Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Morality”

Episode 61: Evil and Ecstasy: On 'The Silence of the Lambs'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 12:15:00 -0500

The Welsh writer Arthur Machen defined good and evil as "ecstasies." Each one is a "withdrawal from the common life." On this view, any artistic investigation into the nature of good and evil can't remain safely ensconced our modern, common-life construal of thinigs. It must become fantastic and incorporate aspects of "nature" that feel "supernatural" from a modern standpoint. Jonathan Demme's screen adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs is a powerful example. The film oscillates undecidably between a straightforward crime story and a work of supernatural horror. In this episode, JF and Phil cast Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling as figures in a myth that pits the individual against the institution, the singular against the type, and the forces of light against the forces of darkness.

REFERENCES

Jonathan Demme (dir.), The Silence of the Lambs
Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (original novel)
Carl Jung on the doctrine of Privatio Boni
Johann Sebastian Bach, The Goldberg Variations
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Rolling Stones, "Sympathy for the Devil"
Howard Shore, Canadian composer
Arthur Machen, The White People
Weird Studies, episode 3: Ecstasy, Sin, and "The White People"
Machen, The White People
Machen, Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature

Episode 52: On Beauty

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 10:30:00 -0400

The idea that beauty might denote an actual quality of the world, something outside the human frame, is one of the great taboos of modern intellectual thought. Beauty, we are almost universally told, is a cultural contrivance rooted in politics and history, an illusion that exists only in human heads, for human reasons. On this view, a world without us would be a world without beauty. But in this episode Phil and JF explore two texts, by James Hillman and Peter Schjeldahl, that dare to challenge the modern orthodoxy. For Hillman and Schjeldahl, to experience the beautiful is precisely the break out of human bondage and touch the Outside. Beauty may even be one of the few truly objective experiences anyone could hope for.

Peter Schjeldahl, “Notes on Beauty,“ in Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics
James Hillman, “The Practice of Beauty,” in Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics
C.G. Jung's retreat, Bollingen Tower
Ugly public art in Palo Alto
Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
Deleuze and Guattari, “Of the Refrain,” from A Thousand Plateaus
Roger Scruton, Beauty
Weird Studies, Episode 36 -- On Hyperstition
Weird Studies, Episode 33 -- The Fine Art of Changing the Subject: On Duchamp's "Fountain"
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty
Ingri D'Aulaires, D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths
Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time
Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light
God, Book of Job

Episode 51: Blind Seers: On Flannery O'Connor's 'Wise Blood'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 11:30:00 -0400

Through her fiction, Flannery O'Connor reenvisioned life as a supernatural war wherein each soul becomes the site of a clash of mysterious, almost incomprehensible forces. Her first novel, Wise Blood, tells the story of Hazel Motes, a young preacher with a new religion to sell: the Church Without Christ. In this episode, JF and Phil read Motes's misadventures in the "Jesus-haunted" city of Taulkinham, Tennessee, as a prophetic vision of the modern condition that is at once supremely tragic and funny as hell. As O'Connor herself wrote in her prefac to the book: "(Wise Blood) is a comic novel about a Christian malgré lui, and as such, very serious, for all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death.

REFERENCES

Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
James Marshall, George and Martha (here's a great NYT piece on the books)
Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods
Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty
Amy Hungerford's lecture on Wise Blood (Yale University)

Episode 28: Weird Music, Part Two

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 14:00:00 -0400

"Music is worth living for," Andrew W.K. sings in his latest rock anthem. In this second episode on the weirdness of music, JF and Phil focus on two works steeped in ambiguity and paradox: Bob Dylan's "Jokerman," from the landmark post-Christian album Infidels, and Franz Liszt's "Mephisto Waltz, No. 1: The Dance at the Village Inn," inspired by an episode in the Faust legend. If this conversation has a central theme, it may be music's power to unhinge every fixed binary, from God and the Devil to culture and nature. Music, as exemplified in these pieces, can put us in touch with the abiding mystery of the eternal in the historical, the unhuman in the human... The hills are alive!

REFERENCES

Bob Dylan, "Jokerman"
Franz Liszt, “Mephisto Waltz no. 1,” performed by Boris Berezovsky

Andrew WK, "Music is Worth Living For"
Leonard Cohen, “The Future”
C.G. Jung, Aion
Douglas Rushkoff, Testament
The Guardian, “Carthaginians sacrificed own children, archaeologists say”
Garry Wills, "Our Moloch"
Minoan snake goddess statues
Richard Wagner, Parsifal http://www.monsalvat.no/
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts
Beckett, Not I
Nikolaus Lenau, German Romantic poet
Wolgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 1, translated by David Luke
Weird Studies, Episode 3: Sin: "Ecstasy, and the White People"