Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Time”

Episode 175: Don't Look Now: Live at Lily Dale

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 10:30:00 -0400

Daphne du Maurier was a prolific English writer of novels, plays, and short stories resonant with what she termed "a sense of unreality." In this episode, JF and Phil discuss her great short story "Don't Look Now," which Nicholas Roeg famously adapted to the screen in 1973 in a film starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. Recorded live at Shannon Taggart's Lily Dale Symposium on July 25th, 2024, the discussion takes a number of turns, exploring the ghost as an "image of itself," the phenomenon of "deathishness," the experience of derealization, the human capacity to break time, and grief as a rift in time.

Visit the Weirdosphere and sign up for JF's upcoming course of lectures and discussions, "Whirl Without End: Fairy Tales and the Weird," starting on September 5th, 2024.

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.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES

Daphne du Maurier, "Don't Look Now"
Nicholas Roeg (dir.), Don't Look Now
Weird Studies, Episode 66 on “Diviner’s Time”
Chuck Klosterman, "Tomorrow Rarely Knows”
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Peter Medak (dir.), The Changeling
Philip K. Dick, “Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes”

Episode 159: Three Songs, with Meredith Michael

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 11:15:00 -0500

Every once in a while, JF and Phil like to do a “song swap.” Each picks a song, and the ensuing conversation locates linkages and correspondences where none was previously thought to exist. In this episode, they are joined by the music scholar Meredith Michael – Weird Studies assistant, and co-host of Cosmophonia, a podcast about music and outer space – to discuss songs by Lili Boulanger, Vienna Teng, and Iron & Wine. Before long, this disparate assortment personal favourites occasions a weirdly focused dialogue on time, impermanence, control, (mis)recognition, and the affinity of art and synchronicity.

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.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES
Iron and Wine, “Passing Afternoon”
Vienna Teng, “The Hymn of Acxiom”, (and here is the live version)
Lili Boulanger, Vieille Priére Bouddhique
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle Mozart’s Arrow
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Vladimir Jankelevitch, Music and the Ineffable
Hector Berlioz, Fugue on “amen” from La Damnation du Faust
Slavoj Zizek, A Pervert’s Guide to Idiology
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic
Shepard Tone
Rudolf Steiner, The Influces of Lucifer and Ahriman

Special Guest: Meredith Michael.

Episode 149: Song Swap: On Judee Sill's 'The Kiss' and Wilco's 'Jesus, Etc.'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 12:00:00 -0400

Occasionally, JF and Phil do a song swap. Each host chooses a song he loves and shares it with the other, and then they record an episode on it. This time, JF chose to discuss "Jesus, Etc." from Wilco's 2001 album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Phil picked Judee Sill's ethereal "The Kiss," from Heart Food (1973). It was in the zone of Time, in all its strangeness, that the two songs began to resonate with one another. Sill's song is a fated grasping at the eternal that is present even when it eludes us, and "Jesus, Etc." is a leap across time that captures, in jagged shards and signal bursts, the events of the day on which Wilco's album was scheduled to drop: September 11, 2001.

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!

REFERENCES

Judee Sill, “The Kiss”
James Elkins, Pictures and Tears
Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, “Surf’s Up”
Weird Studies, Episode 148 on “Twin Peaks”
Wilco, “Jesus Etc.”
Jeff Buckley, singer-songwriter
William Gibson, Forward to Dhalgren
L. E. J. Brouwer, Concept of “two-ity”
Dogen, Genjokoan
David Bowie, “Heroes”
Philip K. Dick, Valis
Weird Studies, Episode 147 “You Must Change Your Life”
Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
James Longley, Iraq in Fragments
Sam Jones, I am Trying to Break your Heart
Number Stations

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 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 10: Philip K. Dick: Adrift in the Multiverse

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 10:00:00 -0400

In 1977, Philip K. Dick read an essay in France entitled, "If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others." In it, he laid out one of the dominant tropes of his fictional oeuvre, the idea of parallel universes. It became clear in the course of the lecture that Dick didn't intend this to be a talk about science fiction, but about real life - indeed, about his life. In this episode, Phil and JF seriously consider the speculations which, depending on whom you ask, make PKD either a genius or a madman. This distinction may not matter in the end. As Dick himself wrote in his 8,000-page Exegesis: "The madman speaks the moral of the piece."

REFERENCES

Philip K. Dick, excerpts from “If You Find This World Bad You Should See Some Of The Others”
R. Crumb, The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick
Emmanuel Carrère, I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick
“20 Examples of the Mandela Effect That’ll Make You Believe You’re In A Parallel Universe”
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Weird Studies, "Episode 9: On Aleister Crowley and the Idea of Magick"
Weird Studies, "Episode 4: Exploring the Weird with Erik Davis"
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Sun Ra, Space is the Place
Zebrapedia (crowdsourced online transcribing/editing of the Exegesis)
Ramsey Dukes (Lionel Snell), Words Made Flesh
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
Bernado Kastrup, Why Materialism is Baloney
Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits
Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”