In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Meredith Michael—musicologist, podcaster, and Weird Studies production assistant—for a conversation about animal songs. The phrase is intentionally slippery. Are we talking about songs about animals, or songs by animals? Both, as it turns out. Beginning with three very different human compositions—The Beatles’ “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” Hovhaness’s And God Created the Great Whales, and Björk’s “Human Behavior”—the hosts discuss the roles animals play in human music, mythology, and mind. Along the way, they touch on Pink Floyd, the Beatles' trip to India, heroin addiction, the indeterminacy of singing and screaming, the messiness of inter-species communication, the discovery of whale song, the problem of (not) projecting humanness onto animals, the Book of Genesis, and the porous boundary between the human and non-human worlds. All that (and more) for two of the songs! Phil’s pick will be explored in a forthcoming episode.

Meredith Michael is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the Indiana

References

Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”

Pink Floyd, Animals

Neko Case, "People Got a Lotta Nerve"

The Beatles, "Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and my Monkey"

Gavin Steingo, Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music beyond Humanity

Little Richard, "Long Tall Sally"  

Alan Hovhaness, And God Created Great Whales

Roger Payne, Songs of the Humpback Whale

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time

Weird Studies, Episode 181 on “The X Files”

Kate Altizer, Piano Dogs and Whale Theaters: Paranoid Relations and Affect with Nowhere to Go in the Study of Nonhuman Animals and Music 

David Rothenberg, Thousand Mile Songs

Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug

King James Bible 

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Leonard Nimoy (dir.), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature

George Crumb, Vox Balaenae  

Terrence Malick (dir.), The Tree of Life

Image by Navin75, via Wikimedia Commons

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How do you become religious? What is a conversion experience? Does it happen all at once or gradually? What's the point of religion, anyway? These are questions that JF (a Catholic) and Phil (a Zennist) have often been asked since starting Weird Studies, and in this episode they attempt some answers.

Image: "Small Candle Flame" by Le Priyavrat, via Wikimedia Commons

Sign up to attend Shannon Taggart's Lily Dale symposium, July 24-26

REFERENCES

Ross Douthat, Believe  

Dogen, Shobogenzo  

New Atheism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism 

Weird Studies, Episode 99 on “Wild, Wild Country”

William James, Varieties of Religious Experience  

George Steiner, Real Presences

Patrick Curry, Art and Enchantment

Max Picard, The Flight from God

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

Richard Wagner, Ring Cycle

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense

Weird Studies, Episode 183 on “Siddhartha”

Charles Sanders Peirce, American philosopher

Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah”  

Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot

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Phil and JF first explored the mysteries of walking back in episode 59. That episode felt like a mere introduction—a tentative first step on a long and winding path. Now, 133 episodes later, they return to the theme as they prepare to lead a six-week course on the art of walking and its affinity with the Weird. This conversation touches on meditative walking, walking as dventure, psychogeography, wilderness mysticism, and more.

References

Weird Studies, Episode 59 on Walking

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

Kinhin, walking meditation

Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”

Randonautica, walking app

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

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This conversation was originally recorded in August 2024 and released for our Patreon supporters. Weird Studies will be back with a new episode on June 25, 2025.

What is cultural theory? How is philosophy "a preparation for death?"

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This special release is a Patreon extra we’re making available to all listeners, in lieu of the official episode originally scheduled for today. As explained in the introduction, we will be back with a full episode later in the month. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this conversation about how art transforms experience, making the mundane mythic, calling images out of the flux of life, and shaping what is in us to think, feel, and live.

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Best known as the wife and partner of Timothy Leary, Rosemary

Susannah Cahalan is the New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire, a memoir about her experience with autoimmune encephalitis. Her second book, The Great Pretender, which investigated a seminal study in the history of mental health care and diagnosis, was shortlisted for the the Royal Society's 2020 Science Book Prize. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

Photo from the Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection at UCLA, via Wikimedia Commons.

REFERENCES

Susannah Cahalan, The Acid Queen

Weird Studies, Episode 189 with Jacob Foster

Marion Woodman, Canadian feminist author

Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s & '70s

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Eric Davis, TechGnosis

Lutz Dammbeck, The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet

Robert Greenfield, Timothy Leary: A Biography

Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay

Blanche Hoschedé Monet, French painter

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

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In this episode, JF and Phil paddle into the marshlands of Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 masterpiece The Willows, a tale Lovecraft once called the finest weird story of all time. They explore how a narrative in which almost nothing happens can conjure a cosmic dread more potent than a legion of monsters, and how Blackwood’s genius lies in revealing the spiritual

Photo by Derek Dye, via Wikimedia Commons.

REFERENCES

Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows”  

Weird Studies, Episode 55 on “The Wendigo”  

SCTV

Algernon Blackwood, “The Psychology of Places” in The Lure of the Unknown

Weird Studies, Episodes 14 and 15 on Stalker

Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

Sue Clifford and Angela King, England in Particular

Michael Dames, Pagans Progress

J. G. Ballard, English fiction author

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In this episode, JF and Phil are joined by Jacob G. Foster—sociologist, physicist, and researcher at Indiana University Bloomington and the Santa Fe Institute—for a conversation about their recent collaboration in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Their co-authored essay, “Care of the Dead,” explores how the dead continue to shape our cultures, languages, and ways of being. Together, they discuss the process of writing the piece and what it means to say that the dead are not gone—that they persist, and that they make claims on the living.

The article is available here: https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/154/1/166/127931/Care-of-the-Dead-Ancestors-Traditions-amp-the-Life

**References**

[Peter Kingsley,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kingsley) English writer 

Weird Studies, [Episode 98 on “Taboo”]) https://www.weirdstudies.com/98) 

John Berger, “12 Theses on the Economy of the Dead” in _[Hold Everything Dear](12 Theses on the Economy of the Dead)_ 

Bernard Koch, Daniele Silvestro, and Jacob Foster, ["The Evolutionary Dynamics of Cultural Change”](https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/659bt_v1) 

Gilbert Simondon, _[Imagination and Invention](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9781517914455)_ 

William Gibson, _[Neuromancer](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780441007462)_ 

[Phlogiston theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory) 

George Orwell, _[1984](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780451524935)_ 

HP Lovecraft, [“The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cdw.aspx) 

Weird Studies, [Episode 187 on “Little, Big”](https://www.weirdstudies.com/187) 

[John Dee,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dee) English occultist 

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, _[The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780195320992)_ 

Robert Harrison, _[The Dominion of the Dead](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780226317939)_ 

Gilles Deleuze, _[Bergsonism](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780942299076)_ 

Elizabeth LeGuin, _[Boccherini’s Body](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780520240179)_ 

Elizabeth LeGuin, [“Cello and Bow thinking”](http://www.echo.ucla.edu/cello-and-bow-thinking-baccherinis-cello-sonata-in-eb-minor-faouri-catalogo/) 

Johannes Brahms, _Handel Variations_ 

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In this continuation of their non-linear journey through the tarot, Phil and JF discuss the ninth Arcanum: the Hermit. Walking through darkness with his lantern and staff, the Hermit invites us to break from the collective and seek a direct relationship with the Real. This is the card of the seeker, the misfit, the sage, and the wanderer. As tends to happen in these tarot episodes, the hosts take the opportunity to range across many topics, connecting the Hermit to Jung’s Red Book, the Desert Fathers, angels and demons, the I Ching, contemporary politics, and more.

Support us on Patreon

Order Christian Bunyan's Weird Studies poster here.

Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.

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

Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

Find us on Discord

Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau

REFERENCES

Carl Jung, The Red Book

Stanley Kubrick, American filmmaker

Samuel Beckett, Irish writer

Emily Dickinson, American poet

Temptation of Saint Anthony

Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot

Weird Studies, Episode 103 on the Tower card

The Gnostic Tarot

Nigel Richmond, Language of the Lines

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

John Minford, The I Ching: The Essential Translation of the Ancient Chinese Oracle and Book of Wisdom

William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of the Tarot

Wolfgang Petersen (dir.), The Neverending Story

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John Crowley’s Little, Big is, at once, a family saga, a fairy tale, an occult thriller, an idyll, a dystopia, as well as a meditation on myth and history, the real and the fantasy, memory and imagination. Little, Big is also a book that JF and Phil have been planning to discuss for as long as Weird Studies has existed. In this episode, they are joined by writer and scholar Erik Davis to explore the enduring charms and mysteries of one of the greatest—and most underrated—American novels of the late twentieth century.

Order Christian Bunyan's Weird Studies poster here.

Support us on Patreon.

REFERENCES

John Crowley, Little, Big

Special Guest: Erik Davis.

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