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244 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
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Holiday Bonus: Magic, Madness, and Sadness
21 december 2020 · 51 min
Weird Studies will launch its fourth season on January 6th, 2021. But to celebtrate the end of very strange year, we thought we'd release a conversation which until now was available only to our top-tier Patreon backers. Therein we discuss the philosophical underpinnings of "Puhoy," memorable episode of the brilliant animated series Adventure Time. This was JF's introduction to a show that Phil has often recommended for its novel treatment of complex ideas and downright weirdness. Lees meer
Watch "Puhoy" on YouTube:
Part 1
Part 2Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 88: On Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean's 'Mr Punch'
9 december 2020 · 1 uur 21 min
Before Coraline, before American Gods, in the early days of the Sandman series, Neil Gaiman collaborated with Dave McKean on some truly groundbreaking graphic novels: Violent Cases (1987), Signal to Noise (1989), and the work discussed in this Weird Studies episode. The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch (1994) is the story of a boy whose initiation into the dark realities of life, death, and family plays out in the shadow of the (in)famous Punch & Judy puppet show. Unlike some of Gaiman's more overtly marvellous offerings, Mr Punch is a subtle fantasy whose weirdness hides in the gaps and folds of lost time. It is in Dave McKean's brilliant art that the magic shines through, letting us know that the narrative is only part of a vaster, hidden thing. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the themes, ideas, and mysteries of an unparalleled piece of comics art. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Watch Aaron Poole's 9-minute short film "Oracle"
Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, _The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch
"That's the Way to Do It! A History of Punch and Judy", Victoria Albert Museum
_Ronald Briggs, Father Christmas
Clement Greenberg, American art critic
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
J. F. Martel, Patreon Post on The Untimely
Weird Studies, Episodes 20 and 21 on the Trash Stratum
Weird Studies, Episode 72 on the Castrati
Samuel Pepys, English administrator and diarist
Nick Lowe, The Beast in MeLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 87: Glyphs, Rifts, and Ecstasy: On Arthur Machen's Vision of Art
25 november 2020 · 1 uur 8 min
It would be wrong to describe Arthur Machen's Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature (1902) as a work of nonfiction, since the book features a narrative frame that is as moody and irreal as the best tales penned by this luminary of weird fiction. But if the eccentric recluse at the centre Hieroglyphics is a fictional philosopher, he is one who, in Phil and JF's opinion, rivals most aesthetic thinkers in the history of philosophy. The significance of this text lies in its willingness to disclose a function of art that few before Machen had dared to touch, namely its capacity to generate ecstasy by confronting us with the mystery that beats the heart of existence. In this episode, your hosts discuss a work which, in their opinion, comes as close to scripture as the nonexistent field of Weird Studies is likely to get. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Arthur Machen, Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature
Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer
Weird Studies, Episode 3 on the White People
J.F. Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Weird Studies, Episode 63 on Colin Wilson’s 'The Occult'
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Indra’s Net, philosophical concept
James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880 – 1939
Weird Studies, Episode 5 on Lisa Ruddick's 'When Nothing is Cool'
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Rudolph Otto, German theologianLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 86: On E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman," and Freud's Sequel to It
11 november 2020 · 1 uur 24 min
The German polymath E. T. A. Hoffmann is one of the founding figures of what we now call weird literature. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss one of his most memorable tales, "Der Sandmann." Originally published in 1816, it is the story of a young German student whose fate is sealed by a terrifying encounter with the eponymous figure during his youth. The story packs several tropes that would later become staples of the weird: the protean monster, the double, the automaton... Your hosts discuss how Hoffmann uses these tropes without letting any of them coalesce into a stable thing in the reader's mind, thereby effecting a slowbuild of ambiguity upon ambiguity that culminates in a true paroxysm of dread. The argument is made that Freud does essentially the same thing in his famous essay "The Uncanny," wherein Hoffmann's story plays an important role. Lees meer
REFERENCES
E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Sandman
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
Edgar Allan Poe, American writer
Sunn o))), American metal band
La Monte Young,, American composer
Stuart Davis, Aliens and Artists
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny
Neil Gaiman, Mr. Punch
Jaques Offenbach, Tales of Hoffmann
Frank Zappa, American musician
Ernst Jentsch,, German psychiatrist
E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr
Weird Studies, episodes 73 and 74 on Carl JungLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 85: On 'The Wicker Man'
28 oktober 2020 · 1 uur 18 min
Since its release in 1973, Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man has exerted a profound influence on the development of horror cinema, a rich vein of folk music, and the modern pagan revival more generally. Anthony Shaffer's ingenious screenplay gives us a thrilling yarn that is also a meditation on the nature of religious belief and practice. Just in time for Halloween, Phil and JF discuss the philosophical ideas that undergird this folk horror classic, focusing on the perennial role of sacrifice in religious thought. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Robin Hardy (director), The Wicker Man
Stanley Kubrick (director), The Shining
Terence Fisher (director), The Devil Rides Out
Piers Haggard (director), Blood on Satan’s Claw
John Boorman (director), Deliverance
Rob Young, Electric Eden
Gerald Gardner, English wiccan
Margaret Murray, English anthropologist
Cecil Sharp, English ethnomusicologist
Phil Ford, "Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica"
Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely MeditationsLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 84: Mona Lisa Smile: On the Empress, the Third Card in the Tarot
14 oktober 2020 · 1 uur 20 min
This second instalment in our series on the major trumps of the traditional tarot deck features the Empress. As Aleister Crowley writes in The Book of Thoth, this card is probably the most difficult to decipher, since it is inherently "omniform," changing shapes continuously. In a sense, the Empress is variation itself. Her card becomes the occasion for a conversation about the less knowable side of reality, the one that tradition associates with the Yin, nature, potential, and -- controversially -- the feminine. This in turn leads to a discussion of white versus black magic, and how the two may not always be as diametrically opposed as we might believe. Lees meer
REFERENCES
P.D. Ouspensky, The Symbolism of the Tarot
Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism
Weird Studies episode 82 on the I Ching
Patrick Harper, The Secret Tradition of the Soul
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Simon Magus, religious figure
Henri Gamache, The Mystery of the Long Lost 8th, 9th, and 10th Books of Moses
Solomon grimoires
Lionel Snell/Ramsay Dukes, English magician
Weird Studies episode 3 on Arthur Machen's "The White People"
Joséphin Péladan, French magician
Susanna Clarke Piranesi
Shawshank Redemption, film
Franz Liszt, musician
Twin Peaks: The Missing PiecesLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 83: On David Lynch's 'Lost Highway'
30 september 2020 · 1 uur 19 min
David Lynch's Lost Highway was released in 1997, five years after Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me elicited a fusillade of boos and hisses at Cannes. The Twin Peaks prequel's poor reception allegedly sent its American auteur spiralling into something of an existential crisis, and Lost Highway has often been interpreted as a response to -- or result of -- that crisis. Certainly, the film is among Lynch's darkest, boldest, and most enigmatic. But of course, we do the film an injustice by reducing it to the psychological state of its director. Indeed, one of the contentions of this episode is that all artistic interpretation constitutes a kind of injustice. But as you will hear, that doesn't stop Phil and JF from interpreting the hell out of the film. Just or unjust, fair or unfair, interpretation may well be necessary in aesthetic matters. It may be the means by which we grow through the experience of art, the way by which art makes us something new, strange, and other. Perhaps the trick is to remember that no mode of interpretation is, to borrow Freud's phrase, the one and only via regia, but that every one is just another highway at night... Lees meer
REFERENCES
David Lynch (dir.), Lost Highway
Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), Vertigo
Arnold Schoenberg, Three Keyboard Pieces, op. 11
James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake
Weird Studies, Episode 81 on The Course of the Heart
Jacques Lacan, French psychoanalyst
Slavoj Žižek, Slovenian philosopher
Arnold Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
David Foster Wallace, "David Lynch Keeps his Head" in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again
Leonard Bernstein, West Side Story
Patreon audio extra on Penderecki's "Threnody"
Trent Reznor, American musician
David Bowie, "Deranged"
Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, "Oblique Strategies"
Tim Powers, Last Call
Manuel DeLanda, Mexican-American philosopherLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 82: On The I Ching
16 september 2020 · 1 uur 30 min
The Book of Changes, or I Ching, is more than an ancient text. It's a metaphysical guide, a fun game, and -- to your hosts at least -- a lifelong, steadfast friend. The I Ching has come up more than once on the show, and now is the time for JF and Phil to face it head on, discussing the role it has played in their lives while delving into some of its mysteries. Lees meer
REFERENCES
I Ching, Wilhelm-Baynes translation
I Ching, Stephen Karcher translation
Game of Thrones, HBO series
George R. R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire
George R. R. Martin, “Sandkings” in: Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
H. P. Lovecraft, American writer
Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy
Aleister Crowley, “777”
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics
Joel Biroco, Calling Crane in the Shade (website)
Philip K. Dick, American novelist
Lionel Snell, a.k.a. Ramsey Dukes, British occultist
Richard Rutt, _Zhouyi: A New Translation with Commentary _
Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast
Redmond and Hon, Teaching the I Ching
Weird Studies, episode 72, On the castrati
Weird Studies, episode 77, On the fool tarot card
Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot
The Usual Suspects (movie)
Colin Wilson, The OccultLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 81: Gnostic Lit: On M. John Harrison's 'The Course of the Heart'
2 september 2020 · 1 uur 18 min
The British writer M. John Harrison is responsible for some of the most significant incursions of the Weird into the literary imagination of the last several decades. His 1992 novel The Course of the Heart is a masterful exercise in erasing whatever boundary you care to mention, from the one between reality and mind to the one between love and horror. Recounting the lives of three friends as they play out the fateful aftermath of a magical operation that went horribly wrong, Harrison's novel gives Phil and JF the chance to talk contemporary literature, metaphysics, Gnosticism, zones (see episodes 13 & 14), myth, transcendence, history, and arachnology. Together, they weave a fragile web of ideas centered on that imperceptible something that forever trembles at the edge of our perception, beckoning us to step into its world, and out of ours. Lees meer
REFERENCES
M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart
M. John Harrison, "The Great God Pan"
Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan
Philip K. Dick, Ubik
Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Weird Studies, Episode 14 on Stalker
Jonathan Carrol, American novelist
Robert Aickman, British writer
Magic Realism, literary genre
Phil Ford, “An Essay on Fortuna, parts 1 and 2,” Weird Studies Patreon
John Crowley, Ægypt
Jorge Borges," The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim"
Strange Horizons, Interview with M. John Harrison
M. John Harrison on worldbuilding
Thomas Ligotti, American horror writer
Weird Studies subreddit
Albert Camus, French philosopher
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
Spiders’ nervous systems
Valentinus, gnostic theologian
Simon Magus, religious figure
Wiccan goddess and god
Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
Weird Studies, Episode 37 with Stuart DavisLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 80: The Pit and the Pyramid, or, How to Beat the Philosopher's Blues
19 augustus 2020 · 1 uur 18 min
Your hosts' exploration of mysticism and vision in pop music continues with two powerful pieces of popular music: Radiohead's "Pyramid Song" from the 2001 album Amnesiac, and Fran Landesman and Tommy Wolf's "Ballad of the Sad Young Men," from the 1959 Broadway musical The Nervous Set. Synchronicity rears its head as the dialogue reveals how these two gems, selected by JF and Phil with no expectation that they might form a set, begin to glow when placed side by side, amplifying and focussing each other's eldritch light. This episode touches on Neoplatonic myths of spiritual ascent, African-American spirituals, Plato's realm of Forms, Gnosticism, dream visitations by the dearly departed, the travails of the Beat generation, the objectivity of hope, the implosion of America, and that particularly modern condition of the soul which Phil calls the "Philosopher's Blues." Lees meer
REFERENCES
Radiohead, "Pyramid Song"
Fran Landesman and Tommy Wolf, "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men"Edgar Allan Poe, "The Pit and the Pendulum"
Charles Mingus, Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus
Plato, Phaedrus
Plato, Republic
Plato's Unwritten Doctrines
The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast, episode 69: "Plutarch's Myths of Cosmic Ascent"
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Pierre Hadot, French philosopher
Algis Uzdavynis, Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth: From Ancient Egypt to Neoplatonism
Charles Taylor, Canadian philosopher
Phil Ford, "The Philosopher’s Blues" (Weird Studies Patreon exclusive)
Peter Sloterdijk, German philosopher
Ferdinand de Saussure, French linguist
JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
JF Martel, "Stay With Mystery: Hiroshima Mon Amour, Melancholia, and the Truth of Extinction" in Canadian Notes & Queries, issue 106: Winter 2020, edited by Sharon English and Patricia Robertson
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction
Jay Landesman and Theodore J. Flicker, The Nervous Set, musical
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Cu… -
Episode 79: Love, Death, and the Dream Life
5 augustus 2020 · 1 uur 5 min
In this episode of Weird Studies, an improvised analysis of two pop songs -- Nina Simone's version of James Shelton's "Lilac Wine" and Ghostface Killah's visionary "Underwater" -- becomes the occasion for a deep dive to the weird wellspring of artistic creation. In trying to understand these songs and why they love them so much, your hosts touch on themes such as necromancy, decadence, liebestod, visionary experience, the Muslim image of paradise, the necessity of rifts, Norman Mailer's concept of "dream life," and the magical operation that is sampling. Lees meer
Header image: Boris Kasimov, Wikimedia Commons
REFERENCES
James Shelton, "Lilac Wine"
Nina Simone, "Lilac Wine" from the album WIld is the Wind (1966)
Ghostface Killah, "Underwater, from the album Fishscale (2006)
MF Doom, "Orange Blossoms," from the album Special Herbs, Volume 4, 5 & 6
Richard Strauss, [Salome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salome(opera))_
Weird Studies, episode 25: David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch
C. G. Jung's practice of active imagination
JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Paul Horn, Visions
Alexander Mackendrick (dir.), The Sweet Smell of Success
Les Baxter, American composer
Les Baxter, "Papagayo"
Debussy, [Nocturnes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnes(Debussy))_
Rebecca Leydon, music scholar
Weird Studies episodes 73 and 74, on C. G. Jung's aesthetic vision
Alexander Courage, Theme from Star Trek ("Where No Man Has Gone Before")
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket"
James Joyce, Ulysses and Finnegans WakeLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 78: On John Keel's 'The Mothman Prophecies'
22 juli 2020 · 1 uur 14 min
At the time The Mothman Prophecies' was released in 1975, and again when he penned an afterword for the 2001 edition, John Keel appeared to have made up his mind about the "ultraterrestrials" that he had tracked and hunted for most of his adult life. They were unconcerned about the welfare of the people whose lives they threw into disarray, he said. They were liars, cheats, and frauds who refused to play fair. They saw good and evil as synonymous and they were dangerous. Like many other explorers of reality's uncharted waters, John Keel returned to port knowing less than he did (or thought he did) when he set out. And this led him to ponder the possibility that only thing to know about such matters is that there is nothing to know -- that the universal mind, as Charles Fort had suggested before him, was insane. In this episode of Weird Studies, JF and Phil share their thoughts on The Mothman Prophecies, focusing less on the creatures and events that haunted Point Pleasant in 1966-67 than on how these things affected the brilliant writer who was chosen to be their baffled chronicler. Lees meer
REFERENCES
John A. Keel, The Mothman Prophecies: A True Story
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Stephanie Quick's blog
Weird Studies talks to Jeffrey J. Kripal: episode 39 and episode 45
H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Jeffrey J. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal
David Lynch's Twin Peaks
David Lynch, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
Bob Lazar, American engineer (?)
William James, American philosopherLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 77: What a Fool Believes: On the Unnumbered Card in the Tarot
8 juli 2020 · 1 uur 9 min
"What a fool believes he sees, no wise man can reason away." This line from a Doobie Brothers song is probably one of the most profound in the history of rock-'n'-roll. It is profound for all the reasons (or unreasons) explored in this discussion, which lasers in on just one of the major trumps of the traditional tarot deck, that of the Fool. The Fool is integral to the world, yet stands outside it. The Fool is an idiot but also a sage. The Fool does not know; s/he intuits, improvises a path through the brambles of existence. We intend this episode on the Fool to be the first in an occasional series covering all twenty-two of the major trumps of the Tarot of Marseilles. Lees meer
REFERENCES
The Fool in the tarot
St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians
Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey Into Christian Hermeticism
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Plato, Phaedrus
Weird Studies episode 60 - Space is the Place: On Sun Ra, Gnosticism, and the Tarot
Till Eulenspiegel, folk figure
Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears
Weird Studies episode 75 - Our Old Friend the Monolith: On Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey
Weird Studies episode 76 - Below the Abyss: On Bergson's Metaphysics
Rider-Waite Tarot Deck
Richard Wagner, Parsifal
G. W. F. Hegel, German philosopher
Ramsey Dukes, Words Made Flesh: Information in Formation
George Spencer Brown, Laws of Form
Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being
Punch and Judy, British puppet show
George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal
Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Phil Ford's lecture on Death in Venice (Patreon exclusive!)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
Hal Ashby (dir.), Being There
Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa, The Way of the Tarot
Frank Pavich (dir.), Jodorowsky’s Dune
Tarot of Marseilles
André Breton, French surrealist artistLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 76: Below the Abyss: On Bergson's Metaphysics
24 juni 2020 · 1 uur 19 min
According to the French philosopher Henri Bergson, there are two ways of knowing the world: through analysis or through intuition. Analysis is our normal mode of apprehension. It involves knowing what's out there through the accumulation and comparison of concepts. Intuition is a direct engagement with the absolute, with the world as it exists before we starting tinkering with it conceptually. Bergson believed that Western metaphysics erred from the get-go when it gave in to the all-too-human urge to take the concepts by which we know things for the things themselves. His entire oeuvre was an attempt to snap us out of that spell and plug us directly into the flow of pure duration, that primordial time that is the real Real. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss the genius -- and possible limitations -- of his metaphysics. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Henri Bergson, "Introduction to Metaphysics"
Weird Studies episode 13 -- The Obscure: On the Philosophy of Heraclitus
Weird Studies episode 16: On Dogen Zenji's 'Genjokoan'
Bertrand Russel's critique of Bergson's philosophy
Dōgen Zenji, Shōbōgenzō
Wiliam James, Principles of Psychology
Plato, Theaetetus
Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
Aleister Crowley, British occultist
Graham Harman, "The Third Table"
Weird Studies episode 8 - On Graham Harman's "The Third Table"
Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-PhilosophicusLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Bonus: The Duke of Ellington
18 juni 2020 · 1 uur 4 min
When the quarantine began, professors around the world raced to put their classes online, and for the Jacobs School's big undergraduate music history course (M402 represent!) Phil created a series of solo podcasts, many of which have been appearing on the Weird Studies Patreon site. Our patrons seem to be enjoying them, so we thought we'd publish the first one ("The Duke of Ellington") as an off-week bonus for all our listeners, partly as a teaser for the subscriber-only stuff on Patreon and partly because Duke Ellington is cool. There's a bit of technical music talk in this, but you can ignore it and still get the main point: Ellington's early short film Symphony in Black and his subsequent orchestral suite Black Brown and Beige represent his lifelong project of using his "beyond category" music to articulate a vision of African American past and future. Lees meer
Please note: this was Phil's first attempt at doing a solo podcast in far-from-ideal circumstances, and the sound is pretty unpolished in places. He got his act together for the later ones; go check them out at https://www.patreon.com/weirdstudies.
REFERENCES
Fred Waller (dir.), Symphony In Black - A Rhapsody of Negro Life
Duke Ellington, Black, Brown, and Beige
Dudley Murphy (dir.), Black and Tan Fantasy
John Howland, Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert JazzLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 75: Our Old Friend the Monolith: On Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'
10 juni 2020 · 1 uur 27 min
"You don't find reality only in your own backyard, you know," Stanley Kubrick once told an interviewer. "In fact, sometimes that's the last place you'll find it." Oddly, this episode of Weird Studies begins with Phil Ford hatching the idea of putting a replica of the monolith from 2001 in his backyard. As the ensuing discussion suggests, this would amount to putting reality -- or the Real, as we like to call it -- in the place where it may be least apparent. Perhaps that is what Kubrick did when he planted his monolithic film in thousands of movie theatres back in 1968. Moviegoers went in expecting a Kubrickian twist on Buck Rogers; they came out changed by the experience, much like the hominids of great veld in the "Dawn of Man" sequence that opens the film. This is what all great art does, and if you look closely, maybe 2001 can tell you something about how it does it. Because in the end, the film is the monolith, and the monolith is all art. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), 2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke, "The Sentinel"
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (novel)
Clement Greenberg, American art critic
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), The Shining
Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory
Weird Studies episode 62: It's Like "The Shining," But With Nuns: On "Black Narcissus"
Ligeti, Atmosphères
Gerard Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology
Jay Weidner, Kubrick's Odyssey: Secrets Hidden in the Films of Stanley Kubrick
Rob Ager's analysis of 2001 (Ager was criticized for not citing Loughlin above)
Eric Norton's Playboy interview with Stanley Kubrick
J. F. Martel, "The Kubrick Gaze" in Daniel Pinchbeck & Ken Jordan (eds.), Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age
J. F. Martel, "The Future is Immanent: Speculations on a Possible World"
Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Sid Meier's Civilization V
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Stanley Kubrick (dir… -
Episode 74: A Luminous Parasite: Jung on Art, Part Two
27 mei 2020 · 1 uur 12 min
In this second part of their exploration of C. G. Jung's essay "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," JF and Phil try to discern the psychological and metaphysical implications of the great Swiss psychologist's theory of art. For one, this involves discussing what Jung meant by archetypes, and how these relate to the artists who bring them forth in artistic works. This in turn leads to a discussion of the emergent artwork as an "autonomous complex," that is, as a self-moving spirit that requires the artist merely as a conduit for its manifestation in human -- and cosmic -- history. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Carl Gustav Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry"
Arthur Machen, "Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy"
Rick Riordan, [Percy Jackson & the Olympians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Jackson%26_the_Olympians)_ series of novels
Robert Altman (director), Nashville
Homer, The Odyssey
Jacques Offenbach, The Tales of Hoffmann
E. T. A. Hoffmann, "The Sandman"
David Lynch, American filmmaker (the Dionysian!)
Stanley Kubrick, American filmmaker (the Apollonian!)
Richard Wagner's idea of Gesamtkunstwerk
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, and JF's analysis thereof
Lisa Ruddick, "When Nothing is Cool"
Weird Studies episode 5: Reading Lisa Ruddick's "When Nothing is Cool"Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 73: Carl Jung and the Power of Art, Part One
13 mei 2020 · 1 uur 5 min
This is the first of two conversations that Phil and JF are devoting to C. G. Jung's seminal essay, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," first delivered in a 1922 lecture. It was in this text that Jung most clearly distilled his thoughts on the power and function of art. In this first part, your hosts focus their energies on Jung's puralistic style, opposing it not just to Freud's monism (which Jung critiques in the paper) but also to the monism of those other two "masters of suspicion," Marx and Nietzsche. For Jung, art is not a branch of psychology, economics, philosophy, or science. It constitutes its own sphere, and non-artists who would investigate the nature of art would do well to respect the line that art has drawn in the sand. Weird Studies listenters will know this line as the boundary between the general and the specific, the common and the singular, the mundane and the mystical... Lees meer
REFERENCES
C. G. Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry"
Joshua Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century
Peter Kingsley, Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity
Sigmund Freud, Austrian psychologist
Kinka Usher (director), Mystery Men
Theodor Adorno, “Bach Defended Against his Devotees”
Aleister Crowley, English magician
C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus
Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
C. G. Jung, The Portable Jung
Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" in: Untimely Meditations
Weird Studies, episode 49: Nietzsche on History
Weird Studies, episode 70: Masks All the Way Down, with James Curcio
Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Unconscious
Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal
Paul Ricoeur, French philosopher
Rudolph Steiner, Austrian esotericistLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 72: Morning of the Mutants: On the Castrati
29 april 2020 · 1 uur 14 min
For over two centuries in early modern Italy, boys were selected for their singing talent castrated before the onset of puberty. The goal was to preserve the qualities of their voice even as they grew into manhood. The procedure resulted in other physiological changes which, combined with an unnaturally high voice, made the castrati the most prodigious singers on the continent. As Martha Feldman shows in her book The Castrato, a masterpiece of cultural history, the castrated singer was such a singular figure that he invited comparisons with angels, animals, and kings, attracting adoration and ridicule in equal measures. The castrato was a true liminal being, and as JF and Phil discover in this episode of Weird Studies, an unlikely herald of the present age. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Martha Feldman, The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds
Stanley Kubrick, American filmmaker
Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato, singing "Ave Maria"
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
X-Men
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"
Thomas Ligotti, "Mrs Ligotti's Angel", read by horror writer Jon Padgett
Weird Studies, Episode 48: Thomas Ligotti's Angel
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Genesis P-Orridge, American musician and occultistLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 71: The Medium is the Message
15 april 2020 · 1 uur 26 min
On the surface, the phrase "the medium is the message," prophetic as it may have been when Marshall McLuhan coined it, points a now-obvious fact of our wired world, namely that the content of any medium is less important than its form. The advent of email, for instance, has brought about changes in society and culture that are more far-reaching than the content of any particular email. On the other hand, this aphorism of McLuhan's has the ring of an utterance of the Delphic Oracle. As Phil proposes in this episode of Weird Studies, it is an example of what Zen practitioners call a koan, a statement that occludes and illumines in equal measures, a jewel whose shining surface is an invitation to descend into dark depths. Join JF and Phil as they discuss the mystical and cosmic implications of McLuhan's oracular vision. Lees meer
REFERENCES
McLuhan, Understanding Media
The Playboy interview
McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
Graham Harman, American philosopher
Clement Greenberg, American critic
Dale Pendell, Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft
Brian Eno, British composer
Marshall and Eric McLuhan, The Laws of Media: The New Science _
Jonathan Sterne, _The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction
Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (editors), The Essential McLuhan
Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America
David Fincher (director), The Social Network _
Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema I _and _Cinema II
Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin
Eric Havelock,_ Preface to Plato_
Walter J. Ong, American theorist
Plato, [Republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic(Plato))_Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 70: Masks All the Way Down, with James Curcio
1 april 2020 · 1 uur 17 min
James Curcio is an American multidisciplinary artist and nonfiction writer whose works include the novels Join My Cult, The Party at the World's End, and the upcoming Tales from When I Had a Face. Recently, Curcio edited Masks: Bowie and Artists of Artifice, an anthology of essays by various thinkers and artists on the complex interplay of fact and fiction, self and other, in the life of the modern creator of artistic works. David Bowie's career, from the early experimentations to the great working that was his final album Blackstar, provides the book's gravitational field. In his effort to better plumb the mysteries of the aesthetic universe, Curcio penned the anthology's opening essay, "Masks All the Way Down," and it is on that piece that this conversation focuses. Join James, Phil and JF as they discuss the terrifying and liberating idea of an aesthetic cosmos as seen from the vantage point of the artist who learns that with new each work comes a new face, an amalgam of symbols and forces drawn from a depth of surfaces, a paper-thin dream that goes ever so deep... Lees meer
REFERENCES
James Curcio (editor), [Masks: Bowie and Artists of Artifice](www.intellectbooks/masks)
James Curcio's website: https://www.jamescurcio.com
James Curcio's new novel, [Tales from When I Had a Face](www.TalesFromWhenIHadAFace.com)David Bowie, Blackstar
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex
Poppy, American singer
Anatta, the Buddhist concept of no-self
Nagarjuna, Indian philosopher
Yukio Mishima, Japanese writer
Hunter S. Thompson, American writer
Lewis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought
Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" in Untimely Meditations
Ornette Coleman, Change of the Century
Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu
Vladimir Nabokov, Russian novelist
Nicholas Roeg (director), The Man Who Fell to Earth
Raphael Bob-Waksberg (creator), BoJack Horseman
Richard Dyer, Heavenly … -
Episode 69: Special Episode: On Some Mental Effects of the Pandemic
25 maart 2020 · 1 uur
What is there to say about the COVID-19 virus that hasn't already been said, over and over again, all around the world, in quaratined houses and on TV and social media and countless Zoom chats ... what can we say that you haven't heard? Well, probably nothing. But we are now at the point where we realize that the real importance of the things we say is not their content, but the mere fact of saying them. As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message, and at a time when we have been driven into separate solitudes, we are discovering that the real meaning of our utterances might be something like "hello, are you there?" and "I am here, talking to you." In that spirit, Phil and JF have a conversation about William James's essay "On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake," partly to discuss the ways that it's relevant to our present circumstances and the ways it's not, but mostly to make human connections, both with each other and with Weird Studies listeners. Lees meer
As JF says, stay close, but keep your distance.
REFERENCES
William James, "On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake"
William James, Writings 1902-1910
Noel Black (director), "To See the Invisible Man", 2nd segment of episode 16 of The Twilight Zone (1985-86)
Weird Studies no. 29, “On Lovecraft”
Weird Studies no. 64, “Dreams and Shadows: On Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea”
Weird Studies no. 67, “Goblins, Goat-Gods and Gates: On Hellier”
Martin Heidegger, “‘Only a God Can Save Us’: The Spiegel Interview"
Bruno Latour, "An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns"
H.P. Lovecraft, “Nyarlathotep”Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Weird Stories: "On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake" by William James
23 maart 2020 · 23 min
In preparation for an upcoming special episode on living in the early days of the Covid-19 Pandemic, here's Phil Ford reading an essay William James wrote on his experience of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Lees meer
REFERENCES
William James, "On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake"
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 68: On James Hillman's 'The Dream and the Underworld'
18 maart 2020 · 1 uur 16 min
In 1979, the American psychologist James Hillman published The Dream and the Underworld, a polemical meditation on the nature of dreams. Rejecting the orthodoxies of both Freud and Jung, Hillman argued that the the "nightworld" of dream should not play second fiddle to the "dayworld" of waking life, because in the soul as on earth, day and night are equally essential, and equally real. To reduce a dream to a message or interpretation is to fail the dream. In order for dreams to do their work on us, says Hillman, we must cease to regard them as hallucinations, mere metaphors, epiphenomena, or illusions, and instead see them as the imaginal other life we all must live. Every night, for Hillman, each of us descends into the underworld to encounter those forces that shape us and our surroundings. The way down is the way up. Lees meer
REFERENCES
James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
George Steiner, Real Presences
Hakim Bey, Orgies of the Hemp Eaters: Cuisine, Slang, Literature and Ritual of Cannabis Culture
Erik Davis, High Strangeness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
Brad Warner on drugs and Buddhism
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
Christopher Nolan (dir.), Inception
Jorge Luis Borges, "Nightmares" in Seven Nights
Henri Bergson, DreamsLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 67: Goblins, Goat-Gods and Gates: On 'Hellier'
4 maart 2020 · 1 uur 24 min
On the night before this episode of Weird Studies was released, a bunch of folks on the Internet performed a collective magickal working. Prompted by the paranormal investigator Greg Newkirk, they watched the final episode of the documentary series Hellier at the same time -- 10:48 PM EST -- in order to see what would happen. Listeners who are familiar with this series, of which Newkirk is both a protagonist and a producer, will recall that the last episode features an elaborate attempt at gate opening involving no less than Pan, the Ancient Greek god of nature. If we weren't so cautious (and humble) in our imaginings, we at Weird Studies might consider the possibility that this episode is a retrocausal effect of that operation. In it, we discuss the show that took the weirdosphere by storm last year, touching on topics such as subterranean humanoids, the existence of "Ascended Masters," Aleister Crowley's secret cipher, the Great God Pan, and the potential dangers of opening gates to other worlds ... or of leaving them closed. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Karl Pfeiffer (director), Hellier
Philip K. Dick, Valis
Weird Studies episode 12 - The Dark Eye: On the Films of Rodney Ascher
John Benson Brooks, American musician
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Thelema
Allen H. Greenfield, The Complete Secret Cipher of the Ufonauts
Secret cipher online tool
Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law
Gematria
John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies
Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious
Grant Morrison, The Invisibles
Genesis P. Orridge, American artist
Alex Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music
Helena Blavatsky, Russian theosophist
Annie Besant, British theosophist
Peter J. Carroll, British occultist
Kenneth Grant, British occultist
C. G. Jung, The Red Book
Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford, "Chinese Whispers: The Origin of LAM" in The Blood of the Saints
Richard Sharpe Shaver, American writer and contactee
James Hillman, Pan and the Nigh… -
Episode 66: On Diviner's Time
19 februari 2020 · 1 uur 32 min
In the paper discussed in this episode, Phil Ford coins the term "diviner's time" to denote a particular feeling that will be familiar to anyone who has engaged in divinatory or magical practice, namely the feeling that it all means something, that the universe, with all its chaos and randomness, nevertheless contains -- or is itself -- a kind of music. This episode goes deep down the rabbit hole as Phil and JF try to wrap their heads around conceptions of time, causality, and meaning that are very different from our usual understanding of those terms. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Phil Ford, "Diviner’s Time" (Patreon exclusive)
Karl Pfeifer (director), Hellier
Joshua Ramey, "Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux"
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande
Jung, "On Synchronicity"
Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
Bruno Latour, An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns
Grant Morrison on chaos magic, the occult, and sigil creation
Austin Osman Spare's sigil theory
Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious
Alan Chapman, Advanced Magick for Beginners
William James's essays in psychical research: bibliography
Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
Toronto World Youth Day 2002
Crowley, Magick Without Tears
Leibniz's concept of pre-established harmony
Matthew Segall on the Greek concepts of time, "Minding Time: Chronos, Kairos and Aion in an Archetypal Cosmos"
Richard Lester (director), Hard Day's Night
Freud, "The Uncanny"
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History
Charles Taylor, A Secular AgeLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 65: Touched by that Fire: On Visionary Literature, with B. W. Powe
5 februari 2020 · 1 uur 20 min
B. W. Powe is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and professor at York University, in Toronto. His work, though it covers an immense range of topics from politics and poetics to magic and technology, proceeds from a mystical apprehension of the universe as the locus of magical operations, the site of experiments in cosmic becoming. In his various books and essays, Powe continues a uniquely Canadian form of the visionary tradition whose luminaries include his former teachers Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. In this episode, he joins JF and Phil for an exploration of the meaning, potency, and danger of the visionary in art and literature. Lees meer
Header image: Detail of "Green Color" by Gausanchennai (Wikimedia Commons).
REFERENCES
B. W. Powe's website
B. W. Powe, The Charge in the Global Membrane
B. W. Powe, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye: Apocalypse and AlchemyFrank Lentricchia, "Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic"
Lorca's concept of duende
Hildegard of Bingen's concept of viriditas
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
Marshall McLuhan, "Notes on William Burroughs"
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
John Clellon Holmes, beatnik
Northrop Frye, Canadian literary critic
Hildegard von Bingen, Ordo Virtutum
Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock"
Genesis 32, Jacob and the Angel
R. D. Laing, Scottish psychologist
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazarus"
Sylvia Plath, "Daddy"
Jack Kerouac, American writer
Allen Ginsberg, American poet
Lionel Snell, British philosopher and magician
Special Guest: B. W. Powe.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 64: Dreams and Shadows: On Ursula Le Guin's 'A Wizard of Earthsea'
22 januari 2020 · 1 uur 18 min
In her National Book Award acceptance speech in 2014, Ursula K. Le Guin intimated that, far from being superseded by digital technology, fantastic fiction has never been more important than it is about to become. Soon, she prophesied, "we will need writers who can remember freedom -- poets, visionaries, realists of a larger reality." In this episode, Phil and JF plumb the prophetic depths of one of her most famous books, A Wizard of Earthsea. A discussion of the novel's style and lore leads us into the politics and metaphysics of fantasy as developed by Le Guin and her predecessor, J. R. R. Tolkien. In the end, we realize that fantasy is not the literary ghetto it's been made out to be, but the sine qua non of all fiction. Lees meer
SHOW NOTES
John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Heidegger, "On the Origin of the Work of Art"
Beowulf, An Anglo-Saxon epic poem
Weird Studies, episode 41 -- On Speculative Fiction, with Matt Cardin
Weird Studies, episode 61 -- Evil and Ecstasy: On 'The Silence of the Lambs'
Weird Studies, episode 62: Like 'The Shining,' But With Nuns: On 'Black Narcissus'
The Complete Romances of Chretien de Troyes (translated by J.F.'s mentor, David Staines)
Sir Thomas Malory, La Morte d'Arthur
Lewis Carroll, British fantasist
Ursula K. Le Guin's acceptance speech at the National Book Awards, 2014
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and A Treatise of Human NatureLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 63: Faculty X: On Colin Wilson's 'The Occult'
8 januari 2020 · 1 uur 20 min
At its simplest, what Colin Wilson calls Faculty X is "simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present." Yet its existence is evinced in all those phenomena that modernity files under "supernatural" or "occult." As difficult to explain as it is impossible to omit from any honest survey of human existence, the occult haunts the modern, not just as a vestige of the past but also, perhaps, as a promise from a time to come. For Wilson, magic isn't the living fossil the arch-rationalists would like it to be, but a "science of the future." Faculty X is an evolutionary power, innately positive, inseparable from the will to live and the unshakeable conviction that, somehow, this world has some real, ineffable meaning. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss Wilson's concept of Faculty X as elaborated in his monumental 1971 work, The Occult. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Colin Wilson, The Occult: A History
Rick and Morty, American sitcom
Colin, Wilson, Dreaming to Some Purpose
Colin Wilson, The Outsider
Gary Lachman, Beyond the Robot
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence
Making Sense, episode 107: Is Life Actually Worth Living?
Peter Wessel Zapffe, Norwegian philosopher
Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
Emil Cioran, Franco-Romanian essayist
Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher
At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing, Library of America collection
Joe Frazier, American pugilist
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
Edouard Schuré, [The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions](Edouard Schuré, _The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religion
Weird Studies, episode 8: On Graham Harman's "The Third Table"
Thomas Merton, American monk
Gary Snyder, American poetLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 62: It's Like 'The Shining', But With Nuns: On 'Black Narcissus'
18 december 2019 · 1 uur 34 min
The 1947 British film Black Narcissus is many things: an allegory of the end of empire, a chilling ghost story with nary a spook in sight, a psychological romance, and a meditation on the nature of the divine. Its weirdness is as undeniable as it is difficult to locate. On the surface, the story is straightforward: five nuns are tasked with opening a convent in the former seraglio of a dead potentate in the Himalayas. But on a deeper level, there is a lot more going on, as Phil and JF discover in this conversation touching on the presence of the past, the monstrosity of God, the mystery of the singular, and the eroticism of prayer, among other strangenesses. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburged (dirs.), Black Narcissus
Rumer Godden, author of the original novelStanley Kubrick, The Shining
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Tim Ingold, British anthropologist -- lecture: "One World Anthropology"
Jonathan Demme (dir.), The Silence of the Lambs
Pierre Bourdieu, French sociologist
Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods
Don Barhelme, American short story writer
Paul Ricoeur, French philosopher
Weird Studies episode 16: On Dogen Zenji's Genjokoan
The King and the Beggar Maid
Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers
“Painting with Light,” featurette on the Criterion Collection DVD of Black NarcissusLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 61: Evil and Ecstasy: On 'The Silence of the Lambs'
4 december 2019 · 1 uur 7 min
The Welsh writer Arthur Machen defined good and evil as "ecstasies." Each one is a "withdrawal from the common life." On this view, any artistic investigation into the nature of good and evil can't remain safely ensconced our modern, common-life construal of thinigs. It must become fantastic and incorporate aspects of "nature" that feel "supernatural" from a modern standpoint. Jonathan Demme's screen adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs is a powerful example. The film oscillates undecidably between a straightforward crime story and a work of supernatural horror. In this episode, JF and Phil cast Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling as figures in a myth that pits the individual against the institution, the singular against the type, and the forces of light against the forces of darkness. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Jonathan Demme (dir.), The Silence of the Lambs
Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (original novel)
Carl Jung on the doctrine of Privatio Boni
Johann Sebastian Bach, The Goldberg Variations
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Rolling Stones, "Sympathy for the Devil"
Howard Shore, Canadian composer
Arthur Machen, The White People
Weird Studies, episode 3: Ecstasy, Sin, and "The White People"
Machen, The White People
Machen, Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in LiteratureLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 60: Space is the Place: On Sun Ra, Gnosticism, and the Tarot
20 november 2019 · 1 uur 26 min
Somebody once said, "No prophet is welcome in his own country." Whether this was true in the case of jazz musician and composer Sun Ra depends on whom you ask. With most, the dictum probably bears out. But there are those who can make out certain patterns in Ra's life and work, patterns that place him among the true mystics and prophets. Of course, these people already believe in mysticism and prophecy, but Sun Ra's total devotion to his myth does not leave much wiggle room on this front. He is asking us to choose: believe or disbelieve. And if you go with disbelief, you'll need to explain the sustained coherence and lucidity of his message, and the transformative power of his music. In this episode, Phil and JF take a look at Sun Ra's unforgettable film Space is the Place, interpreting it as a document in the history of esotericism, using gnostic thought and the tarotology as instruments to bring some of his secrets to light. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Sun Ra, Space is the Place
Sun Ra: Brother from Another Planet_
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus and [Kafka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority(philosophy))_ (for the concept of minority)
Antoine Faivre, French historian of esotericism
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
Eliphas Lévi, French occultist
Edward O. Bland (director) The Cry of Jazz
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History
Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal
Stanley Kubrick, Dr Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice
Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in AmericaLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 59: Green Mountains Are Always Walking
6 november 2019 · 1 uur 20 min
"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around a lake." This line from Wallace Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" captures something of the mysteries of walking. It points to the undeniable yet baffling relationship between walking and thinking, between putting one foot in front of the other and uncovering the secret of the soul and world. In this episode, JF and Phil exchange ideas about the weirdness of this thing most humans did on most days for most of world history. The conversation ranges over a vast territory, with zen monks, novelists, Jesuits and more joining your hosts on what turns out to be a journey to wondrous places. Lees meer
Header image by Beatrice, Wikimedia Commons
REFERENCES
Dogen, The Mountains and Waters Sutra
Weird Studies listener Stephanie Quick on the Conspirinormal podcast
Weird Studies episode 51, Blind Seers: On Flannery O'Connor's 'Wise Blood'
Lionel Snell, SSOTBME
Henry David Thoreau, "Walking"
Arthur Machen, "The White People"
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Vladimir Horowitz, Russian panist
Gregory Bateson, cybernetic theorist
The myth of the Giant Antaeus
Wallce Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
John Cowper Powys, English novelist
Will Self, English writer
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Arcade Fire, “We Used to Wait”
Paul Thomas Anderson (director), Punch Drunk Love
Viktor Shklovsky, Russian formalist
Patreon blog post on Phil’s dream
David Lynch (director), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With MeLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 58: What Do Critics Do?
23 oktober 2019 · 1 uur 1 min
What is the role of the critic in the world of art? For some, including lots of critics, the figure exudes an aura of authority: her task is to tell us what this or that work of art means, why it matters, and what we are supposed to think and feel in its presence. Cast in in this mold, the critic is an arbiter, not just of taste, but also of sense and meaning. The American art critic Dave Hickey categorically rejects this interpretation, which he says gives off a mild stench of fascism. For Hickey, the critic plays a weak role, and it's this weakness that makes it essential. In his essay "Air Guitar," published in 1997, Hickey argues that criticism can never really penetrate the mystery of any artwork. Criticism is rather a way to capture the "enigmatic whoosh" of art as one instance of the more pervasive "whoosh" of ordinary experience. So, no act of criticism can ever exhaust an artwork. The critic interprets a singular experience of art into words so that others might be encouraged to have their own, equally singular experiences. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss what criticism has to do with art, life, politics, and ordinary experience. Lees meer
Header image: Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599-1600)
REFERENCES
Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
Plato, Republic
Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying"
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?
Dave Hickey, "Buying the World"
Clinton e-mails exhibition at the Venice Biennale
Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian GrayLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 57: Box of God(s): On 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'
9 oktober 2019 · 1 uur 31 min
Raiders of the Lost Ark is more than a Hollywood movie made in the summer blockbuster mold. As Phil says in his intro to this popping Weird Studies episode, the film is "a Trojan horse of the Weird, easy to let in but once inside, apt to take over." This conversation sees him and JF discuss a movie we dismiss at our own risk, a cinematic masterpiece replete with enigmas that reach back to the foundations of Western civilization. What does the Ark of the Covenant signify? What does it contain? What happens if you open that box of god(s)? And whose god is this, anyway? These are questions that have puzzled theologians and mystics for centuries, and Steven Spielberg's great work asks them anew for an age gone nuclear. Lees meer
Image by arsheffield
REFERENCES
Steven Spielberg, Raiders of the Lost Ark
Steven Soderbergh’s version of Raiders with sound and color removed
Weird Studies Patreon extra, “Weird Genius”
Weird Studies episode 28, “Weird Music Part 2”
Camille Saint-Saëns, Danse Macabre
M. Night Shyamalan, Signs
Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon
Neil Jordan (dir.), The End of the Affair
Weird Studies episode 29, “On Lovecraft”
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism
Howard Carter, British archaeologist
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”
Claude Levi Strauss, French anthropologist
Clement Greenberg's concept of medium specificity
D. W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation
David Mamet, On Directing Film
Dumbo (1941 film)
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Strange High House in the Mist”
Jan Fries, Helrunar: A Manual of Rune Magick
Neil Gaiman, American Gods
GIF of the soldier moving funny at the end of Raiders
Weird Studies episode 2, “Garmonbozia”
Aaron Leitch, occultist
Austin Osman Spare, The Book of Pleasure
Gene Wolfe, [Soldier of the Mist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoldieroftheMist)_Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 56: On Jean Gebser, with Jeremy D. Johnson
25 september 2019 · 1 uur 19 min
The German poet and philosopher Jean Gebser's major work, The Ever-Present Origin, is a monumental study of the evolution of consciousness from prehistory to posthistory. For Gebser, consciousness adopts different "structures" at different times and in different contexts, and each structure reveals certain facets of reality while potentially occluding others. An integral human being is one who can utilize all of the structures according to the moment or situation. As Gebserian scholar Jeremy Johnson explains in this episode, modern humans are currently experiencing the transition from the "perspectival" structure which formed in the late Middle Ages to the "aperspectival," a new way of seeing and being that first revealed itself in the art of the Modernists. Grokking what the aperspectival means, and what it might look like, is just one of the tasks Jeremy, Phil and JF set themselves in this engaging trialogue. Lees meer
Jeremy D. Johnson is the author of the recently released Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness.
REFERENCES
Jeremy Johnson, Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and the Integral Consciousness
Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin
William Irwin Thompson, Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness
Ken Wilber, integral theorist
Lionel Snell, “Spare Parts”
Nagarjuna, “Verses of the Middle Way” (Mulamadhyamakakarika)
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Object-oriented ontology (OOO)
Dogen, Uji (“The Time-Being”), from the Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye)
Special Guest: Jeremy D. Johnson.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 55: The Great Weird North: On Algernon Blackwood's 'The Wendigo'
11 september 2019 · 1 uur 23 min
No survey of weird literature would be complete without mentioning Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). As with all masters of the genre, Blackwood's take on the weird is singular: here, it isn't the cold reaches of outer space that elicit in us a nihilistic frisson, but the vast expanses of our own planet's wild places -- especially the northern woods. In his story "The Wendigo," Blackwood combines the beliefs of the Indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands with the folktales of his native Britain to weave an ensorcelling story that perfectly captures the mood of the Canadian wilderness. In this conversation, JF and Phil discuss their own experience of that wilderness growing up in Ontario. The deeper they go, the spookier things get. An episode best enjoyed in solitude, by a campfire. Lees meer
Header Image: "Highway 60 Passing Through the Boreal Forest in Algonquin Park" by Dimana Koralova, Wikimedia Commons
SHOW NOTES
Glenn Gould, The Idea of North
Algernon Blackwood, "The Wendigo"
Game of Thrones (HBO series)
Weird Studies, Episode 29: On Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition"
Fritz Leiber, The Adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Richard Wagner, Parsifal
David Lynch, Twin Peaks: The Return
Peter Heller, The River: A Novel
The Killing of Tim McLean (July 30, 2008)
Weird Studies, Episode 3: Ecstasy, Sin, and "The White People"
Mysterious Universe: Strange and Terrifying Encounters with Skinwalkers
Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds
Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy
Arthur Machen, Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon EcstasyLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 54: Lobsters, Pianos, and Hidden Gods
28 augustus 2019 · 1 uur 18 min
"All things feel," Pythagoas said. Panpsychism, the belief that consciousnes is a property of all things and not limited to the human brain, is back in vogue -- with good reason. The problem of how inert matter could give rise to subjectivity and feeling has proved insoluble under the dominant assumptions of a hard materialism. Recently, the American filmmaker Errol Morris presented his own brand of panpsychism in a long-form essay entitled, "The Pianist and the Lobster," published in the New York Times. The essay opens with an episode from the life of Sviatoslav Richter, namely a time where the famous Russian pianist couldn't perform without a plastic lobster waiting for him in the wings. In Morris's piece, the curious anecdote sounds the first note of what turns out to be a polyphony of thoughts and ideas on consciousness, agency, Nerval's image of the the "Hidden God," and the deep weirdness of music. Phil and JF use Morris's essay to create a polyphony of their own. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Errol Morris, "The Pianist and the Lobster"
Sviatoslav Richter, Russian pianist
Nick Cave., Red Hand Files #53
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Bruno Monsaingeon (dir.), Richter: The Enigma
Bon Jovi, "Livin’ on a Prayer"
Brad Warner, "The Eyes of Dogen"
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Edgard Varèse, composer
Benjamin Libet, neuroscientist
Robin Hardy (dir), The Wicker Man
Frans De Waal, Mama’s Last Hug
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego
Tarot de Marseille - XVIII: The Moon
Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life
Carl Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry", The Red Book
Terence McKenna, Food of the GodsLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 53: Astral Jet Lag: On William Gibson's 'Pattern Recognition'
14 augustus 2019 · 1 uur 3 min
William Gibson's Pattern Recognition was published in 2003, in the wake of 9/11. You would think that a novel about the early Internet's effects on the collective psyche would feel dated today. But Gibson's insight into the deeper implications of digital culture and soul-rending consumerism are such that we are still catching up with Cayce Pollard, the novel's protagonist, as she journeys into the hypermodern underworld, searching for the secrets of art, time, and death. In this episode, JF and Phil read Pattern Recognition as an exploration of the attention economy, an ascent of the all-seeing pyramid, a subtle rewilding of postmodern culture, and a handbook for the magicians of the future. Lees meer
REFERENCES
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Malcolm Gladwell, "The Coolhunt"
Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Future Shock
Weird Studies Episode 30 -- On Stanley _Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut_
Weird Studies Episode 50 -- Demogorgon: On _Stranger Things_
Austin Osman Spare, The Focus of Life: The Mutterings of AOS
Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital AgeLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 52: On Beauty
31 juli 2019 · 1 uur 16 min
The idea that beauty might denote an actual quality of the world, something outside the human frame, is one of the great taboos of modern intellectual thought. Beauty, we are almost universally told, is a cultural contrivance rooted in politics and history, an illusion that exists only in human heads, for human reasons. On this view, a world without us would be a world without beauty. But in this episode Phil and JF explore two texts, by James Hillman and Peter Schjeldahl, that dare to challenge the modern orthodoxy. For Hillman and Schjeldahl, to experience the beautiful is precisely the break out of human bondage and touch the Outside. Beauty may even be one of the few truly objective experiences anyone could hope for. Lees meer
Peter Schjeldahl, “Notes on Beauty,“ in Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics
James Hillman, “The Practice of Beauty,” in Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics
C.G. Jung's retreat, Bollingen Tower
Ugly public art in Palo Alto
Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
Deleuze and Guattari, “Of the Refrain,” from A Thousand Plateaus
Roger Scruton, Beauty
Weird Studies, Episode 36 -- On Hyperstition
Weird Studies, Episode 33 -- The Fine Art of Changing the Subject: On Duchamp's "Fountain"
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty
Ingri D'Aulaires, D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths
Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time
Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light
God, Book of JobLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 51: Blind Seers: On Flannery O'Connor's 'Wise Blood'
17 juli 2019 · 1 uur 36 min
Through her fiction, Flannery O'Connor reenvisioned life as a supernatural war wherein each soul becomes the site of a clash of mysterious, almost incomprehensible forces. Her first novel, Wise Blood, tells the story of Hazel Motes, a young preacher with a new religion to sell: the Church Without Christ. In this episode, JF and Phil read Motes's misadventures in the "Jesus-haunted" city of Taulkinham, Tennessee, as a prophetic vision of the modern condition that is at once supremely tragic and funny as hell. As O'Connor herself wrote in her prefac to the book: "(Wise Blood) is a comic novel about a Christian malgré lui, and as such, very serious, for all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
James Marshall, George and Martha (here's a great NYT piece on the books)
Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods
Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty
Amy Hungerford's lecture on Wise Blood (Yale University)Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 50: Demogorgon: On 'Stranger Things'
3 juli 2019 · 1 uur 37 min
The Duffer Brothers' hit series Stranger Things is many things: an exemplary piece of entertainment in the summer blockbuster mold, a fresh take on the "kids on bikes" subgenre of science fiction, a loving pastiche of 1980s Hollywood cinema. And as Phil and JF attempt to show in this episode, Stranger Things is also a deep investigation into the metaphysical assumptions of our times, and a bold statement on the ontology of the analog real. This, at least, was the thesis of JF's three-part essay "Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things," which appeared on Metapsychosis after the first season dropped in 2016. Here, Phil and JF revisit that essay in order to expand on its arguments and discuss how it hoilds up in light of the series continued unfolding. The conversation touches on Apple's famous 1984 ad for the first Macintosh, the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the otherworldliness of airports, the ensorcelments of consumerism, and much more. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Stranger Things
"Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things" available at Metapsychosis or in ebook format
Samuel Delaney, Dhalgren
1984 Apple commercial for Macintosh
Wild Wild Country, Netflix documentary series
Tom Frank, “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent”
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Arcade Fire, “We Used to Wait”
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody
William James, A Pluralistic Universe
Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity
Weird Studies, episode 2: Garmonbozia
Homer, Odyssey
Matt Cardin, Dark Awakenings
The Wachowskis, The Matrix
Jonathan Haight and Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American MindLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 49: Out of Time: Nietzsche on History
19 juni 2019 · 1 uur 23 min
In his essay "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," Nietzsche attacks the notion that humans are totally determined by the historical forces that shape their physical and mental environment. Where other philosophers like Plato saw virtue in remembering eternal truths that earthly existence had wiped from our memories, Nietzsche extolled the virtues of forgetting, of becoming "untimely" and creating a zone where something new could arise. For Nietzsche, history was useful only if it served Life. Because we live in an age which constantly reifies history (through movies, news, social media, etc.) while also tricking us into thinking we somehow exist outside of history, the essay remains as relevant today as it was when Nietzsche wrote it a century and a half ago. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" in Untimely Meditations
Epic Rap Battles of History: Eastern Philosophers vs Western Philosophers
Ernest Newman, Life of Wagner
Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature
Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity
Michael Foucault, "What is Englightenment?"
Antinatalism
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
P. J. O’Rourke, American writer
Richard Pryor, American comedianLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 48: Walking the Tightrope with Erik Davis
5 juni 2019 · 1 uur 25 min
Journalist and historian of religion Erik Davis joins Phil and JF to talk about his latest magnum opus, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. In this masterwork of weird scholarship, Davis explores the simultaneously luminous and obscure worlds of three giants of Seventies counterculture: Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick. Their psychonautical legacy serve as fuel for a deep-delving conversation on Davis' own ontological leanings, yearnings, and hesitations. We touch on his philosophical development since the release of Techgnosis in 1998, the meaning of "weird naturalism," the primacy of the aesthetic, the uses and abuses of anthropotechnics, the challenges of tightrope-walking across bottomless chasms, and lots more. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Expreience in the Seventies
Erik Davis, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of InformationPhilip K. Dick, American science fiction writer
Robert Anton Wilson, American writer
Terence McKenna, Half-elf bard
Graham Harman, American philosopher
Timothy Morton, British philosopher
Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion
William James, American philosopher and psychologist
Hee-jin Kim, Eihei Dogen: Mystical Realist
Dogen, "Instructions for the Cook"
Steve Reich, "Music as a Gradual Process"
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Albert Hofman’s famous bicycle ride
Erowid LSD vault
George Lackoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, Syntheism: Creating God in the Internet Age
Special Guest: Erik Davis.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 47: Machines of Loving Grace: Technology and the Unabomber
22 mei 2019 · 1 uur 8 min
Made in 2003, Lutz Dammbeck's documentary The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet is a film about many things, but the gist of it is something like what William Burroughs called the doctrine of control. We live in a world governed by technologies designed with a particular idea of society in mind, one that has its roots in the trauma of global war and the utopian dreams of modern thinkers. The viability of this ideal is, of course, an important question, and it was made all the more urgent by recent developments at the intersection of technology and politics. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss the doctrine of control as imagined by one of its fiercest -- and most insane -- critics: Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski's thoughts on technological society form the through-line of Dammbeck's film, which in turn serves as a through-line for this jam on everything from one-world government and cybernetics to the archetype of the magus and the Whole Earth Catalog. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Lutz Dammbeck (director), The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet (2003)
Chuck Klosterman, "FAIL" in Eating the Dinosaur
Jacques Ellul, French theorist
Suzanne Treister, HEXEN Tarot Deck
-- Seven of Swords
-- Justice
-- The Sun
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine and The Human Use of Human Beings
Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
Weird Studies Episode 2: Garmonbozia
Stewart Brand, writer and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog
Ursula Le Guin, Always Coming Home
Gary Snyder's idea that "we are primitives of an unknown culture" is explored in Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Richard Brautigan, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" (poem)
San Francisco Oracle
Heidegger, The Question Concerning TechnologyLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 46: Thomas Ligotti's Angel
8 mei 2019 · 1 uur 30 min
In his short story "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel," contemporary horror author Thomas Ligotti contrasts the chaotic monstrosity of dreams with the cold, indifferent, and no less monstrous purity of angels. It is the story of a boy whose vivid dream life is sapping his vital force, and who resorts to esoteric measures to rectify the situation. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the beauty and horror of dreams, the metaphysical signifiance of angels and demons, and the potential dangers of seeking the peace of absolute "purity" in the wondrous flux of lived experience. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Thomas Ligotti, "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel" (read by Jon Padgett)
Roger Scruton, The Face of God
Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer
Thomas Ligotti, "The Last Feast of Harlequin" in Grimscribe: His Lives and Works
Robert Aickman, English author
H. P. Lovecraft, American author
H. R. Giger, Swiss artist
Jean Giraud a.k.a. Moebius, French comic book artist
Donald Barthelme, American author
Pierre Soulages, French artist
Bruno Schulz, Polish author
Thomas Bernhard, Austrian author
Edgar Allan Poe, American author
J. F. Martel, "The Beautiful Madness: Primacy of Wonder in the Works of Thomas Ligotti" (Forthcoming in James Curcio (ed.), Masks: Bowie and the Artists of Artifice from Intellect Books)
Algernon Blackwood, "The Wendigo"
Thomas Ligotti, "The Dark Beauty of Unheard of Horrors" in The Thomas Ligotti Reader: Essays and Explorations
Dogen Zenji, Zen master
Manichaeism
Spencer Brown, The Laws of Form
Ramsey Dukes, Words Made Flesh: Information In Formation
Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical
Thomas Ligotti, "Purity," in Teatro Grottesco
James Joyce, Ulysses
Advaita Vedanta
Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
P. J. O’Rourke, political satiristLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 45: Jeffrey J. Kripal on 'Flipping' Out of Materialism
24 april 2019 · 1 uur 10 min
"May the present 'you' not survive this little book," Jeffrey Kripal writes in the prologue to The Flip. "May you be flipped in dramatic or quiet ways." Indeed, Kripal's latest is a kind of manifesto, a call to embrace the metaphysical expanses that reveal themselves to many who dare dip a toe outside the materialist lifeboat we've been rowing away in for a couple of centuries now. In this conversation, Phil and JF talk to the eminent scholar of religion about the life-changing epiphanies that have convinced many a hardboiled materialist that bouncing billiard balls is probably not the best metaphor for what is actually going on in the universe. In essence, this is a conversation about stories, about the fictions we tell ourselves to make sense -- or nonsense -- of our world. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge
Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
Weird Studies, Episode 37: Entities, with Stuart Davis
Special Guest: Jeffrey J. Kripal.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 44: Doomed to Enchantment: The Psychical Research of William James
9 april 2019 · 1 uur 34 min
The great American thinker William James knew well that no intellectual pursuit is purely intellectual. His interest in the "supernormal," whether it take the form of spiritual apparition or extrasensory perception, was rooted in a personal desire to uncover the miraculous in the mundane. Indeed, the early members of the British Society for Psychical Research and its American counterpart (which James co-founded in 1884) were united in this conviction that certain phenomena which most scientists of their day considered unworthy of their attention were in fact the frontier of a new world, an avenue for humanity's deepest aspirations. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss two papers that James wrote about the first phase in the history of these research societies. James lays bare his conclusions about the reality of psychical phenomena and its scientific significance. The bizarre fact that psychical research has made little progress since its inception lays the ground for an engaging discussion on the limits of the knowable. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Frederic W. H. Myers, theorist of the "subliminal self"
Weird Studies, Episode 37: Entities
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka "Darwin's Bulldog"
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld
Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Trilogy
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
James Randi, professional skeptic
Dean Radin, Real Magic
Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious
Lionel Snell a.k.a. Ramsey Dukes, British magician
Changeling: The Lost tabletop roleplaying game
Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
Joshua Ramey, "[Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux]("Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux")"
C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting PrincipleLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 43: On Shirley Jackson
27 maart 2019 · 1 uur 17 min
Shirley Jackson's stories and novels rank among the greatest weird works produced in America during the 20th century. However, unlike authors such as Philip K. Dick and H.P. Lovecraft, Jackson didn't cut her teeth in the pulps but among the slick pages of such illustrious publications as The New Yorker. On the other hand, whether because her most famous novel uses the traditional ghost story form or because she was a woman, Jackson only rarely appears in the litanies of weird literature, where she most definitely belongs. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss two of Jackson's short works, "The Lottery" and "The Summer People." The conversation touches on such cheerful topics as human sacrifice, the use of tradition to license evil, and the alienness that can infect even the most familiar things ... when the stars are right. Lees meer
Header image by Hussein Twabi, Wikimedia Commons
REFERENCES
The Weird Studies Patreon
Shirley Jackson
Zoë Heller, “The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson,” review of Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
American writer Mitch Horowitz
Rhonda Byrne, The Secret
Stuart Wilde, The Trick to Money is Having Some
Seymour Ginsburg, Gurdjieff Unveiled
Randall Collins, Violence: A Microsociological Theory
James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War
Homer, The Iliad
Phil & JF at Octopus Books in Ottawa, 2015
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations “Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that happen to you.”
David Lynch, Blue VelvetLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 42: On Pauline Oliveros, with Kerry O'Brien
13 maart 2019 · 1 uur 4 min
In the mid-1960s, Pauline Oliveros was a composer of experimental electronic music. But at the end of the 1960s, shocked by the political violence around her, she turned away from electronic technology and towards to a different kind of experimentation, which Dr. Kerry O'Brien calls "experimentalisms of the self." The immediate result of this turn was Oliveros's Sonic Meditations, a series of instructions for group bodymind practice. This work became the seed of Deep Listening, a sort of musical yoga Oliveros developed throughout the rest of her long career. Dr. O'Brien joins JF and Phil for a conversation on practice, "gaining mind," the ritual value of art, the wisdom of the body, and whether Deep Listening is really best understood as art at all. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Kerry O'Brien, "Listening as Activism: The 'Sonic Meditations' of Pauline Oliveros"
Pauline Oliveros, American composer
John Cage, 4'33"
Dead Territory performing Cage's 4'33"
Alvin Lucier, "Music for a Solo Performer"
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
Special Guest: Kerry O'Brien.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices