Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Erik Davis”

Episode 187: The Affirmation of Imagination: On John Crowley's 'Little, Big,' with Erik Davis

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 10:30:00 -0400

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.

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REFERENCES

John Crowley, Little, Big
Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Eric Davis, interview with Neil Gaiman and Rachel Pollack
David Lynch (dir.), Lost Highway
America, “The Last Unicorn”
John Cooper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance
J. R. R. Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality
Lord Dunsany, Irish novelist
Special Guest: Erik Davis.

Episode 48: Walking the Tightrope with Erik Davis

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 05 Jun 2019 13:30:00 -0400

Journalist and historian of religion Erik Davis joins Phil and JF to talk about his latest magnum opus, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. In this masterwork of weird scholarship, Davis explores the simultaneously luminous and obscure worlds of three giants of Seventies counterculture: Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick. Their psychonautical legacy serve as fuel for a deep-delving conversation on Davis' own ontological leanings, yearnings, and hesitations. We touch on his philosophical development since the release of Techgnosis in 1998, the meaning of "weird naturalism," the primacy of the aesthetic, the uses and abuses of anthropotechnics, the challenges of tightrope-walking across bottomless chasms, and lots more.

REFERENCES

Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Expreience in the Seventies
Erik Davis, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information

Philip K. Dick, American science fiction writer
Robert Anton Wilson, American writer
Terence McKenna, Half-elf bard
Graham Harman, American philosopher
Timothy Morton, British philosopher
Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion
William James, American philosopher and psychologist
Hee-jin Kim, Eihei Dogen: Mystical Realist
Dogen, "Instructions for the Cook"
Steve Reich, "Music as a Gradual Process"
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Albert Hofman’s famous bicycle ride
Erowid LSD vault
George Lackoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, Syntheism: Creating God in the Internet Age
Special Guest: Erik Davis.

Episode 4: Exploring the Weird with Erik Davis

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 10:00:00 -0500

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