Weird Studies

In 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 between its fruitful and hollow forms. They argue that the real gamble, and inherent value, of daring to pretend lies in recognizing that imagination is an active contributor to, rather than a detractor from, reality. Pierre-Yves Martel's EPHEMERA project It isn't too late to join JF's upcoming course on the films of Stanley Kubrick, which goes until the end of April, 2024. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel

"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 century, emerges fully formed, dripping with the xanthous milk of Decadence. What’s more, it is here given a symbol, a face, and a home in the Yellow Sign, the Pallid Mask of the Yellow King, and the lost land of Carcosa. Come one, come all. Join JF's upcoming course on the films of Stanley Kubrick, starting March 28, 2024. Support us on Patreon. 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 Stud

What 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 recording, your hosts agreed to focus on two pieces of writing: Victoria Nelson's The Secret Life of Puppets and a recent Internet post on eighties and nineties American films entitled "Neo-Expressionism: The Forgotten Studio Style." Though focused on a number of films, the conversation includes forays into the world of the visual arts, literature, and music. Support us on Patreon. 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,

"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 Meditations on the Tarot that one ought not look too deeply into the nature of evil, which is "unknowable in its essence." Support us on Patreon. 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 Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot The Gnostic Tarot Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, Part 1 Ramsey Dukes, S

In 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. Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, 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 Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage John Cassavetes, Shadows Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World Phil Ford, Dig Weird Studies, Episode 90 on “Owl in Daylight” Kult, role-playing game Tom Delong and Peter Lavenda, Secret Machines: Gods, Men, a

Listener 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 reference to the gruesome murders, never solved, of five women in London's Whitechapel district, in the fall of 1888. In Alan Moore's occult imagination, the Ripper murders were more than another instance of human depravity: they constituted a magical operation intended to alter the course of history. The nature of this operation, and whether or not it was successful, is the focus of this episode, in which JF and Phil also explore the imaginal actuality of Victorian London and the strange nature of history and time. Suppor

Every off-week, listeners who have chosen to support Weird Studies by joining our Patreon 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 extra, recorded as the holiday season was getting under way. Happy New Year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As 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 qualifies as a Christmas movie because there is snow (and a dog) in it, explore the metaphysical implications of a cult classic. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, 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 John Carpenter, The Thing Weird Studies, Episode 100 on Carpenter Films Weird Studies, Episode 157 on Vid

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 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 weirdly focused dialogue on time, impermanence, control, (mis)recognition, and the affinity of art and synchronicity. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, 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 Iron and Wine, “Passing Afternoon” Vienna Teng, “The Hymn of Acxiom”, (and here is the live version) Lili Boulanger, V

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 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 how Plato's vision of a divinely ordered cosmos echoes through the corridors of esoteric thought from antiquity to modern times. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, 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 Plato, [Timaeus](https://hackettpublishing.com/history/history-of-science/timaeus](Donald Zeyl Edition)

"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 technology into a strange new alloy. In this episode, recorded live after a screening of the film at Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington, JF and Phil set out to interpret Cronenberg's vision... and come to dig the New Flesh. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, 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 David Cron

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 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 Weird will find it lurking on every page. More than a masterpiece of psychological exploration, it is a story about the resurgence of the old god Dionysus, and a chronicle of fate; fate conceived, in the manner of the Ancient Greeks, as a cosmic force. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, 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 Burea

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 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 way to a procedural that invites us to ponder the ethics and methodologies of paranormal investigation in the age of Global Weirding. What do we owe the Others we encounter? What do they owe us? In this episode, JF and Phil discuss some of the questions haunting this brilliant documentary from the creators of Hellier. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Visit the Weird Studie

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 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 hard on ayahuasca, he might have come up with something like Hodgson's genre-defying novel, which reads more like a report to committee of 17th-century heretics than a piece of speculative fiction from the early twentieth century. MIT Press recently released a (blessedly) abridged edition of The Night Land as part of their Radium Series. Journalist, scholar, and lecturer Erik Davis, who penned a brilliant foreword for the new edition, was kind enough to join Phil and JF to discuss this underrated masterpiece. Support

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 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 by Rolf Dietrich Brecher via Wikimedia Commons It's not too late to join JF's Nura Learning course, ["Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence."](www.nuralearning.com) Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Download Pierre-Yves Martel's new album, Mer Bleue. Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Find us on Discord Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! SHOW NOTES Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot Ale

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 a new official episode on September 13th. Enjoy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 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 JF Martel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 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 Frederic W. H. Myers' autobiographical essay, "Fragments of Inner Life," first published in full in 1961, some sixty years after the author's death. Myers was one of the original members of the Society for Psychical Research in England. A poet and classicist, he remained committed to the scientific promise of paranormal investigation until the end of his life. His book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, also published posthumously, argues that psychical studies have confirmed, beyond the shadow of a doubt,

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 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 sociologist and physicist Jacob G. Foster of UCLA. Jacob is the co-founder of the Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute (DISI), a gathering of scholars, scientists, and students that takes place each year at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. It was there that this conversation was recorded. The topic was the Possible, that dream-blurred vanishing point where art, philosophy, and science converge as imaginative and creative practices. Click here or here for more information on Shannon Taggart's Science of Thing

"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 Machen, virtuoso of the weird. But, as Phil and JF discuss, this writing style intentionally draws attention to the absurdity of modern, materialist life, creating a striking contrast with the mysterious other world that Mr. and Mrs. Darnell eventually begin to pursue. Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Download Pierre-Yves Martel's new album, Mer Bleue. Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Find us on Discord Ge