Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Metaphysics”

Episode 186: Meeting at the Center: The Wedge, Part Two

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:30:00 -0400

In this episode, JF and Phil continue their conversation on the wedge, their figure for the epistemological divide between approaching reality from the heart and exploring it with the mind. As the discussion unfolds, the wedge begins to reveal itself not as a rigid binary but as a spectrum—one that stretches from ultimate thickness to ultimate thinness. Could thinking, then, may be the art of navigating this epistemic gradient, seeking the sweet spot where the self meets the world, each on the other's terms?

Visit Weirdosphere for more details on Erik Davis's upcoming course, The Three Stigmata of Philip K. Dick.

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REFERENCES

Weird Studies, Episode 155 on ‘The Unbinding’
Alan Chapman, Advanced Magick for Beginners
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude
The Principle of Sufficient Reason
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
Weird Studies, Episode 139 on the power of art
Phil Ford, “The View from the Cheap Seats”
Arnold Schoenberg, Austrian composer
Jaques Vallee, Passport to Magonia

Episode 185: Intuition and Reality: The Wedge, Part One

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 10:30:00 -0500

"The Wedge" is a key concept for Phil and JF. When exploring weird phenomena—from artworks to ghosts, and everything in between—one tends to emphasize one or the other "end" of the event. At the thin end of the Wedge, the focus is on subjective experience: how it felt, what it was like, and its personal significance. At the thick end, the emphasis shifts to what actually happened, independent of how it was experienced. Though their roles sometimes switch, Phil generally thinks from the thin end, while JF approaches things from the thick. In this episode, they begin unpacking the implications of the Wedge for making sense of reality’s stranger aspects.

Header image by SavidgeMichael via Wikimedia Commons.
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Join the Weirdosphere, our online learning platform
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.
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REFERENCES

Weird Studies, Episode 184 on David Lynch
Phil Ford, “The View from the Cheap Seats at the UFO Show”
Scene by Scene, 1999 Interview with David Lynch
Weird Studies, Episodes 76 on Henri Bergson’s Metaphysics
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Phil Ford, Dig
Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages
Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven: The Music and the Life

Episode 180: The Player: On the Magician Card in the Tarot

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 11:15:00 -0500

The Magician card likely graces more front covers of books on the tarot than any of the other major arcana. In many ways, it symbolizes the tarot itself, or the individual who has mastered the art of manipulating the cards to divine their meanings. Yet, the Magician is a profoundly ambiguous figure. From one perspective, he is the Magus, piercing through the illusions of ceaseless becoming to glimpse the hidden depths of reality. From another, he is all surface without depth, a carnival huckster ready to empty your coin purse while you’re transfixed by his crystal ball. In this episode, JF and Phil continue their on-again, off-again journey through the major trumps with a discussion of the card that—deservedly or not—proudly calls itself Number One.

REFERENCES
Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot
Weird Studies, Episode 24 on “The Charlatan and the Magus”
Weird Studies, Episode 109 and Episode 110 on The Glass Bead Game
Weird Studies, Episode 179 with Lionel Snell
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Geneology of Morals
Louis Sass, Modernism and Madness
Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence
Richard Wagner, Parsifal
William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light
Participation mystique
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Leigh Mccloskey, Tarot Re-visioned

Episode 179: The Final Frontier, with Lionel Snell

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 11:45:00 -0500

One of the great rewards of "weirding" the world is learning that boredom may be a kind of ethical transgression—the world is simply too strange to allow for it, and if you're bored, you're at least partly to blame. Few have put this notion to the test as rigorously as Lionel Snell, whose work as a magician celebrates the wonders of everyday events, from a walk in the park to a moment of car trouble. Unlike the pursuit of the extraordinary that often defines occult practice, Snell's approach reminds us of the magic in the mundane. In this episode, Snell, also known as Ramsey Dukes, shares the insights he's gained over his decades-long career as one of the leading figures in contemporary magical theory and practice.

For an exclusive Vimeo link to Aaron Poole's film Dada mentioned in the intro, go to Instagram and send @aaronsghost the direct message "movie link please".

REFERENCES
Ramsey Dukes, Thundersqueak
Weird Studies, Episode 141 on “SSOTBME
Weird Studies, Episode 24 with Lionel Snell
John Crowley, Little, Big
Arthur Machen, “A Fragment of Life”
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
Max Picard, The Flight from God
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking
Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
Henry Bergson, Matter and Memory
Russell’s Paradox

Special Guest: Lionel Snell [Ramsey Dukes].

Episode 178: Edge of Reality: On John Carpenter's 'In the Mouth of Madness'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 10:30:00 -0400

Earlier this month, Phil and JF recorded a live episode at Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington following a screening of John Carpenter's film In the Mouth of Madness. Carpenter’s cult classic obliterates the boundary between reality and fiction, madness and revelation—an ideal subject for a Weird Studies conversation. In this episode, recorded before a live audience, the hosts explore the film’s Lovecraftian themes, the porous nature of storytelling, and how art can function as a conduit to unsettling truths.

Special thanks to Dr. Alicia Kozma and the IU Cinema team for hosting and recording the event.

REFERENCES
John Carpenter, In the Mouth of Madness
John Carpenter, Prince of Darkness*
John Carpenter, The Thing
Joshua Clover, BFI Film Classics: The Matrix
Philip K. Dick, Time Out of Joint
David Cronenberg, Videodrome
Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)"
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer
Nick Land, English philosopher
H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
Jonathan Carroll, The Land of Laughs

Episode 174: Magick and Enlightenment, with Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 10:30:00 -0400

Phil and JF are joined by Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford – practicing magicians, podcasters, and co-authors of the newly released Baptist's Head Compendium: Magick as a Path to Enlightenment, a collection of essays and reports from their famous occult blog, The Baptist's Head. Duncan and Alan are accomplished practitioners with deep insights into the nature of magic(k). The conversation touches on a number of subjects, including the parallels between magic, mysticism, and religion; form and formlessness; the nature of truth; the primacy of devotion; and the quest to converse with one's Holy Guardian Angel.

To purchase The Baptist's Head Compendium at a 20% discount, go to http://www.spirit.aeonbooks.co.uk and enter the code given in the introduction to this episode.

REFERENCES

Occult Experiments in the Home, Duncan Baford's blog and podcasts.
Barbarous Words, Alan Chapman's Substack.
WORP FM, a ten-part podcast series with Alan and Duncan.
The Abremelin working
Illuminates of Thanatos (IOT)
Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law
Buddhist Geeks, “The Great Work of Western Magic with Alan Chapman”
Aleister Crowly, John St. John
Special Guests: Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford.

Episode 171: The Beauty and the Horror

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 21:00:00 -0400

This week on Weird Studies, Phil and JF explore the intersections of the beautiful and the terrible in art and literature. There is a conventional beauty that calms and placates, and there is a radical beauty which, taking horror’s pale-gloved hand, gives up all pretense to permanence and fixity and joins the danse macabre of our endless becoming. This episode is a preamble to a five-week course of lectures and discussions starting June 20th on Weirdosphere, JF and Phil’s new online learning platform. For more information and to enroll in The Beauty and the Horror, visit www.weirdosphere.org.

REFERENCES

JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, the audiobook, with a new introduction written and read by Donna Tartt.
Denis Villeneuve, Dune: Part Two
William Blake, “The Tyger”
Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
Steven Spielberg, Raiders of the Lost Ark
Walter Pater, The Renaissance
David Lynch, Twin Peaks: The Return
Anna Aikin, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness
Charles Baudelaire, “Le Voyage”
Franz Schubert, “Death and the Maiden” Quartet
Franz Schubert, Piano Sonata in C major, D. 840
J.R.R. Tolkein, The Hobbit

Episode 164: Towards a Weird Materialism: On Expressionism in Cinema

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 10:30:00 -0500

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.

REFERENCES

comrade_yui, “neo-expressionism: the forgotten studio style”
Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets
Francis Ford Coppola, Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Weird Studies, Episode 161 on ‘From Hell’
Bram Stoker, Dracula
E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art
Jean-Francois Millet, “Gleaners”
Kathe Kollwitz, “Need”
Robert Weine, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Arnold Schoneberg, Pierrot Lunaire
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1
Peter Yates (dir.), Krull
Wilhelm Worringer, German art historian
Weird Studies, Episode 136 on ‘The Evil Dead’
In Camera The Naive Visual Effects of Dracula
Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life
Weird Studies, Episode 121 ‘Mandwagon’

Episode 160: The Way of All Flesh: On John Carpenter's 'The Thing'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 10:30:00 -0500

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.
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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 Videodrome
Ridley Scott, Blade Runner
Ridley Scott Alien
Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence
Haecceity
Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Characters as a Medium for Poetry
Weird Studies, Episode 89 on ‘Mumbo Jumbo’
Weird Studies, Episode 127 on ‘The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity’
Wikipedia, “Quiddity”
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Danish painter
Jez Conolly, The Thing
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Dylan Trigg, The Thing a Phenomenology of Horror
Plato, The Timaeus
Lucretius, “On the Nature of Things”
Clive Barker, The Great and Secret Show

Episode 158: As Above, So Below: On Plato's 'Timaeus'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 10:30:00 -0500

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.

REFERENCES

Plato, [Timaeus](https://hackettpublishing.com/history/history-of-science/timaeus](Donald Zeyl Edition)
Earl Fontenelle, The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast
The Book of Thoth
Graham Hancock, British journalist
Hesiod, Theogony
Hermes Trismegistus, {Emerald Tablet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Tablet)
Pierre Hadot,, scholar of classical philosophy
Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”
Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought
Lionel Snell, SSOTBME

Episode 157: Long Live the New Flesh: On David Cronenberg's 'Videodrome'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

"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.

REFERENCES
David Cronenberg, Videodrome
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible
Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb
Weird Studies, Episode 75 on “2001: A Space Odyssey”
Richard Porton and David Cronenberg, "The Film Director as Philosopher: An Interview with David Cronenberg"
George Hickenlooper and David Cronenberg, "The Primal Energies of the Horror Film: An Interview with David Cronenberg"
Weird Studies, Episode 144 with Connor Habib
William Friedkin (dir.), The Exorcist
Plato, Timaeus
William Gibson, Idoru
CBC, Yorkville: Hippie Haven
Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”

Episode 154: Into the Night Land, with Erik Davis

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 23:00:00 -0400

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 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

William Hope Hodgeson, The Night Land
Weird Studies, Episode 37 with Stuart Davis
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
William Hope Hodgeson, House on the Borderland
Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Sumptuary Laws
Arcosanti, arcology
Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men
Pierre Schaeffer, “Traité des objets musicaux”
Schitzophonia
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine Special Guest: Erik Davis.

Episode 152: The Science of Things Spiritual: Live in Lily Dale

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 11:15:00 -0400

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, that death is just the beginning. In this talk, JF and Phil discuss Myers' relevance to 21st-century thinking on the Weird.

REFERENCES

The Science of Things Spiritual Symposium: July 27-29, 2023
Frederic Myers, Fragments of Inner Life
Alan Bennett, History Boys
Arthur Machen, A Fragment of Life
Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan
Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug
Daniel Dennett, American cognitive scientist

Frederic Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death
Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being
Phil Ford, Dig
William James, Principles of Psychology
Akashic Record, Theosophical idea
Jeff Kripal, Authors of the Impossible

Episode 151: The Real and the Possible: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, with Jacob G. Foster

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

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 Things Spiritual Symposium at Lily Dale NY, July 27-29 2023.

REFERENCES

Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute
"Deconstructing the Barrier of Meaning," a talk by Jacob G. Foster at the Santa Fe Institute
William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture
Frederic Rzewski, “Little Bangs: A Nihilist Theory of Improvisation”
Brian Eno, Oblique Strategies
The accident of Bob in Twin Peaks
Carl Jung, “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry
August Kekule,, German chemist
Robert Dijkgraaf, “Contemplating the End of Physics”
Richard Baker, American zen teacher
Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Shoggoth, Lovecraftian entity Special Guest: Jacob G. Foster.

Episode 148: Mythos of the Moment: On 'Twin Peaks,' Season 3

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 10:30:00 -0400

David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks has been a touchstone of Weird Studies since the podcast's inception. Back in 2018, Phil and JF recorded Episode 1: Garmonbozia while still reeling from the series' third season, which aired on Showtime the year before. Now, in preparation for their upcoming course on Twin Peaks, they watched the third season again and recorded this episode. Their conversation touched on the virtues of late style in the arts, the divergence of knowing and understanding, the fate of Agent Dale Cooper, and the dream logic of the _Twin Peaks _universe.

Last change to sign up for The Twin Peaks Mythos, a 4-week Weird Studies view-along starting June 8th, 2023.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle.
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!

REFERENCES

Symposium at Lily Dale, July 27-29, 2023
David Lynch and Mark Frost (creators), Twin Peaks
David Lynch (dir.), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?
Chris Carter (creator), The X-Files
Erik Davis, American scholar, lecturer, and journalist
Thomas Ligotti, American writer
Stephen King, American writer
Joshua Brand and John Falsey (creators), Northern Exposure
James Elkins, Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings
David Lynch (dir.), Mulholland Drive
Robert Aickman, English writer of "strange stories"
Manuel DeLanda on signification vs significance
Weird Studies, episode 105: Fire Walk With Tamler Sommers
Kyle McLachlan interview in Vanity Fair

Episode 147: You Must Change Your Life

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 24 May 2023 10:30:00 -0400

Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" ends on a note that has puzzled and inspired readers for more than a century: "For there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life." In this episode, JF and Phil search for the meaning of this ethico-aesthetic imperative that Rilke heard resounding from a fragment of Greek statuary. This episode is special because the hosts were able to record it in person while on a writing retreat in Western Quebec.

Enroll in THE TWIN PEAKS MYTHOS, a 4-week Weird Studies view-along starting June 8th.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle.
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!

REFERENCES

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
He Man, superhero
Munich Terrorist Photo
Albert Camus, The Rebel
Franz Kafka, "The Trial" and “In the Penal Colony"
Auguste Rodin, French sculptor

Episode 143: On UFOs

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 10:30:00 -0400

In the 1950s, Carl Jung expressed frustration at the impenetrability of the UFO mystery, the "strange, unknown, and indeed contradictory nature" of this "ostensibly physical phenomenon" with "an extremely important psychic component." Throughout his writings on the topic, he marvels at the impossibility of coming to even preliminary conclusions. Fastforward to 2023, after a series of astounding disclosures on the part of qualified government people, and we have as much reason to be baffled as we ever had. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the mercurial, tricksterish fact of ortherwordly things seen in the sky.

Learn more about the Ohio UFO Heritage Conference on May 5-6, 2023.

Preorder Pierre-Yves Martel's album Mer bleue.

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's ongoing podcast on Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

REFERENCES

Patrik Harpur, Daimonic Reality
John Keel The Mothman Prophecies
Jaques Vallee Passport to Magonia
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast
Carl Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky
Weird Studies, Episode 141 on SSOTBME
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
Weird Studies, Episodes 73 and 74 on Jung
Weird Studies, Episode 44 on William James’s Psychical Research
Jacques Vallée and Paola Leopizzi, Harris, Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret
Jacques Vallée, "Physical Analyses in Ten Cases of Unexplained Aerial Objects with Material Samples"
Shepard tone
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
Twin Peaks
Mark Pilkington, Mirage Men
Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy
Weird Studies, Episode 59 on Walking
Weird Studies, Episode 142 on “Last and First Men”

Episode 141: Actual Magic: On Ramsey Dukes' SSOTBME

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 10:30:00 -0500

Ramsey Dukes, also known by his real name of Lionel Snell, may be one of the most important thinkers on magic since Aleister Crowley. In the impishly-titled Sex Secrets of the Black Magicians Exposed (or SSOTBME for short), Dukes accomplishes something few writers on the topic have been able to do: he gives us magic without asking us to sacrifice anything that makes us sensible modern people. He makes magic seem like the most obvious thing in the world, and he does it without taking away any of its, well, magic. How he does it and what it means are questions that would take several episodes to unpack. In this one, Phil and JF begin the work by discussing how Dukes situates magic in an epistemic compass that also includes science, art, and religion. This set of tools is as essential to a holistic view of reality as the four suits in a deck of cards are essential to a proper poker game. In other words, when we lose magic, we lose a way of dealing with reality.

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's ongoing podcast on Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.

REFERENCES

David Lynch (dir.), Mulholland Drive
Ramsey Dukes, SSOTBME
Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures
Weird Studies, Episode 139 on Art Power
Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy
“Virtual” and “Actual”, as developed by Bergson and Deleuze
Pragmatism, philosophical school
Jack Parsons, American rocket scientist
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return
William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Episode 134: On Federico Campagna's 'Technic and Magic'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 22:00:00 -0400

In Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality, the philosopher Federico Campagna argues that we moderns have exhausted the reality system we devised at the dawn of our age, a system he calls Technic. Technic has one goal: to reduce all things to language by naming, tagging, measuring, and quantifying them, by turning every parcel of the physical and psychic universe into a "unit" defined by its position in the system. The result has been an erasure of the mere "suchness" of things, the singularity of things simply existing as they are. To replace a worldview that is now revealing its endemic nihilism, Campagna proposes Magic, a way of seeing that reestablishes a balance between the measurable and the ineffable. JF and Phil discuss Campagna's magisterial performance in this episode.

Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
Support us on Patreon
Find us on Discord
Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

SHOW NOTES

Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic
Bill Hicks, “Bit on Marketing”
Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time
Plotinus, Neoplatonist philosopher
Francis Bacon, Irish artist
Samuel Beckett, Irish author
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Weird Stuides, Episode 87 on Arthur Machen
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

Episode 131: Knocking on the Abyssal Door: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

The historian of religion Jeffrey J. Kripal writes, "The world is one, and the human is two." The line captures the riddle of reality. What is it with our species? Equipped with an intellect able to grok the basic laws that govern the physical universe, we seem unable to wrap our heads around as simple a question as "What is real?". Recorded live before a learned audience at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) in August of 2022, this episode approaches the enigma by teasing the Weird out of the very idea of intellection. If the architects of DISI are right to say that mind, far from being confined to human skulls, enjoys wide distribution across nature, what might such ideas as magic, synchronicity, and prophecy tell us about intelligence and meaning?

DISI is a three-week interdisciplinary event held each year at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The hosts are grateful to Jacob Foster and Erica Cartmill of UCLA for inviting them to speak at the institute.

**Header image: **Detail of The Ancient of Days by William Blake.

SHOW NOTES

Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI)
Earlier iteration of Jacob Foster's talk, "Toward a Social Science of the Possible"

Pauline Oliveros's Tuning Meditation
Norbert Wiener, American mathematician
Joshua Ramey, "Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux"
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande
Aristotle, Physics and Metaphysics
Jeffrey J. Kripal, "The World is One, and the Human is Two: Tentative Conclusions of a Working Historian of Religion"
Jeffrey Kripal on Weird Studies: episodes ## and ##
Aleister Crowley, See The Vision and the Voice and Magick in Theory and Practice
The "Unwritten Doctrines" of Plato
Plato, Republic, "Seventh Letter" & Phaedrus
Phil's prophetic dream report (Patreon supporters only)
H. P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (for description of Azathoth)
C. G. Jung, Synchroncity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Alchemical Studies & Mysterium Coniunctionis
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
New York Times article on 2022 UFO hearings

Episode 128: Demon Workshop: On Victoria Nelson's 'Neighbor George'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 17:00:00 -0400

The American writer and thinker Victoria Nelson is justly revered by afficionados of the Weird for The Secret Life of Puppets and its follow-up Gothicka. Both are masterful explorations the supernatural as it subsists in the "sub-Zeitgeist" of the modern secular West. In 2021, Strange Attractor Press released Neighbor George, Nelson's first novel. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss this gothic anti-romance with a mind to seeing how it contributes to Nelson's overall project of acquainting us with the eldritch undercurrents of contemporary life.

Click here for more information on the Supernormal Festival, Aug 12-14, in Oxfordshire, England.

References

Victoria Nelson, Neighbor George
Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets
Victoria Nelson, Gothicka
Wendy Lesser, American critic
Ward Sutton Onion cartoons
Extension, metaphysical concept
Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer
Cessation of Miracles, theological belief
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande
Greg Anderson, “Retrieving the Lost Worlds of the Past: A Case for the Ontological Turn”
Orcus Grotto, sculpture
Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman
Nathalie Cooke, Margaret Atwood: A Biography
Weird Studies, Episode 96 on Beauty and the Beast
M. C. Richards, “Wrestling with the Daemonic”

Episode 127: Leaving the Mechanical Dollhouse: On Abeba Birhane's "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity"

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 10:30:00 -0400

Like Caligula declaring war on Neptune and ordering his troops to charge into the Mediterranean Sea, our technological masters are designing neural networks meant to capture the human soul in all its oceanic complexity. According to the cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane, this is a fool's errand that we undertake at our peril. In her paper "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity," she makes the case for the irremediable fluidity, spontaneity, and relationality of people and societies. She argues that ongoing efforts to subsume the human (and the rest of reality) in predictive algorithms is actually narrowing the human experience, as so many of us are excluded from the system while others are compelled to artificially conform to its idea of the human. Far from paving the way to a better world, the tyranny of automation threatens to cut us off from the Real, ensuring an endless perpetuation of the past with all its errors and injustices. Phil and JF discuss Birhane's essay in this episode.

Header image from via www.vpnsrus.com (cropped). Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

REFERENCES

Abebe Birhane, "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity”
J. F. Martel, “Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things”
Melissa Adler, Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge
Weird Studies, Episode 75 on 2001: A Space Odyssey
Weird Studies, Episode 114 on the Wheel of Fortune
William James, American philosopher
Midjourney, AI art generator
Rhine Research Center, parapsychology lab
George Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives”
Abebe Birhane, “Descartes was Wrong: A Person is a Person Through Other Persons”
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German philosopher
J. R. R. Tolkein, “On Fairy-Stories”
Martin Buber, I and Thou

Episode 125: Strange Brews: Weird Studies Live at Illuminated Brew Works

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 10:00:00 -0400

On May 23, 2022, Meredith Michael joined JF and Phil for a live recording at Illuminated Brew Works, a craft brewery in Chicago, Illinois.The occasion was the launch of Weird Studies Black IPA, the fruit of a collaboration with IBW brewmaster Brian Buckman and his team of beer alchemists. The game plan was to talk about potions, but the final conversation ranges over a number of topics including singularity and repetition, time and eternity, alchemy and ritual, Okakura Kakuzō's The Book of Tea, cooking and pickling, and the cultural phenomenon Phil calls "weedhead sh*t."

Purchase the Weird Studies Black IPA from Beer on the Wall or visit the Illuminated Brew Works website.

Buy volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
Support us on Patreon
Find us on Discord
Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

SHOW NOTES

Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea
Oscar Wilde on absinthe
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History
Toni Morrison. Song of Solomon
The Suzuki Method
Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice
David Cronenberg (dir.), Scanners (1981)
Lars von Trier (dir.), Dancer in the Dark (2000)
Alan Watts, Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen
William Shakespeare, Macbeth Special Guest: Meredith Michael.

Episode 123: Off-Week Patreon Bonus: On Modern Miracles

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 18 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

Every off-week, JF and Phil record a bonus episode for Patreon supporters. The conversations on that stream are shorter, less formal, and more improvisitory than those of the flagship show. To give the wider public a glimpse of this hidden dimension of the WS universe, we decided to make this week's "audio extra" available to everyone. As it happens, this episode also contains an important announcement concerning next week's event at Illuminated Brew Works in Chicago: tickets must be purchased via Eventbrite using the link below. No tickets can be sold at the door.

Click here to purchase tickets to the Weird Studies beer launch at Illuminated Brew Works in Chicago on May 23.

Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack
Support us on Patreon
Find us on Discord
Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

Episode 122: Spirals and Crooked Lines: On the Star Card in the Tarot

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 11 May 2022 11:15:00 -0400

The Star is one of the most iconic of the major trumps of the traditional tarot deck. It is also one of the most ambiguous. A woman is shown emptying two urns of water onto the parched ground. She is flanked by nascent plant life. Shining above her are those nocturnal luminaries whose "eternal silence" so frightened the philosopher Blaise Pascal at the dawn of modernity. Are the stars pointing the way to a brighter future, or are they stars of ill omen, warning us of what lies ahead? And what does that little bird in the background signify? In this episode, Phil and JF try to get to the bottom of the starry heavens, only to find out that starry heavens have no bottom.

Click here to purchase tickets to the Weird Studies beer launch at Illuminated Brew Works in Chicago on May 23.

REFERENCES

Our Known Friend (Valentin Tomberg), Meditations on the Tarot

Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of the Tarot

Pink Floyd, “Astronomy Domine”
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law
Heimarmene, Greek goddess of fate
Weird Studies, Episode 121 on Mandy
Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
Samuel Delaney, Dahlgren
J R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Juan Eduardo Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols
Weird Studies, Episode 103 on the Tower
Weird Studies, [Episode 114 on the Wheel of Fortune]
Joni Mitchell, “Ladies of the Canyon”

Episode 121: Dream Theater: On 'Mandy' and 'The Band Wagon'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 10:00:00 -0400

In this episode, each of your hosts bullies the other into watching a movie he would normally not touch with a bargepole. Phil has been (unsuccessfully) trying to get JF to watch Vincente Minnelli's 1953 musical comedy The Band Wagon and JF has been (also unsuccessfully) trying to get Phil to watch Panos Cosmatos's 2018 psychedelic horror film Mandy. For this episode, they decided they would compromise and watch both. What started as a goof ended up a fascinating Glass Bead Game from which emerge occulted correspondences between films that, on the surface, could not be more dissimilar. One film is a dream of song and dance, the other a dream of blood and violence. Either way, though, watch out: as Deleuze says, "beware of the dreams of others, because if you are caught in their dream, you are done for."

Support us on Patreon
Find us on Discord
Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack

SHOW NOTES

Iluminated Brew Works, Chicago
JF's new course, [Groundwork for a Philosophy of Magic](www.nuralearning.com)

Vincente Minnelli (dir.), The Bandwagon
Panos Cosmatos (dir.), Mandy
Weird Studies, Episode 73 on Carl Jung
Norman Jewison (dir.), Moonstruck
David Thompson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image) and Cinema 2: The Time Image
Henri Bergson, “The Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion”, from Creative Evolution
Terry Gilliam (dir.), The Fisher King
Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music
Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity
Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia” in Only Entertainment
Gilles Deleuze, “What is the Creative Act”

Episode 119: Behind the Cosmic Curtain: On Stanislaw Lem's 'The New Cosmogony,' with Meredith Michael

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 10:30:00 -0400

Over the last several centuries, there has been one thing on which science and religion have generally agreed, and that is the fixity of the laws under which the universe came to be. At the moment of the Big Bang or the dawn of the First Day, the underlying principles that govern reality were already set, and they have never changed. But what if the laws of nature were not as chiseled in stone as Western intellectuals on both sides of the magisterial divide have assumed them to be? What if creation was an ongoing process, such that our universe in its beginning might have behaved very differently from how it does at present? This is the central conceit of Stanislaw Lem's story "The New Cosmogony," the capstone of his metafictional collection A Perfect Vacuum, originally published in 1971. In this episode, Meredith Michael joins JF and Phil to discuss the metaphysical implications of the idea that nature is an eternal work-in-progress.

REFERENCES

For more information JF's new course, Groundwork for a Philosophy of Magic, visit Nura Learning.

Stanislaw Lem, “A New Cosmogony” in A Perfect Vacuum
Weird Studies, Episode 118 The Unseen and Unnamed
Ramsey Dukes, SSOTBME
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude
M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart
Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Stanislaw Lem, His Master’s Voice
David Pruett, Reason and Wonder
Andrei Tarkovsky (dir.), Solaris
Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”
Andrew W.K., “No One to Know”

Special Guest: Meredith Michael.

Episode 118: The Unseen and the Unnamed, with Meredith Michael

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 11:30:00 -0400

In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by music scholar and Weird Studies assistant Meredith Michael to discuss two strange and unsettling short stories: J.G. Ballard's "The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon" (1964) and Ursula K. Le Guin's "She Unnames Them" (1985). Their plan was to talk about three stories, but they never got to Phil's pick, which will be the focus of episode 119. The reason is that Le Guin and Ballard's stories share surprising resonances that merited close discussion. From opposite perspectives, both tales put words to a region of reality that resists discursive description, a borderland where that which is named reveals its unnamed facet, and that which must remain unseen reveals itself to the inner eye.

REFERENCES

J. G. Ballard, “The Giaconda of the Twilight Noon,” from The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard
Ursula K. Le Guin, "She Unnames Them," from The Real and the Uneal
Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), The Birds
Jung's concept of the collective unconscious
Walter Pater, The Renaissance
Ursula K. Le Guin, “She Unnames Them” in The Real and the Unreal
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
M. C .Richards, Centering
Weird Studies, Episode 35 on Centering
Weird Studies, Episode 81 on The Course of the Heart
Weird Studies, Episode 84 on the Empress
Linguistically deprived children
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's thoughts on on imagination and fancy can be found in Biographia Literaria Special Guest: Meredith Michael.

Episode 117: Time is a Child at Play: On the Mystery of Games

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 10:30:00 -0500

The topic of games and play has fascinated JF and Phil since the launch of Weird Studies. Way back in 2018, they recorded back-to-back episodes on tabletop roleplaying games and fighting sports, and more recently, they did a two-parter on Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, a philosophical novel suggesting that all human culture tends toward play. In this episode, your hosts draw on a wealth of texts, memories, and nascent ideas to explore the game concept as such. What is a game? What do games tell us about life? What is the function of play in the formation of reality?

REFERENCES

Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia
Jobe Bittman, The Book of Antitheses US version, EU version
Weird Studies, Episode 6, Dungeons and Dragons
Weird Studies, Episode 7, Boxing
C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art
Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics
BF Skinner, American psychologist
Heraclitus, Fragments

Episode 97: Art in the Age of Artifice

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 10:00:00 -0400

The question of art has been of central concern for JF and Phil since Weird Studies began in 2018. What is art? What can it do that other things can't do? How is it connected to religion, psyche, and our current historical moment? Is the endless torrent of advertisements, entertainment, memes, and porn in which seem hopelessly immersed a manifestation of art or of something else entirely? In this exploration of the main ideas in JF's book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, your hosts focus on these burning questions in hopes that the answers might shed light on our collective predicament and the paths that lead out of it.

Photo by Petar Milošević via Wikimedia Commons

REFERENCES

JF's upcoming course on the nature and power of art, starting May 10th, 2021

JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice

Weird Studies, Episode 84 on the Empress card
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Adam Savage, Special effects designer
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Kabbalistic emanationist cosmology
Henry Corbin’s concept of the “imaginal”
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Tibetan book of the Dead
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and The Soul of the World
Phil Ford, “Battlefield medicine”
Jaques Ellul, idea of “technique”
Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith

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.

Holiday Bonus: Magic, Madness, and Sadness

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Weird Studies will launch its fourth season on January 6th, 2021. But to celebtrate the end of very strange year, we thought we'd release a conversation which until now was available only to our top-tier Patreon backers. Therein we discuss the philosophical underpinnings of "Puhoy," memorable episode of the brilliant animated series Adventure Time. This was JF's introduction to a show that Phil has often recommended for its novel treatment of complex ideas and downright weirdness.

Watch "Puhoy" on YouTube:
Part 1
Part 2

Episode 76: Below the Abyss: On Bergson's Metaphysics

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 10:00:00 -0400

According to the French philosopher Henri Bergson, there are two ways of knowing the world: through analysis or through intuition. Analysis is our normal mode of apprehension. It involves knowing what's out there through the accumulation and comparison of concepts. Intuition is a direct engagement with the absolute, with the world as it exists before we starting tinkering with it conceptually. Bergson believed that Western metaphysics erred from the get-go when it gave in to the all-too-human urge to take the concepts by which we know things for the things themselves. His entire oeuvre was an attempt to snap us out of that spell and plug us directly into the flow of pure duration, that primordial time that is the real Real. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss the genius -- and possible limitations -- of his metaphysics.

REFERENCES

Henri Bergson, "Introduction to Metaphysics"
Weird Studies episode 13 -- The Obscure: On the Philosophy of Heraclitus
Weird Studies episode 16: On Dogen Zenji's 'Genjokoan'
Bertrand Russel's critique of Bergson's philosophy
Dōgen Zenji, Shōbōgenzō
Wiliam James, Principles of Psychology
Plato, Theaetetus
Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
Aleister Crowley, British occultist
Graham Harman, "The Third Table"
Weird Studies episode 8 - On Graham Harman's "The Third Table"
Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Episode 75: Our Old Friend the Monolith: On Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 13:30:00 -0400

"You don't find reality only in your own backyard, you know," Stanley Kubrick once told an interviewer. "In fact, sometimes that's the last place you'll find it." Oddly, this episode of Weird Studies begins with Phil Ford hatching the idea of putting a replica of the monolith from 2001 in his backyard. As the ensuing discussion suggests, this would amount to putting reality -- or the Real, as we like to call it -- in the place where it may be least apparent. Perhaps that is what Kubrick did when he planted his monolithic film in thousands of movie theatres back in 1968. Moviegoers went in expecting a Kubrickian twist on Buck Rogers; they came out changed by the experience, much like the hominids of great veld in the "Dawn of Man" sequence that opens the film. This is what all great art does, and if you look closely, maybe 2001 can tell you something about how it does it. Because in the end, the film is the monolith, and the monolith is all art.

REFERENCES

Stanley Kubrick (dir.), 2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke, "The Sentinel"
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (novel)
Clement Greenberg, American art critic
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), The Shining
Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory
Weird Studies episode 62: It's Like "The Shining," But With Nuns: On "Black Narcissus"
Ligeti, Atmosphères
Gerard Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology
Jay Weidner, Kubrick's Odyssey: Secrets Hidden in the Films of Stanley Kubrick
Rob Ager's analysis of 2001 (Ager was criticized for not citing Loughlin above)
Eric Norton's Playboy interview with Stanley Kubrick
J. F. Martel, "The Kubrick Gaze" in Daniel Pinchbeck & Ken Jordan (eds.), Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age
J. F. Martel, "The Future is Immanent: Speculations on a Possible World"
Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Sid Meier's Civilization V
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), A Clockwork Orange
Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology"
Gilbert Ryle, "Improvisation"

Episode 71: The Medium is the Message

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 13:00:00 -0400

On the surface, the phrase "the medium is the message," prophetic as it may have been when Marshall McLuhan coined it, points a now-obvious fact of our wired world, namely that the content of any medium is less important than its form. The advent of email, for instance, has brought about changes in society and culture that are more far-reaching than the content of any particular email. On the other hand, this aphorism of McLuhan's has the ring of an utterance of the Delphic Oracle. As Phil proposes in this episode of Weird Studies, it is an example of what Zen practitioners call a koan, a statement that occludes and illumines in equal measures, a jewel whose shining surface is an invitation to descend into dark depths. Join JF and Phil as they discuss the mystical and cosmic implications of McLuhan's oracular vision.

REFERENCES

McLuhan, Understanding Media
The Playboy interview
McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
Graham Harman, American philosopher
Clement Greenberg, American critic
Dale Pendell, Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft
Brian Eno, British composer
Marshall and Eric McLuhan, The Laws of Media: The New Science _
Jonathan Sterne, _The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction
Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (editors), The Essential McLuhan
Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America
David Fincher (director), The Social Network _
Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema I _and _Cinema II
Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin
Eric Havelock,_ Preface to Plato_
Walter J. Ong, American theorist
Plato, [Republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic(Plato))_

Episode 66: On Diviner's Time

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 10:30:00 -0500

In the paper discussed in this episode, Phil Ford coins the term "diviner's time" to denote a particular feeling that will be familiar to anyone who has engaged in divinatory or magical practice, namely the feeling that it all means something, that the universe, with all its chaos and randomness, nevertheless contains -- or is itself -- a kind of music. This episode goes deep down the rabbit hole as Phil and JF try to wrap their heads around conceptions of time, causality, and meaning that are very different from our usual understanding of those terms.

REFERENCES

Phil Ford, "Diviner’s Time" (Patreon exclusive)

Karl Pfeifer (director), Hellier
Joshua Ramey, "Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux"
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande
Jung, "On Synchronicity"
Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
Bruno Latour, An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns
Grant Morrison on chaos magic, the occult, and sigil creation
Austin Osman Spare's sigil theory
Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious
Alan Chapman, Advanced Magick for Beginners
William James's essays in psychical research: bibliography
Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
Toronto World Youth Day 2002
Crowley, Magick Without Tears
Leibniz's concept of pre-established harmony
Matthew Segall on the Greek concepts of time, "Minding Time: Chronos, Kairos and Aion in an Archetypal Cosmos"
Richard Lester (director), Hard Day's Night
Freud, "The Uncanny"
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

Episode 64: Dreams and Shadows: On Ursula Le Guin's 'A Wizard of Earthsea'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 10:30:00 -0500

In her National Book Award acceptance speech in 2014, Ursula K. Le Guin intimated that, far from being superseded by digital technology, fantastic fiction has never been more important than it is about to become. Soon, she prophesied, "we will need writers who can remember freedom -- poets, visionaries, realists of a larger reality." In this episode, Phil and JF plumb the prophetic depths of one of her most famous books, A Wizard of Earthsea. A discussion of the novel's style and lore leads us into the politics and metaphysics of fantasy as developed by Le Guin and her predecessor, J. R. R. Tolkien. In the end, we realize that fantasy is not the literary ghetto it's been made out to be, but the sine qua non of all fiction.

SHOW NOTES

John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Heidegger, "On the Origin of the Work of Art"
Beowulf, An Anglo-Saxon epic poem
Weird Studies, episode 41 -- On Speculative Fiction, with Matt Cardin
Weird Studies, episode 61 -- Evil and Ecstasy: On 'The Silence of the Lambs'
Weird Studies, episode 62: Like 'The Shining,' But With Nuns: On 'Black Narcissus'
The Complete Romances of Chretien de Troyes (translated by J.F.'s mentor, David Staines)
Sir Thomas Malory, La Morte d'Arthur
Lewis Carroll, British fantasist
Ursula K. Le Guin's acceptance speech at the National Book Awards, 2014
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and A Treatise of Human Nature

Episode 63: Faculty X: On Colin Wilson's 'The Occult'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 14:00:00 -0500

At its simplest, what Colin Wilson calls Faculty X is "simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present." Yet its existence is evinced in all those phenomena that modernity files under "supernatural" or "occult." As difficult to explain as it is impossible to omit from any honest survey of human existence, the occult haunts the modern, not just as a vestige of the past but also, perhaps, as a promise from a time to come. For Wilson, magic isn't the living fossil the arch-rationalists would like it to be, but a "science of the future." Faculty X is an evolutionary power, innately positive, inseparable from the will to live and the unshakeable conviction that, somehow, this world has some real, ineffable meaning. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss Wilson's concept of Faculty X as elaborated in his monumental 1971 work, The Occult.

REFERENCES

Colin Wilson, The Occult: A History
Rick and Morty, American sitcom
Colin, Wilson, Dreaming to Some Purpose
Colin Wilson, The Outsider
Gary Lachman, Beyond the Robot
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence
Making Sense, episode 107: Is Life Actually Worth Living?
Peter Wessel Zapffe, Norwegian philosopher
Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
Emil Cioran, Franco-Romanian essayist
Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher
At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing, Library of America collection
Joe Frazier, American pugilist
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
Edouard Schuré, [The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions](Edouard Schuré, _The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religion
Weird Studies, episode 8: On Graham Harman's "The Third Table"
Thomas Merton, American monk
Gary Snyder, American poet

Episode 50: Demogorgon: On 'Stranger Things'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 03 Jul 2019 10:30:00 -0400

The Duffer Brothers' hit series Stranger Things is many things: an exemplary piece of entertainment in the summer blockbuster mold, a fresh take on the "kids on bikes" subgenre of science fiction, a loving pastiche of 1980s Hollywood cinema. And as Phil and JF attempt to show in this episode, Stranger Things is also a deep investigation into the metaphysical assumptions of our times, and a bold statement on the ontology of the analog real. This, at least, was the thesis of JF's three-part essay "Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things," which appeared on Metapsychosis after the first season dropped in 2016. Here, Phil and JF revisit that essay in order to expand on its arguments and discuss how it hoilds up in light of the series continued unfolding. The conversation touches on Apple's famous 1984 ad for the first Macintosh, the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the otherworldliness of airports, the ensorcelments of consumerism, and much more.

REFERENCES

Stranger Things
"Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things" available at Metapsychosis or in ebook format
Samuel Delaney, Dhalgren
1984 Apple commercial for Macintosh
Wild Wild Country, Netflix documentary series
Tom Frank, “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent”
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Arcade Fire, “We Used to Wait”
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody
William James, A Pluralistic Universe
Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity
Weird Studies, episode 2: Garmonbozia
Homer, Odyssey
Matt Cardin, Dark Awakenings
The Wachowskis, The Matrix
Jonathan Haight and Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind

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 46: Thomas Ligotti's Angel

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 08 May 2019 14:45:00 -0400

In his short story "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel," contemporary horror author Thomas Ligotti contrasts the chaotic monstrosity of dreams with the cold, indifferent, and no less monstrous purity of angels. It is the story of a boy whose vivid dream life is sapping his vital force, and who resorts to esoteric measures to rectify the situation. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the beauty and horror of dreams, the metaphysical signifiance of angels and demons, and the potential dangers of seeking the peace of absolute "purity" in the wondrous flux of lived experience.

REFERENCES

Thomas Ligotti, "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel" (read by Jon Padgett)

Roger Scruton, The Face of God
Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer
Thomas Ligotti, "The Last Feast of Harlequin" in Grimscribe: His Lives and Works
Robert Aickman, English author
H. P. Lovecraft, American author
H. R. Giger, Swiss artist
Jean Giraud a.k.a. Moebius, French comic book artist
Donald Barthelme, American author
Pierre Soulages, French artist
Bruno Schulz, Polish author
Thomas Bernhard, Austrian author
Edgar Allan Poe, American author
J. F. Martel, "The Beautiful Madness: Primacy of Wonder in the Works of Thomas Ligotti" (Forthcoming in James Curcio (ed.), Masks: Bowie and the Artists of Artifice from Intellect Books)
Algernon Blackwood, "The Wendigo"
Thomas Ligotti, "The Dark Beauty of Unheard of Horrors" in The Thomas Ligotti Reader: Essays and Explorations
Dogen Zenji, Zen master
Manichaeism
Spencer Brown, The Laws of Form
Ramsey Dukes, Words Made Flesh: Information In Formation
Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical
Thomas Ligotti, "Purity," in Teatro Grottesco
James Joyce, Ulysses
Advaita Vedanta
Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
P. J. O’Rourke, political satirist

Episode 36: On Hyperstition

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 10:15:00 -0500

Hyperstition is a key concept in the philosophy of Nick Land. It refers to fictions which, given enough time and libidinal investment, become realities. JF and Phil explore the notion using one of those optometric apparatuses with multiple lenses -- deleuzian, magical, mythological, political, ethical, etc. The goal isn't to understand how fictions participate in reality (that'll have to wait for another episode), but to ponder what this implies for a sapient species. The conversation weaves together such varied topics as Twin Peaks: The Return, Internet meme magic (Trump as tulpa!), Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysics, occult experiments in spirit creation, the Brothers Grimm, and the phantasmic overtones of The Communist Manifesto. In the end we can only say, "What a load of bullsh*t!"

Header Image: Still from the 1920 German Expressionist film The Golem: How He Came in the World, by Paul Wegener.

REFERENCES

JF's notes on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
David Lynch (director), Twin Peaks: The Return
Phil Ford, "Garmonbozia" (work in progress, unpublished)
Delphi Carstens, "Hyperstition"
Delphi Carstens, "Hyperstition: An Introduction" (2009 interview with Nick Land)
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
CCRU Archives
The occult concept of the egregore
William Irwin Thompson, Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford, The Blood of the Saints
A. T. L. Carver, "The Truth About Pepe the Frog and the Cult of Kek"
Paul Spencer, "Trump's Occult Online Supporters Believer 'Meme Magic' Got Him Elected"
Colm A. Kelleher, The Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Sun Ra, Space is the Place

Episode 32: Orbis Tertius: Borges on Magic, Conspiracy and Idealism

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 31 Oct 2018 11:15:00 -0400

Jorge Luis Borges's story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a metaphysical detective story, an armchair conspiracy thriller, and a masterpiece of weird fiction. In this tale penned by a true literary magician, Phil and JF see an opportunity to talk about magic, hyperstition, non-linear time, and the power of metaphysics to reshape the world. When Phil questions his co-host's animus against idealist doctrines, the discussion turns to dreams, cybernetics, and information theory, before reaching common ground with the dumbfound appreciation of radical mystery.

Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in Ficciones
Weird Studies, Episode 29, "On Lovecraft"
George Berkley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)
John Crowley, the Aegypt tetralogy
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia - Urn Burial
Richard Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung)
William James, A Pluralistic Universe
Karl Schroeder, "Degrees of Freedom"
Weird Studies, Episode 26, "Living in a Glass Age"
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Dogen, Genjokoan

Episode 16: On Dogen Zenji's 'Genjokoan'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 30 May 2018 10:00:00 -0400

JF and Phil tackle Genjokoan, a profound and puzzling work of philosophy by Dogen Zenji. In it, the 13th-century Zen master ponders the question, "If everything is already enlightened, why practice Zen?" As a lapsed Zen practitioner ("a shit buddhist") with many hours of meditation under his belt, Phil draws on personal experience to dig into Dogen's strange and startling answers, while JF speaks from his perspective as a "decadent hedonist." "When one side is illumined," says Dogen, "the other is dark." For proof of this utterance, you could do worse than listen to this episode of Weird Studies.

REFERENCES

Dogen Zenji, Genjokoan
Shohaku Okumura and the Sanshin Zen Community in Bloomington, Indiana
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Weird Studies, Episode 8: "On Graham Harman's 'The Third Table'"
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image
Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Joris-Karl Huysmans, À Rebours (Against Nature)
Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism