contemporary symposia

This is going to make me look like a no-life pretentious geek, but this weekend I decided to see if I could find any filmed interviews of Susan Sontag online. Naturally the longer the film the more I wanted to watch it, which is how I came across a roundtable discussion of Sontag's life and work. This seemed to be in a university or institutional setting, and after I'd watched the 90+ minute film I set out to find more. Which is an elevated way of saying I clicked twice, once to get from the video to the stream from which it came, and once to follow a link to the organisation where the stream and the video originated. This turns out to be a centre based in New York called The Philoctetes Center at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute who hold and record regular multidisciplinary roundtables on creativity and the imaginative process. These are available on the website under Past Programs, and on YouTube, and last about 90-120 minutes from what I've seen so far. What I've seen so far are discussions on Susan Sontag, on Psychogeography, on Samuel Beckett, and on Place, Imagination and Identity. If you're at all interested in the brain, in ideas, in art, and if you have a broadband connection and a lot of time then I'd really recommend you get yourself over there. It's fantastic. It's been like taking an intellectual bath in a way that I haven't done for a long time. I love it, I love it, I love it. Go, go now, you'll thank me later.

.