Myriad clubs proliferate: Spanish, French, German, Music, Film, and the Writer’s Workshop!
Friends, Fellow Travelers, and The Curious,
Our last TU HUB event was absolute fire. The Hub Event was off the hook. Some people were able to drop in and out throughout the day, but some of you missed it. This newsletter will tell you what happened, what’s coming, and wax philosophical a quick sec about what it is we are doing with the TU HUB events. I’ll do that latter part right after this itinerary:
TOMORROW is
- The first official TU FILM CLUB event (5pm Pacific | 8pm Eastern), which will be hosted over Zoom at the link you can find at the end of this email. We will be discussing Suburbia (1983) and The Decline of the West III (a documentary about gutterpunks). PUNK, as a movement and lifestyle, is the theme of this month. Some of us have watched the double features together, others by ourselves, and we’re all excited to get together to discuss it. Join us if you like! You don’t have to watch the movies but obviously that helps. You can stream them for free on Amazon Prime.
- FILM CLUB events take place on the 4th Tuesday of every month.
- The first official TU Music Listening Club (4pm Pacific | 7pm Eastern)
- Listening to CYCLES by No Bragging Rights (you’ll understand why later)
- The first official TU GERMAN CLUB (2pm Pacific | 4pm Eastern)
- Live recording of the next TU PSA: (1pm Pacific | 3pm Eastern)
- Office Hours (11am Pacific | 1pm Eastern)
THURSDAY is our next TU HUB event.
TU HUB schedule for this week:
- 6am Pacific | 9pm Eastern: Exegetical with Nance: The Incredible Need to Believe by Julia Kristeva
- We will re-read and discuss this important work by Julia Kristeva, famous psychoanalytic theorist and former (alleged) Soviet asset.
- 9am Pacific | 12pm Eastern: Writers workshop
- Submit something to me by Wednesday night this week that is between 500 and 1000 words, and we will workshop it at this time.
- 10:30am Pacific | 1:30pm Eastern: THE SWOLETARIAT: Dialectics of Health and Fitness.
- Accountability with Eamon Stephen of Redecki Fitness: What did you eat this week? What physical challenges did you undertake? How was your sleep?! What are your plans for meals, sleep, and exercise for this upcoming week?
- 12pm Pacific | 3pm Eastern: APP WALKTHROUGH LIVESTREAM
- 2:15pm Pacific | 5:15pm Eastern: Multilingualism: Spanish Club with Bryan Weeks, Ann Snelgrove-McKerracher, David McKerracher, and Bryce Nance
- Office hours (TU TOUR PLANNING)
- 5:30pm Pacific | 8:30pm Eastern: SURPRISE
- 7:30pm Pacific | 10:30pm Eastern: Multilingualism: French Club with Nance and Dave.
Join via this Link.
Ok so check it out:
The TU HUB event is a new idea. It hasn’t been around very long. You’ll notice that nobody else on the internet is doing anything remotely close to it. I consider it cutting edge. So do the people involved. And we would know, since most of us are doing cutting edge work in CMT (critical media theory).
See, the issue is about timenergy. Because none of us have any, we have to figure out how to get the most relative timenergetic bang for our buck on the things we do, whether that be instrumentalized towards efficient health and nutrition, or, on the other hand, reverse-instrumentalization to create something like otium or schole.
Otium and schole are ways of saying leisure time, which is, if we are to listen to philosophers from antiquity through Descartes and up to Bourdieu, means not a lot of frivolous distractions or stressors such as clock-consciousness. But what about for those of us who have no timenergy, who do not belong to some elite caste of aristocrats or gentry? We have to use instrumentalization to counteract or harness certain tendencies in the attention economy and our regular work weeks. That’s what we at the CMT cohort and the TU HUB events are trying to do.
When people speak up online they typically become influencers and thus get swept off their feet by algorithms and all the weird tendencies of this digital octopus. One of the worst tendencies is a constant deference and capitulation to “the They,” the everybody-but-nobody, the social order, and our flawed sense for its norms. Part of that means spending hundreds of hours obsessing about how to reduce the length of the content, simplify the way we say things, and make it “accessible.” I still do this in a sense, but have in many ways outgrown the worst pitfalls I see the influencersphere forever stuck in.
TU HUB events are a way of reverse-instrumentalizing, harnessing, and countering a million tendencies that would undermine the intellectual and artistic integrity of the operation. Most importantly, it’s a way of managing energy throughout my week. Instead of doing this over here, and that over there, having a conversation with students for office hours, then later in the day on a different call doing an interview, then doing that same thing day after day, to finally get stuck in a stultifying routine that does its utmost to leave me with no relative timenergy throughout the week, what I end up doing is putting everything social on one or two days so I can build up to and then better recover/wind down after events.
The TU HUB event yesterday started with Nance and I doing an exegetical for Bernays’ Propaganda. Edward Bernays is the father of public relations and advertising psychology, so he is on our CMT syllabus for this month. Even though I had listened to Propaganda a few times over the years, I got so much out of it thanks to the dialogue I’ve had going with Nance through these special sessions over the last year and in the CMT research cohort. Christopher, another CMT researcher, was in the live audience, which was fucking rad because he not only asked good questions, but was also present for the rest of the day’s events.
Not everyone is able to make it to a full day event like that. In fact, most people are not. But that’s ok, because many of the segments throughout the day will go public from the TU YouTube channel later in the month. For instance, one very special segment was for a talk from The Swoletariat (AKA Eamon Stephen) on The Dialectics of Health and Fitness. He has a timenergy theory of strength training that has been developing in dialogue with me for years, and now he’s sharing it with all of us.
Another very special event you can look forward to seeing published on the channel was with Michael Downs of The Dangerous Maybe and Nance on the topic of Timenergy, Andre Gorz, and Anti-Work. But many other of the segments throughout the day were not recorded, whereas others will go up on specific forums. An example of a forum only video was the first session of French Club, which we did during the multilingualism session.
What’s the point of always having a multilingualism segment in the HUB event? Because language is social, and language-learning is social, whereas monolingualism is anti-social. We are rewiring our brains through immersion exercises that do deep dives into essential and primary texts in their original languages, starting with Spanish, French, and German.
Finally we just started a lot of clubs, as you might have noticed in the above itinerary.
LOTS OF NEW CLUBS and they’re all free to join for regular and serious members who are there for it in the first few months. After that they will be only open to subscribers or dues paying members, but you won’t have to worry about paying if you’ve been grandfathered in. (In the future, once paywalls are up, there will be scholarships for anyone for whom those are a serious obstacle!)
Anyway, enough tooting the TU horn. HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE on Tuesday (for film club) or Thursday (for the TU HUB).
Take care,
McKerracher
