What can the body, in pain, teach us about the hilarity of our own finitude?

Hotel Bar Sessions is currently between seasons and while our co-hosts are hard at work researching and recording next season's episodes, we don't want to leave our listeners without content! So, as we have in the past, we've given each co-host the opportunity to record a "Minibar" episode-- think of it as a shorter version of our regular conversations, only this time the co-host is stuck inside their hotel room with whatever is left in the minibar... and you are their only conversant!

This week's Minibar episode features Bob Vallier's reflections on what he learned after a serious automobile-meets-bicycle accident in late-2024. (Bob was on the bike!). The pain, the trauma, the rehab-- and the friendships that showed up along the way to help manage it all-- turned out to be an unexpected lesson in not only what able-bodied people naively assume about their world, but also what insights can be gleaned from the sudden interruption of those naive assumptions.

Turns out, according to Bob, there's a lot more that's funny about our finitude than is immediately obvious in our pain!

Tune in for the first episode of Season 15 on January 23, 2026!

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/minibar-pain
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SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)
BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.

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How might "oppression" be best understood as a "cage"?

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/marilyn-fryes-oppression
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SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)
BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.

Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!

"Nostalgia" is a portmanteau coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, combining the Greek nostros (homecoming) and algos (pain, ache). Hofer was a medical student, and he invented this term to describe a kind of melancholia, a somewhat depressive state–- and so, from its inception, "nostalgia" was viewed as a mood disorder. For the Romantics, it was a sentimentality for the past, the good old days of yore, combining the sadness of loss with a joy that that loss is not complete or total.

Nostalgia is also paradoxical, because the past we long for and re-member is a past that was never present. If it is a "homecoming," what one discovers in returning home, as Odysseus does, is that there is no "there" there.

That is, nostalgia is always unheimlich ("unhomely") or more accurately, "uncanny." It always involves a manner of self-deception about what was by distorting or idealizing the past. This can often have negative, even dangerous consequences: individually, socially, and politically.

More than just a "mood," nostalgia is a vector of philosophical investigation par excellence that opens onto a wide range of themes: memory, time, the hermeneutics of personal identity, and even reality itself.

So, pour a drink, and let's see what might be problematic about what we "fondly remember"!

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/nostalgia
---------------------
SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)
BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.

Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!