Weird Studies
179 episodes - English - Latest episode: 9 days ago - ★★★★★ - 463 ratingsProfessor 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."
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Episodes
Episode 167: The Hand of Ithell, with Amy Hale
April 17, 2024 14:30 - 1 hour - 122 MBIthell 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 ...
Episode 166: Make Believe: On the Power of Pretentiousness
April 03, 2024 14:00 - 1 hour - 101 MBIn 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 betwe...
Episode 165: Tatters of the King: On Robert Chambers' 'The King in Yellow'
March 20, 2024 14:30 - 1 hour - 119 MB"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 cent...
Episode 164: Towards a Weird Materialism: On Expressionism in Cinema
March 06, 2024 15:30 - 1 hour - 123 MBWhat 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 recordin...
Episode 163: The Source of All Abysses: On the Devil Card in the Tarot
February 21, 2024 15:30 - 1 hour - 97.4 MB"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 Medit...
Episode 162: The Incarnation of Meaning: Greenwich Village After the War
February 07, 2024 15:30 - 1 hour - 108 MBIn 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 (ht...
Episode 161: Scene of the Crime: On Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's 'From Hell'
January 24, 2024 15:30 - 1 hour - 124 MBListener 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 refer...
Mid-Hiatus Bonus: On Horror and the Retail Experience
January 10, 2024 15:30 - 54 minutes - 74.7 MBEvery off-week, listeners who have chosen to support Weird Studies by joining our Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/weirdstudies) 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 e...
Episode 160: The Way of All Flesh: On John Carpenter's 'The Thing'
December 20, 2023 15:30 - 1 hour - 104 MBAs 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 qual...
Episode 159: Three Songs, with Meredith Michael
December 06, 2023 16:15 - 1 hour - 124 MBEvery 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 weir...
Episode 158: As Above, So Below: On Plato's 'Timaeus'
November 22, 2023 15:30 - 1 hour - 132 MBIn 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...
Episode 157: Long Live the New Flesh: On David Cronenberg's 'Videodrome'
November 08, 2023 16:00 - 1 hour - 102 MB"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 technol...
Episode 156: The Only Possible End: On Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History'
October 25, 2023 14:00 - 1 hour - 127 MBThere 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 We...
Episode 155: Dispatches From the Inside: On Planet Weird's 'The Unbinding'
October 11, 2023 15:00 - 1 hour - 124 MBOne 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...
Episode 154: Into the Night Land, with Erik Davis
September 27, 2023 03:00 - 1 hour - 115 MBWilliam 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 h...
Episode 153: Celestial Machine: On the Temperance Card in the Tarot
September 13, 2023 14:30 - 1 hour - 109 MBEven 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 ...
Summer Bonus #2: Art and AI
September 08, 2023 14:15 - 51 minutes - 70.3 MBIn 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.
Summer Bonus: On Affectation, with a Special Announcement
August 15, 2023 14:00 - 49 minutes - 45.6 MBA 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 ...
Episode 152: The Science of Things Spiritual: Live in Lily Dale
August 01, 2023 15:15 - 1 hour - 99 MBOn 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 Fr...
Episode 151: The Real and the Possible: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, with Jacob G. Foster
July 19, 2023 13:00 - 1 hour - 69.3 MBIn 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...
Episode 150: Sacramental Reality: On Arthur Machen's "A Fragment of Life"
July 05, 2023 17:00 - 1 hour - 157 MB"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 Ma...
Episode 149: Song Swap: On Judee Sill's 'The Kiss' and Wilco's 'Jesus, Etc.'
June 21, 2023 16:00 - 1 hour - 72.8 MBOccasionally, 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 elu...
Episode 148: Mythos of the Moment: On 'Twin Peaks,' Season 3
June 07, 2023 14:30 - 1 hour - 71 MBDavid 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 (https://www.nuralearning.com) 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 divergenc...
Episode 147: You Must Change Your Life
May 24, 2023 14:30 - 1 hour - 85.4 MBRainer 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 PE...
Episode 146: An Air of Great Power: On the Chariot in the Tarot
May 10, 2023 14:30 - 1 hour - 70.7 MBOf 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...
Episode 145: Waiting for the Miracle: On Vanessa Onwuemezi's "Dark Neighbourhood"
April 26, 2023 15:30 - 1 hour - 82.4 MBIn 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 dubi...
Episode 144: On Clive Barker's 'Hellraiser' and 'The Hellbound Heart,' with Conner Habib
April 12, 2023 14:30 - 1 hour - 94 MBIn 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 disc...
Episode 143: On UFOs
March 29, 2023 14:30 - 1 hour - 82.3 MBIn 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...
Episode 142: The Music of the Spheres: On Jóhann Jóhannsson's "Last and First Men"
March 15, 2023 14:30 - 1 hour - 74.6 MBJóhann 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 ...
Episode 141: Actual Magic: On Ramsey Dukes' SSOTBME
February 28, 2023 15:30 - 1 hour - 77 MBRamsey 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 ...
Episode 140: That Ain't Plot: On Hayao Miyazaki's 'Spirited Away'
February 15, 2023 16:30 - 1 hour - 74.1 MBHayao 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...
Episode 139: Sex, Money, and Power are YOURS with our SECRET Art-Power Formula!
February 01, 2023 16:30 - 1 hour - 85.7 MB"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! Listen to volume 1 (https://pierre-yvesmartel.bandcamp.com/album/weird-studies-music-from-the-podcast-vol-1) and volume 2 (https://pierre-yvesmartel.bandcamp.com/alb...
Episode 138: Yours and Yours Alone: On the Death Card in the Tarot
January 18, 2023 15:30 - 1 hour - 68.8 MBWhat 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 c...
The Weird Studies Christmas Special
December 25, 2022 05:00 - 37 minutes - 41.3 MBWe 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 Christma...
Episode 137: Brute Force: on Sunn O)))'s 'Life Metal'
December 14, 2022 16:00 - 1 hour - 68.6 MBWhat 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 bruta...
Episode 136: The Things That Were And Shall Be Again: On 'Evil Dead II'
November 30, 2022 15:30 - 1 hour - 62.3 MB"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 ...
Episode 135: On 'The Secret Life of Puppets,' with Victoria Nelson
November 16, 2022 15:00 - 1 hour - 58.1 MBVictoria 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 (https://www.weirdstudies.com/128), Phil and JF discussed Nelson's wonderful first novel Neighbor George (2021). In this episode, Nelson joins th...
Episode 134: On Federico Campagna's 'Technic and Magic'
November 02, 2022 02:00 - 1 hour - 84.7 MBIn 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 ...
Episode 133: On Weirding, and the Virtues of Unknowing Everything
October 19, 2022 14:30 - 1 hour - 65.4 MBWith 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...
Episode 132: Art Is an Alien Technology: Live at the Supernormal Festival
October 05, 2022 14:30 - 1 hour - 74.7 MBWith 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 ...
Off-Week Bonus: On Worlds and Stories, with a Special Announcement
September 27, 2022 19:00 - 57 minutes - 52.6 MBIn 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.
Episode 131: Knocking on the Abyssal Door: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute
September 21, 2022 15:00 - 1 hour - 65.8 MBThe 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 ...
Episode 130: Holiday Memories
September 07, 2022 14:00 - 1 hour - 70.1 MBIn 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 interscipli...
Episode 129: Luminous Miasma: On Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"
August 03, 2022 17:00 - 1 hour - 174 MBEdgar 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 ...
Episode 128: Demon Workshop: On Victoria Nelson's 'Neighbor George'
July 19, 2022 21:00 - 1 hour - 80.4 MBThe 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 u...
Episode 127: Leaving the Mechanical Dollhouse: On Abeba Birhane's "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity"
July 06, 2022 14:30 - 1 hour - 69.8 MBLike 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 a...
Episode 126: The Daemon Speaks, with Matt Cardin
June 22, 2022 15:00 - 1 hour - 65.7 MBReturning 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. ...
Episode 125: Strange Brews: Weird Studies Live at Illuminated Brew Works
June 08, 2022 14:00 - 1 hour - 88.7 MBOn 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 Te...
Episode 124: Dark Night Radio of the Soul, with Duncan Barford
May 25, 2022 14:15 - 1 hour - 80.4 MBFor 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 ...
Episode 123: Off-Week Patreon Bonus: On Modern Miracles
May 18, 2022 13:00 - 39 minutes - 36.5 MBEvery 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 purchase...