Weird Studies

By SpectreVision RadioSociety & Culture Arts Philosophy

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Typical duration
80 min
per episode

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Weird Studies episodes

March 07, 2018 Episode 4: Exploring the Weird with Erik Davis
Scholar, journalist and author Erik Davis joins Phil and JF for a freewheeling conversation on the permutations of the weird, Burning Man, speculative realism, the uncanny, the H. P. Lovecraft/Philip K. Dick syzygy, and how the world has gotten weirder (and less weird) since Erik’s groundbreaking Techgnosis was published twenty years ago.
WORKS DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
Erik Davis’s Techgnosis website
Erik Davis's podcast, Expanding Mind
Erik Davis, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information
Erik Davis, Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica
Erik Davis, Led Zeppelin IV
Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie
Philip K. Dick, Exegesis
Goop Magazine, no. 2
Hakim Bey and the Temporary Autonomous Zone
The Burning Man Festival
Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance
Erik Davis, “Weird Shit”
JF Martel, “How Symbols Matter”
Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics
Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondances” from Fleurs du mal
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
The Onion, “Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added to Curriculum”
Special Guest: Erik Davis.

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1 hr 22 min
February 21, 2018 Episode 3: Ecstasy, Sin, and "The White People"
JF and Phil delve deep into Arthur Machen's fin-de-siècle masterpiece, "The White People," for insight into the nature of ecstasy, the psychology of fairies, the meaning of sin, and the challenge of living without a moral horizon.
WORKS CITED OR DISCUSSED
Arthur Machen, "The White People" - full text or Weird Stories audiobook read by Phil Ford
Arthur Machen, Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy
H. P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"
J.F. Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Jack Sullivan (ed)., The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural
John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies: A True Story
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality
Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers
Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians
Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
J.K. Huysmans, Against Nature (À rebours)

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1 hr 21 min
February 19, 2018 Weird Stories: Arthur Machen's "The White People"
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 in Literature," H. P. Lovecraft named Arthur Machen one of the four "modern masters" of horror fiction, alongside Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, and M. R. James. Born in 1863, Machen burst onto the London literary scene in 1890 with the controversial novella "The Great God Pan." He was briefly considered one of the luminaries of the Decadent movement before falling into obscurity and experiencing a literary rebirth toward the end of his life.
In this Weird Stories installment, Phil Ford reads the complete text of one of Machen's most famous works, "The White People" (1904).

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1 hr 38 min
February 01, 2018 Episode 2: Garmonbozia
Phil and JF use a word from the Twin Peaks mythos, "garmonbozia," to try to understand what it was that the detonation of atomic bomb brought into the world. We use the fictional world of Twin Peaks as a map to the (so-called) real world and take Philip K. Dick, Krzysztof Penderecki, Norman Mailer, William S. Burroughs, Theodor Adorno, and H.P. Lovecraft as our landmarks.
Warning: some spoilers of Twin Peaks season 3.
Works Cited or Discussed:
Phil Ford, "The Cold War Never Ended", Dial M for Musicology (1) (2) (3) (4)
Twin Peaks: The Return — Official Site
Philip K. Dick, “The Empire Never Ended,” treated in R. Crumb’s “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick” and the “Tractate” from Dick’s Exegesis: http://www.tekgnostics.com/PDK.HTM
Norman Mailer, “The White Negro”
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Arthur Machen, The White People
Robert Oppenheimer, “I am become death”
C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
William B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"
Krzysztof Penderecki, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima
The Book of Ecclesiastes
Jon H. Else, The Day After Trinity (documentary)
Francisco Goya, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters"
Stanley Kubrick, Doctor Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Jean Beaudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
William James, A Pluralistic Universe
Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself

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1 hr 27 min
January 31, 2018 Episode 1: Introduction to Weird Studies
Phil and J.F. share stories of sleep paralysis and talk about Charles Fort's sympathy for the damned, Jeff Kripal's phenomenological approach to Fortean weirdness, Dave Hickey's notion of beauty as democracy, and Timothy Morton's hyperobjects.

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33 min

About Weird Studies

From the publisher's feed

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."