Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Guest Episodes”

Episode 135: On 'The Secret Life of Puppets,' with Victoria Nelson

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 10:00:00 -0500

Victoria 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, Phil and JF discussed Nelson's wonderful first novel Neighbor George (2021). In this episode, Nelson joins the hosts of Weird Studies to talk about the vision that drove her to write Secret Life along with its equally insightful follow-up, Gothicka.

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SHOW NOTES

Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets, Gothicka, Neighbor George

M. R. James, Collected Ghost Stories
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight series
William P. Young, The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity _
Against Everyone with Conner Habib, episodes 202 & 203
James R. Lewis, _The Gods Have Landed
Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Honoré de Balzac, "Séraphîta"
L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology

Special Guest: Victoria Nelson.

Episode 107: On Joy Williams' 'Breaking and Entering,' with Conner Habib

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 10:30:00 -0400

Joy Williams' third novel, Breaking and Entering, is the story of lovers who break into strangers' homes and live their lives for a time before moving on. First published in 1988, it is a book impossible to describe, a work of singular vision and sensibilty that is as infectious in its weird effect as it is unforgettable for the quality of its prose.

In this episode, the novelist, spiritual thinker, and acclaimed podcaster Conner Habib joins JF and Phil to explore how the novel's enchantments rest on the uniqueness of Williams' style, which is to say, her bold embrace of ways of seeing that are hers alone. Williams is an artist who refuses to work from within some predetermined philosophical or political idiom. As Habib tells your hosts, she goes her own way, and even the gods must follow.

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Photo by Wolfgang Moroder via Wikimedia Commons

REFERENCES

Conner Habib, "Joy Williams: The Best Fiction Writer Alive"

Joy Williams, Breaking and Entering
Joy Williams, The Quick and the Dead
The Paris Review, Interview with Joy Williams
Heraclitus, Fragments
Joy Williams, “Breakfast” in Taking Care
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
The Phantom Stranger, DC Comics character
James Joyce, Ulysses
Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros
Deleuze and Guatarri, What is Philosophy?
Quentin Meillassoux, French philosopher
David Mamet, On Directing Film
David Mamet, True and False
Nicholas Winding Refn (dir.), The Neon Demon
Joy Williams, “Congress”
Joy Williams, “Hawk”
Stephen Sexton, If All the World and Love Were Young
Scott Burnham, Mozart’s Grace

Special Guest: Conner Habib.

Episode 102: On Pan, with Gyrus

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 10:30:00 -0400

"What was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river?" With this question, the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning opens her famous poem "A Musical Instrument," which explores nature's troubling embrace of savagery and beauty. It seems that Pan always raises questions: What is he doing? What does he want? Where will he appear next? Linked to instinct, compulsion, and the spontaneous event, Pan is without a doubt the least predictable of the Greek Gods. Small wonder that he alone in the Greek pantheon sports human and animal parts. In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Gyrus, author of the marvellous North: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Cosmos, to capture a deity who, though he has made more than one appearance on Weird Studies, remains decidedly elusive.

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REFERENCES

Gyrus, "Sketches of the Goat God in Albion"
Gyrus, North
James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare
Pharmakon, philosophical term
Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive
Philippe Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece
Hellier, television docuseries
Weird Studies, Episode 98 on exotica
Pink Floyd, Piper at the Gates of Dawn
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Clayton Eshelman, Juniper Fuse
Plutarch “On the Silence of the Oracles”
Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger
D.H. Lawrence, “Pan in America”
Jim Brandon, The Rebirth of Pan

Episode 92: Glitch in the Matrix: A Conversation with Rodney Ascher

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 10:45:00 -0500

With his latest film, a meditation on what it means to believe we live in a computer simulation, Rodney Ascher has once again placed himself among the most innovative and visionary filmmakers working in the documentary form today. While the "Simulation Hypothesis" has been a hot topic ever since The Matrix came out in 1997, it is Ascher's ability to suspend judgement, training his camera on the experience of believers rather than the value of their beliefs, that makes A Glitch in the Matrix such a unique and significant exploration, a strange work of "phantom phenomenology."

Weird Studies listeners will recall that Phil and JF devoted an episode to Ascher's films -- most notably Room 237 and The Nightmare -- back in the early days of the podcast. In this episode, Rodney Ascher joins them to discuss his cinematic vision, his take on the weird, and his thoughts on what is real and why it matters.

REFERENCES

[Rodney Ascher](www.rodneyascher.com), American filmmaker
-- [A Glitch in the Matrix](www.aglitchinthematrixfilm.com)

Jay Weidner's theories on Kubrick
Buddhist idea of the the Arising and Passing Away
[Dungeons & Dragons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons%26_Dragons), tabletop roleplaying game
James Machin, _Weird Fiction in Britain 1880-1939
Magic Eye pictures
Parmenides, Greek philosopher
Wachowskis, The Matrix
Alan Moore, "Superman: For the Man Who Has Everything"
Conway's Game of Life
Joshua Clover, The Matrix (BFI Film Classics)
Jonathan Snipes, American composer
Clipping, experimental hip hop band
"Shining" romantic comedy recut
Michael Curtiz (dir.), Casblanca
John Boorman (dir.), [Point Blank](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062138/?ref=fn_al_tt_2)_
Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought

Special Guest: Rodney Ascher.

Episode 70: Masks All the Way Down, with James Curcio

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 12:00:00 -0400

James Curcio is an American multidisciplinary artist and nonfiction writer whose works include the novels Join My Cult, The Party at the World's End, and the upcoming Tales from When I Had a Face. Recently, Curcio edited Masks: Bowie and Artists of Artifice, an anthology of essays by various thinkers and artists on the complex interplay of fact and fiction, self and other, in the life of the modern creator of artistic works. David Bowie's career, from the early experimentations to the great working that was his final album Blackstar, provides the book's gravitational field. In his effort to better plumb the mysteries of the aesthetic universe, Curcio penned the anthology's opening essay, "Masks All the Way Down," and it is on that piece that this conversation focuses. Join James, Phil and JF as they discuss the terrifying and liberating idea of an aesthetic cosmos as seen from the vantage point of the artist who learns that with new each work comes a new face, an amalgam of symbols and forces drawn from a depth of surfaces, a paper-thin dream that goes ever so deep...

REFERENCES

James Curcio (editor), [Masks: Bowie and Artists of Artifice](www.intellectbooks/masks)
James Curcio's website: https://www.jamescurcio.com
James Curcio's new novel, [Tales from When I Had a Face](www.TalesFromWhenIHadAFace.com)

David Bowie, Blackstar
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex
Poppy, American singer
Anatta, the Buddhist concept of no-self
Nagarjuna, Indian philosopher
Yukio Mishima, Japanese writer
Hunter S. Thompson, American writer
Lewis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought
Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" in Untimely Meditations
Ornette Coleman, Change of the Century
Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu
Vladimir Nabokov, Russian novelist
Nicholas Roeg (director), The Man Who Fell to Earth
Raphael Bob-Waksberg (creator), BoJack Horseman
Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society
Euripides, The Bacchae

Special Guest: James Curcio.