoia is, how we can help ourselves keep from spiraling into a paranoid thought process, and why paranoia manifests itself differently in different cultures.
Home and Homelessness
This month’s episode explores what it means to be displaced or without a home. Our new roundtable participants ask: How do we define “home”? Is it a house? Is it family, a sense of community? Is it a place or a feeling? The discussants share their perspectives, from the practical concerns of living on the streets of Austin, to the role of creative production in dealing with homelessness, to challenging notions of displacement and transience as unnatural. Ultimately, the discussion turns toward the ways in which our perceptions of home and homelessness influence our views on immigration, the need for refuge, and national identity.
Tempering The Tantrum
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke take on temper tantrums.
Amnesia
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke discuss the various aspects of amnesia.
Doug Dorst
Doug Dorst is a wonder at words and worlds. He’s a master of bringing the known and unknown, the mundane and the strange, into immediate proximity to one another is such a way that the line begins to fade. Whether it’s insecure police officers encountering restless ghosts romping through northern California in his debut novel Alive in Necropolis, or the dark inner lives of surf gurus and cake sculptors in his short story collection The Surf Guru, or the wild labyrinth voices, artifacts, and nightmarish locales of S., Dorst mingles nightmares and fantastical visions with earthy, recognizable emotions.
It’s an absolute pleasure to chat books and writing with Doug Dorst on this edition of The Write Up.
In 2009, Alive in Necropolis was awarded the Emperor Norton Award, and was a runner up for the Shirley Jackson Award, the IAFA/Crawford Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. It made the Editor’s Choice list in The New York Times Book Review and was named one of the year’s best books by Amazon. The book was also chosen as San Francisco’s 2009 One City One Book selection.
He followed up his success with the beautiful and haunting story collection The Surf Guru, which also landed on the Editor’s Choice list in The New York Times Book Review and was a Rumpus Book Club pick.
Not long after, director and producer J.J. Abrams picked him out to pen a novel in which the story would be found in the margins. Dorst crafted S., a complex but highly accessible book filled with handwritten notes in the text, loose napkins and postcards between the pages, and mysteries that stretch beyond the final chapter. The book is a marvel – a thrill for any lover of the printed word and fan of puzzles.
Dorst is an accomplished playwright, essayist, and, believe it or not, a three-time Jeopardy champion.
In our conversation we talk through his approach to writing, including writing habits, struggles, and how he finds his way into a story. We talk about the pressure of deadlines and joy of the blank page.
Doug Dorst is a celebrated teacher of creative writing who helps run the Texas State MFA program in San Marcos. He talks enthusiastically about his students and the feel of the workshop.
It is a thrill to have Doug Dorst on The Write Up. He is a pleasure to talk with – or just to listen to. The depth of his voice is matched only by the depth of his soul. So please join us as Doug Dorst, with charming humility, shares his passion for craft, teaching, and above all, storytelling
Tongue Twisters and Rhymes
Why rhymes are so appealing, and what makes for a good tongue twister, in this episode of Two Guys on Your Head with Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke.
Holiday Special
Join us for a holiday special as Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke take us through questions about the link between freewill and gratitude, why we feel so compelled to recreate traditions exactly as we remember them, and why yawning is contagious. Plus, we’ll take a trip to The Thinkery with Dr. Cristine Legare.
It’s the holidays so let’s celebrate with Two Guys on Your Head!
The Interpertation of Memory
How and why we misperceive how memory works in the brain, in this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, with Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke.
Artificial Intelligence
In this edition of In Perspective we teamed up with KUT’s Views and Brews for a discussion on various elements of and debates over Artificial Intelligence. What does it actually mean to think? How does understanding how computers work inform what we understand about the brain? And what is on the horizon for us in the world of Artificial Intelligence?
Listen back as KUT’s Rebecca McInroy discusses all things AI with: Dr Galen Strawson, philosophy professor and author of Locke on personal identity: Consciousness and Concernment; Dr. Peter Stone, professor of computer science and author of: Keyframe Sampling, Optimization, and Behavior Integration: Towards Long-Distance Kicking in the RoboCup 3D Simulation League; and novelist and poet Dr. Louisa Hall, whose latest novel Speak takes the reader through 5 decades of building an AI doll.
Holidays: The Fountain of Youth?
For many of us, Thanksgiving means spending time with our families, carrying out traditions that we’ve practiced for years.
While it can be very stressful, messy, and challenging to spend time with family members you don’t see very often, it can also be a beautiful time of re-centering.
Traditions serve a psychological function. By repeating the same traditional activity with the same group of people over the years, we construct a chronological record of who we’ve been before – and who we are now. It’s a hidden way of staying in touch with the consistent elements of our identities, and it allows us to track ourselves as we develop and change.
Traditions give us an opportunity to become psychologically close to the person that we used to be in childhood, or adolescence – or even as recently as last year. And that’s something to be thankful for.
As always, Drs. Bob Duke and Art Markman are carving it up.
Carrie Fountain
Always Remain a Beginner
Interviews on the Write Up come out more as conversations than a scripted line of questioning. The authors who are featured bring their own spirit and personality into the discussion and the conversation spins to wonderfully surprising places. Our episode with award-winning poet Carrie Fountain is a perfect example. Talking with Fountain is like grabbing a coffee with a dear friend you who leaves you feeling thrilled and more awake to the world about you.
During our talk, Fountain and I explore parenting, mysticism, craft, and her extraordinary new poetry collection Instant Winner. Whether it’s writing her next poem or facing a new parenting challenge, Fountain strives to “always remain a beginner.”
Carrie Fountain’s poems are prayers. Like prayers they carry the earthbound to heaven. Her poems are born from daily life — experiences of motherhood, marriage, traffic and trash trucks – but quickly rise up to questions of spirit and desires for divine connection.
Fountain earned her MFA at the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin where she began work on what would become her debut collection Burn Lake. That book received the 2009 National Poetry Series winner and was published in 2010 by Penguin.
Her latest collection, Instant Winner, is a sly prayer book of winking meditations and wry observations. Fountain has a gift for finding the miraculous in the mundane, the tremendous in the ordinary. Capturing a fragment of life, a passing moment, Fountain highlights the endless magic moments that fill an average day. Like the best of poetry, her pieces inspire new views on a world we believe we know.
Balancing a family and a writing career can be an incredible trial. Fountain and I chat about becoming a mother and how that has impacted her life and poetry. Fountain is married to acclaimed playwright Kirk Lynn. We chat about how a household of two creatives works and how the two have inspired, supported, and challenged each other.
Fountain has taught at the university level for several years and is now the writer-in-residence at St. Edward’s University. We chat about mentoring younger poets and her love for poets who have inspired her.
Much of poetry in Instant Winner describes encounters with the spiritual. Fountain shares some her own experiences with organized religion and where she stands now on questions of faith, God, and religion. She also discusses the role writing poetry plays in her spiritual life.
We touch upon Fountain’s own process in approaching writing: When she writes, how she seeks inspiration, and the discipline needed to sculpt a career in the arts. She also gives us a peek at how she approaches a blank page. Fountain hopes her style never outshines her poem, instead she aims for what she calls an “invisible craft.”
So brew a cup of coffee, pull up a chair, and join us for a conversation on this edition of The Write Up.
Why We Go To Extremes
From CrossFit to quilting, in this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the pros and cons of going to extremes.
How To Protect Your Brain As You Age
Whether we like it or not, time marches on. And as it does, we age.
One of the most challenging realities for everyone to face in life is that we are all, inevitably, destined to grow old (if we’re lucky, that is).
Aging correlates to a steady decline of functional abilities, both physical and mental. Memory and cognition peak in our early twenties, and we begin a very slow, steady decline of those functions as we near our senior years.
After age 80, many bodily functions – including brain function – seem to have reached the average limit of their operation. So what can we do to preserve our brains for as long as possible?
You know what they say: use it or lose it. The more you think now, the more you will be able to think later, as you age. Activities that are interactive and intellectually rewarding, like having good conversations with people, are not only enjoyable – they’re also good for your brain.
The next time you spend too long talking to someone, lost in a good conversation, there’s your excuse – you were exercising your brain. And by the same token, physical activity and fitness help preserve brain function. After all, your brain is a part of your body – so you have to take care of your body to take care of your brain.
So: think a lot, move a lot, and live a lot if you want to live longer. Drs. Art Markman and Bob Duke give you more of the details.
You’re only as old as you feel: Continued activity – both physical and mental – protects you as you age.
Artificial Intelligence
The brief history of Artificial Intelligence in this edition of Two Guys on Your Head with Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke.
Defining Intelligence
How intelligence tests were developed and why, and what they do and don’t tell us about our ability to achieve success, in this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, with Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke.
Why We Laugh At Fear
Why we respond to uncomfortable situations with humor, in this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, with Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke.
War Memorials, Trauma and Identity
This month on In Perspective, our roundtable participants discuss public memory in relation to grief, war, and memorials such as the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Two of our guests represent that museum, which commemorates the September 11 attacks of 2001 and the World Trade Center bombing of 1993. Also joining us are two distinguished faculty from The University of Texas at Austin and by a call-in guest who is an assistant professor and filmmaker from Northwestern University.
The Discussion
Kyle Henry, MFA, is an assistant professor at Northwestern University. He is the editor of Heather Courtney’s 2012 film, Where Soldiers Come From, among many others. His latest documentary project, Half-Life of War (2014), explores war memorials and asks the question: Do we memorialize wars to remember, or do we construct monuments and memorials so that we can forget? In this discussion, Henry describes how he works to distill emotional realities through filmmaking in order to get at larger truths.
Clifford Chanin, director of education at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, discusses the significance of technology to how September 11th was experienced and how it is remembered in the museum. He addresses the question of whether or not memorials have particular life spans, and explains the dramatic change in the nature of memorials over the past several decades.
Jenny Pachucki, oral historian and assistant curator at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, shares what it means to speak about tragic events and the value of listening to each other’s recollections of where they were during historical moments. She explains that the exhibits bring together a vast array of remembrances and celebrate the victims’ lives, rather than attend only to their tragic passing.
Richard Flores, Ph.D., is a professor of anthropology and Mexican American studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He has written extensively on the topic of public memory, particularly in relation to Texas history and the Alamo. He helps frame the discussion of public memory and history with reference to the particular purposes served by myth-making and memorials. He explains how the distillation of events and lives toward the symbolic might also silence the voices of veterans and gloss over ongoing conflicts.
Tom Palaima, Ph.D., joins us from the department of classics at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a MacArthur fellow who focuses on Aegean prehistory and early Greek language and culture. He offers examples from Greek antiquity to give context to the discussion of early war memorials in the form of songs and epics. Palaima categorizes memorials as one of two varieties: those created to benefit those affected by the war, such as veterans and their families; and those created to benefit the state and national identity.
What’s your perspective?
These In Perspective participants together question how we deal with the trauma of terrorism and war, how we might mourn collectively, and why we build public memorials. They seek to understand and to teach an understanding of public memory and the human costs of war. At the Texas Humanities Project, we hope that this engagement with war and public memory from a variety of points of view in the humanities will spark thoughtful discussion among listeners about the impacts of memory and memorials in your lives.
Check back this time next month for our third In Perspective roundtable.
Responding To Ebola
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the psychology behind our response to threats like Ebola.
Louisa Hall
On this edition of The Write Up, host Owen Egerton sits down with novelist Louisa Hall, author of The Carriage House. Plus we’ll hear book reviews of Cats Cradle and Stiff!
V&B: David Hidalgo & Marc Ribot
In 2011 UT Performing Arts hosted living legends David Hidalgo and Marc Ribot for their project Border Music
Their musical excursions across the borders between cultures, styles and genres were the perfect preparation for this ambitious new project. West Coast meet East Coast, Real meets Prosthetic, and guitar meets guitar in a rocking post roots pan Latin rave up/descarga. Together they have forged a unique partnership where immigrant neighborhoods meet intellectual nuance – creating truly new music to stir your heart, challenge your head and move your body.
They joined us for a Views and Brews with guest host Jody Denberg for a night of great live music and a discussion about their lives, careers and what’s next.
David Hidalgo is the driving vocal and guitar force of East LA’s Los Lobos and Latin Playboys, the former of which took border-hopping cultural collisions onto the world stage with a series of chart-topping songs and albums.
Marc Ribot (ex Tom Waits ex Lounge Lizards and just plain excellent guitarist) is the ex leader of downtown NY’s “The Prosthetic Cubans” (Los Cubanos Postizos).