Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Interviews”

Episode 56: On Jean Gebser, with Jeremy D. Johnson

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 11:30:00 -0400

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.

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 45: Jeffrey J. Kripal on 'Flipping' Out of Materialism

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 11:30:00 -0400

"May the present 'you' not survive this little book," Jeffrey Kripal writes in the prologue to The Flip. "May you be flipped in dramatic or quiet ways." Indeed, Kripal's latest is a kind of manifesto, a call to embrace the metaphysical expanses that reveal themselves to many who dare dip a toe outside the materialist lifeboat we've been rowing away in for a couple of centuries now. In this conversation, Phil and JF talk to the eminent scholar of religion about the life-changing epiphanies that have convinced many a hardboiled materialist that bouncing billiard balls is probably not the best metaphor for what is actually going on in the universe. In essence, this is a conversation about stories, about the fictions we tell ourselves to make sense -- or nonsense -- of our world.

REFERENCES

Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge
Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
Weird Studies, Episode 37: Entities, with Stuart Davis

Special Guest: Jeffrey J. Kripal.

Episode 42: On Pauline Oliveros, with Kerry O'Brien

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

In the mid-1960s, Pauline Oliveros was a composer of experimental electronic music. But at the end of the 1960s, shocked by the political violence around her, she turned away from electronic technology and towards to a different kind of experimentation, which Dr. Kerry O'Brien calls "experimentalisms of the self." The immediate result of this turn was Oliveros's Sonic Meditations, a series of instructions for group bodymind practice. This work became the seed of Deep Listening, a sort of musical yoga Oliveros developed throughout the rest of her long career. Dr. O'Brien joins JF and Phil for a conversation on practice, "gaining mind," the ritual value of art, the wisdom of the body, and whether Deep Listening is really best understood as art at all.

REFERENCES

Kerry O'Brien, "Listening as Activism: The 'Sonic Meditations' of Pauline Oliveros"
Pauline Oliveros, American composer
John Cage, 4'33"
Dead Territory performing Cage's 4'33"
Alvin Lucier, "Music for a Solo Performer"
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

Special Guest: Kerry O'Brien.

Episode 41: On Speculative Fiction, with Matt Cardin

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 10:30:00 -0500

Neil Gaiman wrote, "If literature is the world, then fantasy and horror are twin cities, divided by a river of black water." Flame Tree Publishing underwrites this claim with their recent publication, The Astounding Illustrated History of Fantasy and Horror. The book is a veritable gazetteer of these two cities in the heartland of the imaginal world. Writer and scholar Matt Cardin, founding editor of the marvellous [Teeming Brain](www.teemingbrain.com), wrote a chapter for the book focusing on the books and films of the Sixties and Seventies. In this episode, he joins JF and Phil to discuss the kinship of horror and fantasy, the modern ghettoization of mythopoeic art, the prophetic reach of speculative fiction, and the "cauldron of cultural transformation" that was the Sixties and Seventies.

Header Image by Moralist, Wikimedia Commons

REFERENCES

The Astounding Illustrated History of Fantasy and Horror
Matt Cardin's website
The Teeming Brain

American literary critic S. T. Joshi
British writer and scholar Roger Luckhurst
Neil Gaiman, introduction to The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death
The concept of "folk psychology"
H. P. Lovecraft, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"
H. P. Lovecraft, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key"
James Curcio, Masks: Bowie and the Artists of Artifice (forthcoming)
American author Thomas Ligotti
British author Arthur Machen
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Ian McEwen, Enduring Love
Weird Studies, Episode 36: On Hyperstition
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Terry Brooks, The Sword of Shannara
Stephen R. Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968)
The Lord of the Rings animated film (Ralph Bakshi, 1978)
Lloyd Alexander, The Chronicles of Prydain
Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
The Call of Cthulhu Role-Playing Game (Chaosium)
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978)
William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History
Interview with Twilight Zone luminary George Clayton Johnson
The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)
The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976)
Stephen King, Salem's Lot

Special Guest: Matt Cardin.

Episode 39: The Challenge of the Paranormal, with Jeffrey J. Kripal

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 30 Jan 2019 13:00:00 -0500

"The world is not simply composed of physical causes strung together in strictly materialistic and mechanical fashion," writes Prof. Jeffrey J. Kripal in his seminal book, Authors of the Impossible. "The world is also a series of meaningful signs requiring a hermeneutics for their decipherment." This, in a nutshell, is Kripal's position vis à vis the fact of paranormal experience, a fact that he has explored in numerous works of scholarship over the last 25 years. For Kripal, whether we see supernatural entities as beings from other worlds or creatures of the human imagination is secondary to the question of whether they merit serious philosophical thought and consideration. On that point, he says, "it's not an option to be neutral." JF and Phil had the honor of sitting down with Jeffrey Kripal to discuss the super-natural, the sacred, and the reasons why these categories remain as vital now as they ever have been.

Header image: "Artist's Impression of the Mothman," by Tim Bertelink, Wikimedia Commons.

REFERENCES

Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred, The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, The Super Natural: Why the Unexplained is Real (with Whitley Strieber), and Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks it Empowers Us All (with Elizabeth G. Krohn)

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining
Wouter Hanegraaff, historian of hermetic philosophy
John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies
Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker, philosophers
J. F. Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande
The X-Men (Marvel Comics)

Special Guest: Jeffrey J. Kripal.

Episode 37: Entities, with Stuart Davis

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 10:00:00 -0500

Several years ago, on New Year’s Eve, a tall, purple-robed praying mantis appeared to multidisciplinary artist Stuart Evan Davis as he meditated while running a fever. “Remember who you work for,” the entity said after beaming a zettabyte of information into Stuart’s febrile mind. Though it lasted less than a minute, the encounter sparked a series of life-changing -- and hair-raising -- events worthy of a Philip K. Dick novel.

JF and Phil talk to Stuart Davis to get his thoughts on nonhuman intelligences, the artistic cosmos, a movie trilogy the Mantis commissioned, and Stuart’s brilliant audio documentary, Man Meets Mantis.

Header image by OLJA, Wikimedia Commons

Stuart Davis Official Website
Stuart Davis, Man Meets Mantis
Stuart Davis, “Something from Nothing” course
Jasmine Karimova, singer-songwriter
Ramsey Dukes, The Good, The Bad, and the Funny
John Mack, psychiatrist and abduction phenomenon researcher
Jacques Vallee, ufologist
John Keel, paranormal researcher
Weird Studies episode 2, “Garmonbozia”
Norman McLaren, Spheres
Remedios Varo, artist
Leonora Carrington, artist
JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice

Special Guest: Stuart Evan Davis.