Weird Studies

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

11 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

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

27 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 (unsuccessfull...

Episode 120: On Radical Mystery

13 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Though it is seldom acknowledged in the weirdosphere, there is a difference between weirdness and mystery. Most of the time, the Weird confronts us wi...

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

30 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 unde...

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

16 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by music scholar and Weird Studies assistant Meredith Michael to discuss two strange and unsettling short stor...

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

02 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 tab...

Episode 116: On 'Blade Runner'

16 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In his 1978 bestseller The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins described humans as "survival machines" whose sole purpose is the replication of genes. All o...

Episode 115: Transience & Immersion: On Brian Eno's 'Music for Airports'

02 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Soft, soothing, and understated as a rule, ambient music may seem the least weird of all musical genres. Not so, say JF and Phil, who devote this epis...

Episode 114: On the Wheel of Fortune, the Tenth Card of the Tarot

19 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Season five kicks off with a new installment in the ongoing series on the Tarot's twenty-two major arcana. This time, your hosts overcome the trials t...

Episode 113: Framing the Invisible, with Shannon Taggart

22 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Shannon Taggart's book Seance is a landmark in art photography and the history of psychical research. Taggart spent years photographing practitioners ...

Episode 112: Readings from the 'Book of Probes': The Mysticism of Marshall McLuhan

08 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The Book of Probes contains a assortment of aphorisms and maxims from the work of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, each one set to evocat...

Episode 111: What Is Best in Life: On "Conan the Barbarian"

24 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

A wish-fulfilment fantasy for pubescent boys of all ages, or a subtle disquisition on the ethics of a sorcerous world? John Milius' Conan the Barbaria...

Episode 110: Monks of the Cultural Apocalypse: 'The Glass Bead Game,' Part Two

10 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In the current "attention economy," which has resulted in plummeting literacy rates and the almost wanton neglect of various cultural practices, what ...

Episode 109: Infinite Play: On 'The Glass Bead Game,' by Hermann Hesse

27 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

JF and Phil have been talking about doing a show on The Glass Bead Game since Weird Studies' earliest beginnings. It is a science-fiction novel that a...

Episode 108: On Skepticism and the Paranormal

13 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Modern skeptics pride themselves on being immune to unreason. They present themselves as defenders of rationality, civilization, and good sense agains...

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

29 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Joy Williams' third novel, Breaking and Entering, is the story of lovers who break into strangers' homes and live their lives for a time before moving...

Episode 106: The Wanderer: On Weird Studies

01 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, Weird Studies turns meta, reflecting on the peculiar medium that is podcasting, and how it has shaped the Weird Studies project itsel...

Episode 105: Fire Walk with Tamler Sommers

18 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The Twin Peaks mythos has been with Weird Studies from the very beginning, and it is only fitting that it should have a return. In this episode, Phil ...

Episode 104: We'd Love to Turn You On: 'Sgt. Pepper' and the Beatles

04 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

It is said that for several days after the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the spring of 1967, you could have driven from one U.S....

Episode 103: On the Tower, the Sixteenth Card of the Tarot

21 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Continuing their series on the tarot, Phil and JF discuss the card nobody wants to see in a reading – The Tower. Featuring lightning bolts, plumes o...

Episode 102: On Pan, with Gyrus

07 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

"What was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river?" With this question, the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning opens her fa...

Episode 101: Our Fear of the Dark: On Tanizaki's 'In Praise of Shadows'

23 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In modern physics as in Western theology, darkness and shadows have a purely negative existence. They are merely the absence of light. In mythology an...

Episode 100: The Price of Beauty is Horror: On the Films of John Carpenter

09 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Central to the tradition of cosmic horror is the suggestion that the ultimate truth about our universe is at once knowable and unthinkable, such that ...

Episode 99: Curing the Human Condition: On 'Wild Wild Country'

26 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In this never-before-released episode recorded in 2019, Phil and JF travel to rural Oregon through the Netflix docu-series, Wild Wild Country. The ser...

Episode 98: Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica

12 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Exotica is a kind of music that was popular in the 1950s, when it was simply known as "mood music." Though somewhat obscure today, the sound of exotic...

Episode 97: Art in the Age of Artifice

28 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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'...

Episode 96: Beautiful Beast: On Jean Cocteau's 'La Belle et la Bête'

14 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Jean Cocteau's visionary rendition of Madame de Beaumont's fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast," itself the retelling of a story that may be several mill...

Episode 95: Demon Seed: On Doris Lessing's 'The Fifth Child'

31 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Doris Lessing's uncategorizable oeuvre reached strange new heights in 1988 with the publication of her short novel The Fifth Child. The story couldn't...

Episode 94: All is Mysterious: On the Moon Card in the Tarot

17 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

"Here is a weird, deceptive life." Thus does Aleister Crowley describe the meaning of one of the most sinister and spectral cards in the tarot. In thi...

Episode 93: Living and Dying in a Secular Age: On Charles Taylor and Disenchantment

03 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In A Secular Age, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor tries to come to grips with the seismic development that transformed the world after the Ren...

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

17 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Episode 91: On Susanna Clarke's 'Piranesi'

03 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, Phil and JF explore the vast palatial halls of Susanna Clarke's novel Piranesi. Set in an otherworld consisting of endless galleries ...

Episode 90: 'The Owl in Daylight': On Philip K. Dick's Unwritten Masterpiece

20 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Weird Studies has so far devoted just one show to Philip K. Dick, and that was way back in April 2018, with episode 10, "Adrift in the Multiverse." La...

Episode 89: On Ishmael Reed's 'Mumbo Jumbo,' or, Why We Need More Magical Thinking

06 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo is a conspiracy thriller, a postmodern experiment, a revolutionary tract, a celebration, and a magical working. ...

Holiday Bonus: Magic, Madness, and Sadness

21 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

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 conversati...

Episode 88: On Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean's 'Mr Punch'

09 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Before Coraline, before American Gods, in the early days of the Sandman series, Neil Gaiman collaborated with Dave McKean on some truly groundbreaking...

Episode 87: Glyphs, Rifts, and Ecstasy: On Arthur Machen's Vision of Art

25 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

It would be wrong to describe Arthur Machen's Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature (1902) as a work of nonfiction, since the book features...

Episode 86: On E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman," and Freud's Sequel to It

11 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The German polymath E. T. A. Hoffmann is one of the founding figures of what we now call weird literature. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss one o...

Episode 85: On 'The Wicker Man'

28 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Since its release in 1973, Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man has exerted a profound influence on the development of horror cinema, a rich vein of folk mus...

Episode 84: Mona Lisa Smile: On the Empress, the Third Card in the Tarot

14 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

This second instalment in our series on the major trumps of the traditional tarot deck features the Empress. As Aleister Crowley writes in The Book of...

Episode 83: On David Lynch's 'Lost Highway'

30 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

David Lynch's Lost Highway was released in 1997, five years after Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me elicited a fusillade of boos and hisses at Cannes. The...

Episode 82: On The I Ching

16 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The Book of Changes, or I Ching, is more than an ancient text. It's a metaphysical guide, a fun game, and -- to your hosts at least -- a lifelong, ste...

Episode 81: Gnostic Lit: On M. John Harrison's 'The Course of the Heart'

02 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The British writer M. John Harrison is responsible for some of the most significant incursions of the Weird into the literary imagination of the last ...

Episode 80: The Pit and the Pyramid, or, How to Beat the Philosopher's Blues

19 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Your hosts' exploration of mysticism and vision in pop music continues with two powerful pieces of popular music: Radiohead's "Pyramid Song" from the ...

Episode 79: Love, Death, and the Dream Life

05 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of Weird Studies, an improvised analysis of two pop songs -- Nina Simone's version of James Shelton's "Lilac Wine" and Ghostface Killa...

Episode 78: On John Keel's 'The Mothman Prophecies'

22 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

At the time The Mothman Prophecies' was released in 1975, and again when he penned an afterword for the 2001 edition, John Keel appeared to have made ...

Episode 77: What a Fool Believes: On the Unnumbered Card in the Tarot

08 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

"What a fool believes he sees, no wise man can reason away." This line from a Doobie Brothers song is probably one of the most profound in the history...

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

24 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

According to the French philosopher Henri Bergson, there are two ways of knowing the world: through analysis or through intuition. Analysis is our nor...

Bonus: The Duke of Ellington

18 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

When the quarantine began, professors around the world raced to put their classes online, and for the Jacobs School's big undergraduate music history ...

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

10 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

"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'...

Episode 74: A Luminous Parasite: Jung on Art, Part Two

27 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In this second part of their exploration of C. G. Jung's essay "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," JF and Phil try to discern the ps...

Episode 73: Carl Jung and the Power of Art, Part One

13 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

This is the first of two conversations that Phil and JF are devoting to C. G. Jung's seminal essay, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetr...

Episode 72: Morning of the Mutants: On the Castrati

29 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

For over two centuries in early modern Italy, boys were selected for their singing talent castrated before the onset of puberty. The goal was to prese...

Episode 71: The Medium is the Message

15 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

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 ou...

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

01 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

James Curcio is an American multidisciplinary artist and nonfiction writer whose works include the novels Join My Cult, The Party at the World's End, ...

Episode 69: Special Episode: On Some Mental Effects of the Pandemic

25 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

What is there to say about the COVID-19 virus that hasn't already been said, over and over again, all around the world, in quaratined houses and on TV...

Weird Stories: "On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake" by William James

23 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In preparation for an upcoming special episode on living in the early days of the Covid-19 Pandemic, here's Phil Ford reading an essay William James w...

Episode 68: On James Hillman's 'The Dream and the Underworld'

18 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In 1979, the American psychologist James Hillman published The Dream and the Underworld, a polemical meditation on the nature of dreams. Rejecting the...

Episode 67: Goblins, Goat-Gods and Gates: On 'Hellier'

04 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On the night before this episode of Weird Studies was released, a bunch of folks on the Internet performed a collective magickal working. Prompted by ...

Episode 66: On Diviner's Time

19 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

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 h...

Episode 65: Touched by that Fire: On Visionary Literature, with B. W. Powe

05 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

B. W. Powe is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and professor at York University, in Toronto. His work, though it covers an immense range of topics ...

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

22 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In her National Book Award acceptance speech in 2014, Ursula K. Le Guin intimated that, far from being superseded by digital technology, fantastic fic...

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

08 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

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 existenc...

Episode 62: It's Like 'The Shining', But With Nuns: On 'Black Narcissus'

18 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The 1947 British film Black Narcissus is many things: an allegory of the end of empire, a chilling ghost story with nary a spook in sight, a psycholog...

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

04 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

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 inves...

Episode 60: Space is the Place: On Sun Ra, Gnosticism, and the Tarot

20 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Somebody once said, "No prophet is welcome in his own country." Whether this was true in the case of jazz musician and composer Sun Ra depends on whom...

Episode 59: Green Mountains Are Always Walking

06 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around a lake." This line from Wallace Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" captures something of the myster...

Episode 58: What Do Critics Do?

23 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

What is the role of the critic in the world of art? For some, including lots of critics, the figure exudes an aura of authority: her task is to tell u...

Episode 57: Box of God(s): On 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'

09 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Raiders of the Lost Ark is more than a Hollywood movie made in the summer blockbuster mold. As Phil says in his intro to this popping Weird Studies ep...

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

25 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The German poet and philosopher Jean Gebser's major work, The Ever-Present Origin, is a monumental study of the evolution of consciousness from prehi...

Episode 55: The Great Weird North: On Algernon Blackwood's 'The Wendigo'

11 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

No survey of weird literature would be complete without mentioning Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). As with all masters of the genre, Blackwood's take...

Episode 54: Lobsters, Pianos, and Hidden Gods

28 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

"All things feel," Pythagoas said. Panpsychism, the belief that consciousnes is a property of all things and not limited to the human brain, is back i...

Episode 53: Astral Jet Lag: On William Gibson's 'Pattern Recognition'

14 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

William Gibson's Pattern Recognition was published in 2003, in the wake of 9/11. You would think that a novel about the early Internet's effects on th...

Episode 52: On Beauty

31 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

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...

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

17 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Through her fiction, Flannery O'Connor reenvisioned life as a supernatural war wherein each soul becomes the site of a clash of mysterious, almost inc...

Episode 50: Demogorgon: On 'Stranger Things'

03 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The Duffer Brothers' hit series Stranger Things is many things: an exemplary piece of entertainment in the summer blockbuster mold, a fresh take on th...

Episode 49: Out of Time: Nietzsche on History

19 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In his essay "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," Nietzsche attacks the notion that humans are totally determined by the historical fo...

Episode 48: Walking the Tightrope with Erik Davis

05 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Journalist and historian of religion Erik Davis joins Phil and JF to talk about his latest magnum opus, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionar...

Episode 47: Machines of Loving Grace: Technology and the Unabomber

22 May 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Made in 2003, Lutz Dammbeck's documentary The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet is a film about many things, but the gist of it is something l...

Episode 46: Thomas Ligotti's Angel

08 May 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In his short story "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel," contemporary horror author Thomas Ligotti contrasts the chaotic monstrosity of dreams with the cold, indif...

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

24 Apr 2019

Contributed by Lukas

"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...

Episode 44: Doomed to Enchantment: The Psychical Research of William James

09 Apr 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The great American thinker William James knew well that no intellectual pursuit is purely intellectual. His interest in the "supernormal," whether it ...

Episode 43: On Shirley Jackson

27 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Shirley Jackson's stories and novels rank among the greatest weird works produced in America during the 20th century. However, unlike authors such as ...

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

13 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

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 aro...

Episode 41: On Speculative Fiction, with Matt Cardin

27 Feb 2019

Contributed by Lukas

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 und...

Episode 40: On Jonathan Glazer's 'Under the Skin'

13 Feb 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In Jonathan Glazer's loose screen adaptation of Michel Faber's novel Under the Skin, a creature of mysterious origin drives around Scotland in a white...

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

30 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

"The world is not simply composed of physical causes strung together in strictly materialistic and mechanical fashion," writes Prof. Jeffrey J. Kripal...

Episode 38: Style as Analysis

16 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Music writing has always been something of an occult practice, trying by some weird alchemy to use concepts to describe stuff that defies the basic ca...

Episode 37: Entities, with Stuart Davis

02 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Several years ago, on New Year’s Eve, a tall, purple-robed praying mantis appeared to multidisciplinary artist Stuart Evan Davis as he meditated whi...

Christmas Bonus: Hyperstition Addendum

25 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Happy holidays, Weird Studies listeners! In this short "Christmas Bonus" episode, your intrepid hosts finish up what began as a discussion of Nick Lan...

Episode 36: On Hyperstition

19 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Hyperstition is a key concept in the philosophy of Nick Land. It refers to fictions which, given enough time and libidinal investment, become realitie...

Episode 35: Whirl Without End: On M.C. Richards' 'Centering'

05 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The first step in any pottery project is to center the clay on the potter's wheel. In her landmark essay Centering: In Pottery, Poetry and the Person ...

Episode 34: The Weird Realism of Robert Aickman

21 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Although he is one of the luminaries of the weird tale, Robert Aickman referred to his irreal, macabre short works as strange stories. Born in London ...

Episode 33: The Fine Art of Changing the Subject: On Duchamp's 'Fountain'

07 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp trolled the New York art scene with Fountain, the famous urinal, whose significance has since swelled in the minds of art afic...

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

31 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Jorge Luis Borges's story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a metaphysical detective story, an armchair conspiracy thriller, and a masterpiece of weird...

Episode 31: Scarcely Human at All: On Glenn Gould's 'Prospects of Recording'

24 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Most people know Glenn Gould as a brilliant pianist who forever changed how we receive and interpret the works of Europe's great composers: Bach, Beet...

Episode 30: On Stanley Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut'

14 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

No dream is ever just a dream. Or so Tom Cruises tells Nicole Kidman at the end of Eyes Wide Shut. In this episode, Phil and JF expound some of the ke...

Episode 29: On Lovecraft

09 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Phil and JF indulge their autumnal mood in this discussion of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's work, specifically the essay "Notes on the Writing of Weird ...

Episode 28: Weird Music, Part Two

02 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

"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 w...

Episode 27: Weird Music, Part One

26 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In this first of two episodes devoted to the music of the weird, Phil and JF discuss two works that have bowled them over: the second movement of Lige...