Weird Studies

This week on Weird Studies, Phil and JF explore the intersections of the beautiful and the terrible in art and literature. There is a conventional beauty that calms and placates, and there is a radical beauty which, taking horror’s pale-gloved hand, gives up all pretense to permanence and fixity and joins the danse macabre of our endless becoming. This episode is a preamble to a five-week course of lectures and discussions starting June 20th on Weirdosphere, JF and Phil’s new online learning platform. For more information and to enroll in The Beauty and the Horror, visit www.weirdosphere.org.

REFERENCES

JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, the audiobook, with a new introduction written and read by Donna Tartt.
Denis Villeneuve, Dune: Part Two
William Blake, “The Tyger”
Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
Steven Spielberg, Raiders of the Lost Ark
Walter Pater, The Renaissance
David Lynch, Twin Peaks: The Return
Anna Aikin, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness
Charles Baudelaire, “Le Voyage”
Franz Schubert, “Death and the Maiden” Quartet
Franz Schubert, Piano Sonata in C major, D. 840
J.R.R. Tolkein, The Hobbit

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Orson Welles made F for Fake in the early seventies, while still bobbing in the wake of a Pauline Kael essay accusing him of being cinema's greatest fraud. Ostensibly a documentary on the famous art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving (a talented faker in his own right), the film blurs the line between fact and fiction in an effort to explore art's weird entanglement with illusion, magic, and ultimately, the search for truth. This is a film unlike any other, and it is arguably Welles's most important contribution to the evolution and theory of film aesthetics.

Join the Weirdosphere online learning community by enrolling in Phil and J.F.'s inaugural course, [THE BEAUTY AND THE HORROR](www.weirdosphere.org), starting June 20th.

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Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
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RERERENCES

Orson Welles, F for Fake
Gilles Deleuze Cinema 2
Elmyr de Hory, art forger
Clifford Irving, American writer
Howard Hughes, American aerospace engineer
David Thomson, Biographical Dictionary of Film
David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles
Pauline Kael, Raising Kane
“War of the Worlds” radio drama
The Farm Podcast, “Horror Hosts, Films & Other Strange Realities w/ David Metcalfe, Conspirinormal & Recluse”
Orson Welles - Interview with Michael Parkinson (BBC 1974)
Geoffrey Cornelius, Cornelius
Victoria Nelson, Secret Life of Puppets
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking
Sokal affair, hoax
Werner Herzog, “Minnesota Declaration”

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The ongoing crackdown on protests at many American universities prompts a discussion on the politics, ethics, and metaphysics of free expression.

Support us on Patreon.
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REFERENCES

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic
George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature
George Orwell, Inside the Whale
New York Times, “At Indiana University, Protests Only Add to a Full Year of Conflicts
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Indiana Daily Student, “Provost Addresses Controversy”
Official government page for the Proposed Bill to address Online Harms in Canada.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Daryl Davis, American musician and activist
DavidFoster Wallace, Just Asking

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There are artists who express the vision of a place, person, or thing so vividly and originally that it sets the bar for all future imaginings. With his four Mad Max films, this is what George Miller did with the image of the Wasteland. No one has been able to capture the stark, raw energy and chaotic beauty of a post-apocalyptic desert quite like Miller. His portrayal not only defines the aesthetic of a cinematic world but also prompts us to think about the meaning of civilization, technology, humanity, and how they intertwine. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss how Mad Max challenges our perception of civilization, and our conception of the human.

Support us on Patreon.
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REFERENCES

George Miller (dir.), Mad Max
George Miller (dir.), Mad Max: The Road Warrior
George Miller (dir.), Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdrome
George Miller (dir.), Mad Max: Fury Road
Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), A Clockwork Orange
Sam Raimi (dir), The Quick and the Dead
Joe Bob Briggs, movie critic
Phil Ford, “The Wanderer”
Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Nomadology
Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot

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Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was a British painter, poet, and occultist, long identified as a pioneer of the Surrealist movement in the UK. While her work is increasingly recognized for its mystical themes and innovative use of automatic techniques, deeply influenced by her esoteric studies, it also inspired extensive research on its broader cultural and spiritual contexts. Amy Hale, an anthropologist, folklorist, and author, has dedicated much of her career to exploring Cornwall, the fabled region of southwest England that became Colquhoun’s spiritual home. Hale’s book, Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern-Loved Gully, published by Strange Attractor Press, offers a profound biographical study of Colquhoun, examining the historical and spiritual forces that influenced her work. In this episode, she joins JF and Phil to discuss Colquhoun, Cornwall, and the transformative power of research and writing.

REFERENCES

Amy Hale, Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern-Loved Gully
Agnes Callard, I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is
Steven Feld, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

Special Guest: Amy Hale.

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In culture and the arts, labeling something you don't like (or don't understand) "pretentious" is the easy way out. It's a conversation killer, implying that any dialogue is pointless, and those who disagree are merely duped by what you've cleverly discerned as a charade. It's akin to cynically revealing that a magic show is all smoke and mirrors—as if creative vision doesn't necessitate a leap of faith. In this episode, Phil and JF explore the nuances of pretentiousness, distinguishing between its fruitful and hollow forms. They argue that the real gamble, and inherent value, of daring to pretend lies in recognizing that imagination is an active contributor to, rather than a detractor from, reality.

Pierre-Yves Martel's EPHEMERA project

It isn't too late to join JF's upcoming course on the films of Stanley Kubrick, which goes until the end of April, 2024.
Support us on Patreon.
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Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
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Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES

Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices
Dan Fox, Pretentiousness: Why it Matters
Ramsay Dukes, How to See Fairies
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Weird Studies, Episode 49 on Nietzsche’s idea of “untimely”
Sokal Affair, scholarly hoax
Weird Studies, Episode 75 on ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’
Stanley Kubrick, “Notes on Film”
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Abuses of History
Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak
Mary Shelley, “Introduction to Frankenstein”
Matt Cardin, A Course in Demonic Creativity
Playboy interview with Stanley Kubrick

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"Let the red dawn surmise / What we shall do, / When the blue starlight dies / And all is through." This short poem, an epigraph to "The Yellow Sign," arguably the most memorable tale in Robert W. Chambers' 1895 collection The King in Yellow, encapsulates in four brief lines the affect that drives cosmic horror: the fearful sense of imminent annihilation. In the four stories JF and Phil discuss in this episode, this affect, which would inspire a thousand works of fiction in the twentieth century, emerges fully formed, dripping with the xanthous milk of Decadence. What’s more, it is here given a symbol, a face, and a home in the Yellow Sign, the Pallid Mask of the Yellow King, and the lost land of Carcosa. Come one, come all.

Join JF's upcoming course on the films of Stanley Kubrick, starting March 28, 2024.
Support us on Patreon.
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Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
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REFERENCES

Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow
Weird Studies, Episode 100 on John Carpenter films
Algernon Blackwood, “The Man Who Found Out”
Susannah Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, Thought Forms
Weird Studies, Episode 140 on “Spirited Away”
Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
David Bentley Hart, “Angelic Monster”
M. R. James, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad”
William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow

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What is expressionism? A school? A movement? A philosophy? At the end of this episode, Phil and JF agree that it is, above all, a sensibility, one that surfaces periodically in history, punctuating it with occasional bursts of frenetic colour and eruptions of light and shadow. Whenever it appears, expressionism challenges our tendency to divide the world up into neat quadrants: mind and matter, subject and object lose their legitimacy as they start to bleed into one another. Prior to recording, your hosts agreed to focus on two pieces of writing: Victoria Nelson's The Secret Life of Puppets and a recent Internet post on eighties and nineties American films entitled "Neo-Expressionism: The Forgotten Studio Style." Though focused on a number of films, the conversation includes forays into the world of the visual arts, literature, and music.

Support us on Patreon.
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Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
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REFERENCES

comrade_yui, “neo-expressionism: the forgotten studio style”
Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets
Francis Ford Coppola, Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Weird Studies, Episode 161 on ‘From Hell’
Bram Stoker, Dracula
E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art
Jean-Francois Millet, “Gleaners”
Kathe Kollwitz, “Need”
Robert Weine, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Arnold Schoneberg, Pierrot Lunaire
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1
Peter Yates (dir.), Krull
Wilhelm Worringer, German art historian
Weird Studies, Episode 136 on ‘The Evil Dead’
In Camera The Naive Visual Effects of Dracula
Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life
Weird Studies, Episode 121 ‘Mandwagon’

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"The Devil's finest ruse," Baudelaire wrote, "is to persuade you that he doesn't exist." In this episode, JF and Phil peer through a buzzing haze of lies, illusions, and mirages, in hopes of catching a glimpse, however brief, of the figure standing at its center. With a focus on the fifteenth major arcanum of the tarot, they try to make sense of this archetype which feels, at once, remotely distant and uncomfortably close to us, all while heeding the warning from the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot that one ought not look too deeply into the nature of evil, which is "unknowable in its essence."

Support us on Patreon.
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REFERENCES
Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot
The Gnostic Tarot
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, Part 1
Ramsey Dukes, SSOTBME
Edgar Allan Poe, The Imp of the Perverse
Aleister Crowley, Magic, Book 4
Leigh McCloskey, Tarot Re-Visioned
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
The Library of Esoterica, Tarot
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic

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In this second of two episodes on "scenes," Phil and JF set their sights on Greenwich Village in the wake of the Second World War. Focusing on two works on the era – Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was the Rage and John Cassavetes' Shadows – the conversation further develops the mystique of urban scenes and explores the weirdness of cities. The city, long considered the human artifact par excellence, comes to seem like something that comes from outside the ambit of humanity.

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
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REFERENCES
Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage
John Cassavetes, Shadows
Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
Phil Ford, Dig
Weird Studies, Episode 90 on “Owl in Daylight”
Kult, role-playing game
Tom Delong and Peter Lavenda, Secret Machines: Gods, Men, and War
Chandler Brossard, Who Walk in Darkness
Yukio Mishima, Japanese artist
Anatole Broyard, “Portrait of the Hipster”

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Listener discretion advised: This episode delves into the disturbing details of the Whitechapel murders of 1888, and may not be suitable for all audiences.

Serialized from 1989 to 1996, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's graphic novel From Hell was first released in a single volume in 1999, just as the world was groaning into the present century. This is an important detail, because according to the creators of this astounding work, the age then passing away could not be understood without reference to the gruesome murders, never solved, of five women in London's Whitechapel district, in the fall of 1888. In Alan Moore's occult imagination, the Ripper murders were more than another instance of human depravity: they constituted a magical operation intended to alter the course of history. The nature of this operation, and whether or not it was successful, is the focus of this episode, in which JF and Phil also explore the imaginal actuality of Victorian London and the strange nature of history and time.

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
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REFERENCES

Daniel Silver, Terry Nichols Clark, and Clemente Jesus Navarro Yanez, “Scenes: Social Context in an Age of Contingency”
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, From Hell
Floating World, Edo Japanese concept
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
John Clellon Holmes recordings
Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes Collection
Yacht Rock, web series
Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
Colin Wilson, Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict
Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages
Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor
Weird Studies, Episode 89 on “Mumbo Jumbo”
Charles Howard Hinton, mathematician
J. G. Ballard, Preface to Crash
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine

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Every off-week, listeners who have chosen to support Weird Studies by joining our Patreon at the Listener's Tier get to enjoy a bonus episode. These episodes are different from the flagship show. Less formal and entirely improvised, they offer Phil and JF a different way of exploring the weird in art, philosophy and culture. To tide our listenership over until the next new episode drops on January 24th, here is a recent example of a Weird Studies audio extra, recorded as the holiday season was getting under way. Happy New Year.

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As a horror movie, John Carpenter's The Thing seems to have it all: amazing practical effects, body horror, psychological drama, Kurt Russell ... Indeed, there is only one element this movie lacks, and that is anything at all corresponding to the titular villain. There is no thing in The Thing! What we have instead is a process, a pattern, a way for which the term "thing" is as good as any other. (What is a thing anyway?) In this episode, Phil and JF, having decided that Carpenter's film qualifies as a Christmas movie because there is snow (and a dog) in it, explore the metaphysical implications of a cult classic.

Support us on Patreon.
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Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
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REFERENCES

John Carpenter, The Thing
Weird Studies, Episode 100 on Carpenter Films
Weird Studies, Episode 157 on Videodrome
Ridley Scott, Blade Runner
Ridley Scott Alien
Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence
Haecceity
Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Characters as a Medium for Poetry
Weird Studies, Episode 89 on ‘Mumbo Jumbo’
Weird Studies, Episode 127 on ‘The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity’
Wikipedia, “Quiddity”
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Danish painter
Jez Conolly, The Thing
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Dylan Trigg, The Thing a Phenomenology of Horror
Plato, The Timaeus
Lucretius, “On the Nature of Things”
Clive Barker, The Great and Secret Show

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Every once in a while, JF and Phil like to do a “song swap.” Each picks a song, and the ensuing conversation locates linkages and correspondences where none was previously thought to exist. In this episode, they are joined by the music scholar Meredith Michael – Weird Studies assistant, and co-host of Cosmophonia, a podcast about music and outer space – to discuss songs by Lili Boulanger, Vienna Teng, and Iron & Wine. Before long, this disparate assortment personal favourites occasions a weirdly focused dialogue on time, impermanence, control, (mis)recognition, and the affinity of art and synchronicity.

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
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REFERENCES
Iron and Wine, “Passing Afternoon”
Vienna Teng, “The Hymn of Acxiom”, (and here is the live version)
Lili Boulanger, Vieille Priére Bouddhique
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle Mozart’s Arrow
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Vladimir Jankelevitch, Music and the Ineffable
Hector Berlioz, Fugue on “amen” from La Damnation du Faust
Slavoj Zizek, A Pervert’s Guide to Idiology
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic
Shepard Tone
Rudolf Steiner, The Influces of Lucifer and Ahriman

Special Guest: Meredith Michael.

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In this episode of Weird Studies, we delve into the mysterious depths of Plato's Timaeus, one of the foundational texts of our civilization. In his characteristic brilliance, Plato blends cosmology and metaphysics, anatomy and politics to tell a creation story that rivals the most fantastical mythologies, yet he does it while remaining grounded in a philosophical rigor that announces a radically new way of thinking the world. Here, Phil and JF try unravel the layers of the dialogue, revealing how Plato's vision of a divinely ordered cosmos echoes through the corridors of esoteric thought from antiquity to modern times.

Support us on Patreon.
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REFERENCES

Plato, [Timaeus](https://hackettpublishing.com/history/history-of-science/timaeus](Donald Zeyl Edition)
Earl Fontenelle, The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast
The Book of Thoth
Graham Hancock, British journalist
Hesiod, Theogony
Hermes Trismegistus, {Emerald Tablet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Tablet)
Pierre Hadot,, scholar of classical philosophy
Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”
Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought
Lionel Snell, SSOTBME

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"Death to Videodrome! Long live the New Flesh!"

It was perhaps inevitable that the modern Weird, driven as it is to swallow all things, would sooner or later veer into the realm of political sloganeering without losing any of its unknowable essence. David Cronenberg's 1983 film Videodrome is more than a masterwork of body horror: it is a study in technopolitics, a meditation on the complex weave of imagination and perception, and a prophecy of the now on-going coalescence of flesh and technology into a strange new alloy. In this episode, recorded live after a screening of the film at Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington, JF and Phil set out to interpret Cronenberg's vision... and come to dig the New Flesh.

Support us on Patreon.
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REFERENCES
David Cronenberg, Videodrome
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible
Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb
Weird Studies, Episode 75 on “2001: A Space Odyssey”
Richard Porton and David Cronenberg, "The Film Director as Philosopher: An Interview with David Cronenberg"
George Hickenlooper and David Cronenberg, "The Primal Energies of the Horror Film: An Interview with David Cronenberg"
Weird Studies, Episode 144 with Connor Habib
William Friedkin (dir.), The Exorcist
Plato, Timaeus
William Gibson, Idoru
CBC, Yorkville: Hippie Haven
Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”

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There are works of weird fiction that dispense their strangeness so subtly that many readers never pick up on it, books that allow themselves to be pass for mundane, the better to haunt us after we put them down. Donna Tartt's debut novel The Secret History, published in 1992, is such a work. On the surface, it is a brilliant, yet completely naturalistic, telling of the lead-up and aftermath of a murder. But The Secret History is also a work of the depths, and readers who go in seeking the Weird will find it lurking on every page. More than a masterpiece of psychological exploration, it is a story about the resurgence of the old god Dionysus, and a chronicle of fate; fate conceived, in the manner of the Ancient Greeks, as a cosmic force.

Support us on Patreon.
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REFERENCES

Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Robertson Davies, Canadian novelist
Weird Studies, Episode 98 on Exotica
M. R. James, English author
Weird Studies, Episode 3 on “The White People”
E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational
Jean Cocteau, La Machine Infernale
John Crowley, Little, Big
Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Outrageous Okana”
Weird Studies, Episode 110 on “The Glass Bead Game”
Gabriel Faure, Nocturne No. 11
Pierre-André Boutang, L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

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One of the most surprising aspects of paranormal experience is how often it takes on a storylike form, unfolding exactly as you would expect it to in, say, a Hollywood horror film. Viewers of Karl Pfeiffer's film The Unbinding will get a sense of this in the early sequences of Greg and Dana Newkirk's latest occult adventure. The haunting comes on strong and takes rather familiar forms. But the almost too-good-to-be-true frights -- effective as they are in an almost fairy-tale way -- soon give way to a procedural that invites us to ponder the ethics and methodologies of paranormal investigation in the age of Global Weirding. What do we owe the Others we encounter? What do they owe us? In this episode, JF and Phil discuss some of the questions haunting this brilliant documentary from the creators of Hellier.

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REFERENCES

Planet Weird, The Unbinding
Weird Studies, Episode 67 on “Hellier”
Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, “Sovereignty and the UFO”
Duncan Barford, “Magick Versus Content”
Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty

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William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land is without a doubt one of the weirdest entries in the annals of weird fiction. Set in the earth's distant future, after the sun has gone out and the planet has been cleaved in two by an unspecified disaster, a telepathic scientist dons his armour and weapons to brave the monster-haunted yet strangely monotonous wastes that engirdle the massive pyramid in which the last humans took refuge, hundreds of thousands of years earlier. If Samuel Beckett tripped hard on ayahuasca, he might have come up with something like Hodgson's genre-defying novel, which reads more like a report to committee of 17th-century heretics than a piece of speculative fiction from the early twentieth century.

MIT Press recently released a (blessedly) abridged edition of The Night Land as part of their Radium Series. Journalist, scholar, and lecturer Erik Davis, who penned a brilliant foreword for the new edition, was kind enough to join Phil and JF to discuss this underrated masterpiece.

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle.
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SHOW NOTES

William Hope Hodgeson, The Night Land
Weird Studies, Episode 37 with Stuart Davis
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
William Hope Hodgeson, House on the Borderland
Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Sumptuary Laws
Arcosanti, arcology
Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men
Pierre Schaeffer, “Traité des objets musicaux”
Schitzophonia
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

Special Guest: Erik Davis.

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Even learned commentators on the tarot are likely to point out at the fourteenth major arcana, Temperance, is a bit of a boring card. At least, it comes off as dull until you look at it closely, as JF and Phil do in this episode. What they find is that the Temperance card is actually a diagram, a kind of blueprint for a celestial machine that underlies human technology, beckoning us to restore even the most mechanical contraption to the raw weirdness at the source of everything.

Header image by Rolf Dietrich Brecher via Wikimedia Commons

It's not too late to join JF's Nura Learning course, ["Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence."](www.nuralearning.com)

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Download Pierre-Yves Martel's new album, Mer Bleue.
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Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

SHOW NOTES

Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Adrien Lyne, Jacob’s Ladder
Weeping Angels, Dr. Who creatures
Joel Schumacher, Flatliners
Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles
Gregory Bateson, Steps To an Ecology of Mind
Hesychasm, monastic practice
Yoav Ben-Dov, Tarot: the Open Reading
The Gnostic Tarot
Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible
Nagarjuna, Verses of the Middle Way

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In this bonus episode, originally released on July 26th on the Weird Studies Patreon, Phil and JF explore a few ways in which artificial intelligence will impact the arts. The podcast returns with a new official episode on September 13th. Enjoy.

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A bonus offering to break up the summer hiatus, this episode contains a conversation on the virtues of affectation originally available only to third- and fourth-tier members of the Weird Studies Patreon ("Putting on the Bow-Tie," Apr 5, 2023). The episode opens with a short piece on JF's upcoming Nura Learning course, Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, starting on September 12th. Enjoy.

[Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence](www.nuralearning.com), a seven-week online course with JF Martel.

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On the last week of July, 2023, Phil and JF were delighted to speak at Shannon Taggart's Science of Things Spiritual Symposium in Lily Dale, the nerve centre of the Spiritualist movement. As speakers, your hosts were part of an inspiring lineup of scholars, artists, and researchers committed to exploring the borderlands of art, science, religion, and the paranormal. They also had the honour of launching the symposium with a live recording held on the evening of the July 27th. The topic was Frederic W. H. Myers' autobiographical essay, "Fragments of Inner Life," first published in full in 1961, some sixty years after the author's death. Myers was one of the original members of the Society for Psychical Research in England. A poet and classicist, he remained committed to the scientific promise of paranormal investigation until the end of his life. His book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, also published posthumously, argues that psychical studies have confirmed, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that death is just the beginning. In this talk, JF and Phil discuss Myers' relevance to 21st-century thinking on the Weird.

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REFERENCES

The Science of Things Spiritual Symposium: July 27-29, 2023
Frederic Myers, Fragments of Inner Life
Alan Bennett, History Boys
Arthur Machen, A Fragment of Life
Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan
Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug
Daniel Dennett, American cognitive scientist

Frederic Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death
Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being
Phil Ford, Dig
William James, Principles of Psychology
Akashic Record, Theosophical idea
Jeff Kripal, Authors of the Impossible

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In The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, the cultural historian William Irwin Thompson predicted the rise of a new form of knowledge building, a direly needed alternative to the Wissenshaft of standard science and scholarship. He called it Wissenskunst, "the play of knowledge in a world of serious data processors." Wissenskunst is pretty much what JF and Phil have been aspiring to do on Weird Studies since 2018, but in this episode they are joined by a master of the craft, the computational sociologist and physicist Jacob G. Foster of UCLA. Jacob is the co-founder of the Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute (DISI), a gathering of scholars, scientists, and students that takes place each year at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. It was there that this conversation was recorded. The topic was the Possible, that dream-blurred vanishing point where art, philosophy, and science converge as imaginative and creative practices.

Click here or here for more information on Shannon Taggart's Science of Things Spiritual Symposium at Lily Dale NY, July 27-29 2023.

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
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REFERENCES

Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute
"Deconstructing the Barrier of Meaning," a talk by Jacob G. Foster at the Santa Fe Institute
William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture
Frederic Rzewski, “Little Bangs: A Nihilist Theory of Improvisation”
Brian Eno, Oblique Strategies
The accident of Bob in Twin Peaks
Carl Jung, “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry
August Kekule,, German chemist
Robert Dijkgraaf, “Contemplating the End of Physics”
Richard Baker, American zen teacher
Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Shoggoth, Lovecraftian entity

Special Guest: Jacob G. Foster.

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"A Fragement of Life" opens with Mr. Darnell waking up from a dream and going down to breakfast, where it is described that "before he sat down to his fried bacon he kissed his wife seriously and dutifully." He then proceeds to take the tram to visit a friend, with whom he has a long and tedious conversation about plants, clothes, kids, and how best to spend ten pounds. The story continues on in this mundane manner for quite some time, which is probably not what we would expect from Arthur Machen, virtuoso of the weird. But, as Phil and JF discuss, this writing style intentionally draws attention to the absurdity of modern, materialist life, creating a striking contrast with the mysterious other world that Mr. and Mrs. Darnell eventually begin to pursue.

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REFERENCES
Arthur Machen, A Fragment of Life
Weird Studies, Episode 3 on “The White People and Episode 87 on “Heiroglyphics”
Karl Marx, Capital
James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain
Thomas Ligotti, “The Order of Illusion” in Noctuary
Weird Studies, Episode 20 on the Trash Stratum
Artur Schnitzler, Traumnovelle
Weird Studies, Episode 59 on Walking
Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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Occasionally, JF and Phil do a song swap. Each host chooses a song he loves and shares it with the other, and then they record an episode on it. This time, JF chose to discuss "Jesus, Etc." from Wilco's 2001 album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Phil picked Judee Sill's ethereal "The Kiss," from Heart Food (1973). It was in the zone of Time, in all its strangeness, that the two songs began to resonate with one another. Sill's song is a fated grasping at the eternal that is present even when it eludes us, and "Jesus, Etc." is a leap across time that captures, in jagged shards and signal bursts, the events of the day on which Wilco's album was scheduled to drop: September 11, 2001.

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle.
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REFERENCES

Judee Sill, “The Kiss”
James Elkins, Pictures and Tears
Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, “Surf’s Up”
Weird Studies, Episode 148 on “Twin Peaks”
Wilco, “Jesus Etc.”
Jeff Buckley, singer-songwriter
William Gibson, Forward to Dhalgren
L. E. J. Brouwer, Concept of “two-ity”
Dogen, Genjokoan
David Bowie, “Heroes”
Philip K. Dick, Valis
Weird Studies, Episode 147 “You Must Change Your Life”
Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
James Longley, Iraq in Fragments
Sam Jones, I am Trying to Break your Heart
Number Stations

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David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks has been a touchstone of Weird Studies since the podcast's inception. Back in 2018, Phil and JF recorded Episode 1: Garmonbozia while still reeling from the series' third season, which aired on Showtime the year before. Now, in preparation for their upcoming course on Twin Peaks, they watched the third season again and recorded this episode. Their conversation touched on the virtues of late style in the arts, the divergence of knowing and understanding, the fate of Agent Dale Cooper, and the dream logic of the _Twin Peaks _universe.

Last change to sign up for The Twin Peaks Mythos, a 4-week Weird Studies view-along starting June 8th, 2023.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle.
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REFERENCES

Symposium at Lily Dale, July 27-29, 2023
David Lynch and Mark Frost (creators), Twin Peaks
David Lynch (dir.), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?
Chris Carter (creator), The X-Files
Erik Davis, American scholar, lecturer, and journalist
Thomas Ligotti, American writer
Stephen King, American writer
Joshua Brand and John Falsey (creators), Northern Exposure
James Elkins, Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings
David Lynch (dir.), Mulholland Drive
Robert Aickman, English writer of "strange stories"
Manuel DeLanda on signification vs significance
Weird Studies, episode 105: Fire Walk With Tamler Sommers
Kyle McLachlan interview in Vanity Fair

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Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" ends on a note that has puzzled and inspired readers for more than a century: "For there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life." In this episode, JF and Phil search for the meaning of this ethico-aesthetic imperative that Rilke heard resounding from a fragment of Greek statuary. This episode is special because the hosts were able to record it in person while on a writing retreat in Western Quebec.

Enroll in THE TWIN PEAKS MYTHOS, a 4-week Weird Studies view-along starting June 8th.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
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REFERENCES

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
He Man, superhero
Munich Terrorist Photo
Albert Camus, The Rebel
Franz Kafka, "The Trial" and “In the Penal Colony"
Auguste Rodin, French sculptor

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Of the twenty-two figures that make up the major arcana of the tarot, the Chariot is probably the most commonplace. While the tenth arcanum is a wheel, it's The Wheel of Fortune, not just any old wagon wheel. But arcanum VII is neither the Chariot of Fire or the Chariot of the Gods – just the plain old chariot. Usually, it is interpreted as a symbol of the will in its lower and higher aspects. In this episode, Phil notes that the Chariot can also symbolize something as ordinary as new car. Of course, here on Weird Studies, no car is just a car, and we like to think that Youngblood Priest, the protagonist of the 1972 film Super Fly, would agree. A car also a tool, a medium, a token of mastery, an atmospheric disturbance, a means of manifestation, a spaceship...

Enroll in THE TWIN PEAKS MYTHOS, a 4-week Weird Studies view-along starting June 8th.
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REFERENCES

Rachel Pollack, Tarot Wisdom
Jordan Parks Jr., Super Fly
Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot
Weird Studies, Episode 144 on “Hellraiser”
Plato, Phaedrus
Vanessa Onwuemezi, Dark Neighborhood
J. G. Ballard, Crash
Paul Virilio, War and Cinema
Karl Marx, Grundrisse
Weird Studies, Episode 26 with Michael Garfield

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In this episode, Phil and JF discuss Vanessa Onwuemezi's, "Dark Neighbourhood," a tale of scintillant darkness from her debut collection of the same name. This strangest of strange stories is set in a vast encampment of destitute yet hopeful people whose lives consist entirely of waiting for their turn to step through the iron gates of the Beyond. Living off the dregs of civilization, they seem the last of our kind. They are the ones who, having made it to the front of the line, have the dubious honour of contemplating directly the mystery that awaits us all. Unlike anything we've covered on the show, "Dark Neighbourhood" is a chilling and moving story that elicits interpretation as elegantly as it resists it.

Pierre-Yves Martel's album Mer bleue drops on May 1st, 2023!

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's ongoing podcast on Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.

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REFERENCES

Show Notes.docx

Vanessa Omwuemezi, Dark Neighbourhood
Peter Breugel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Weird Studies, Episode 140 on “Spirited Away”
Karl Marx, Capital
Phil Ford, Dig
Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism
Weird Studies, Episode 98 on “Taboo”
Michael Wadleigh (dir.), Woodstock
Samuel R. Delaney, Dahlgren
Leonard Cohen, “Waiting for the Miracle
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd
One red paperclip, story of guy who traded a paper clip for a house
Weird Studies, Episode 101 on Tanizaki
James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
George Steiner, Real Presences
H. P. Lovecraft, “Nyarlothotep”
Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, “Sovereignty and the UFO”
Weird Studies, Episode 144 on Hellraiser
Weird Studies, Episode 29 on Lovecraft

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In the 1980s, Clive Barker burst onto the cultural scene with The Books of Blood, collections of unforgettable tales of horror, depravity, and decadence the likes of which had been seldom seen since the days of Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror and Huysmans' Là-Bas. In the decades that followed, he went on to create an astounding body of work in fantasy and horror as a writer, artist, and film director. In this episode, author, lecturer, and podcaster Conner Habib joins JF and Phil to discuss what is arguably Barker's best-known work, the 1987 horror classic Hellraiser, as well as the novella that inspired it, "The Hellbound Heart."

Preorder Pierre-Yves Martel's album Mer bleue.

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References

Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart
Clive Barker (dir.), Hellraiser
Tod Browning (dir.), Freaks
Clive Barker, “In the Hills, The Cities” in Books of Blood
Wes Craven, A Nightmare on Elm Street
Angela Carter, English writer
Susan Sontag, “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition”
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?
Sturm und Drang, 18th-century artistic movement
Gayle Rubin, American cultural anthropologist
Stephen King, It
Robert Wise (dir.), The Sound of Music
Slavoj Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
Robert Wise (dir.), The Haunting
David Mamet, On Directing Film
Mark Hedsel and David Ovason, The Zealotor
David Lynch (dir.), Mulholland Drive
Stanley Kubrick, The Shining
Coil, Hellraiser Themes
Bela Bartok, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta
Golden Section, mathematical ratio
Kevin Williamson,, American screenwriter
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

Special Guest: Conner Habib.

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In the 1950s, Carl Jung expressed frustration at the impenetrability of the UFO mystery, the "strange, unknown, and indeed contradictory nature" of this "ostensibly physical phenomenon" with "an extremely important psychic component." Throughout his writings on the topic, he marvels at the impossibility of coming to even preliminary conclusions. Fastforward to 2023, after a series of astounding disclosures on the part of qualified government people, and we have as much reason to be baffled as we ever had. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the mercurial, tricksterish fact of ortherwordly things seen in the sky.

Learn more about the Ohio UFO Heritage Conference on May 5-6, 2023.

Preorder Pierre-Yves Martel's album Mer bleue.

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's ongoing podcast on Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
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Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
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REFERENCES

Patrik Harpur, Daimonic Reality
John Keel The Mothman Prophecies
Jaques Vallee Passport to Magonia
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast
Carl Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky
Weird Studies, Episode 141 on SSOTBME
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
Weird Studies, Episodes 73 and 74 on Jung
Weird Studies, Episode 44 on William James’s Psychical Research
Jacques Vallée and Paola Leopizzi, Harris, Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret
Jacques Vallée, "Physical Analyses in Ten Cases of Unexplained Aerial Objects with Material Samples"
Shepard tone
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
Twin Peaks
Mark Pilkington, Mirage Men
Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy
Weird Studies, Episode 59 on Walking
Weird Studies, Episode 142 on “Last and First Men”

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Jóhann Jóhannsson was one of contemporary cinema's greatest score composers when he passed away in 2018 at the young age of 48. Last and First Men, his enigmatic directorial debut, was released shortly after in 2020. Based on a novel by the same name by the British science fiction writer Olaf Stapleton, the film offers a sustained meditation on the prospect of extinction, the eventuality of humanity's disappearance from the comos. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss the images and sounds of the film as they flicker and swell against the backdrop of nonbeing that envelops us all. The conversation touches on the idea of beauty, Brutalist architecture, modernism, and futurity.

Preorder Pierre-Yves Martel's album Mer bleue.

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's ongoing podcast on Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
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REFERENCES

Jóhann Jóhannsson, Last and First Men
Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, SNL character
Spomeniks, Yugoslavian monuments
Olaf Stapleton, The Last and First Men
Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters
The Last of Us, television show
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction
Weird Studies, Episode 2 on Garmonbozia
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize Speech
Weird Studies Episode 139 on Art Power
Numenius, Platonist philosopher
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?
Jia Tolentino, “The Overwhelming Emotion of Hearing Toto’s “Africa”
Weird Studies, Episode 110 on “The Glass Bead Game”
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

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Ramsey Dukes, also known by his real name of Lionel Snell, may be one of the most important thinkers on magic since Aleister Crowley. In the impishly-titled Sex Secrets of the Black Magicians Exposed (or SSOTBME for short), Dukes accomplishes something few writers on the topic have been able to do: he gives us magic without asking us to sacrifice anything that makes us sensible modern people. He makes magic seem like the most obvious thing in the world, and he does it without taking away any of its, well, magic. How he does it and what it means are questions that would take several episodes to unpack. In this one, Phil and JF begin the work by discussing how Dukes situates magic in an epistemic compass that also includes science, art, and religion. This set of tools is as essential to a holistic view of reality as the four suits in a deck of cards are essential to a proper poker game. In other words, when we lose magic, we lose a way of dealing with reality.

Sign up for JF's upcoming course on Macbeth

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's ongoing podcast on Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.

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REFERENCES

David Lynch (dir.), Mulholland Drive
Ramsey Dukes, SSOTBME
Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures
Weird Studies, Episode 139 on Art Power
Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy
“Virtual” and “Actual”, as developed by Bergson and Deleuze
Pragmatism, philosophical school
Jack Parsons, American rocket scientist
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return
William Shakespeare, Macbeth

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Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away is one of those rare films that is both super popular and super weird. Rife with cinematic non sequiturs, unforgettable imagery, and moments of horror, it is an outstanding example of a story form that goes all the way back to the myth of Psyche and Eros from Apuleius's Golden Ass, if not earlier. In this type of story, a girl on the cusp of maturity steps into a magical realm where people and things from waking life reappear, draped in the gossamer of dream and nightmare. Musicologist and WS assistant Meredith Michael joins JF and Phil to discuss a strange jewel of Japanese animated cinema.

Support us on Patreon and get early access to Phil Ford's new podcast series on Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Sign up for JF's upcoming online course on Shakespeare's Macbeth on Nura Learning.

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REFERENCES

Hayao Miyazaki, Spirited Away
Kyle Gann, Robert Ashley
Robert Ashely, Perfect Lives
Apuleius, “Psyche and Eros” from The Golden Ass
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
Kentucky Route Zero, video game
Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, video game
Jean Sibelius, 5th Symphony
Quentin Tarantino, film maker
Mark Rothko, American painter
Giles Deleuze, “What is the Creative Act?”
GK Chesterton, Orthdoxy
Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
Andrew Osmond, BFI Guide to Spirited Away

Special Guest: Meredith Michael.

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"YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE!"

Tired of failure and self-loathing? Want to be rich and famous while having a good time all the time? Wondering how to turn your banal opinions into Transcendent Truths? Look no further than this special, exclusive episode of Weird Studies, where we reveal, once and for all, the secrets of ART-POWER!

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SHOW NOTES

Ramsey Dukes, BLAST Your Way to Megabuck$ with My SECRET Sex-Power Formula
James Raggi's statements on artistic freedom in tabletop roleplaying games: Proud to Commit Commercial Suicide 2023 and On Potential Inclusivity/Morality Clauses in RPG Licenses
David Cronenberg, "I Would Like to Make a Case for the Crime of Art"
Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey
Alfred Gell, The Art of Anthropology
Susanne Langer, “On the Cultural Importance of the Arts”
Weird Studies, Episodes 73 and 74 on Carl Jung’s Theory of Art
Kodo Sawaki, Japanese zen teacher
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics
Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence
Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams
John Dewey, Art as Experience
Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
Neil Gaiman, “Make Good Art”
Leon Wieseltier, “Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture”
Eugene Vodolazkin, Laurus

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What better way to ring in the New Year than with a freeranging discussion of the dreaded thirteenth arcanum of the tarot? Of all topics, surely death needs the least introduction. Or does it? To those of us who inhabit the castellated compounds of post-industrial privilege, it is perhaps too easy to forget the uninvited guest who skulks in the shadows, touching each of us in turn as he sidles past. "Nothing is certain except death and taxes," Benjamin Franklin once wrote. He was joking, of course. The truth is that death is the only certainty.

Click here for information about JF's upcoming talk at the Last Tuesday Society.

Header image: Detail from Harry Clarke's illustration for "The Masque of the Red Death," from the 1919 edition of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

SHOW NOTES

Brian George, Masks of Origin
Chris Leech, The Gnostic Tarot
Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot
Rachel Pollack, Tarot Wisdom
Rachel Pollack, 78 Degrees of Wisdom
Edgar Allen Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death”
Weird Studies, Episode 2 on Garmonbozia
Steven Spielberg (dir.), Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
Weird Studies, Episode 137 on Sunn O)))’s “Life Metal”
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Thomas Browne, “Urn Burial”
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic
Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of Tarot
Sallie Nichols, Tarot and the Archetypal Journey
Clive Barker, Hellraiser
Weird Studies, Episode 116 on “Blade Runner”
George Gurdjieff, Armenian mystic
Body without organs, philosophical concept
Elizabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Weird Studies, Episode 126 with Matt Cardin

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We recorded this episode in early December for our Patreon subscribers, but as it's the closest thing to a Christmas special we're ever likely to make, we thought we'd slip it into everyone's stocking this year. In it, we discuss the Ford family's most recently acquired Christmas ornament (which Phil mistakenly calls a luminaria), gazing into the Christmas tree, the loneliness of little worlds, the mystery of incarnation, Colin Wilson's "Faculty X," and the utter weirdness of British Christmas specials.

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REFERENCES

Erik Davis, A Brief History of the Phantasm
Colin Wilson, The Occult
The Dog House UK, TV series
The Christmas Lantern

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What Evil Dead 2 is to the Baroque, Sunn O))) is to Brutalism. Or more like: if the likening of Evil Dead 2 to the Baroque felt like a stretch in episode 136, the brutalist bona fides of Sunn O)))'s drone metal are incontestable. In this episode, their 2019 masterpiece Life Metal frames a conversation touching on 20th-century avant garde music, the tactility of sound, the metaphysics of the Kickass Riff, Aztec aesthetics, the virtues of impermanence, and of course, the sublime beauty of brutalist buildings.

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REFERENCES

Sunn O))), Life Metal
Theatre of Eternal Music, musical group
Daniel Albright, Panaesthetics
Brian Eno, Imaginary Landscapes
John Wray, “Heady Metal”
Nyarlathotep, Lovecraft character
Byung-Hul Chan, The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism
Fred Wilcox (dir.), Forbidden Planet
H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
Godfrey Reggio (dir.), [Koyaanisquatsi](imdb.com/title/tt0085809/)

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"We are the things that were and shall be again." So a demonic flesh puppet tells Ash and his allies in a memorable scene from the classic splatstick flick Evil Dead II. In addition to being a rollicking piece of entertainment, Evil Dead II is an expertly crafted film whose director used every tool and technique to generate a cinematic experience that is – as the tagline went – "2 terrifying, 2 frightening ... 2 much!" In this episode, JF and Phil court the absurd by turning a fun 80s horror movie into a statement on the dread aspirations of matter and a shining example of the modern baroque.

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SHOW NOTES

Sam Raimi (dir.), The Evil Dead II
Weird Studies, Episode 121 on Mandy and the Bandwagon
Joe Bob Briggs, American movie critic
Chalres Ludlam, American actor
Weird Studies, Episode 88 on Mr Punch
Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics
Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets
Joseph Cermatori, Baroque Modernity

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Victoria Nelson saw it first: Popular culture teems with occult ideas, vestiges of bygone belief, fragments of ancient magic disguised as common entertainment. Her 2001 work The Secret Life of Puppets is in many ways the ur-text of weird studies, so prescient and probing it is even more relevant now than it was when it first appeared. In episode 128, Phil and JF discussed Nelson's wonderful first novel Neighbor George (2021). In this episode, Nelson joins the hosts of Weird Studies to talk about the vision that drove her to write Secret Life along with its equally insightful follow-up, Gothicka.

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SHOW NOTES

Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets, Gothicka, Neighbor George

M. R. James, Collected Ghost Stories
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight series
William P. Young, The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity _
Against Everyone with Conner Habib, episodes 202 & 203
James R. Lewis, _The Gods Have Landed
Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Honoré de Balzac, "Séraphîta"
L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology

Special Guest: Victoria Nelson.

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In Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality, the philosopher Federico Campagna argues that we moderns have exhausted the reality system we devised at the dawn of our age, a system he calls Technic. Technic has one goal: to reduce all things to language by naming, tagging, measuring, and quantifying them, by turning every parcel of the physical and psychic universe into a "unit" defined by its position in the system. The result has been an erasure of the mere "suchness" of things, the singularity of things simply existing as they are. To replace a worldview that is now revealing its endemic nihilism, Campagna proposes Magic, a way of seeing that reestablishes a balance between the measurable and the ineffable. JF and Phil discuss Campagna's magisterial performance in this episode.

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SHOW NOTES

Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic
Bill Hicks, “Bit on Marketing”
Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time
Plotinus, Neoplatonist philosopher
Francis Bacon, Irish artist
Samuel Beckett, Irish author
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Weird Stuides, Episode 87 on Arthur Machen
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

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With the term "weird studies" gaining currency inside and outside academia, Phil and JF thought it was time to discuss the philosophical method they've been developing on the podcast since 2018. Borrowing a term from Erik Davis, they call it weirding, and here set about trying to understand what it is, and what it means. David Lynch's fondness for crying, the practice of queering in cultural theory, the all-too-real phenomenon of "global weirding,"the spooky agency of artworks, and the tragic death of E.T. at the hands of Damien Hirst are just a few of the subjects touched on in the conversation. "Weirding" also happens to be the working title of the book your hosts are writing for Strange Attractor Press, as well as an eight-week series of lectures and discussions starting October 25th, 2022, on the Nura Learning platform.

Header image: David Lynch, Mulholland Drive

Link to the upcoming course: Weirding: An 8-Week Course With the Hosts of the Weird Studies Podcast

SHOW NOTES

Ludwig van Beethoven, 9th Symphony
James Elkins, Pictures and Tears
Eugenie Brinkema, The Form of the Affects
David Lynch (dir.), Mulholland Drive
Gilkes Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?
Weird Studies, Episode 121 on “Mandy”
Erik Davis and Timothy Morton, “Uncanny Objects” episode of Expanding Minds
Coen brothers (dir.), Hail Caesar
Esther Williams, American swimmer
Weird Studies, Episode 120 on Radical Mystery
Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Erik Davis, “Weird Shit”
Pete Docter and Bob Peterson (dir.), Up
Steven Spielberg (dir.), E.T.
Alejandro Jodorowsky, Psychomagic
Martin Buber, I and Thou
Gilbert Simondon, Imagination and Invention
Weird Studies, Episode 106 the Wanderer
Charles Ludlam, “On Camp” in Ridiculous Theater
Weird Studies, Episodes 14 and 15 on “Stalker
Weird Studies, Episode 35 on M. C. Richards’ “Centering”

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With his 2010 film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog peeled away the veneer of familiarity on the Chauvet cave paintings, restoring them to their original eldritch sparkle. In this conversation, Phil and JF discuss a cinematic jewel that was wrought under tremendous pressure – and is all the more dazzling for it. The episode was recorded live at the Supernormal Festival in Oxfordshire, England, where your hosts were also subjected to unexpected pressure as the band Plastics started their set at the same time as the talk! Though we feel the musical accompaniment adds depth to the dialogue, listeners who find it distracting can skip to the end of the Plastics' set around 41:30. All listeners are urged to visit the band's Bandcamp page to sample some choice hardcore.

Weird Studies thanks Strange Attractor Press, the Supernormal Festival , and Plastics. JF Martel gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts in making this live recording possible.

Header image via Wikimedia Commons.

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SHOW NOTES

Werner Herzog, “The Minnesota Declaration”
Tom Waits, “Step Right Up”
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Weird Studies, Episode 76 on “Hellier”
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), 2001: A Space Odyssey
Paul Bahn, Images of the Ice Age
Weird Studies, Episode 101 on “In Praise of Shadows
Weird Studies, Episode 129 on “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Matthew Barney, The Cremaster Films
Stanley Kubrick, The Shining

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In this bonus episode, originally released for Listener's Tier Patreon supporters, a discussion of the books Phil and JF are reading leads to a debate about the place of plot, story, and worldbuilding in narrative art. The episode contains information on "Weirding," a new course that the hosts of Weird Studies will be teaching together at Nura Learning, starting in late October. Visit nuralearning.com for more information.

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The historian of religion Jeffrey J. Kripal writes, "The world is one, and the human is two." The line captures the riddle of reality. What is it with our species? Equipped with an intellect able to grok the basic laws that govern the physical universe, we seem unable to wrap our heads around as simple a question as "What is real?". Recorded live before a learned audience at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) in August of 2022, this episode approaches the enigma by teasing the Weird out of the very idea of intellection. If the architects of DISI are right to say that mind, far from being confined to human skulls, enjoys wide distribution across nature, what might such ideas as magic, synchronicity, and prophecy tell us about intelligence and meaning?

DISI is a three-week interdisciplinary event held each year at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The hosts are grateful to Jacob Foster and Erica Cartmill of UCLA for inviting them to speak at the institute.

**Header image: **Detail of The Ancient of Days by William Blake.

SHOW NOTES

Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI)
Earlier iteration of Jacob Foster's talk, "Toward a Social Science of the Possible"

Pauline Oliveros's Tuning Meditation
Norbert Wiener, American mathematician
Joshua Ramey, "Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux"
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande
Aristotle, Physics and Metaphysics
Jeffrey J. Kripal, "The World is One, and the Human is Two: Tentative Conclusions of a Working Historian of Religion"
Jeffrey Kripal on Weird Studies: episodes ## and ##
Aleister Crowley, See The Vision and the Voice and Magick in Theory and Practice
The "Unwritten Doctrines" of Plato
Plato, Republic, "Seventh Letter" & Phaedrus
Phil's prophetic dream report (Patreon supporters only)
H. P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (for description of Azathoth)
C. G. Jung, Synchroncity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Alchemical Studies & Mysterium Coniunctionis
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
New York Times article on 2022 UFO hearings

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In August, 2022, JF and Phil flew to the UK to attend the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) at the University of St. Andrews and the Supernormal Festival in Oxfordshire. In addition to recording two live shows (to be released in the coming weeks), they encountered billiant minds, novel ideas, and arresting works of art that opened new avenues for thought. It's these encounters that anchor this conversation, which branches off to touch ideas such as the elusive ideal of intersciplinarity, Hakim Bey's temporary autonomous zone, the legacy of the 20th-century counterculture, the fate of revolutionary movements, non--human intelligences, and the weirdness of human thought.

Header Image by RomitaGirl67 via Wikimedia Commons.

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References

Dial M for Musicology, Interdisciplinarity
Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone
Entitled Opinions Podcast
William Gibson, Foreword to Samuel Delaney’s Dhalgren
DISI Podcast, Many Minds
John Krakauer, professor of nuerology and neuroscience
Hunter S. Thompson, American journalist
The Great Ape Dictionary, specific database used by Cat Hobaiter

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Edgar Allan Poe can be lauded as a major inspiration for many innovative artists, genres, and movements, from horror fiction to the music of Maurice Ravel. He has also been a major inspiration for Weird Studies, particularly his short story "The Fall of the House of Usher." In this episode, JF and Phil try to pinpoint just what it is about this tale that is so compelling, discovering in the process that whatever it is cannot be pinpointed. Instead, the haunting mood of the story emerges from the peculiar arrangement of all its parts, becoming something entirely new.

Click here for more information on the Supernormal Festival, Aug 12-14, in Oxfordshire, England.

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References

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death
Klangfarbenmelodie, musical technique
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Poetic Principle"
Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy
Lovecraft without adjectives
Weird Studies, Development of Circle vs. Spiral: Wheel of fortune, Blade Runner, The Star, Birhane
Matei Calinescu, The Five Faces of Modernity
Weird Studies, Episode 101 on ‘In Praise of Shadows’
Phanes, deity
James Herbert, The Dark
Joseph Adamson, “Frye and Poe”
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, French anthropologist
James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain
Edgar Allan Poe, “Eureka”

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The American writer and thinker Victoria Nelson is justly revered by afficionados of the Weird for The Secret Life of Puppets and its follow-up Gothicka. Both are masterful explorations the supernatural as it subsists in the "sub-Zeitgeist" of the modern secular West. In 2021, Strange Attractor Press released Neighbor George, Nelson's first novel. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss this gothic anti-romance with a mind to seeing how it contributes to Nelson's overall project of acquainting us with the eldritch undercurrents of contemporary life.

Click here for more information on the Supernormal Festival, Aug 12-14, in Oxfordshire, England.

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References

Victoria Nelson, Neighbor George
Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets
Victoria Nelson, Gothicka
Wendy Lesser, American critic
Ward Sutton Onion cartoons
Extension, metaphysical concept
Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer
Cessation of Miracles, theological belief
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande
Greg Anderson, “Retrieving the Lost Worlds of the Past: A Case for the Ontological Turn”
Orcus Grotto, sculpture
Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman
Nathalie Cooke, Margaret Atwood: A Biography
Weird Studies, Episode 96 on Beauty and the Beast
M. C. Richards, “Wrestling with the Daemonic”

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Like Caligula declaring war on Neptune and ordering his troops to charge into the Mediterranean Sea, our technological masters are designing neural networks meant to capture the human soul in all its oceanic complexity. According to the cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane, this is a fool's errand that we undertake at our peril. In her paper "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity," she makes the case for the irremediable fluidity, spontaneity, and relationality of people and societies. She argues that ongoing efforts to subsume the human (and the rest of reality) in predictive algorithms is actually narrowing the human experience, as so many of us are excluded from the system while others are compelled to artificially conform to its idea of the human. Far from paving the way to a better world, the tyranny of automation threatens to cut us off from the Real, ensuring an endless perpetuation of the past with all its errors and injustices. Phil and JF discuss Birhane's essay in this episode.

Header image from via www.vpnsrus.com (cropped). Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

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REFERENCES

Abebe Birhane, "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity”
J. F. Martel, “Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things”
Melissa Adler, Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge
Weird Studies, Episode 75 on 2001: A Space Odyssey
Weird Studies, Episode 114 on the Wheel of Fortune
William James, American philosopher
Midjourney, AI art generator
Rhine Research Center, parapsychology lab
George Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives”
Abebe Birhane, “Descartes was Wrong: A Person is a Person Through Other Persons”
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German philosopher
J. R. R. Tolkein, “On Fairy-Stories”
Martin Buber, I and Thou

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Returning guest Matt Cardin is a writer of fiction and nonfiction whose focus on numinous horror places him in the literary lineage as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. His new book, What the Daemon Said, collects two decades' worth of meditations on literature, cinema, mysticism, philosophy, and the weird. He joins Phil and JF to talk about a range of topics including dark enlightenment, the idea that fear and trembling are the only sensible reactions to direct exposure to cosmic truth.

Header image: detail of cover design for What the Daemon Said, by Dan Sauer Design.

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REFERENCES

Matt Cardin's website
Matt Cardin, What the Daemon Said: Essays on Horror, Fiction, Film and Philosophy
Matt Cardin, Dark Awakenings
Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way Morning Pages Journal
Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
The Gospel of Thomas
Matt Cardin, Dark Awakenings
Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes”
John Horgen, Rational Mysticism
Weird Studies, Episode 41 with Matt Cardin
Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for his Highest
Weird Studies ep. 124: Dark Night Radio of the Soul, with Duncan Barford
Theodore Roszak, American scholar
M. C. Richards, Centering
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Huston Smith, American religious scholar
Martin Buber, I and Thou
John Lee Hancock (dir.), The Rookie (2002)
Eckart Tolle, German spiritual teacher
Richard Wagner, Parsifal
Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion
Alan Watts, English writer and teacher
Richard Rose, After the Absolute: The Inner Teachings of Richard Rose

Special Guest: Matt Cardin.

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On May 23, 2022, Meredith Michael joined JF and Phil for a live recording at Illuminated Brew Works, a craft brewery in Chicago, Illinois.The occasion was the launch of Weird Studies Black IPA, the fruit of a collaboration with IBW brewmaster Brian Buckman and his team of beer alchemists. The game plan was to talk about potions, but the final conversation ranges over a number of topics including singularity and repetition, time and eternity, alchemy and ritual, Okakura Kakuzō's The Book of Tea, cooking and pickling, and the cultural phenomenon Phil calls "weedhead sh*t."

Purchase the Weird Studies Black IPA from Beer on the Wall or visit the Illuminated Brew Works website.

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SHOW NOTES

Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea
Oscar Wilde on absinthe
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History
Toni Morrison. Song of Solomon
The Suzuki Method
Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice
David Cronenberg (dir.), Scanners (1981)
Lars von Trier (dir.), Dancer in the Dark (2000)
Alan Watts, Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen
William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Special Guest: Meredith Michael.

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For several episodes now, Phil and JF have been circling what St. John of the Cross called the Dark Night of the Soul, that moment in the spiritual journey where all falls a way and an abyss seems to crack open beneath our feet. When it came time to go there in earnest, they could think of no better guide than Duncan Barford, host of the excellent Occult Experiments in the Home podcast. As a master magician, long-time meditator, psychotherapeutic counsellor and writer on spirituality and the occult, Barford is uniquely endowed with the tools, experience, and language to discuss even the most difficult spiritual topics with wisdom and warmth. A Virgil for any Inferno.

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SHOW NOTES

Occult Experiments in the Home, Duncan Barford's excellent solo podcast
Duncan's other website, focusing on his work as a psychotherapeutic counselor
Duncan's books on Amazon US

Weird Studies, Episode 67 on Hellier
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Judgement
Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Dogen’s Bendowa
Tibetan Book of the Dead
Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel
Spinoza, Ethics
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

Special Guest: Duncan Barford.

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Every off-week, JF and Phil record a bonus episode for Patreon supporters. The conversations on that stream are shorter, less formal, and more improvisitory than those of the flagship show. To give the wider public a glimpse of this hidden dimension of the WS universe, we decided to make this week's "audio extra" available to everyone. As it happens, this episode also contains an important announcement concerning next week's event at Illuminated Brew Works in Chicago: tickets must be purchased via Eventbrite using the link below. No tickets can be sold at the door.

Click here to purchase tickets to the Weird Studies beer launch at Illuminated Brew Works in Chicago on May 23.

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The Star is one of the most iconic of the major trumps of the traditional tarot deck. It is also one of the most ambiguous. A woman is shown emptying two urns of water onto the parched ground. She is flanked by nascent plant life. Shining above her are those nocturnal luminaries whose "eternal silence" so frightened the philosopher Blaise Pascal at the dawn of modernity. Are the stars pointing the way to a brighter future, or are they stars of ill omen, warning us of what lies ahead? And what does that little bird in the background signify? In this episode, Phil and JF try to get to the bottom of the starry heavens, only to find out that starry heavens have no bottom.

Click here to purchase tickets to the Weird Studies beer launch at Illuminated Brew Works in Chicago on May 23.

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REFERENCES

Our Known Friend (Valentin Tomberg), Meditations on the Tarot

Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of the Tarot

Pink Floyd, “Astronomy Domine”
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law
Heimarmene, Greek goddess of fate
Weird Studies, Episode 121 on Mandy
Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
Samuel Delaney, Dahlgren
J R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Juan Eduardo Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols
Weird Studies, Episode 103 on the Tower
Weird Studies, [Episode 114 on the Wheel of Fortune]
Joni Mitchell, “Ladies of the Canyon”

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In this episode, each of your hosts bullies the other into watching a movie he would normally not touch with a bargepole. Phil has been (unsuccessfully) trying to get JF to watch Vincente Minnelli's 1953 musical comedy The Band Wagon and JF has been (also unsuccessfully) trying to get Phil to watch Panos Cosmatos's 2018 psychedelic horror film Mandy. For this episode, they decided they would compromise and watch both. What started as a goof ended up a fascinating Glass Bead Game from which emerge occulted correspondences between films that, on the surface, could not be more dissimilar. One film is a dream of song and dance, the other a dream of blood and violence. Either way, though, watch out: as Deleuze says, "beware of the dreams of others, because if you are caught in their dream, you are done for."

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SHOW NOTES

Iluminated Brew Works, Chicago
JF's new course, [Groundwork for a Philosophy of Magic](www.nuralearning.com)

Vincente Minnelli (dir.), The Bandwagon
Panos Cosmatos (dir.), Mandy
Weird Studies, Episode 73 on Carl Jung
Norman Jewison (dir.), Moonstruck
David Thompson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image) and Cinema 2: The Time Image
Henri Bergson, “The Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion”, from Creative Evolution
Terry Gilliam (dir.), The Fisher King
Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music
Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity
Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia” in Only Entertainment
Gilles Deleuze, “What is the Creative Act”

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Though it is seldom acknowledged in the weirdosphere, there is a difference between weirdness and mystery. Most of the time, the Weird confronts us with a problem, an impersonal epistemic obstacle which we can always believe would go away if we just closed our eyes and whistled past it with our hands in our pockets. Mystery, however, is always personal. It envelops us; it addresses us as persons. Mystery is as present within us as it is out there. It is there when you open your eyes, and even more so when you shut them tight. Maybe it had us in its grip before we were even born. In this episode, JF and Phil make radical mystery the focus of a discussion ranging over everything from unique kinds of tea and spelunking mishaps to antisonic demon pipes and malevolent radiators.

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REFERENCES

For information on JF's new course, Groundwork for a Philosophy of Magic, go to [Nura Learning](www.nuralearning.com).

Phil Ford, “Radical Mystery: A Preliminary Account”
J.F. Martel, “Reality is analog”
John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Eugene Paul Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics”
Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism
Peter Kingsley, Catafalque
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy
Steven Spielberg (dir.), Raiders of the Lost Ark
Dogen, “Instructions for the Cook”
Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
Weird Studies, Episode 56 with Jeremy Johnson

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Over the last several centuries, there has been one thing on which science and religion have generally agreed, and that is the fixity of the laws under which the universe came to be. At the moment of the Big Bang or the dawn of the First Day, the underlying principles that govern reality were already set, and they have never changed. But what if the laws of nature were not as chiseled in stone as Western intellectuals on both sides of the magisterial divide have assumed them to be? What if creation was an ongoing process, such that our universe in its beginning might have behaved very differently from how it does at present? This is the central conceit of Stanislaw Lem's story "The New Cosmogony," the capstone of his metafictional collection A Perfect Vacuum, originally published in 1971. In this episode, Meredith Michael joins JF and Phil to discuss the metaphysical implications of the idea that nature is an eternal work-in-progress.

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REFERENCES

For more information JF's new course, Groundwork for a Philosophy of Magic, visit Nura Learning.

Stanislaw Lem, “A New Cosmogony” in A Perfect Vacuum
Weird Studies, Episode 118 The Unseen and Unnamed
Ramsey Dukes, SSOTBME
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude
M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart
Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Stanislaw Lem, His Master’s Voice
David Pruett, Reason and Wonder
Andrei Tarkovsky (dir.), Solaris
Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”
Andrew W.K., “No One to Know”

Special Guest: Meredith Michael.

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In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by music scholar and Weird Studies assistant Meredith Michael to discuss two strange and unsettling short stories: J.G. Ballard's "The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon" (1964) and Ursula K. Le Guin's "She Unnames Them" (1985). Their plan was to talk about three stories, but they never got to Phil's pick, which will be the focus of episode 119. The reason is that Le Guin and Ballard's stories share surprising resonances that merited close discussion. From opposite perspectives, both tales put words to a region of reality that resists discursive description, a borderland where that which is named reveals its unnamed facet, and that which must remain unseen reveals itself to the inner eye.

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REFERENCES

J. G. Ballard, “The Giaconda of the Twilight Noon,” from The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard
Ursula K. Le Guin, "She Unnames Them," from The Real and the Uneal
Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), The Birds
Jung's concept of the collective unconscious
Walter Pater, The Renaissance
Ursula K. Le Guin, “She Unnames Them” in The Real and the Unreal
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
M. C .Richards, Centering
Weird Studies, Episode 35 on Centering
Weird Studies, Episode 81 on The Course of the Heart
Weird Studies, Episode 84 on the Empress
Linguistically deprived children
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's thoughts on on imagination and fancy can be found in Biographia Literaria

Special Guest: Meredith Michael.

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The topic of games and play has fascinated JF and Phil since the launch of Weird Studies. Way back in 2018, they recorded back-to-back episodes on tabletop roleplaying games and fighting sports, and more recently, they did a two-parter on Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, a philosophical novel suggesting that all human culture tends toward play. In this episode, your hosts draw on a wealth of texts, memories, and nascent ideas to explore the game concept as such. What is a game? What do games tell us about life? What is the function of play in the formation of reality?

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REFERENCES

Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia
Jobe Bittman, The Book of Antitheses US version, EU version
Weird Studies, Episode 6, Dungeons and Dragons
Weird Studies, Episode 7, Boxing
C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art
Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics
BF Skinner, American psychologist
Heraclitus, Fragments

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In his 1978 bestseller The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins described humans as "survival machines" whose sole purpose is the replication of genes. All of culture needed to be understood as a side-effect, if not an epiphenomenon, of that defining function. Four years after Dawkins' book was published, Warner Brothers released Blade Runner, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's dystopian novel Do Androis Dream of Electric Sheep?. Ridley Scott's film presents us with a different kind of survival machine: the replicant, a technology whose sole function is the replication of human beings. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the ethical, metaphysical, and aesthetic dimensions of one of the greatest and most prophetic science fiction films of all time.

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REFERENCES

Ridley Scott (dir.), Blade Runner

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick, “The Android and the Human”
Philip K. Dick, “Man, Android, and Machine”
Dennis Villeneuve (dir.), Blade Runner 2049
Weird Studies, Episode 114 on the Wheel of Fortune
Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner: BFI Film Classics
Alan Nourse, The Bladerunner
Weird Studies, Episode 115 on Brian Eno
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Weird Studies, Episode 5 on “When Nothing is Cool”
JF Martel, “Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things”
John Carpenter (dir,), The Thing
Beyond Yacht Rock podcast
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”
Weird Studies, Episode 86 on “The Sandman”
Orson Welles (dir.), Touch of Evil
George Orwell, 1984

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Soft, soothing, and understated as a rule, ambient music may seem the least weird of all musical genres. Not so, say JF and Phil, who devote this episode to Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports, the 1978 album in whose liner notes the term "ambient music" first appeared. In this conversation, your hosts explore the aesthetic, metaphysical, and political implications of a kind of music designed to interact with the listener -- and the listener's environment -- below the threshold of ordinary, directed awareness. Eno and Peter Schmidt's famous Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards designed to heighten and deepen creativity, lends divinatory support to the endeavor.

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REFERENCES

Brian Eno, Ambient 1: Music for Airports
Gabriella Cardazzo, Duncan Ward, and Brian Eno, Imaginary Landscapes
Oblique Strategies Deck
Theodore Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music
Marc Auge, Non-Places
Anahid Kassabian, “Ubiquitous Music”
Sigmund Freud, “On Transience”
Weird Studies, Episode 104 on Sgt. Pepper
Joris Karl Huysmans, A Rebours
Roger Moseley, Keys to Play

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Season five kicks off with a new installment in the ongoing series on the Tarot's twenty-two major arcana. This time, your hosts overcome the trials that fortune has dealt them -- a hangover in the case of Phil, a sleepless night for JF -- to discuss the Wheel of Fortune. Not surprisingly, the conversation is a mess, albeit a beautiful one that comes full circle in the end, tying up all its loose ends in something like a bow (or a coiled serpent). Topics include the challenges of improvised philosophical discussion, the importance of exposing oneself to difficult ideas, the serpentine nature of immanentist discourse, and the doctrine of the Fall. As usual, the anomymously-authored Meditations on the Tarot gets pride of place, although occult luminaries such as Alejandro Jodorowsky, Aleister Crowley, and Pat Sajak make notable appearances.

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REFERENCES

Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot
Pints with Aquinas
Jaroslav Hašek, Czech author
Lon Milo Duquette, Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot
True Detective, tv show
Thomas Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race
Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Alexander Jodorowsky, The Way of Tarot
Jessica Hundley et. al., Tarot. Library of Esoterica
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French priest and scientist
Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
Bruno Latour, French philosopher
David Bentley Hart interview

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Shannon Taggart's book Seance is a landmark in art photography and the history of psychical research. Taggart spent years photographing practitioners of spiritualism in the U.S. and Europe in an effort to capture the mysteries of mediumship, ectoplasm, and spirit photography. In this episode, she joins JF and Phil for a conversation on the often-misunderstood tradition of spiritualism, the investigation of the paranormal, and the real magic of photography. If the technological medium is the message, then perhaps the spiritual medium is the messenger.

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**REFERENCES

*Shannon Taggart, Séance *
Read the introduction to the book here
Visual companion page for this episode

Shannon and her work are featured in Peter Bebergal's excellent book, Strange Frequencies: The Extraordinary Story of the Technological Quest for the Supernatural

Weird Studies, Episode 24 with Lionel Snell
Lionel Snell, “The Charlatan and the Magus”
George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal
Diane Arbus, American photographer
Warner Herzog (dir.), Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Jeffrey Mishlove, Interview with James Tunney on Francis Bacon
Eva C, French medium
Andrew Jackson Davis, American spiritualist
Henry Alcott, American Theosophist

For further reading on women, spiritualism, and the art of the invisible:
Ann Braude, Radical Spirits
Guggenheim, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

Special Guest: Shannon Taggart.

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The Book of Probes contains a assortment of aphorisms and maxims from the work of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, each one set to evocative imagery by American graphic designer David Carson. McLuhan called the utterances collected in this book "probes," that is, pieces of conceptual gadgetry designed not to disclose facts about the world so much as blaze new pathways leading to the invisible background of our time. In this episode, Phil and JF use an online number generator to discuss a random yet uncannily cohesive selection of of McLuhanian probes.

REFERENCES

Marshall Mcluhan and David Carson, The Book of Probes

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Marshall Mcluhan, The Mechanical Bride
Aristotle, System of causation
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato
Weird Studies, Episode 71 on Marshall Mcluhan
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Christiaan Wouter Custers, A Philosophy of Madness
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense
Marshall Mcluhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
Harry Partch, American composer
Marc Augé, Non-Places
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Denis Villeneuve (dir.), Arrival
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

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A wish-fulfilment fantasy for pubescent boys of all ages, or a subtle disquisition on the ethics of a sorcerous world? John Milius' Conan the Barbarian (1982) manages to be both, although one may be easy to overlook. In this episode, JF and Phil leave the heights of Hesse's The Glass Bead Game with a headlong dive to the trash stratum. Their wager: that Conan the Barbarian, a film without a hint of irony, is a spiritual statement that is equal parts empowering and disquieting, and a prime of example of how fantasy is sometimes the straightest way to the heart of reality.

REFERENCES

John Milus (dir.), Conan the Barbarian (1982)
Richard Fleischer (dir.), Conan the Destroyer (1984)
Robert E. Howard, American writer, author of the Conan stories
Jack Smith, "On the Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez"
Weird Studies #3: Ecstasy, Sin, and "The White People"
H. P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"
Fritz Leiber, American writer
Weird Studies #95: Demon Seed: On Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child
Dungeons & Dragons
Weird Studies #20: The Trash Stratum (part 1, part 2)
Masaki Kobayashi (dir.), Kwaidan
Jerry Zucker (dir.), Ghost (1990)
Roget's Thesarus of English Words and Phrases
Maria Montez, Dominican-American actress

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In the current "attention economy," which has resulted in plummeting literacy rates and the almost wanton neglect of various cultural practices, what significance does culture even have? Why seek to preserve something our age has decided doesn't have to exist? Perhaps Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game can be read as an answer to those questions. The order of monastic scholars in the novel exists mainly to remember what others were happy to consign to oblivion. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss Hesse's ideas on the order and its sacred game in terms of how they might help us meet the challenge facing anyone who believes the value of culture can't be expressed in dollars and cents.

REFERENCES

Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
Pope Benedict XVI, former head of the Catholic church
J.S. Bach, Well Tempered Clavier, Rosalyn Tureck interpretation and Glenn Gould interpretation
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Chauvet Cave
Peter Bebergal Strange Frequencies
Andy Goldsworthy, British artist
Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists
William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light

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JF and Phil have been talking about doing a show on The Glass Bead Game since Weird Studies' earliest beginnings. It is a science-fiction novel that alights on some of the key ideas that run through the podcast: the dichotomy of work and play, the limits and affordances of institutional life, the obscure boundary where certainty gives way to mystery... Throughout his literary career, Hesse wrote about people trying to square their inner and outer selves, their life in the spirit and their life in the world. The Glass Bead Game brings this central concern to a properly ambiguous and heartbreaking conclusion. But the novel is more than a brilliant work of philosophical or psychological literature. It is also an act of prophecy -- one that seems intended for us now.

Header image by Liz West, via Wikimedia Commons.

REFERENCES

Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Paul Hindemith, German composer
Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture
Alfred Korzybski, concept of Time Binding
Christopher Nolan, Memento
William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism
Jeremy Johnson, Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness
Teilhard de Chardin, French theologian
Mathesis
Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze
Weird Studies, Episode 22 with Joshua Ramey
Joseph Needham, British historian of Chinese culture
James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

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Modern skeptics pride themselves on being immune to unreason. They present themselves as defenders of rationality, civilization, and good sense against what Freud famously called the "black mud-tide of occultism." But what if skepticism was more implicated in the phenomena it aims to banish than it might appear to be? What if no one could debunk anything without getting some of that black mud on their hands? In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the weird complicity of the skeptic and the believer in the light of George P. Hansen's masterpiece of meta-parapsychology, The Trickster and the Paranormal.

REFERENCES

George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal

James Randi, stage magician and paranormal debunker
Michael Shermer, American science writer
CSICOP, Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, Publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer
Rune Soup, Interview with George P. Hansen
Weird Studies, Episode 24 with Lionel Snell
Weird Studies, Episode 89 on Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure
Wouter Hanegraaff, Dutch professor of esoteric philosophy
Shannon Taggart, Seance
Society for Psychical Research
Weird Studies, Episode 44 on William James’s Psychical Research
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Robert Anton Wilson, American author
Aleister Crowley, Magic Without Tears

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Joy Williams' third novel, Breaking and Entering, is the story of lovers who break into strangers' homes and live their lives for a time before moving on. First published in 1988, it is a book impossible to describe, a work of singular vision and sensibilty that is as infectious in its weird effect as it is unforgettable for the quality of its prose.

In this episode, the novelist, spiritual thinker, and acclaimed podcaster Conner Habib joins JF and Phil to explore how the novel's enchantments rest on the uniqueness of Williams' style, which is to say, her bold embrace of ways of seeing that are hers alone. Williams is an artist who refuses to work from within some predetermined philosophical or political idiom. As Habib tells your hosts, she goes her own way, and even the gods must follow.

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Photo by Wolfgang Moroder via Wikimedia Commons

REFERENCES

Conner Habib, "Joy Williams: The Best Fiction Writer Alive"

Joy Williams, Breaking and Entering
Joy Williams, The Quick and the Dead
The Paris Review, Interview with Joy Williams
Heraclitus, Fragments
Joy Williams, “Breakfast” in Taking Care
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
The Phantom Stranger, DC Comics character
James Joyce, Ulysses
Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros
Deleuze and Guatarri, What is Philosophy?
Quentin Meillassoux, French philosopher
David Mamet, On Directing Film
David Mamet, True and False
Nicholas Winding Refn (dir.), The Neon Demon
Joy Williams, “Congress”
Joy Williams, “Hawk”
Stephen Sexton, If All the World and Love Were Young
Scott Burnham, Mozart’s Grace

Special Guest: Conner Habib.

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In this episode, Weird Studies turns meta, reflecting on the peculiar medium that is podcasting, and how it has shaped the Weird Studies project itself. JF and Phil provide a glimpse into what it feels like to create the show from the inside, where each recording session is like a journey into an unknown Zone. The conversation also occasions sojourns into the flow state, or experience of pure durée, its implications for our conception of free will, and surprising parallels between modern materialists’ adherence to nihilism and ancient religious ascetic practices. Ultimately, JF and Phil explore the archetypal image of the wanderer as representative of Weird Studies’s existence so far, and of the kind of impact and legacy this project can have.

N.B. Weird Studies will be on a haitus for the month of September, and will return on September 29. In the meantime:

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References

Robert Sapolsky, Interview with Pau Guinart
Bruno Latour, French philosopher
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith
Nina Simone, “Feeling Good”
Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus
Richard Wagner, Siegfried
Lewis Carol, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
John David Ebert, American cultural critic
Patrick Harpur Daimonic Reality
Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village
Phil Ford, “What was Blogging?”
Weird Studies, Episode 71 on Marshall McLuhan

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The Twin Peaks mythos has been with Weird Studies from the very beginning, and it is only fitting that it should have a return. In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Tamler Sommers, co-host of the podcast Very Bad Wizards to discuss Fire Walk with Me, the prequel film to the original Twin Peaks series. Paradoxically, David Lynch’s work both necessitates and resists interpretation, and the pull of detailed interpretation is unusually strong in this episode. The three discuss how Fire Walk with Me, and the series as a whole, depicts two separate worlds that sometimes begin to intermingle, disrupting the perceived stability of time and space. Often this happens in moments of extreme fear or love. Through their love for Laura Palmer and for the film under consideration, JF, Phil, and Tamler enact their own interpretation, entering a rift where the world of Twin Peaks and the “real” world seem to merge, demonstrating how Twin Peaks just won’t leave this world alone, and can become a way for disenchanted moderns once again to live inside of myth.

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References

David Lynch, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness, Netflix documentary
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double
Mark Frost, The Secret History of Twin Peaks
Mark Frost, Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier
Jason Louv, occultist
Duncan Barford, Occult Experiments in the Home podcast
Weird Studies, Episode 67 on “Hellier”
Weird Studies, Episode 78 on “The Mothman Prophesies”
Sound mass, musical technique
Michael Hanake (dir.), Caché
Courtenay Stallings, Laura’s Ghost

Special Guest: Tamler Sommers.

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It is said that for several days after the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the spring of 1967, you could have driven from one U.S. coast to the other without ever going out of range of a local radio broadcast of the album. Sgt. Pepper was, in a sense, the first global musical event -- comparable to other sixties game-changers such as the Kennedy assassination and the moon landing. What's more, this event is as every bit as strange as the latter two; it is only custom and habit that blind us to the profound weirdness of Sgt. Pepper. In this episode, Phil and JF reimagine the Beatles' masterpiece as an egregore, a magical operation that changes future and past alike, and a spiritual machine for "turning us on" to the invisible background against which we strut and fret our hours on the stage.

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REFERENCES

Weird Studies, Episode 31 on Glenn Gould’s ‘Prospects of Recording’
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art
Brian Eno, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
Weird Studies, Episode 33 On Duchamp’s Fountain
Emmanuel Carrère, La Moustache
Rob Reiner, This is Spinal Tap
Richard Lester, A Hard Day's Night
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy?
Arthur Machen, “A Fragment of Life”
David Lynch, Lost Highway
Zhuangzi (Butterfly dream)
Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head

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Continuing their series on the tarot, Phil and JF discuss the card nobody wants to see in a reading – The Tower. Featuring lightning bolts, plumes of ominous smoke, and figures plummeting from the windows, the Tower’s meaning at first glance seems clear: “pride comes before a fall,” as the old adage goes. But as JF and Phil delve into the details, they note not only the card’s connection to the Biblical tower of Babel and the fall of man, but also its relevance to the present era’s systems of control and communication breakdown. This discussion leads them to search for an antidote to the Tower's message of destruction.

References

Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot
Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of the Tarot
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Arnold Schoenberg, Austrian composer
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”
Wilco, “Radio Cure”
Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies
George Cukor (dir.), A Star is Born
Performativity, sociological concept
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Jaques Ellul, The Technological Society

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"What was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river?" With this question, the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning opens her famous poem "A Musical Instrument," which explores nature's troubling embrace of savagery and beauty. It seems that Pan always raises questions: What is he doing? What does he want? Where will he appear next? Linked to instinct, compulsion, and the spontaneous event, Pan is without a doubt the least predictable of the Greek Gods. Small wonder that he alone in the Greek pantheon sports human and animal parts. In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Gyrus, author of the marvellous North: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Cosmos, to capture a deity who, though he has made more than one appearance on Weird Studies, remains decidedly elusive.

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REFERENCES

Gyrus, "Sketches of the Goat God in Albion"
Gyrus, North
James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare
Pharmakon, philosophical term
Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive
Philippe Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece
Hellier, television docuseries
Weird Studies, Episode 98 on exotica
Pink Floyd, Piper at the Gates of Dawn
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Clayton Eshelman, Juniper Fuse
Plutarch “On the Silence of the Oracles”
Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger
D.H. Lawrence, “Pan in America”
Jim Brandon, The Rebirth of Pan

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In modern physics as in Western theology, darkness and shadows have a purely negative existence. They are merely the absence of light. In mythology and art, however, light and darkness are enjoy a kind of Manichaean equality. Each exists in its own right and lays claim to one half of the Real. In this episode, JF and Phil delve into the luxuriant gloom of the Japanese novelist Jun'ichirō Tanazaki's classic meditation on the half-forgotten virtues of the dark.

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REFERENCES

Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
Chiaroscuro, Renaissance art style
John Carpenter (dir.), Escape from L.A.
Weird Studies, Episode 13 on Heraclitus
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Yasujiro Ozu (dir.), Late Spring
Wabi Sabi, Japanese idea
John Carpenter (dir.), Escape from NY
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep
Eric Voegelin, German-American philosopher

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Central to the tradition of cosmic horror is the suggestion that the ultimate truth about our universe is at once knowable and unthinkable, such that one learns it only at the cost of one's sanity and soul. John Carpenter is one of a handful of horror directors to have successfully ported this idea from literature to cinema. This episode is an attempt to unearth some of the eldritch symbols buried in a selection of Carpenter's apocalyptic works, including Escape from New York, The Thing, They Live,_ In the Mouth of Madness_, and the little known Cigarette Burns.

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REFERENCES

John Carpenter films discussed:
The Thing
Cigarette Burns
In the Mouth of Madness
Prince of Darkness
Halloween
They Live
Escape from New York
Escape from L.A.
Big Trouble in Little China

Other References:

Pascal Laugier (dir.), Martyrs
Srdjan Spasojevic (dir.), A Serbian Film
Weird Studies, Episode 90 on The Owl in Daylight
Roger Corman, American director
Northrup Frye, Words with Power
J. R. R. Tolkien, forward to The Fellowship of the Ring
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, “Percept, Affect, and Concept” in What is Philosophy
Weird Studies, Episode 72 on the Castrati
Weird Studies, Episode 46, Thomas Ligotti’s Angel
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”
China Mieville, British author
Karlheinz Stockhausen, comments on 9/11
H. P. Lovecraft, Nyarlothotep
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Haunter of the Dark”
Nick Land, Fanged Noumena
Zack Snyder, American director
Haeccaity and Quiddity, philosophical concepts
Samuel Delaney, Dahlgren
Weird Studies, Episode 98 on Exotica
Quentin Meillasoux, After Finitude
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

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In this never-before-released episode recorded in 2019, Phil and JF travel to rural Oregon through the Netflix docu-series, Wild Wild Country. The series, which details the establishment of a spiritual community founded by Bhagwan Rajneesh (later called Osho) and its religious and political conflicts with its Christian neighbors, provides a starting point for a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of spirituality and religion. What emerges are surprising ties between the “spiritual, not religious” attitude and class, cultural commodification, and the culture of control that pervades modern society. But they also uncover the true “wild” card at the heart of existence that spiritual movements like that of Rajneesh can never fully control, no matter how hard they try.

REFERENCES

Chapman and Maclain Way (dirs), Wild Wild Country
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Carl Wilson, Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste
Peter Sloterdijk, German cultural theorist
Weird Studies, Episode 47, Machines of Loving Grace
Slavoj Žižek, On Western appropriation of Eastern religions
William Burroughs, American writer
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”
Bhagwan Rajneesh/Osho, Speech on friendship
Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith
James Carse, The Finite and Infinite Games

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Exotica is a kind of music that was popular in the 1950s, when it was simply known as "mood music." Though somewhat obscure today, the sound of exotica remains immediately recognizable to contemporary ears. Its use of "tribal" beats, ethereal voices, flutes and gongs evoke a world that is no more at home in the modern West than it is anywhere else on earth. With its shameless stereotyping of non-Western cultures and its aestheticization of the other, exotica rightly deserves the criticism it has drawn over the years. But as we shall see in this episode, if you stop there, you just might miss the thing that makes exotica so difficult to expunge from Western culture, and also what makes it a prime example of how the "trash stratum" sometimes becomes the site of strange visions that transcend culture altogether.

REFERENCES

Phil Ford, “Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica”
Future Fossils, Episode 157
Weird Studies, Episode 21: The Trash Stratum
Weird Studies, Episode 79: Love, Death and the Dream Life
Jack Smith, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness Maria Montez”
Yma Sumac, Peruvian singer
Les Baxter, "The Oasis of Dakhla"
Steely Dan, "I Heard the News"
Stravinsky, Rite of Spring
Les Baxter, “Hong Kong Cable Car”
Jacques Riviere, review of The Rite of Spring
Nenao Sakaki, Japanese poet
Lew Welch, American Beat poet
JF Martel, “Stay with Mystery: Hiroshima Mon Amour, Melancholia, and the truth of extinction”
Jeffrey Kripal, Mutants and Mystics
Captain Beefheart, “Orange Claw Hammer”
Martin Buber, I and Thou

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The question of art has been of central concern for JF and Phil since Weird Studies began in 2018. What is art? What can it do that other things can't do? How is it connected to religion, psyche, and our current historical moment? Is the endless torrent of advertisements, entertainment, memes, and porn in which seem hopelessly immersed a manifestation of art or of something else entirely? In this exploration of the main ideas in JF's book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, your hosts focus on these burning questions in hopes that the answers might shed light on our collective predicament and the paths that lead out of it.

Photo by Petar Milošević via Wikimedia Commons

REFERENCES

JF's upcoming course on the nature and power of art, starting May 10th, 2021

JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice

Weird Studies, Episode 84 on the Empress card
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Adam Savage, Special effects designer
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Kabbalistic emanationist cosmology
Henry Corbin’s concept of the “imaginal”
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Tibetan book of the Dead
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and The Soul of the World
Phil Ford, “Battlefield medicine”
Jaques Ellul, idea of “technique”
Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith

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Jean Cocteau's visionary rendition of Madame de Beaumont's fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast," itself the retelling of a story that may be several millennia old, is the topic of this Weird Studies episode, which proposes a journey down lunar paths to the crossroads where love and death intersect. Drawing on Surrealism, myth, and the occult, Cocteau's 1946 film transcends the limitations of media to become a living poem, a thing that is also a place, a place that is also a mind. This conversation touches on the genius of the child, the mysteries of Eros, the monstrosity of consciousness, and the sorcery of cinema.

Photo by Ivan Jevtic on Unsplash

Click here to register for JF's upcoming course on art.

REFERENCES

Jean Cocteau (dir.), La Belle et la Bête

Jaques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry
Sergei Diaghilev, Russian impresario
Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise (dir.), Beauty and the Beast
David Thomson, Have You Seen?
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Johannes Vermeer, Dutch painter
Philip Glass, La Belle et la Bête (opera)
Game of Thrones, Television series
Weird Studies, Episode 84 on the Empress Card
Weird Studies, Episode 94 on the Moon Card

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Doris Lessing's uncategorizable oeuvre reached strange new heights in 1988 with the publication of her short novel The Fifth Child. The story couldn't be simpler. In the England of the 1970s, a couple determined to live out a dream that many of their generation have rejected -- the big family in the old house with the pretty garden -- conceive a child that may or may not be human. From that moment on, the boy, their fifth, becomes the alien force that will tear their dream to pieces. Profoundly ambiguous and unsettling, The Fifth Child is a weird novel that raises questions about parenthood, family, and the impenetrable depths of nature.

Header Image: The Changeling by Henry Fuseli (1780)

Additional music: "Fast Bossa Nova: Falling Stars" by Dee Yan-Key

REFERENCES

Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child
Doris Lessing, Shikasta
M. R. James, weird fiction author
Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Weird Studies, Episode 67 on “Hellier”
Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets
David Icke, conspiracy theorist
Deros, underground beings from the fiction of Richard Sharpe Shaver
Hieronymus Bosch, Dutch Renaissance painter
Weird Studies, Episode 86 on “The Sandman”
Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf
Louis Sass, “The Land of Unreality: On the Phenomenology of the Schizophrenic Break”
Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
Richard Thorpe (dir.), The Wizard of Oz
Frank L. Baum, The Wizard of Oz
Weird Studies, bonus episode on Adventure Time
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code
Doris Lessing, Ben in the World
Roman Polanski (dir.), Rosemary’s Baby
Richard Donner (dir.), The Omen
Donald Cammell (dir.), Demon Seed

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"Here is a weird, deceptive life." Thus does Aleister Crowley describe the meaning of one of the most sinister and spectral cards in the tarot. In this episode, Phil and JF continue their ongoing series on the twenty-two major trumps with a deep dive into the hopelessly enigmatic world of Arcanum XVIII: The Moon. After a brief chat about Voltron and professional wrestling, your hosts start on the lunar path beset by traps and illusions, in hopes that their half-blind perambulation will lead to startling insights.

Image by Damien Deltenre via Wikimedia Commons.

References

Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot
Colin Wilson, The Occult
Eliphas Levi,_ French esotericist
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
Weird Studies, [Episode 86 on The Sandman](weirdstudies.com/86)
Plato, Republic
Antoine Faivre, scholar of esoteric studies
Wouter Hanegraaff, historian of philosophy
Alastair Crowley, Book of Thoth
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis
Peter Kingsley, historian of philosophy
St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul
J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Weird Studies, Episode 93 on Charles Taylor
Algis Uždavinys, Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth

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In A Secular Age, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor tries to come to grips with the seismic development that transformed the world after the Renaissance, namely the secularization of the society and soul of Western humanity. What does it mean to live in an age where religion, once the very matrix of social existence, is relegated to the realm of private and personal choice? What defines secularity? Are modern people really as "irrelegious" as we make them out to be? In this episode, JF and Phil squarely train their sights on a question that continues to haunt them, with Taylor as their Virgil in what amounts to a descent into the ordinary inferno of modern unknowing.

Header Image by Pahudson, via Wikimedia Commons

REFERENCES

Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity
Weird Studies, ep 71: The Medium is the Message
Penn & Teller, Bullshit
René Descartes, Meditations
Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Jacques Ellul, The New Demons
David Foster Wallace's essay on David Letterman
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics
Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History

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With his latest film, a meditation on what it means to believe we live in a computer simulation, Rodney Ascher has once again placed himself among the most innovative and visionary filmmakers working in the documentary form today. While the "Simulation Hypothesis" has been a hot topic ever since The Matrix came out in 1997, it is Ascher's ability to suspend judgement, training his camera on the experience of believers rather than the value of their beliefs, that makes A Glitch in the Matrix such a unique and significant exploration, a strange work of "phantom phenomenology."

Weird Studies listeners will recall that Phil and JF devoted an episode to Ascher's films -- most notably Room 237 and The Nightmare -- back in the early days of the podcast. In this episode, Rodney Ascher joins them to discuss his cinematic vision, his take on the weird, and his thoughts on what is real and why it matters.

REFERENCES

[Rodney Ascher](www.rodneyascher.com), American filmmaker
-- [A Glitch in the Matrix](www.aglitchinthematrixfilm.com)

Jay Weidner's theories on Kubrick
Buddhist idea of the the Arising and Passing Away
[Dungeons & Dragons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons%26_Dragons), tabletop roleplaying game
James Machin, _Weird Fiction in Britain 1880-1939
Magic Eye pictures
Parmenides, Greek philosopher
Wachowskis, The Matrix
Alan Moore, "Superman: For the Man Who Has Everything"
Conway's Game of Life
Joshua Clover, The Matrix (BFI Film Classics)
Jonathan Snipes, American composer
Clipping, experimental hip hop band
"Shining" romantic comedy recut
Michael Curtiz (dir.), Casblanca
John Boorman (dir.), [Point Blank](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062138/?ref=fn_al_tt_2)_
Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought

Special Guest: Rodney Ascher.

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In this episode, Phil and JF explore the vast palatial halls of Susanna Clarke's novel Piranesi. Set in an otherworld consisting of endless galleries filled with enigmatic statues, Piranesi is the story of a man who lives alone -- or nearly alone -- in a dream labyrinth. As usual, our discussion leads to unexpected places every bit as strange as Clarke's setting, from Borge's infinite library and Lovecraft's alien cities to Renaissance Europe, where the art of memory was synonymous with wisdom and magic.

SHOW NOTES

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi
Joshua Clover, 1989: Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About , The Matrix (BFI Modern Classics
John Crowley, Little, Big
Christopher Priest, The Prestige (+Christopher Nolan's screen adaptation)
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
JF Martel, "The Real as Sacrament" (forthcoming?)
Frances Yates, The Art of Memory
Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture
Plato, Phaedrus
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel"
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d'invenzione
Maurits Cornelis Escher, Duch artist
H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Gyrus, North: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Cosmos
Emerald Tablet, foundational Hermetic text
Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Weird Studies ep. 42 - On Pauline Oliveros, with Kerry O'Brien
Giovanni colleague?
Allen Ginsberg, "America"
Rodney Ascher, A Glitch in the Matrix
Walter J. Ong, American philosopher
Weird Studies ep. 71: The Medium is the Message
Thomas Ligotti, "The Night School"
Thomas Aquinas, Christian philosopher and theologian
Erasmus, Christian philosopher
Marsilio Ficino, Christian philosopher