Podcasts by Weird Studies
Professor Phil Ford and writer J. F. Martel host a series of conversations on art and philosophy, dwelling on ideas that are hard to think and art that opens up rifts in what we are pleased to call "reality."
Further podcasts by Phil Ford and J. F. Martel
Podcast on the topic Kunst
All episodes
Episode 159: Three Songs, with Meredith Michael from 2023-12-06T11:15
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...
ListenEpisode 158: As Above, So Below: On Plato's 'Timaeus' from 2023-11-22T10:30
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...
ListenEpisode 157: Long Live the New Flesh: On David Cronenberg's 'Videodrome' from 2023-11-08T11:00
"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 slogan...
ListenEpisode 156: The Only Possible End: On Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' from 2023-10-25T10:00
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...
ListenEpisode 155: Dispatches From the Inside: On Planet Weird's 'The Unbinding' from 2023-10-11T11:00
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 ...
ListenEpisode 154: Into the Night Land, with Erik Davis from 2023-09-26T23:00
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...
ListenEpisode 153: Celestial Machine: On the Temperance Card in the Tarot from 2023-09-13T10:30
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...
ListenSummer Bonus #2: Art and AI from 2023-09-08T10:15
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 ...
ListenSummer Bonus: On Affectation, with a Special Announcement from 2023-08-15T10:00
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 P...
ListenEpisode 152: The Science of Things Spiritual: Live in Lily Dale from 2023-08-01T11:15
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 speake...
ListenEpisode 151: The Real and the Possible: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, with Jacob G. Foster from 2023-07-19T09:00
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 st...
ListenEpisode 150: Sacramental Reality: On Arthur Machen's "A Fragment of Life" from 2023-07-05T13:00
"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 d...
ListenEpisode 149: Song Swap: On Judee Sill's 'The Kiss' and Wilco's 'Jesus, Etc.' from 2023-06-21T12:00
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 Wi...
ListenEpisode 148: Mythos of the Moment: On 'Twin Peaks,' Season 3 from 2023-06-07T10:30
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 ...
ListenEpisode 147: You Must Change Your Life from 2023-05-24T10:30
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 ...
ListenEpisode 146: An Air of Great Power: On the Chariot in the Tarot from 2023-05-10T10:30
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 w...
ListenEpisode 145: Waiting for the Miracle: On Vanessa Onwuemezi's "Dark Neighbourhood" from 2023-04-26T11:30
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 i...
ListenEpisode 144: On Clive Barker's 'Hellraiser' and 'The Hellbound Heart,' with Conner Habib from 2023-04-12T10:30
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 sinc...
ListenEpisode 143: On UFOs from 2023-03-29T10:30
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 ex...
ListenEpisode 142: The Music of the Spheres: On Jóhann Jóhannsson's "Last and First Men" from 2023-03-15T10:30
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 sho...
ListenEpisode 141: Actual Magic: On Ramsey Dukes' SSOTBME from 2023-02-28T10:30
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 Expos...
ListenEpisode 140: That Ain't Plot: On Hayao Miyazaki's 'Spirited Away' from 2023-02-15T11:30
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 outst...
ListenEpisode 139: Sex, Money, and Power are YOURS with our SECRET Art-Power Formula! from 2023-02-01T11:30
"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...
ListenEpisode 138: Yours and Yours Alone: On the Death Card in the Tarot from 2023-01-18T10:30
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 t...
ListenThe Weird Studies Christmas Special from 2022-12-25T00:00
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 stock...
ListenEpisode 137: Brute Force: on Sunn O)))'s 'Life Metal' from 2022-12-14T11:00
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)))'...
ListenEpisode 136: The Things That Were And Shall Be Again: On 'Evil Dead II' from 2022-11-30T10:30
"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 roll...
ListenEpisode 135: On 'The Secret Life of Puppets,' with Victoria Nelson from 2022-11-16T10:00
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 Pupp...
ListenEpisode 134: On Federico Campagna's 'Technic and Magic' from 2022-11-01T22:00
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 ...
ListenEpisode 133: On Weirding, and the Virtues of Unknowing Everything from 2022-10-19T10:30
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. Bo...
ListenEpisode 132: Art Is an Alien Technology: Live at the Supernormal Festival from 2022-10-05T10:30
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 sparkl...
ListenOff-Week Bonus: On Worlds and Stories, with a Special Announcement from 2022-09-27T15:00
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 worldbuild...
ListenEpisode 131: Knocking on the Abyssal Door: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute from 2022-09-21T11:00
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 t...
ListenEpisode 130: Holiday Memories from 2022-09-07T10:00
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 ...
ListenEpisode 129: Luminous Miasma: On Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" from 2022-08-03T13:00
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 ...
ListenEpisode 128: Demon Workshop: On Victoria Nelson's 'Neighbor George' from 2022-07-19T17:00
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 superna...
ListenEpisode 127: Leaving the Mechanical Dollhouse: On Abeba Birhane's "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity" from 2022-07-06T10:30
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 i...
ListenEpisode 126: The Daemon Speaks, with Matt Cardin from 2022-06-22T11:00
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 D...
ListenEpisode 125: Strange Brews: Weird Studies Live at Illuminated Brew Works from 2022-06-08T10:00
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...
ListenEpisode 124: Dark Night Radio of the Soul, with Duncan Barford from 2022-05-25T10:15
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 ...
ListenEpisode 123: Off-Week Patreon Bonus: On Modern Miracles from 2022-05-18T09:00
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...
ListenEpisode 122: Spirals and Crooked Lines: On the Star Card in the Tarot from 2022-05-11T11:15
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 ...
ListenEpisode 121: Dream Theater: On 'Mandy' and 'The Band Wagon' from 2022-04-27T10:00
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'...
ListenEpisode 120: On Radical Mystery from 2022-04-13T10:30
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 ...
ListenEpisode 119: Behind the Cosmic Curtain: On Stanislaw Lem's 'The New Cosmogony,' with Meredith Michael from 2022-03-30T10:30
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 ...
ListenEpisode 118: The Unseen and the Unnamed, with Meredith Michael from 2022-03-16T11:30
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 Twilig...
ListenEpisode 117: Time is a Child at Play: On the Mystery of Games from 2022-03-02T10:30
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, an...
ListenEpisode 116: On 'Blade Runner' from 2022-02-16T10:00
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-eff...
ListenEpisode 115: Transience&Immersion: On Brian Eno's 'Music for Airports' from 2022-02-02T09:00
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 Airport...
ListenEpisode 114: On the Wheel of Fortune, the Tenth Card of the Tarot from 2022-01-19T10:30
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...
ListenEpisode 113: Framing the Invisible, with Shannon Taggart from 2021-12-22T11:00
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 ef...
ListenEpisode 112: Readings from the 'Book of Probes': The Mysticism of Marshall McLuhan from 2021-12-08T10:45
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 ...
ListenEpisode 111: What Is Best in Life: On "Conan the Barbarian" from 2021-11-24T11:15
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 ...
ListenEpisode 110: Monks of the Cultural Apocalypse: 'The Glass Bead Game,' Part Two from 2021-11-10T11:00
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 t...
ListenEpisode 109: Infinite Play: On 'The Glass Bead Game,' by Hermann Hesse from 2021-10-27T10:30
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 throug...
ListenEpisode 108: On Skepticism and the Paranormal from 2021-10-13T10:30
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-tid...
ListenEpisode 107: On Joy Williams' 'Breaking and Entering,' with Conner Habib from 2021-09-29T10:30
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 impo...
ListenEpisode 106: The Wanderer: On Weird Studies from 2021-09-01T05:30
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 f...
ListenEpisode 105: Fire Walk with Tamler Sommers from 2021-08-18T10:30
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...
ListenEpisode 104: We'd Love to Turn You On: 'Sgt. Pepper' and the Beatles from 2021-08-04T10:30
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 r...
ListenEpisode 103: On the Tower, the Sixteenth Card of the Tarot from 2021-07-21T10:30
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 ...
ListenEpisode 102: On Pan, with Gyrus from 2021-07-07T10:30
"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 explore...
ListenEpisode 101: Our Fear of the Dark: On Tanizaki's 'In Praise of Shadows' from 2021-06-23T11:30
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 ...
ListenEpisode 100: The Price of Beauty is Horror: On the Films of John Carpenter from 2021-06-09T10:30
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 ...
ListenEpisode 99: Curing the Human Condition: On 'Wild Wild Country' from 2021-05-26T10:00
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 spiri...
ListenEpisode 98: Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica from 2021-05-12T11:00
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 contempo...
ListenEpisode 97: Art in the Age of Artifice from 2021-04-28T10:00
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, ...
ListenEpisode 96: Beautiful Beast: On Jean Cocteau's 'La Belle et la Bête' from 2021-04-14T10:00
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 e...
ListenEpisode 95: Demon Seed: On Doris Lessing's 'The Fifth Child' from 2021-03-31T10:30
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 cou...
ListenEpisode 94: All is Mysterious: On the Moon Card in the Tarot from 2021-03-17T10:00
"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 s...
ListenEpisode 93: Living and Dying in a Secular Age: On Charles Taylor and Disenchantment from 2021-03-03T10:30
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 soci...
ListenEpisode 92: Glitch in the Matrix: A Conversation with Rodney Ascher from 2021-02-17T10:45
With his latest film (http://www.aglitchinthematrixfilm.com), a meditation on what it means to believe we live in a computer simulation, Rodney Ascher has once again placed himself among the most i...
ListenEpisode 91: On Susanna Clarke's 'Piranesi' from 2021-02-03T10:45
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 ...
ListenEpisode 90: 'The Owl in Daylight': On Philip K. Dick's Unwritten Masterpiece from 2021-01-20T11:15
Weird Studies has so far devoted just one show to Philip K. Dick, and that was way back in April 2018, with episode 10, "Adrift in the Multiverse." Last fall, as another foray into Dickland began t...
ListenEpisode 89: On Ishmael Reed's 'Mumbo Jumbo,' or, Why We Need More Magical Thinking from 2021-01-06T10:00
Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo is a conspiracy thriller, a postmodern experiment, a revolutionary tract, a celebration, and a magical working. It is a novel that, over and above propheticall...
ListenHoliday Bonus: Magic, Madness, and Sadness from 2020-12-21T10:00
Weird Studies will launch its fourth season on January 6th, 2021. But to celebtrate the end of very strange year, we thought we'd release a conversation which until now was available only to our to...
ListenEpisode 88: On Neil Gaiman&Dave McKean's 'Mr Punch' from 2020-12-09T09:45
Before Coraline, before American Gods, in the early days of the Sandman series, Neil Gaiman collaborated with Dave McKean on some truly groundbreaking graphic novels: Violent Cases (1987), Signal t...
ListenEpisode 87: Glyphs, Rifts, and Ecstasy: On Arthur Machen's Vision of Art from 2020-11-25T10:30
It would be wrong to describe Arthur Machen's Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature (1902) as a work of nonfiction, since the book features a narrative frame that is as moody and irreal ...
ListenEpisode 86: On E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman," and Freud's Sequel to It from 2020-11-11T10:30
The German polymath E. T. A. Hoffmann is one of the founding figures of what we now call weird literature. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss one of his most memorable tales, "Der Sandmann." Ori...
ListenEpisode 85: On 'The Wicker Man' from 2020-10-28T10:30
Since its release in 1973, Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man has exerted a profound influence on the development of horror cinema, a rich vein of folk music, and the modern pagan revival more generally...
ListenEpisode 84: Mona Lisa Smile: On the Empress, the Third Card in the Tarot from 2020-10-14T10:30
This second instalment in our series on the major trumps of the traditional tarot deck features the Empress. As Aleister Crowley writes in The Book of Thoth, this card is probably the most difficul...
ListenEpisode 83: On David Lynch's 'Lost Highway' from 2020-09-30T10:15
David Lynch's Lost Highway was released in 1997, five years after Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me elicited a fusillade of boos and hisses at Cannes. The Twin Peaks prequel's poor reception allegedly ...
ListenEpisode 82: On The I Ching from 2020-09-16T10:00
The Book of Changes, or I Ching, is more than an ancient text. It's a metaphysical guide, a fun game, and -- to your hosts at least -- a lifelong, steadfast friend. The I Ching has come up more tha...
ListenEpisode 81: Gnostic Lit: On M. John Harrison's 'The Course of the Heart' from 2020-09-02T10:30
The British writer M. John Harrison is responsible for some of the most significant incursions of the Weird into the literary imagination of the last several decades. His 1992 novel The Course of t...
ListenEpisode 80: The Pit and the Pyramid, or, How to Beat the Philosopher's Blues from 2020-08-19T10:30
Your hosts' exploration of mysticism and vision in pop music continues with two powerful pieces of popular music: Radiohead's "Pyramid Song" from the 2001 album Amnesiac, and Fran Landesman and Tom...
ListenEpisode 79: Love, Death, and the Dream Life from 2020-08-05T10:30
In this episode of Weird Studies, an improvised analysis of two pop songs -- Nina Simone's version of James Shelton's "Lilac Wine" and Ghostface Killah's visionary "Underwater" -- becomesthe occa...
ListenEpisode 78: On John Keel's 'The Mothman Prophecies' from 2020-07-22T10:30
At the time The Mothman Prophecies' was released in 1975, and again when he penned an afterword for the 2001 edition, John Keel appeared to have made up his mind about the "ultraterrestrials" that ...
ListenEpisode 77: What a Fool Believes: On the Unnumbered Card in the Tarot from 2020-07-08T10:30
"What a fool believes he sees, no wise man can reason away." This line from a Doobie Brothers song is probably one of the most profound in the history of rock-'n'-roll. It is profound for all the r...
ListenEpisode 76: Below the Abyss: On Bergson's Metaphysics from 2020-06-24T10:00
According to the French philosopher Henri Bergson, there are two ways of knowing the world: through analysis or through intuition. Analysis is our normal mode of apprehension. It involves knowing w...
ListenBonus: The Duke of Ellington from 2020-06-18T08:00
When the quarantine began, professors around the world raced to put their classes online, and for the Jacobs School's big undergraduate music history course (M402 represent!) Phil created a series ...
ListenEpisode 75: Our Old Friend the Monolith: On Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' from 2020-06-10T13:30
"You don't find reality only in your own backyard, you know," Stanley Kubrick once told an interviewer. "In fact, sometimes that's the last place you'll find it." Oddly, this episode of Weird Studi...
ListenEpisode 74: A Luminous Parasite: Jung on Art, Part Two from 2020-05-27T13:30
In this second part of their exploration of C. G. Jung's essay "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," JF and Phil try to discern the psychological and metaphysical implications of th...
ListenEpisode 73: Carl Jung and the Power of Art, Part One from 2020-05-13T11:30
This is the first of two conversations that Phil and JF are devoting to C. G. Jung's seminal essay, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," first delivered in a 1922 lecture. It was i...
ListenEpisode 72: Morning of the Mutants: On the Castrati from 2020-04-29T13:00
For over two centuries in early modern Italy, boys were selected for their singing talent castrated before the onset of puberty. The goal was to preserve the qualities of their voice even as they g...
ListenEpisode 71: The Medium is the Message from 2020-04-15T13:00
On the surface, the phrase "the medium is the message," prophetic as it may have been when Marshall McLuhan coined it, points a now-obvious fact of our wired world, namely that the content of any m...
ListenEpisode 70: Masks All the Way Down, with James Curcio from 2020-04-01T12:00
James Curcio is an American multidisciplinary artist and nonfiction writer whose works include the novels Join My Cult, The Party at the World's End, and the upcoming Tales from When I Had a Face. ...
ListenEpisode 69: Special Episode: On Some Mental Effects of the Pandemic from 2020-03-25T13:00
What is there to say about the COVID-19 virus that hasn't already been said, over and over again, all around the world, in quaratined houses and on TV and social media and countless Zoom chats ... ...
ListenWeird Stories: "On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake" by William James from 2020-03-23T11:00
In preparation for an upcoming special episode on living in the early days of the Covid-19 Pandemic, here's Phil Ford reading an essay William James wrote on his experience of the 1906 San Francisc...
ListenEpisode 68: On James Hillman's 'The Dream and the Underworld' from 2020-03-18T16:00
In 1979, the American psychologist James Hillman published The Dream and the Underworld, a polemical meditation on the nature of dreams. Rejecting the orthodoxies of both Freud and Jung, Hillman ar...
ListenEpisode 67: Goblins, Goat-Gods and Gates: On 'Hellier' from 2020-03-04T11:30
On the night before this episode of Weird Studies was released, a bunch of folks on the Internet performed a collective magickal working. Prompted by the paranormal investigator Greg Newkirk, they ...
ListenEpisode 66: On Diviner's Time from 2020-02-19T10:30
In the paper discussed in this episode, Phil Ford coins the term "diviner's time" to denote a particular feeling that will be familiar to anyone who has engaged in divinatory or magical practice, n...
ListenEpisode 65: Touched by that Fire: On Visionary Literature, with B. W. Powe from 2020-02-05T10:30
B. W. Powe is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and professor at York University, in Toronto. His work, though it covers an immense range of topics from politics and poetics to magic and technolo...
ListenEpisode 64: Dreams and Shadows: On Ursula Le Guin's 'A Wizard of Earthsea' from 2020-01-22T10:30
In her National Book Award acceptance speech in 2014, Ursula K. Le Guin intimated that, far from being superseded by digital technology, fantastic fiction has never been more important than it is a...
ListenEpisode 63: Faculty X: On Colin Wilson's 'The Occult' from 2020-01-08T14:00
At its simplest, what Colin Wilson calls Faculty X is "simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present." Yet its existence is evinced in all those phenomena that modern...
ListenEpisode 62: It's Like 'The Shining', But With Nuns: On 'Black Narcissus' from 2019-12-18T14:00
The 1947 British film Black Narcissus is many things: an allegory of the end of empire, a chilling ghost story with nary a spook in sight, a psychological romance, and a meditation on the nature of...
ListenEpisode 61: Evil and Ecstasy: On 'The Silence of the Lambs' from 2019-12-04T12:15
The Welsh writer Arthur Machen defined good and evil as "ecstasies." Each one is a "withdrawal from the common life." On this view, any artistic investigation into the nature of good and evil can't...
ListenEpisode 60: Space is the Place: On Sun Ra, Gnosticism, and the Tarot from 2019-11-20T13:00
Somebody once said, "No prophet is welcome in his own country." Whether this was true in the case of jazz musician and composer Sun Ra depends on whom you ask. With most, the dictum probably bears ...
ListenEpisode 59: Green Mountains Are Always Walking from 2019-11-06T10:30
"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around a lake." This line from Wallace Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" captures something of the mysteries of walking. It points to the undeniable yet...
ListenEpisode 58: What Do Critics Do? from 2019-10-23T13:00
What is the role of the critic in the world of art? For some, including lots of critics, the figure exudes an aura of authority: her task is to tell us what this or that work of art means, why it m...
ListenEpisode 57: Box of God(s): On 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' from 2019-10-09T10:00
Raiders of the Lost Ark is more than a Hollywood movie made in the summer blockbuster mold. As Phil says in his intro to this popping Weird Studies episode, the film is "a Trojan horse of the Weird...
ListenEpisode 56: On Jean Gebser, with Jeremy D. Johnson from 2019-09-25T11:30
The German poet and philosopher Jean Gebser's major work, The Ever-Present Origin, is a monumental study of the evolution of consciousness from prehistory to posthistory. For Gebser, consciousnes...
ListenEpisode 55: The Great Weird North: On Algernon Blackwood's 'The Wendigo' from 2019-09-11T11:30
No survey of weird literature would be complete without mentioning Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). As with all masters of the genre, Blackwood's take on the weird is singular: here, it isn't the c...
ListenEpisode 54: Lobsters, Pianos, and Hidden Gods from 2019-08-28T13:00
"All things feel," Pythagoas said. Panpsychism, the belief that consciousnes is a property of all things and not limited to the human brain, is back in vogue -- with good reason. The problem of how...
ListenEpisode 53: Astral Jet Lag: On William Gibson's 'Pattern Recognition' from 2019-08-14T09:00
William Gibson's Pattern Recognition was published in 2003, in the wake of 9/11. You would think that a novel about the early Internet's effects on the collective psyche would feel dated today. But...
ListenEpisode 52: On Beauty from 2019-07-31T10:30
The idea that beauty might denote an actual quality of the world, something outside the human frame, is one of the great taboos of modern intellectual thought. Beauty, we are almost universally tol...
ListenEpisode 51: Blind Seers: On Flannery O'Connor's 'Wise Blood' from 2019-07-17T11:30
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 Blo...
ListenEpisode 50: Demogorgon: On 'Stranger Things' from 2019-07-03T10:30
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, ...
ListenEpisode 49: Out of Time: Nietzsche on History from 2019-06-19T11:00
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 envir...
ListenEpisode 48: Walking the Tightrope with Erik Davis from 2019-06-05T13:30
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 masterwo...
ListenEpisode 47: Machines of Loving Grace: Technology and the Unabomber from 2019-05-22T10:30
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 ...
ListenEpisode 46: Thomas Ligotti's Angel from 2019-05-08T14:45
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....
ListenEpisode 45: Jeffrey J. Kripal on 'Flipping' Out of Materialism from 2019-04-24T11:30
"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 manifes...
ListenEpisode 44: Doomed to Enchantment: The Psychical Research of William James from 2019-04-09T11:30
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 extras...
ListenEpisode 43: On Shirley Jackson from 2019-03-27T11:00
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...
ListenEpisode 42: On Pauline Oliveros, with Kerry O'Brien from 2019-03-13T00:00
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 techno...
ListenEpisode 41: On Speculative Fiction, with Matt Cardin from 2019-02-27T10:30
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 publicati...
ListenEpisode 40: On Jonathan Glazer's 'Under the Skin' from 2019-02-13T13:00
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 ...
ListenEpisode 39: The Challenge of the Paranormal, with Jeffrey J. Kripal from 2019-01-30T13:00
"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...
ListenEpisode 38: Style as Analysis from 2019-01-16T10:30
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 c...
ListenEpisode 37: Entities, with Stuart Davis from 2019-01-02T10:00
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,” ...
ListenChristmas Bonus: Hyperstition Addendum from 2018-12-25T11:00
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 wee...
ListenEpisode 36: On Hyperstition from 2018-12-19T10:15
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 ...
ListenEpisode 35: Whirl Without End: On M.C. Richards' 'Centering' from 2018-12-05T10:45
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 ...
ListenEpisode 34: The Weird Realism of Robert Aickman from 2018-11-21T10:00
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 sto...
ListenEpisode 33: The Fine Art of Changing the Subject: On Duchamp's 'Fountain' from 2018-11-07T10:00
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 a...
ListenEpisode 32: Orbis Tertius: Borges on Magic, Conspiracy and Idealism from 2018-10-31T11:15
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...
ListenEpisode 31: Scarcely Human at All: On Glenn Gould's 'Prospects of Recording' from 2018-10-24T10:00
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 aest...
ListenEpisode 30: On Stanley Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut' from 2018-10-14T11:00
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 ci...
ListenEpisode 29: On Lovecraft from 2018-10-09T14:00
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." Ph...
ListenEpisode 28: Weird Music, Part Two from 2018-10-02T14:00
"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 Dyla...
ListenEpisode 27: Weird Music, Part One from 2018-09-26T13:00
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 ...
ListenEpisode 26: Living in a Glass Age, with Michael Garfield from 2018-09-19T13:30
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...
ListenEpisode 25: David Cronenberg's 'Naked Lunch' from 2018-09-12T10:00
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 d...
ListenEpisode 24: The Charlatan and the Magus, with Lionel Snell from 2018-08-28T15:00
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 ...
ListenEpisode 23: On Presence from 2018-08-15T10:00
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'...
ListenEpisode 22: Divining the World with Joshua Ramey from 2018-08-01T11:00
American philosopher Joshua Ramey, author of The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and the Spiritual Ordeal, and Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency, joins Phil an...
ListenEpisode 21: The Trash Stratum - Part 2 from 2018-07-13T10:00
The writings of underground filmmaker Jack Smith serve as a starting point for Phil and JF's second tour of the trash stratum. In their wanderings, they will uncover such moldy jewels as the 1944 f...
ListenEpisode 20: The Trash Stratum - Part 1 from 2018-07-04T10:00
Is the Holy Grail a crushed beer can in the gutter? JF and Phil consider the implications of Philip K. Dick's line, "the symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum." Gnosticism, A...
ListenEpisode 19: Intermezzo from 2018-06-20T11:00
After announcing that Weird Studies will be going to a bi-weekly release schedule for the summer, Phil and JF talk about how the podcast has gone so far and what's on the horizon (more guests!). Be...
ListenEpisode 18: Does 'Consciousness' Exist? - Part Two from 2018-06-13T10:00
JF and Phil finally get down to brass tacks with William James's essay "Does Consciousness Exist?" At the heart of this essay is the concept of what James calls "pure experience," the basic stuff o...
ListenEpisode 17: Does 'Consciousness' Exist? - Part One from 2018-06-06T10:00
In this first part of their discussion of William James' classic essay in radical empiricism, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?", Phil and JF talk about the various ways we use the slippery C-word in co...
ListenEpisode 16: On Dogen Zenji's 'Genjokoan' from 2018-05-30T10:00
JF and Phil tackle Genjokoan, a profound and puzzling work of philosophy by Dogen Zenji. In it, the 13th-century Zen master ponders the question, "If everything is already enlightened, why practice...
ListenEpisode 15: On Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' - Part Two from 2018-05-23T10:00
In this second of a two-part conversation on Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker, Phil and JF explore the film's prophetic dimension, relating it to Samuel R. Delany's classic science-fiction nove...
ListenEpisode 14: On Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' - Part One from 2018-05-15T23:00
Journey into the Zone to uncover some of the strange artifacts buried in Tarkovsky's cinematic masterpiece, Stalker (1979). In this first of a two-part conversation, Phil and JF discuss a poem by T...
ListenEpisode 13: The Obscure: On the Philosophy of Heraclitus from 2018-05-09T10:00
Heraclitus of Ephesus was one of the great pre-Socratic thinkers. Called the Obscure and the Weeping Philosopher, he left behind a collection of fragments so mysterious and pregnant with meaning th...
ListenEpisode 12: The Dark Eye: On the Films of Rodney Ascher from 2018-05-02T10:00
American filmmaker Rodney Ascher is a master of the weird documentary. Whether he be exploring wild interpretations of a classic horror film in Room 237, bracketing the phenomenon of sleep paralysi...
ListenEpisode 11: Art is a Haunting Spirit from 2018-04-25T10:00
M. R. James' "The Mezzotint" is one of the most fascinating, and most chilling, examples of the classic ghost story. In this episode, Phil and JF discover what this tale of haunted images and burie...
ListenWeird Stories: M. R. James' "The Mezzotint" from 2018-04-23T13:00
M. R. James has been hailed as the unrivalled maser of the classic ghost tale, and his powers are at their zenith in "The Mezzotint," a story that first appeared in his 1904 collection, Ghost Stori...
ListenEpisode 10: Philip K. Dick: Adrift in the Multiverse from 2018-04-18T10:00
In 1977, Philip K. Dick read an essay in France entitled, "If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others." In it, he laid out one of the dominant tropes of his fictional oeuvre, the...
ListenEpisode 9: On Aleister Crowley and the Idea of Magick from 2018-04-11T10:00
The plan was to discuss the introduction to Aleister Crowley's classic work, Magick in Theory and Practice (1924), a powerful text on the nature and purpose of magical practice. JF and Phil stick t...
ListenEpisode 8: On Graham Harman's "The Third Table" from 2018-04-04T13:00
JF and Phil discuss Graham Harman's "The Third Table," a short and accessible introduction to "object-oriented ontology." Phil takes us on a tour of his closet, we discover that JF's kids are bette...
ListenEpisode 7: The Unspeakable Mystery at the Heart of Boxing from 2018-03-28T09:30
For as long as they've been pounding the crap out of each other for good reasons, humans have also been pounding the crap out of each other for fun. Everywhere, in ever age, elaborate systems, ritu...
ListenEpisode 6: Dungeons&Dragons, or the Reality of Illusions from 2018-03-21T10:00
The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga was one of the first thinkers to define games as exercises in world-making. Every game, he wrote, occurs within a magic circle where the rules of ordinary life a...
ListenEpisode 5: Reading Lisa Ruddick's "When Nothing is Cool" from 2018-03-13T15:45
Phil and JF discuss Lisa Ruddick's "When Nothing is Cool," an essay on the postmodern humanities and its allergy to essences -- especially that personal essence we call soul. Maybe the soul is a he...
ListenEpisode 4: Exploring the Weird with Erik Davis from 2018-03-07T10:00
Scholar, journalist and author Erik Davis joins Phil and JF for a freewheeling conversation on the permutations of the weird, Burning Man, speculative realism, the uncanny, the H. P. Lovecraft/Phil...
ListenEpisode 3: Ecstasy, Sin, and "The White People" from 2018-02-21T10:00
JF and Phil delve deep into Arthur Machen's fin-de-siècle masterpiece, "The White People," for insight into the nature of ecstasy, the psychology of fairies, the meaning of sin, and the challenge o...
ListenWeird Stories: Arthur Machen's "The White People" from 2018-02-19T10:00
Weird Stories is a series of readings for Weird Studies listeners who want to dig deeper into the themes and ideas discussed on the Weird Studies podcast. In his seminal essay "Supernatural Horror ...
ListenEpisode 2: Garmonbozia from 2018-02-01T07:00
Phil and JF use a word from the Twin Peaks mythos, "garmonbozia," to try to understand what it was that the detonation of atomic bomb brought into the world. We use the fictional world of Twin Peak...
ListenEpisode 1: Introduction to Weird Studies from 2018-01-31T08:00
Phil and J.F. share stories of sleep paralysis and talk about Charles Fort's sympathy for the damned, Jeff Kripal's phenomenological approach to Fortean weirdness, Dave Hickey's notion of beauty as...
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