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244 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
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Episode 41: On Speculative Fiction, with Matt Cardin
27 februari 2019 · 1 uur
Neil Gaiman wrote, "If literature is the world, then fantasy and horror are twin cities, divided by a river of black water." Flame Tree Publishing underwrites this claim with their recent publication, The Astounding Illustrated History of Fantasy and Horror. The book is a veritable gazetteer of these two cities in the heartland of the imaginal world. Writer and scholar Matt Cardin, founding editor of the marvellous [Teeming Brain](www.teemingbrain.com), wrote a chapter for the book focusing on the books and films of the Sixties and Seventies. In this episode, he joins JF and Phil to discuss the kinship of horror and fantasy, the modern ghettoization of mythopoeic art, the prophetic reach of speculative fiction, and the "cauldron of cultural transformation" that was the Sixties and Seventies. Lees meer
Header Image by Moralist, Wikimedia Commons
REFERENCES
The Astounding Illustrated History of Fantasy and Horror
Matt Cardin's website
The Teeming BrainAmerican literary critic S. T. Joshi
British writer and scholar Roger Luckhurst
Neil Gaiman, introduction to The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death
The concept of "folk psychology"
H. P. Lovecraft, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"
H. P. Lovecraft, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key"
James Curcio, Masks: Bowie and the Artists of Artifice (forthcoming)
American author Thomas Ligotti
British author Arthur Machen
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Ian McEwen, Enduring Love
Weird Studies, Episode 36: On Hyperstition
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Terry Brooks, The Sword of Shannara
Stephen R. Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968)
The Lord of the Rings animated film (Ralph Bakshi, 1978)
Lloyd Alexander, The Chronicles of Prydain
Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
The Call of Cthulhu Role-Playing Game (Chaosium)
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978)
William Irwin Thompson,… -
Episode 40: On Jonathan Glazer's 'Under the Skin'
13 februari 2019 · 1 uur 18 min
In Jonathan Glazer's loose screen adaptation of Michel Faber's novel Under the Skin, a creature of mysterious origin drives around Scotland in a white van, collecting lonely men and spiriting them away to an otherworld where they are turned into food.... or something. Drawing on a deep well of literary, visual, and musical tradition, Glazer (with help from his score composer Mica Levi) create a vivid work of tragedy and horror, masterfully executed for maximal weirdness and unwaveringly true to the auteur's intent to reveal our world from an "alien perspective." In this episode, Phil and JF discuss some themes and ideas they've pried from this exquisite tangle of image and sound. Along the way, they discuss the role that serendipity, coincidence, and fate play in both art-making and scholarship. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
Other films by Glazer: Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004)Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
Iannis Xenakis, Greek composer
Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch, 2017)
Ligeti, Atmosphères
Stranger Things (The Duffer Brothers, 2016)
Screen shot of "Space Invader" Easter egg in Under the Skin
Weird Studies Episode 37: Entities, with Stuart Davis
John August, American screenwriter
Phil Ford, "The Devil's On Your Side: A Meditation on the Perennially Disreputable Business of Hermeneutics" (unpublished)
Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, 2013)
William Irwin Thompson, Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science
Interview with Mica Levi, who composed the score for Under the Skin
Atar Arad, American violist
David Caspar Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of FogLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 39: The Challenge of the Paranormal, with Jeffrey J. Kripal
30 januari 2019 · 1 uur 3 min
"The world is not simply composed of physical causes strung together in strictly materialistic and mechanical fashion," writes Prof. Jeffrey J. Kripal in his seminal book, Authors of the Impossible. "The world is also a series of meaningful signs requiring a hermeneutics for their decipherment." This, in a nutshell, is Kripal's position vis à vis the fact of paranormal experience, a fact that he has explored in numerous works of scholarship over the last 25 years. For Kripal, whether we see supernatural entities as beings from other worlds or creatures of the human imagination is secondary to the question of whether they merit serious philosophical thought and consideration. On that point, he says, "it's not an option to be neutral." JF and Phil had the honor of sitting down with Jeffrey Kripal to discuss the super-natural, the sacred, and the reasons why these categories remain as vital now as they ever have been. Lees meer
Header image: "Artist's Impression of the Mothman," by Tim Bertelink, Wikimedia Commons.
REFERENCES
Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred, The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, The Super Natural: Why the Unexplained is Real (with Whitley Strieber), and Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks it Empowers Us All (with Elizabeth G. Krohn)
Stanley Kubrick's The Shining
Wouter Hanegraaff, historian of hermetic philosophy
John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies
Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker, philosophers
J. F. Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande
The X-Men (Marvel Comics)
Special Guest: Jeffrey J. Kripal.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 38: Style as Analysis
16 januari 2019 · 1 uur 11 min
Music writing has always been something of an occult practice, trying by some weird alchemy to use concepts to describe stuff that defies the basic categories of intellect. So long as we stick to classical music, we can pretend that nothing too odd is happening, since the classical tradition has been steeped in notation for centuries. But when a musicologist attempts to analyze, say, an ambient track by Brian Eno, things aren't so simple. Suddenly notation won't do, and there comes the need to make use of every tool in the poet's shed. This episode focuses on a recently published article by Phil on this question. In due course, the discussion turns to the power of good writing: its capacity not just to convey an author's subjective impressions, but to disclose new facets of the ineffable, baroque objective world. Lees meer
SHOW NOTES
Phil Ford, "Style as Analysis" in The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches, edited by Ciro Scotto, Kenneth M. Smith and John Brackett
Christopher Ricks, Dylan's Vision of Sin
Ferrucio Busoni, Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music
Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Jerry Hopkins, No One Here Gets Out Alive
Brian Eno, Another Green World
Mitchell Morris, The Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s
William Youngren, “Balliett’s Bailiwick,” Partisan Review 32, no. 1 (Winter 1965)
Whitney Balliett, Collected Works
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
Henri Bergson, Matter and MemoryLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 37: Entities, with Stuart Davis
2 januari 2019 · 1 uur 15 min
Several years ago, on New Year’s Eve, a tall, purple-robed praying mantis appeared to multidisciplinary artist Stuart Evan Davis as he meditated while running a fever. “Remember who you work for,” the entity said after beaming a zettabyte of information into Stuart’s febrile mind. Though it lasted less than a minute, the encounter sparked a series of life-changing -- and hair-raising -- events worthy of a Philip K. Dick novel. Lees meer
JF and Phil talk to Stuart Davis to get his thoughts on nonhuman intelligences, the artistic cosmos, a movie trilogy the Mantis commissioned, and Stuart’s brilliant audio documentary, Man Meets Mantis.
Header image by OLJA, Wikimedia Commons
Stuart Davis Official Website
Stuart Davis, Man Meets Mantis
Stuart Davis, “Something from Nothing” course
Jasmine Karimova, singer-songwriter
Ramsey Dukes, The Good, The Bad, and the Funny
John Mack, psychiatrist and abduction phenomenon researcher
Jacques Vallee, ufologist
John Keel, paranormal researcher
Weird Studies episode 2, “Garmonbozia”
Norman McLaren, Spheres
Remedios Varo, artist
Leonora Carrington, artist
JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Special Guest: Stuart Evan Davis.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Christmas Bonus: Hyperstition Addendum
25 december 2018 · 25 min
Happy holidays, Weird Studies listeners! In this short "Christmas Bonus" episode, your intrepid hosts finish up what began as a discussion of Nick Land's concept of hyperstition. Following last week's closing remarks about the importance of "banishing" ideas that might otherwise take us over, the segment focuses on the dividing line between the personal and the political. Where does the one end and the other begin? What do we risk when we choose to make a necessarily limited standpoint the locus of some totalizing view? The answers will take back to the birth of eukaryotic cells, the sin of Cain, and the wisdom of Sun Ra. Lees meer
References made in this conversation were included in the show notes for Episode 36.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 36: On Hyperstition
19 december 2018 · 1 uur 14 min
Hyperstition is a key concept in the philosophy of Nick Land. It refers to fictions which, given enough time and libidinal investment, become realities. JF and Phil explore the notion using one of those optometric apparatuses with multiple lenses -- deleuzian, magical, mythological, political, ethical, etc. The goal isn't to understand how fictions participate in reality (that'll have to wait for another episode), but to ponder what this implies for a sapient species. The conversation weaves together such varied topics as Twin Peaks: The Return, Internet meme magic (Trump as tulpa!), Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysics, occult experiments in spirit creation, the Brothers Grimm, and the phantasmic overtones of The Communist Manifesto. In the end we can only say, "What a load of bullsh*t!" Lees meer
Header Image: Still from the 1920 German Expressionist film The Golem: How He Came in the World, by Paul Wegener.
REFERENCES
JF's notes on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
David Lynch (director), Twin Peaks: The Return
Phil Ford, "Garmonbozia" (work in progress, unpublished)
Delphi Carstens, "Hyperstition"
Delphi Carstens, "Hyperstition: An Introduction" (2009 interview with Nick Land)
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
CCRU Archives
The occult concept of the egregore
William Irwin Thompson, Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford, The Blood of the Saints
A. T. L. Carver, "The Truth About Pepe the Frog and the Cult of Kek"
Paul Spencer, "Trump's Occult Online Supporters Believer 'Meme Magic' Got Him Elected"
Colm A. Kelleher, The Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Sun Ra, Space is the PlaceLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 35: Whirl Without End: On M.C. Richards' 'Centering'
5 december 2018 · 1 uur 2 min
The first step in any pottery project is to center the clay on the potter's wheel. In her landmark essay Centering: In Pottery, Poetry and the Person (1964), the American poet M. C. Richards turns this simple action into a metaphor for all creative acts, including the act of living your life. The result is a penetrating and poetic reflection on the artistic process that values change, unknowing, and radical becoming, making Richards' text a guide to creativity that leaves other examples of that evergreen genre in the dust. Phil and JF get their hands dirty trying to understand what centering is, and what it entails for a life of creation and becoming. The discussion brings in a number of other thinkers and artists including Friedrich Nietzsche, Norman O. Brown, Carl Jung, Antonin Artaud, and Flannery O'Connor. Lees meer
Header image: NASA
REFERENCES
M. C. Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person
J. S. Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier
American pianist David Tudor
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Weird Studies, Episode 33: "The Fine Art of Changing the Subject"
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy
Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double (translated by M. C. Richards)
Rudolf Steiner, Alchemy: The Evolution of the Mysteries
Norman O. Brown, author of Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Flannery O'Connor, "Novelist and Believer"Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 34: The Weird Realism of Robert Aickman
21 november 2018 · 56 min
Although he is one of the luminaries of the weird tale, Robert Aickman referred to his irreal, macabre short works as strange stories. Born in London in 1914, Aickman wrote less than fifty such stories before his death in 1981. JF and Phil focus on one of his most chilling, "The Hospice," from the collection Cold Hand in Mine, published in 1975. In it, Aickman uses a staple ingredient of the classic ghost story -- a man is stranded on a country road at night, lost and out of petrol -- to concoct an unforgettable blend of fantasy and nightmare, reality and dream. Indeed, Phil and JF argue that Aickman deserves a place alongside David Lynch and a few others as one of those rare fabulists who can adeptly disclose how reality is more dreamlike, and dreams more real, than most of us would care to admit. Lees meer
Header Image: Detail from photo by Ivars Indāns (Wikimedia Commons)
REFERENCES
Robert Aickman, "The Hospice" from Cold Hand in Mine
Dante Aligheri, The Divine Comedy: The Inferno
David Lynch, Twin Peaks: The Return
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Weird Studies, Episode 22: Divining the World with Joshua Ramey
Norman Mailer, An American DreamLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 33: The Fine Art of Changing the Subject: On Duchamp's 'Fountain'
7 november 2018 · 1 uur
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp trolled the New York art scene with Fountain, the famous urinal, whose significance has since swelled in the minds of art aficionados to become the prototype of all modern art. The conversation as to whether or not Fountain fulfills the conditions of a genuine work of art has been going on ever since. In this episode, JF and Phil weigh in with their own ideas, not just about what art is, but more importantly, about what art -- and only art -- can do. The result is a no-holds-barred assault on the very idea of conceptual art, a j'accuse aimed squarely at Duchamp and anyone else who would make the arts as scrutable, and as trivial, as the latest political attack ad or home insurance jingle. Lees meer
REFERENCES
J. S. Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier
Roger Scruton, The Face of God
Philip Larkin, All What Jazz
Daniel Clowes, Art School Confidential
Banksy, Girl with Balloon
Bill Hicks, stand-up bit on marketers
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and Paul Klee, Angelus Novus
Arthur Danto, “The Art World”
Andy Warhol, Brillo Boxes
JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Cornelius Cardew, “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism”
John Roderick, “Punk Rock is Bullshit”
Susan McClary, foreword to William Cheng, Just Vibrations
Deleuze, "What is the Creative Act?"
Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Biggie Smalls, "Ready to Die"
Cave paintings at Chauvet
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel lecture
Jonathan Glazer, Under the SkinLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 32: Orbis Tertius: Borges on Magic, Conspiracy and Idealism
31 oktober 2018 · 1 uur 11 min
Jorge Luis Borges's story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a metaphysical detective story, an armchair conspiracy thriller, and a masterpiece of weird fiction. In this tale penned by a true literary magician, Phil and JF see an opportunity to talk about magic, hyperstition, non-linear time, and the power of metaphysics to reshape the world. When Phil questions his co-host's animus against idealist doctrines, the discussion turns to dreams, cybernetics, and information theory, before reaching common ground with the dumbfound appreciation of radical mystery. Lees meer
Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in Ficciones
Weird Studies, Episode 29, "On Lovecraft"
George Berkley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)
John Crowley, the Aegypt tetralogy
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia - Urn Burial
Richard Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung)
William James, A Pluralistic Universe
Karl Schroeder, "Degrees of Freedom"
Weird Studies, Episode 26, "Living in a Glass Age"
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Dogen, GenjokoanLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 31: Scarcely Human at All: On Glenn Gould's 'Prospects of Recording'
24 oktober 2018 · 1 uur 17 min
Most people know Glenn Gould as a brilliant pianist who forever changed how we receive and interpret the works of Europe's great composers: Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg... But Gould was also an aesthetic theorist who saw a new horizon for the arts in the age of recording technology. In the future, he said, the superstitious cult of history, performance, and authorship would disappear, and the arts would retrieve a "neo-medieval anonymity" that would allow us to see them for what they really are: scarcely human at all. This episode interprets Gould's prophecy with the help of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the Chinese Daoist sage Zhuang Zhou, and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, among others. Lees meer
SHOW NOTES
Glenn Gould, "The Prospects of Recording"
Marshall McLuhan's Tetrad of media effects
Ludwig van Beethoven, Concerto no. 3 in C minor
Glenn Gould, "Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould"
Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin, dialogue on The Music of Man
Jean-Luc Godard, A Married Woman (A Married Woman)
Heidegger, Der Spiegel interview (1966)
Daoist sage Zhuang Zhou
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange
Marshall McLuhan, The Playboy interview
Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Douglas Rushkoff and Michael Avon Oeming, Aleister and Adolph
Joyce Hatto
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking
Kevin Bazzana, Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work
Phil Ford, “Blogging and the Van Meegeren Syndrome”
David Thompson, Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 FilmsLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 30: On Stanley Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut'
14 oktober 2018 · 1 uur 7 min
No dream is ever just a dream. Or so Tom Cruises tells Nicole Kidman at the end of Eyes Wide Shut. In this episode, Phil and JF expound some of the key themes of Kubrick's film, a masterpiece of cinematic chamber music that demonstrates, with painstaking attention to detail, Zen Master Dōgen's utterance that when one side of the world is illuminated, the other side is dark. Treading a winding path between wakefulness and dream, love and sex, life and art, your paranoid hosts make boldly for that secret spot where the rainbow ends, and the masks come off. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Arthur Schnitzler, Dream Story (Traumnovelle) -- Source of the EWS screenplay, sadly overlooked in the episode but well worth a read.
Frederic Raphael, Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick
Bathysphere
Frank L. Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
David Icke's "reptilian" theory of the British Royal Family
Thomas A. Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze
Screenshot of newspaper article from Eyes Wide Shut
Rodney Ascher, Room 237
James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare
Gustave Moreau, L'Apparition
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony
William S. Burroughs, “On Coincidence,” in The Adding Machine
J.F. Martel, "The Kubrick Gaze"Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 29: On Lovecraft
9 oktober 2018 · 1 uur 16 min
Phil and JF indulge their autumnal mood in this discussion of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's work, specifically the essay "Notes on the Writing of Weird Fiction" and the prose piece "Nyarlathotep." Philip K. Dick, Algernon Blackwood, and David Foster Wallace make appearances as our fearsome hosts talk about how the weird story differs from conventional horror fiction, how Lovecraft gives voice to contemporary fears of physical, psychological and political infection, and how authors like Lovecraft and Dick can be seen as prophetic poets of the "great unbuffering of the Western self." Lees meer
REFERENCES
H. P. Lovecraft, "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction"
H. P. Lovecraft, "Nyarlathotep"1974 Rolling Stone feature on PKD
Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy
Theodor Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition
Algernon Blackwood, "The Wendigo"
Algernon Blackwood, "The Willows"
Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Music of Erich Zann"
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space"
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
Weird Studies, Episode 2: Garmonbozia
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of ManLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 28: Weird Music, Part Two
2 oktober 2018 · 1 uur 5 min
"Music is worth living for," Andrew W.K. sings in his latest rock anthem. In this second episode on the weirdness of music, JF and Phil focus on two works steeped in ambiguity and paradox: Bob Dylan's "Jokerman," from the landmark post-Christian album Infidels, and Franz Liszt's "Mephisto Waltz, No. 1: The Dance at the Village Inn," inspired by an episode in the Faust legend. If this conversation has a central theme, it may be music's power to unhinge every fixed binary, from God and the Devil to culture and nature. Music, as exemplified in these pieces, can put us in touch with the abiding mystery of the eternal in the historical, the unhuman in the human... The hills are alive! Lees meer
REFERENCES
Bob Dylan, "Jokerman"
Franz Liszt, “Mephisto Waltz no. 1,” performed by Boris BerezovskyAndrew WK, "Music is Worth Living For"
Leonard Cohen, “The Future”
C.G. Jung, Aion
Douglas Rushkoff, Testament
The Guardian, “Carthaginians sacrificed own children, archaeologists say”
Garry Wills, "Our Moloch"
Minoan snake goddess statues
Richard Wagner, Parsifal http://www.monsalvat.no/
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts
Beckett, Not I
Nikolaus Lenau, German Romantic poet
Wolgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 1, translated by David Luke
Weird Studies, Episode 3: Sin: "Ecstasy, and the White People"Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 27: Weird Music, Part One
26 september 2018 · 1 uur 19 min
In this first of two episodes devoted to the music of the weird, Phil and JF discuss two works that have bowled them over: the second movement of Ligeti's Musica Ricercata, used to powerful effect in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, and the opening music to Cronenberg's film Naked Lunch, composed by Howard Shore and featuring the inimitable stylings of Ornette Coleman. After teasing out the intrinsic weirdness of music in general, the dialogue soars over a strange country rife with shadows, mad geniuses, and skittering insects. And to top it all off, Phil breaks out the grand piano. Lees meer
Header image by Bandan, Wikimedia Commons
REFERENCES
Ligeti, Musica Ricercata, 2nd movement
Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman, opening music for David Cronenberg's Naked LunchSchopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique"
Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut
Hitchcock, Psycho
Vulture, "The Evolution of the Movie Trailer" by Granger Willson
Official Trailer for The Shining_vs teaser for _2012
Jan Harlan (director), Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
David Cronenberg, Crash
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Gunther Schuller's interview with Ethan Iverson
Weird Studies, Episode 25: David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch
Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-OedipusLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 26: Living in a Glass Age, with Michael Garfield
19 september 2018 · 1 uur 19 min
Stone, bronze, iron... glass? In his recent thought and writing, transdisciplinary artist and thinker Michael Garfield defines modernity as an age of glass, arguing that the entire ethos of our era inheres in the transformative enchantments of this amorphous solid. No one would deny that glass plays a central role in our lives, although glass does have a knack for disappearing into the background, at least until the beakers or screens crack and shatter. Glass is weird, and like a lot of weird things, it can serve as a lens (so to speak!) for observing our world from strange new angles. In this episode, Michael joins Phil and JF to talk through the origins, the significance, and the fate of the Glass Age. Lees meer
Michael Garfield is a musician, live painter, and futurist. He is the host of the brilliant Future Fossils Podcast.
REFERENCES
Michael Garfield's website + Patreon + Medium + Bandcamp
Michael Garfield, "The Future is Indistinguishable from Magic" (This is the essay we discuss that was unpublished at the time of the recording)
Michael Garfield, "The Future Acts Like You"
Michael Garfield, "The Evolution of Surveillance Part 3: Living in the Belly of the Beast"Artist David Titterington's Patreon page
Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences
Corning, "The Glass Age" (corporate video)
Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire
John David Ebert, "On Hypermodernity"
John C. Wright, The Golden Age
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects
Christopher Knight and Alan Butler, Who Built the Moon?
Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
Spinoza, Ethics
Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity
Martine Rothblatt, Virtually Human: The Promise and the Peril of Digital Immortality
John Crowley, Little, Big
Jose Arguelles, Dreamspell Calendar
William Irwin Thompson, Lindisfarne Tapes
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past
Karl Schroeder, “Degrees of Fr… -
Episode 25: David Cronenberg's 'Naked Lunch'
12 september 2018 · 1 uur 21 min
JF and Phil head for Interzone in an attempt to solve the enigma of Naked Lunch, David Cronenberg's 1991 screen adaptation of William S. Burroughs' infamous 1959 novel. A treatise on addiction, a diagnosis of modern ills, a lucid portrait of the artist as cosmic transgressor, and like the book, "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork," Naked Lunch is here framed in the light Cronenberg's recent speech making the case for the crime of art. Lees meer
Image by Melancholie, Wikimedia Commons.
REFERENCES
David Foster Wallace, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," from Girl With Curious Hair
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, and "How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?" in A Thousand Plateaus
David Cronenberg (writer-director), Naked Lunch (the film)
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (the novel)
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an Opium-Eater
Dale Pendell, Pharmako/Poeia: Power Plants, Poisons and Herbcraft
"David Cronenberg: I would like to make the case for the crime of art," Globe and Mail June 22 2018
JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Derek Bailey (director), On the Edge: Improvisation in Music
Phil Ford, "Good Prose is Written By People Who Are Not Frightened"
Geroge Orwell, "Inside the Whale"Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 24: The Charlatan and the Magus, with Lionel Snell
28 augustus 2018 · 59 min
As Lionel Snell, also known as Ramsey Dukes, observes in his seminal esoteric essay, "The Charlatan and the Magus" (1984), the series of trumps in a tarot deck doesn't begin with the noble Emperor or august Hierophant, but with the lowly Fool, followed by the Juggler. Trickery or illusion, Snell suggests, may not be the dealbreaker we've thought it to be in parapsychological investigation. It may even be a feature, not a bug, of the magical process. In this episode of Weird Studies, JF and Phil talk to Lionel Snell about trickster magic, and all we miss out on when we make rational truth the only measure by which we know reality. Lees meer
Ramsey Dukes [Lionel Snell], "The Charlatan and the Magus"
Darren Brown, Tricks of the Mind
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Phil Ford, “Birth of the Weird"
Ramsey Dukes [Lionel Snell], How to See Fairies: Discover Your Psychic Powers in Six Weeks
Ramsey Dukes [Lionel Snell], S.S.O.T..B.M.E.
John Keats, Negative Capability
Weird Studies, Episode 9: "On Aleister Crowley and the Idea of Magick"
Special Guest: Lionel Snell [Ramsey Dukes].Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 23: On Presence
15 augustus 2018 · 1 uur 44 min
Phil stops by JF's Canadian homestead for a raucous IRL conversation on the idea of presence. The range of topics includes objects of power, the magic of books, the mystery of the event, modernity's knack for making myths immanent, genius loci, the mad wonder of Blue Velvet, and the iron fist of the virtual. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Gil Scott-Heron, "The Revolution Will Bot Be Televised"
Louis CK on smart phones at the ballet recital
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution
Gilles Deleuze on the virtual: see Bergsonism, Proust and Signs, The Logic of Sense, Difference and Repetition, Cinema II: The TIme Image
Expanding Mind with Erik Davis, "Being Anarchist"
JF Martel, "Reality is Analog"
Jason A. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment (and Gyrus's review)
Gyrus, North: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Cosmos
William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture
Geoffrey O’Brien, Phantom Empire
David Foster Wallace, “David Lynch Keeps His Head”
Donald Barthelme
David Lynch, Blue Velvet
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal MeraphysicsLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 22: Divining the World with Joshua Ramey
1 augustus 2018 · 1 uur 10 min
American philosopher Joshua Ramey, author of The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and the Spiritual Ordeal, and Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency, joins Phil and JF to discuss a philosophical project whose implications go deep and weird. In his books and articles, Joshua proffers the vision of a world where divination -- whether or not it is recognized as such -- isn't just possible, but necessary for advancing knowledge, creating art, and forming communities. And his research has revealed that the wardens of our neoliberal order know this all too well. As he writes in an essay discussed in this episode, the mandate of a weird age ought to be clear: "Occupy, and practice divination." Lees meer
**REFERENCES
Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and the Spiritual Ordeal
Joshua Ramey, Politics of DIvination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency
Joshua Ramey, "Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux" (abstract)
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, University of British Columbia, at academia.edu
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Difference and Repetition, and The Logic of Sense
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on Contingency
Elie Ayache, The Blank Swan: The End of Probability
Weird Studies, "Does Consciousness Exist?" Parts One and Two
Special Guest: Joshua Ramey.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 21: The Trash Stratum - Part 2
13 juli 2018 · 1 uur 6 min
The writings of underground filmmaker Jack Smith serve as a starting point for Phil and JF's second tour of the trash stratum. In their wanderings, they will uncover such moldy jewels as the 1944 film Cobra Woman, the exploitation flick She-Devils on Wheels, and (wonder of wonders) Hitchcock's Vertigo. The emergent focus of the conversation is the dichotomy of passionate commitment and ironic perspective, attitudes that largely determine whether a given object will turn out to appear as a negligible piece of garbage... or the Holy Grail. By the end, our hosts realize that even their own personal trash strata may give off shimmers of the divine. Lees meer
Jack Smith, Flaming Creatures
Robert Siodmak (director), Cobra Woman (1944)
Jack Smith, "The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez"
Roger Scruton, English philosopher
Mystery Science Theater 3000 (TV series)
Kenneth Burke, American literary theorist
Alfred Hitchcock (director), Vertigo (1958)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
Charles Ludlam's Theater of the Ridiculous
Mel Brooks (director), High Anxiety (1977)
"Ironic Porn Purchase Leads to Unironic Ejaculation", The Onion (1999)
James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim"
Herschell Gordon Louis (director), She-Devils on Wheels
André Bazin, What is Cinema?
Erik Davis, "The Alchemy of Trash"
David Lynch, Mulholland Drive
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Phil Ford, "Birth of the Weird"Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 20: The Trash Stratum - Part 1
4 juli 2018 · 1 uur 16 min
Is the Holy Grail a crushed beer can in the gutter? JF and Phil consider the implications of Philip K. Dick's line, "the symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum." Gnosticism, Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot, Thomas Ligotti's "The Order of Illusion," Jack Smith's glorification of moldy glamour, saints' relics that look like beef jerky -- all this and more in the first of a two-part conversation. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Phil Ford, "What Good News Do You Bring?"
Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis
Philip K. Dick, VALIS
Stanislav Lem, Microworlds
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels
Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Frank Darabont (dir.), The Shawshank Redemption
Weird Studies podcast, On Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' Part 1 and Part 2
Richard Wagner, ParsifalLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 19: Intermezzo
20 juni 2018 · 1 uur 9 min
After announcing that Weird Studies will be going to a bi-weekly release schedule for the summer, Phil and JF talk about how the podcast has gone so far and what's on the horizon (more guests!). Before long, they're digging deep into what makes each of them tick as weird speculators, locating the points at which their ideas differ and converge. The discussion touches on the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux, the theology of Tertullian, the Beatles, the Coke-Pepsi dichotomy, the art of religion, and more. Lees meer
SHOUT OUTS
Mandala artist Betty Paz
Infinite Conversations
Michael Garfield, the Future Fossils podcast
Ramsey Dukes (Lionel Snell), “The Charlatan and the Magus”
Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and the Spiritual Ordeal and The Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of ContingencyREFERENCES
Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on Contingency
GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy
MC Escher, Drawing Hands
The works of TertullianLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 18: Does 'Consciousness' Exist? - Part Two
13 juni 2018 · 1 uur 2 min
JF and Phil finally get down to brass tacks with William James's essay "Does Consciousness Exist?" At the heart of this essay is the concept of what James calls "pure experience," the basic stuff of everything, only it isn't a stuff, but an irreducible multiplicity of everything that exists -- thoughts as well as things. We're used to thinking that thoughts and things belong to fundamentally different orders of being, but what if thoughts are things, too? For one thing, psychical phenomena (a great interest of James's) suddenly become a good deal more plausible. And the imaginal realm, where art and magic make their home, becomes a sovereign domain. Lees meer
REFERENCES
William James, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?"
Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego
William James, Essays in Psychical Research
Weird Studies D&D episode
Proust, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu
The Venera 13 probe's photos of the surface of Venus
Wallace Stevens, "A Postcard from the Volcano"Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 17: Does 'Consciousness' Exist? - Part One
6 juni 2018 · 48 min
In this first part of their discussion of William James' classic essay in radical empiricism, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?", Phil and JF talk about the various ways we use the slippery C-word in contemporary culture. The episode touches on the political charge of the concept of consciousness, the unholy marriage of materialism and idealism ("Kant is the ultimate hipster"), the role of consciousness in the workings of the weird -- basically, anything but the essay in question. That will come in part two. Lees meer
Header image by Miguel Bolacha, Wikimedia Commons
REFERENCES
William James, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?"
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
Daniel Pinchbeck, author and founder of Reality Sandwich
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
Matt Cardin - author and editor, creator of The Teeming BrainLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 16: On Dogen Zenji's 'Genjokoan'
30 mei 2018 · 1 uur 12 min
JF and Phil tackle Genjokoan, a profound and puzzling work of philosophy by Dogen Zenji. In it, the 13th-century Zen master ponders the question, "If everything is already enlightened, why practice Zen?" As a lapsed Zen practitioner ("a shit buddhist") with many hours of meditation under his belt, Phil draws on personal experience to dig into Dogen's strange and startling answers, while JF speaks from his perspective as a "decadent hedonist." "When one side is illumined," says Dogen, "the other is dark." For proof of this utterance, you could do worse than listen to this episode of Weird Studies. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Dogen Zenji, Genjokoan
Shohaku Okumura and the Sanshin Zen Community in Bloomington, Indiana
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Weird Studies, Episode 8: "On Graham Harman's 'The Third Table'"
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image
Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Joris-Karl Huysmans, À Rebours (Against Nature)
Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual MaterialismLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 15: On Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' - Part Two
23 mei 2018 · 1 uur 5 min
In this second of a two-part conversation on Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker, Phil and JF explore the film's prophetic dimension, relating it to Samuel R. Delany's classic science-fiction novel Dhalgren, the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the affordances of despair, the spookiness of color, the transformation of noise into music, and the Chernobyl disaster. They even come up with a title for a novel Robert Ludlum never wrote but should have written: The Criterion Rendition! Lees meer
REFERENCES
Andrei Tarkovsky (dir.), Stalker
Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (foreword by William Gibson)
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space"
John Searle, Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception
Steve Reich, Come Out
Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 1
Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology"
Stanley Kubrick, The Shining
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure PrincipleLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 14: On Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' - Part One
16 mei 2018 · 42 min
Journey into the Zone to uncover some of the strange artifacts buried in Tarkovsky's cinematic masterpiece, Stalker (1979). In this first of a two-part conversation, Phil and JF discuss a poem by Tarkovsky's dad, compare the film with the sci-fi novel that inspired it, explore the ideological underpinnings of formulaic genre, delve into the meaning and affordances of the concept of zone, and affirm that in a sufficiently weird mindset, even a casual stroll in your hometown can become an excursion into a Zone of your own. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Andrei Tarkovsky (dir.), Stalker
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic
The Wachowskis (dir.), The Matrix
James Cameron (dir.), Avatar
Second City Television (SCTV), vintage Canadian comedy show
Alex Garland (dir.), Annihilation (based on the novel by Jeff Vandermeer; here's an article on how Garland's film differs from Vandermeer's arguably weirder text)
SCTV, Monster Chiller Horror Theatre: Whispers of the WolfLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 13: The Obscure: On the Philosophy of Heraclitus
9 mei 2018 · 1 uur 22 min
Heraclitus of Ephesus was one of the great pre-Socratic thinkers. Called the Obscure and the Weeping Philosopher, he left behind a collection of fragments so mysterious and pregnant with meaning that they continue to puzzle scholars to this day. In this episode, Phil and JF use a random number generator to select a number of fragments and speculate about their content. By the end, they will also have disclosed the bizarre contents of JF's tenth-grade "hippie bag," outed Oscar Wilde as a Zen Buddhist, and taken a walking tour of a city that exists only in Phil's dreams. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?
Northrop Frye, The Great Code
Northrop Frye, Words with Power
I Ching: The Book of Changes
Oxford World Classics, The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists
Wikisource page for Heraclitus
James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
Dogen Zenji, Genjokoan
Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body
Gilles Deleuze on Spinoza
Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Neil Gaiman, Seasons of Mist (the fourth arc of the Sandman series)
Deleuze on DreamsLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 12: The Dark Eye: On the Films of Rodney Ascher
2 mei 2018 · 1 uur 29 min
American filmmaker Rodney Ascher is a master of the weird documentary. Whether he be exploring wild interpretations of a classic horror film in Room 237, bracketing the phenomenon of sleep paralysis in The Nightmare, studying the uncanny power of the moving image in "Primal Screen," or considering the sinister power of a kitschy logo in "The S from Hell," Ascher confronts his viewers with realities that resist final explanations and facile reduction. In this episode, Phil and JF follow Ascher's films into the living labyrinth of a strange universe that isn't just unknown, but radically unknowable. Lees meer
REFERENCES
American filmmaker Rodney Ascher, director of "The S from Hell", Room 237, The Nightmare, and "Primal Screen"
James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
The Duffer Brothers (directors), Stranger Things (web TV series)
Alan Landsburg (creator), In Search Of... with Leonard Nimoy (American TV series)
Errol Morris (director), The Thin Blue Line
Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (editors), The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
British speculative writer Michael Moorcock
Lord Dunsany, The Gods of Pegana
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
Stanley Kubrick (writer-director), The Shining
Richard Attenborough (director), Magic
Sandor Stern (writer-director), Pin
Freud, "The Uncanny"
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
David Lynch (writer-director), Lost Highway
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
Duncan Barford, Occult Experiments in the Home: Personal Explorations of Magick and the Paranormal
JF Martel, "Ramble on the Real"
Phil Ford, "Birth of the Weird"
American astronomer Carl Sagan
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
René Descartes, Meditations on First PhilosophyLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 11: Art is a Haunting Spirit
25 april 2018 · 1 uur 16 min
M. R. James' "The Mezzotint" is one of the most fascinating, and most chilling, examples of the classic ghost story. In this episode, Phil and JF discover what this tale of haunted images and buried secrets tells us about the reality of ideas, the singularity of events, the virtual power of the symbol, and the enduring magic of the art object in the age of mechanical reproduction. Lees meer
To accompany this episode, Phil recorded a full reading of the story. Listen to it here.
REFERENCES
M.R. James, "The Mezzotint"
Robert Aickman, English author of "strange stories"
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Oval Portrait"
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Marshall McLuhan, The Book of Probes
Clement Greenberg, American art critic
J.F. Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Marcel Duchamps, Fountain
Henri Bergson, Laughter
John Cage, American composer
David Lynch (director), Twin Peaks: The Return
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Danish painter
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?
Stanley Kubrick, [The Shining](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shining(film))_
Ferruccio Busoni, Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music
David Lynch on why you shouldn't watch films on your phone
Nelson Goodman, American philosopher
Pablo Picasso, Guernica
Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master
Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings
Phil Ford, "No One Understands You"Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Weird Stories: M. R. James' "The Mezzotint"
23 april 2018 · 28 min
M. R. James has been hailed as the unrivalled maser of the classic ghost tale, and his powers are at their zenith in "The Mezzotint," a story that first appeared in his 1904 collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. In it, James reimagines the Gothic trope of the haunted picture in a weird new light. The text, read here by co-host Phil Ford, serves as a springboard for Weird Studies episode 11, where we discuss the enduring power of the art object in the age of mechanical reproduction. Lees meer
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 10: Philip K. Dick: Adrift in the Multiverse
18 april 2018 · 1 uur 24 min
In 1977, Philip K. Dick read an essay in France entitled, "If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others." In it, he laid out one of the dominant tropes of his fictional oeuvre, the idea of parallel universes. It became clear in the course of the lecture that Dick didn't intend this to be a talk about science fiction, but about real life - indeed, about his life. In this episode, Phil and JF seriously consider the speculations which, depending on whom you ask, make PKD either a genius or a madman. This distinction may not matter in the end. As Dick himself wrote in his 8,000-page Exegesis: "The madman speaks the moral of the piece." Lees meer
REFERENCES
Philip K. Dick, excerpts from “If You Find This World Bad You Should See Some Of The Others”
R. Crumb, The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick
Emmanuel Carrère, I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick
“20 Examples of the Mandela Effect That’ll Make You Believe You’re In A Parallel Universe”
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Weird Studies, "Episode 9: On Aleister Crowley and the Idea of Magick"
Weird Studies, "Episode 4: Exploring the Weird with Erik Davis"
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Sun Ra, Space is the Place
Zebrapedia (crowdsourced online transcribing/editing of the Exegesis)
Ramsey Dukes (Lionel Snell), Words Made Flesh
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
Bernado Kastrup, Why Materialism is Baloney
Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits
Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 9: On Aleister Crowley and the Idea of Magick
11 april 2018 · 1 uur 17 min
The plan was to discuss the introduction to Aleister Crowley's classic work, Magick in Theory and Practice (1924), a powerful text on the nature and purpose of magical practice. JF and Phil stick to the plan for the first part of the show, and then veer off into a dialogue on the basic idea of magic. Along the way, they share some of the intriguing results of their own occult experiments. Lees meer
REFERENCES
Photo of JF's "large sum" cheque
Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice
The Gospel According to Thomas
James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion
Erik Davis, "Weird Shit"
I Ching, The Book of Changes
Joshua Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage
The Shackleton Expedition
Grant Morrison on how to do sigil magic
Alan Chapman, Advanced Magick for Beginners
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding
Joshua Ramey, "Contingency Without Unreason"
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande
H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of MadnessLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 8: On Graham Harman's "The Third Table"
4 april 2018 · 1 uur 13 min
JF and Phil discuss Graham Harman's "The Third Table," a short and accessible introduction to "object-oriented ontology." Phil takes us on a tour of his closet, we discover that JF's kids are better at this weird studies stuff than their old man, and the conversation veers through Harman's Lovecraftian "weird realism," Zen's "just sit" meditation, panpsychism, Martin Buber's I and Thou, experimental filmmaking, and more. Lees meer
WORKS AND IDEAS CITED IN THIS EPISODE
Graham Harman, "The Third Table"
Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects
Martin Heidegger, Being in Time
J. F. Martel, "Ramble on the Real"
Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy
H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World
Graham Harman, "Objects and the Arts" (lecture)
Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism is Baloney
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
Walden, A Game – A computer game based on Heny David Thoreau’s classic work, Walden
South Park, “Guitar Queer-O” (season 11, episode 13)
Wikipedia entry on art critic David Hickey
Heraclitus, Fragments
Martin Buber, I and Thou
The concept of “substantial form” in Aristotle’s philosophy
Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology"
Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things
William James, "Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?"
Andy Warhol’s minimalist films Empire and Sleep
Wikipedia entry on filmmaker Terrence Malick
Neil Jordan (director), The End of the Affair (based on the novel by Graham Greene)
J. F. Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Gustav Klimt, The Kiss (painting)
Matthew Akers (director), David Blaine: Beyond Magic
The Duffer Brothers (directors), Stranger Things 2Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 7: The Unspeakable Mystery at the Heart of Boxing
28 maart 2018 · 1 uur 6 min
For as long as they've been pounding the crap out of each other for good reasons, humans have also been pounding the crap out of each other for fun. Everywhere, in ever age, elaborate systems, rituals, and traditions have arisen to ring in the practice of violence and thereby offer the rough beast that lurks in every soul a chance to come out for a stretch in the sun. In this episode, Phil and JF delve into one of the most scandalous affairs of all: the illicit dalliance of Aphrodite and Ares, beauty and violence. Lees meer
WORKS & IDEAS DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War
Homer, The Odyssey
Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing
La fosse aux tigres (documentary directed by Jason Brennan and JF Martel; Nish Media)
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Richard Strauss's opera Salome
Gur Hirshberg, "Burke, Kant, and the Sublime"
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of SenseLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 6: Dungeons & Dragons, or the Reality of Illusions
21 maart 2018 · 1 uur 19 min
The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga was one of the first thinkers to define games as exercises in world-making. Every game, he wrote, occurs within a magic circle where the rules of ordinary life are suspended and new laws come into play. No game illustrates this better than Gary Gygax's tabletop RPG, Dungeons & Dragons. In this episode, Phil and JF use D&D as the focus of a conversation about the weird interdependence of reality and fantasy. Lees meer
Header image: Gaetan Bahl (Wikimedia Commons)
WORKS CITED OR DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE
Official homepage of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game
Critical Role web series
Another RPG podcast JF failed to mention: The HowWeRoll Podcast
Demetrious Johnson’s Twitch site
Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine (documentary)
Chessboxing!
Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America
Peter Fischli, The Way Things Go
Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy: Raiding the Temple of Wisdom
Lawrence Schick, ed., Deities & Demigods: Cyclopedia of Gods and Heroes from Myth and Legend
Article on Mazes and Monsters, a movie that came out of the D&D moral panic of the 1980s
Phil Ford, “Xenorationality”
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element of Culture
John Sinclair, [Guitar Army: Rock and Revolution with the MC5 and the White Panther Party](https://www.amazon.com/Guitar-Army-Revolution-White-Panther/dp/1934170003)
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 5: Reading Lisa Ruddick's "When Nothing is Cool"
13 maart 2018 · 1 uur 9 min
Phil and JF discuss Lisa Ruddick's "When Nothing is Cool," an essay on the postmodern humanities and its allergy to essences -- especially that personal essence we call soul. Maybe the soul is a heap of miscellaneous notions and influences that I paint a face onto and then call "me." Or maybe there is something under that painted effigy of the self. If so, what? And if there's nothing under there, could it be a nothing that delivers? Lees meer
WORKS DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE
Lisa Ruddick, "When Nothing is Cool"
Elizabeth Gilbert, "Your Elusive Creative Genius"
Judith Halberstam, "Skinflick: Posthuman Gender in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs"
Daniel Chua (the musicologist whose name Phil couldn't remember)
Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho
Mary Harron, American Psycho (film)
David Lynch, Twin Peaks: The Return
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 4: Exploring the Weird with Erik Davis
7 maart 2018 · 1 uur 22 min
Scholar, journalist and author Erik Davis joins Phil and JF for a freewheeling conversation on the permutations of the weird, Burning Man, speculative realism, the uncanny, the H. P. Lovecraft/Philip K. Dick syzygy, and how the world has gotten weirder (and less weird) since Erik’s groundbreaking Techgnosis was published twenty years ago. Lees meer
WORKS DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
Erik Davis’s Techgnosis website
Erik Davis's podcast, Expanding Mind
Erik Davis, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information
Erik Davis, Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica
Erik Davis, Led Zeppelin IV
Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie
Philip K. Dick, Exegesis
Goop Magazine, no. 2
Hakim Bey and the Temporary Autonomous Zone
The Burning Man Festival
Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance
Erik Davis, “Weird Shit”
JF Martel, “How Symbols Matter”
Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics
Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondances” from Fleurs du mal
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
The Onion, “Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added to Curriculum”
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Episode 3: Ecstasy, Sin, and "The White People"
21 februari 2018 · 1 uur 20 min
JF and Phil delve deep into Arthur Machen's fin-de-siècle masterpiece, "The White People," for insight into the nature of ecstasy, the psychology of fairies, the meaning of sin, and the challenge of living without a moral horizon. Lees meer
WORKS CITED OR DISCUSSED
Arthur Machen, "The White People" - full text or Weird Stories audiobook read by Phil Ford
Arthur Machen, Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy
H. P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"
J.F. Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Jack Sullivan (ed)., The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural
John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies: A True Story
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality
Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers
Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians
Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
J.K. Huysmans, Against Nature (À rebours)
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Weird Stories: Arthur Machen's "The White People"
19 februari 2018 · 1 uur 37 min
Weird Stories is a series of readings for Weird Studies listeners who want to dig deeper into the themes and ideas discussed on the Weird Studies podcast. Lees meer
In his seminal essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," H. P. Lovecraft named Arthur Machen one of the four "modern masters" of horror fiction, alongside Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, and M. R. James. Born in 1863, Machen burst onto the London literary scene in 1890 with the controversial novella "The Great God Pan." He was briefly considered one of the luminaries of the Decadent movement before falling into obscurity and experiencing a literary rebirth toward the end of his life.
In this Weird Stories installment, Phil Ford reads the complete text of one of Machen's most famous works, "The White People" (1904).
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Episode 2: Garmonbozia
1 februari 2018 · 1 uur 27 min
Phil and JF use a word from the Twin Peaks mythos, "garmonbozia," to try to understand what it was that the detonation of atomic bomb brought into the world. We use the fictional world of Twin Peaks as a map to the (so-called) real world and take Philip K. Dick, Krzysztof Penderecki, Norman Mailer, William S. Burroughs, Theodor Adorno, and H.P. Lovecraft as our landmarks. Lees meer
Warning: some spoilers of Twin Peaks season 3.
Works Cited or Discussed:
Phil Ford, "The Cold War Never Ended", Dial M for Musicology (1) (2) (3) (4)
Twin Peaks: The Return — Official Site
Philip K. Dick, “The Empire Never Ended,” treated in R. Crumb’s “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick” and the “Tractate” from Dick’s Exegesis: http://www.tekgnostics.com/PDK.HTM
Norman Mailer, “The White Negro”
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Arthur Machen, The White People
Robert Oppenheimer, “I am become death”
C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
William B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"
Krzysztof Penderecki, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima
The Book of Ecclesiastes
Jon H. Else, The Day After Trinity (documentary)
Francisco Goya, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters"
Stanley Kubrick, Doctor Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Jean Beaudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
William James, A Pluralistic Universe
Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself
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Episode 1: Introduction to Weird Studies
31 januari 2018 · 33 min
Phil and J.F. share stories of sleep paralysis and talk about Charles Fort's sympathy for the damned, Jeff Kripal's phenomenological approach to Fortean weirdness, Dave Hickey's notion of beauty as democracy, and Timothy Morton's hyperobjects. Lees meer
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