Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Abeeb, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an engaging and accessible way.

On this episode, I am talking a lot about love, relating, intimacy, and our relatively newly digital lives with the writer, theorist,

and literary critic Joanna Walsh. Joanna had written a book of great short stories called

Vertigo that I saw when I came to Ireland in 2016.

I picked it up, I looked at it, I thought this looks awesome, and then I think I bought something else anyway.

I finally, I kept thinking about the book because I had read a passage in it, and I just thought,

I really need to pick that up. So it kept repeating itself in my mind until finally I read it and it was

truly excellent. Her fiction, which includes Vertigo, which she reads a story from on this episode,

as well as breakup, Grow a Pair, which is a book of pornographic fairy tales and seed story,

which is a novel that you can read on your phone

that unfolds in many different directions, all has this kind of relentless, I would say, repetitive,

observant and really thoughtful quality to it. And so when I read finally Joanna's work, I thought this is someone I really

need to have a conversation with because she's obviously a very brilliant person. Breakup in particular

is filled throughout with all these quotes from different theorists that I like, different writers,

literary critics and all that sort of stuff.

So I think that her mission, which is synthesizing a lot of ideas from disparate currents

and sort of bringing them together into maybe not coherent is not the right word,

but an interesting collection and conversation

through her own creative lens.

And that's something that I try to do on this show,

even if my ideas are also not exactly coherent,

I try to bring together a lot of different currents.

...