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Weird Studies

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

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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."
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Top 10 Weird Studies Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Weird Studies episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Weird Studies for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Weird Studies episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Weird Studies - Episode 3: Ecstasy, Sin, and "The White People"
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02/21/18 • 79 min

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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Weird Studies - Episode 2: Garmonbozia
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02/01/18 • 86 min

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 ReturnOfficial 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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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 are suspended and new laws come into play. No game illustrates this better than Gary Gygax's tabletop RPG, Dungeons & Dragons. In this episode, Phil and JF use D&D as the focus of a conversation about the weird interdependence of reality and fantasy.

Header image: Gaetan Bahl (Wikimedia Commons)

WORKS CITED OR DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE

Official homepage of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game

Critical Role web series
Another RPG podcast JF failed to mention: The HowWeRoll Podcast

Demetrious Johnson’s Twitch site

Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine (documentary)
Chessboxing!
Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America
Peter Fischli, The Way Things Go
Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy: Raiding the Temple of Wisdom
Lawrence Schick, ed., Deities & Demigods: Cyclopedia of Gods and Heroes from Myth and Legend
Article on Mazes and Monsters, a movie that came out of the D&D moral panic of the 1980s
Phil Ford, “Xenorationality”
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element of Culture
John Sinclair, [Guitar Army: Rock and Revolution with the MC5 and the White Panther Party](https://www.amazon.com/Guitar-Army-Revolution-White-Panther/dp/1934170003)

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Weird Studies - Episode 1: Introduction to Weird Studies
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01/31/18 • 32 min

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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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, consciousness adopts different "structures" at different times and in different contexts, and each structure reveals certain facets of reality while potentially occluding others. An integral human being is one who can utilize all of the structures according to the moment or situation. As Gebserian scholar Jeremy Johnson explains in this episode, modern humans are currently experiencing the transition from the "perspectival" structure which formed in the late Middle Ages to the "aperspectival," a new way of seeing and being that first revealed itself in the art of the Modernists. Grokking what the aperspectival means, and what it might look like, is just one of the tasks Jeremy, Phil and JF set themselves in this engaging trialogue.

Jeremy D. Johnson is the author of the recently released Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness.

REFERENCES

Jeremy Johnson, Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and the Integral Consciousness
Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin
William Irwin Thompson, Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness
Ken Wilber, integral theorist
Lionel Snell, “Spare Parts”
Nagarjuna, “Verses of the Middle Way” (Mulamadhyamakakarika)
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Object-oriented ontology (OOO)
Dogen, Uji (“The Time-Being”), from the Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye)

Special Guest: Jeremy D. Johnson.

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Weird Studies - Episode 4: Exploring the Weird with Erik Davis
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03/07/18 • 81 min

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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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 idea of parallel universes. It became clear in the course of the lecture that Dick didn't intend this to be a talk about science fiction, but about real life - indeed, about his life. In this episode, Phil and JF seriously consider the speculations which, depending on whom you ask, make PKD either a genius or a madman. This distinction may not matter in the end. As Dick himself wrote in his 8,000-page Exegesis: "The madman speaks the moral of the piece."

REFERENCES

Philip K. Dick, excerpts from “If You Find This World Bad You Should See Some Of The Others”
R. Crumb, The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick
Emmanuel Carrère, I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick
“20 Examples of the Mandela Effect That’ll Make You Believe You’re In A Parallel Universe”
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Weird Studies, "Episode 9: On Aleister Crowley and the Idea of Magick"
Weird Studies, "Episode 4: Exploring the Weird with Erik Davis"
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Sun Ra, Space is the Place
Zebrapedia (crowdsourced online transcribing/editing of the Exegesis)
Ramsey Dukes (Lionel Snell), Words Made Flesh
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
Bernado Kastrup, Why Materialism is Baloney
Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits
Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”

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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 out. But there are those who can make out certain patterns in Ra's life and work, patterns that place him among the true mystics and prophets. Of course, these people already believe in mysticism and prophecy, but Sun Ra's total devotion to his myth does not leave much wiggle room on this front. He is asking us to choose: believe or disbelieve. And if you go with disbelief, you'll need to explain the sustained coherence and lucidity of his message, and the transformative power of his music. In this episode, Phil and JF take a look at Sun Ra's unforgettable film Space is the Place, interpreting it as a document in the history of esotericism, using gnostic thought and the tarotology as instruments to bring some of his secrets to light.

REFERENCES

Sun Ra, Space is the Place
Sun Ra: Brother from Another Planet_
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus and [Kafka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority(philosophy))_ (for the concept of minority)
Antoine Faivre, French historian of esotericism
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
Eliphas Lévi, French occultist
Edward O. Bland (director) The Cry of Jazz
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History
Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal
Stanley Kubrick, Dr Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice
Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America

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Weird Studies - Episode 159: Three Songs, with Meredith Michael
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12/06/23 • 90 min

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, Vieille Priére Bouddhique
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle Mozart’s Arrow
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Vladimir Jankelevitch, Music and the Ineffable
Hector Berlioz, Fugue on “amen” from La Damnation du Faust
Slavoj Zizek, A Pervert’s Guide to Idiology
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic
Shepard Tone
Rudolf Steiner, The Influces of Lucifer and Ahriman

Special Guest: Meredith Michael.

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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 aesthetic theorist who saw a new horizon for the arts in the age of recording technology. In the future, he said, the superstitious cult of history, performance, and authorship would disappear, and the arts would retrieve a "neo-medieval anonymity" that would allow us to see them for what they really are: scarcely human at all. This episode interprets Gould's prophecy with the help of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the Chinese Daoist sage Zhuang Zhou, and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, among others.

SHOW NOTES

Glenn Gould, "The Prospects of Recording"
Marshall McLuhan's Tetrad of media effects
Ludwig van Beethoven, Concerto no. 3 in C minor
Glenn Gould, "Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould"
Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin, dialogue on The Music of Man
Jean-Luc Godard, A Married Woman (A Married Woman)
Heidegger, Der Spiegel interview (1966)
Daoist sage Zhuang Zhou
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange
Marshall McLuhan, The Playboy interview
Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Douglas Rushkoff and Michael Avon Oeming, Aleister and Adolph
Joyce Hatto
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking
Kevin Bazzana, Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work
Phil Ford, “Blogging and the Van Meegeren Syndrome”
David Thompson, Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films

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FAQ

How many episodes does Weird Studies have?

Weird Studies currently has 200 episodes available.

What topics does Weird Studies cover?

The podcast is about Weird, Society & Culture, Art, Podcasts, Philosophy and Arts.

What is the most popular episode on Weird Studies?

The episode title 'Episode 2: Garmonbozia' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Weird Studies?

The average episode length on Weird Studies is 76 minutes.

How often are episodes of Weird Studies released?

Episodes of Weird Studies are typically released every 14 days.

When was the first episode of Weird Studies?

The first episode of Weird Studies was released on Jan 31, 2018.

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