Through her fiction, Flannery O'Connor reenvisioned life as a supernatural war wherein each soul becomes the site of a clash of mysterious, almost incomprehensible forces. Her first novel, Wise Blood , tells the story of Hazel Motes, a young preacher with a new religion to sell: the Church Without Christ. In this episode, JF and Phil read Motes's misadventures in the "Jesus-haunted" city of Taulkinham, Tennessee, as a prophetic vision of the modern condition that is at once supremely tragic and ...
Jul 17, 2019•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 51
The Duffer Brothers' hit series Stranger Things is many things: an exemplary piece of entertainment in the summer blockbuster mold, a fresh take on the "kids on bikes" subgenre of science fiction, a loving pastiche of 1980s Hollywood cinema. And as Phil and JF attempt to show in this episode, Stranger Things is also a deep investigation into the metaphysical assumptions of our times, and a bold statement on the ontology of the analog real. This, at least, was the thesis of JF's three-part essay ...
Jul 03, 2019•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 50
In his essay "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," Nietzsche attacks the notion that humans are totally determined by the historical forces that shape their physical and mental environment. Where other philosophers like Plato saw virtue in remembering eternal truths that earthly existence had wiped from our memories, Nietzsche extolled the virtues of forgetting , of becoming "untimely" and creating a zone where something new could arise. For Nietzsche, history was useful only if i...
Jun 19, 2019•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 49
Journalist and historian of religion Erik Davis joins Phil and JF to talk about his latest magnum opus, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies . In this masterwork of weird scholarship, Davis explores the simultaneously luminous and obscure worlds of three giants of Seventies counterculture: Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick. Their psychonautical legacy serve as fuel for a deep-delving conversation on Davis' own ontological leanings, ye...
Jun 05, 2019•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 48
Made in 2003, Lutz Dammbeck's documentary The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet is a film about many things, but the gist of it is something like what William Burroughs called the doctrine of control. We live in a world governed by technologies designed with a particular idea of society in mind, one that has its roots in the trauma of global war and the utopian dreams of modern thinkers. The viability of this ideal is, of course, an important question, and it was made all the more urgent...
May 22, 2019•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 47
In his short story "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel," contemporary horror author Thomas Ligotti contrasts the chaotic monstrosity of dreams with the cold, indifferent, and no less monstrous purity of angels. It is the story of a boy whose vivid dream life is sapping his vital force, and who resorts to esoteric measures to rectify the situation. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the beauty and horror of dreams, the metaphysical signifiance of angels and demons, and the potential dangers of seeking the pe...
May 08, 2019•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 46
"May the present 'you' not survive this little book," Jeffrey Kripal writes in the prologue to The Flip . "May you be flipped in dramatic or quiet ways." Indeed, Kripal's latest is a kind of manifesto, a call to embrace the metaphysical expanses that reveal themselves to many who dare dip a toe outside the materialist lifeboat we've been rowing away in for a couple of centuries now. In this conversation, Phil and JF talk to the eminent scholar of religion about the life-changing epiphanies that ...
Apr 24, 2019•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 45
The great American thinker William James knew well that no intellectual pursuit is purely intellectual. His interest in the "supernormal," whether it take the form of spiritual apparition or extrasensory perception, was rooted in a personal desire to uncover the miraculous in the mundane. Indeed, the early members of the British Society for Psychical Research and its American counterpart (which James co-founded in 1884) were united in this conviction that certain phenomena which most scientists ...
Apr 09, 2019•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 44
Shirley Jackson's stories and novels rank among the greatest weird works produced in America during the 20th century. However, unlike authors such as Philip K. Dick and H.P. Lovecraft, Jackson didn't cut her teeth in the pulps but among the slick pages of such illustrious publications as The New Yorker. On the other hand, whether because her most famous novel uses the traditional ghost story form or because she was a woman, Jackson only rarely appears in the litanies of weird literature, where s...
Mar 27, 2019•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 43
In the mid-1960s, Pauline Oliveros was a composer of experimental electronic music. But at the end of the 1960s, shocked by the political violence around her, she turned away from electronic technology and towards to a different kind of experimentation, which Dr. Kerry O'Brien calls "experimentalisms of the self." The immediate result of this turn was Oliveros's Sonic Meditations , a series of instructions for group bodymind practice. This work became the seed of Deep Listening, a sort of musica...
Mar 13, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 42
Neil Gaiman wrote, "If literature is the world, then fantasy and horror are twin cities, divided by a river of black water." Flame Tree Publishing underwrites this claim with their recent publication, The Astounding Illustrated History of Fantasy and Horror . The book is a veritable gazetteer of these two cities in the heartland of the imaginal world. Writer and scholar Matt Cardin, founding editor of the marvellous [Teeming Brain]( www.teemingbrain.com ), wrote a chapter for the book focusing o...
Feb 27, 2019•1 hr•Ep. 41
In Jonathan Glazer's loose screen adaptation of Michel Faber's novel Under the Skin , a creature of mysterious origin drives around Scotland in a white van, collecting lonely men and spiriting them away to an otherworld where they are turned into food.... or something. Drawing on a deep well of literary, visual, and musical tradition, Glazer (with help from his score composer Mica Levi) create a vivid work of tragedy and horror, masterfully executed for maximal weirdness and unwaveringly true to...
Feb 13, 2019•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 40
"The world is not simply composed of physical causes strung together in strictly materialistic and mechanical fashion," writes Prof. Jeffrey J. Kripal in his seminal book, Authors of the Impossible . "The world is also a series of meaningful signs requiring a hermeneutics for their decipherment." This, in a nutshell, is Kripal's position vis à vis the fact of paranormal experience, a fact that he has explored in numerous works of scholarship over the last 25 years. For Kripal, whether we see sup...
Jan 30, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 39
Music writing has always been something of an occult practice, trying by some weird alchemy to use concepts to describe stuff that defies the basic categories of intellect. So long as we stick to classical music, we can pretend that nothing too odd is happening, since the classical tradition has been steeped in notation for centuries. But when a musicologist attempts to analyze, say, an ambient track by Brian Eno, things aren't so simple. Suddenly notation won't do, and there comes the need to m...
Jan 16, 2019•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 38
Several years ago, on New Year’s Eve, a tall, purple-robed praying mantis appeared to multidisciplinary artist Stuart Evan Davis as he meditated while running a fever. “Remember who you work for,” the entity said after beaming a zettabyte of information into Stuart’s febrile mind. Though it lasted less than a minute, the encounter sparked a series of life-changing -- and hair-raising -- events worthy of a Philip K. Dick novel. JF and Phil talk to Stuart Davis to get his thoughts on nonhuman inte...
Jan 02, 2019•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 37
Happy holidays, Weird Studies listeners! In this short "Christmas Bonus" episode, your intrepid hosts finish up what began as a discussion of Nick Land's concept of hyperstition. Following last week's closing remarks about the importance of "banishing" ideas that might otherwise take us over, the segment focuses on the dividing line between the personal and the political. Where does the one end and the other begin? What do we risk when we choose to make a necessarily limited standpoint the locus...
Dec 25, 2018•25 min
Hyperstition is a key concept in the philosophy of Nick Land. It refers to fictions which, given enough time and libidinal investment, become realities. JF and Phil explore the notion using one of those optometric apparatuses with multiple lenses -- deleuzian, magical, mythological, political, ethical, etc. The goal isn't to understand how fictions participate in reality (that'll have to wait for another episode), but to ponder what this implies for a sapient species. The conversation weaves tog...
Dec 19, 2018•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 36
The first step in any pottery project is to center the clay on the potter's wheel. In her landmark essay Centering: In Pottery, Poetry and the Person (1964), the American poet M. C. Richards turns this simple action into a metaphor for all creative acts, including the act of living your life. The result is a penetrating and poetic reflection on the artistic process that values change, unknowing, and radical becoming, making Richards' text a guide to creativity that leaves other examples of that ...
Dec 05, 2018•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 35
Although he is one of the luminaries of the weird tale, Robert Aickman referred to his irreal, macabre short works as strange stories . Born in London in 1914, Aickman wrote less than fifty such stories before his death in 1981. JF and Phil focus on one of his most chilling, "The Hospice," from the collection Cold Hand in Mine , published in 1975. In it, Aickman uses a staple ingredient of the classic ghost story -- a man is stranded on a country road at night, lost and out of petrol -- to conco...
Nov 21, 2018•56 min•Ep. 34
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp trolled the New York art scene with Fountain , the famous urinal, whose significance has since swelled in the minds of art aficionados to become the prototype of all modern art. The conversation as to whether or not Fountain fulfills the conditions of a genuine work of art has been going on ever since. In this episode, JF and Phil weigh in with their own ideas, not just about what art is , but more importantly, about what art -- and only art -- can do . The result is a no...
Nov 07, 2018•1 hr•Ep. 33
Jorge Luis Borges's story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a metaphysical detective story, an armchair conspiracy thriller, and a masterpiece of weird fiction. In this tale penned by a true literary magician, Phil and JF see an opportunity to talk about magic, hyperstition, non-linear time, and the power of metaphysics to reshape the world. When Phil questions his co-host's animus against idealist doctrines, the discussion turns to dreams, cybernetics, and information theory, before reaching comm...
Oct 31, 2018•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 32
Most people know Glenn Gould as a brilliant pianist who forever changed how we receive and interpret the works of Europe's great composers: Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg... But Gould was also an aesthetic theorist who saw a new horizon for the arts in the age of recording technology. In the future, he said, the superstitious cult of history, performance, and authorship would disappear, and the arts would retrieve a "neo-medieval anonymity" that would allow us to see them for what they really are: ...
Oct 24, 2018•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 31
No dream is ever just a dream. Or so Tom Cruises tells Nicole Kidman at the end of Eyes Wide Shut . In this episode, Phil and JF expound some of the key themes of Kubrick's film, a masterpiece of cinematic chamber music that demonstrates, with painstaking attention to detail, Zen Master Dōgen's utterance that when one side of the world is illuminated, the other side is dark. Treading a winding path between wakefulness and dream, love and sex, life and art, your paranoid hosts make boldly for tha...
Oct 14, 2018•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 30
Phil and JF indulge their autumnal mood in this discussion of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's work, specifically the essay "Notes on the Writing of Weird Fiction" and the prose piece "Nyarlathotep." Philip K. Dick, Algernon Blackwood, and David Foster Wallace make appearances as our fearsome hosts talk about how the weird story differs from conventional horror fiction, how Lovecraft gives voice to contemporary fears of physical, psychological and political infection , and how authors like Lovecraft ...
Oct 09, 2018•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 29
"Music is worth living for," Andrew W.K. sings in his latest rock anthem. In this second episode on the weirdness of music, JF and Phil focus on two works steeped in ambiguity and paradox: Bob Dylan's "Jokerman," from the landmark post-Christian album Infidels , and Franz Liszt's "Mephisto Waltz, No. 1: The Dance at the Village Inn," inspired by an episode in the Faust legend. If this conversation has a central theme, it may be music's power to unhinge every fixed binary, from God and the Devil ...
Oct 02, 2018•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 28
In this first of two episodes devoted to the music of the weird, Phil and JF discuss two works that have bowled them over: the second movement of Ligeti's Musica Ricercata , used to powerful effect in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut , and the opening music to Cronenberg's film Naked Lunch , composed by Howard Shore and featuring the inimitable stylings of Ornette Coleman. After teasing out the intrinsic weirdness of music in general, the dialogue soars over a strange country rife with shadows, ...
Sep 26, 2018•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 27
Stone, bronze, iron... glass? In his recent thought and writing, transdisciplinary artist and thinker Michael Garfield defines modernity as an age of glass, arguing that the entire ethos of our era inheres in the transformative enchantments of this amorphous solid. No one would deny that glass plays a central role in our lives, although glass does have a knack for disappearing into the background, at least until the beakers or screens crack and shatter. Glass is weird, and like a lot of weird th...
Sep 19, 2018•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 26
JF and Phil head for Interzone in an attempt to solve the enigma of Naked Lunch , David Cronenberg's 1991 screen adaptation of William S. Burroughs' infamous 1959 novel. A treatise on addiction, a diagnosis of modern ills, a lucid portrait of the artist as cosmic transgressor, and like the book, "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork," Naked Lunch is here framed in the light Cronenberg's recent speech making the case for the crime of art. Image by Melancholie, Wikim...
Sep 12, 2018•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 25
As Lionel Snell, also known as Ramsey Dukes, observes in his seminal esoteric essay, "The Charlatan and the Magus" (1984), the series of trumps in a tarot deck doesn't begin with the noble Emperor or august Hierophant, but with the lowly Fool, followed by the Juggler. Trickery or illusion, Snell suggests, may not be the dealbreaker we've thought it to be in parapsychological investigation. It may even be a feature, not a bug, of the magical process. In this episode of Weird Studies, JF and Phil ...
Aug 28, 2018•59 min•Ep. 24
Phil stops by JF's Canadian homestead for a raucous IRL conversation on the idea of presence. The range of topics includes objects of power, the magic of books, the mystery of the event, modernity's knack for making myths immanent, genius loci, the mad wonder of Blue Velvet , and the iron fist of the virtual. REFERENCES Gil Scott-Heron, "The Revolution Will Bot Be Televised" Louis CK on smart phones at the ballet recital Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory , Creative Evolution Gilles Deleuze on the...
Aug 15, 2018•1 hr 44 min•Ep. 23
