Weird Studies

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. Sign up for JF's upcoming course on Macbeth 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 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away is one of those rare films that is both super popular and super weird. Rife with cinematic non sequiturs, unforgettable imagery, and moments of horror, it is an outstanding example of a story form that goes all the way back to the myth of Psyche and Eros from Apuleius's Golden Ass, if not earlier. In this type of story, a girl on the cusp of maturity steps into a magical realm where people and things from waking life reappear, draped in the gossamer of dream and nightmare. Musicologist and WS assistant Meredith Michael joins JF and Phil to discuss a strange jewel of Japanese animated cinema. Support us on Patreon and get early access to Phil Ford's new podcast series on Wagner's Ring Cycle. Sign up for JF's upcoming online course on Shakespeare's Macbeth on Nura Learning. 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 Hayao Miyazaki, Spirited Away Kyle Gann, Robert Ashley Robert Ashely, Perfect Lives Apuleius, “Psyche and Eros” from The Golden Ass Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will Kentucky Route Zero, video game Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, video game Jean Sibelius, 5th Symphony Quentin Tarantino, film maker Mark Rothko, American painter Giles Deleuze, “What is the Creative Act?” GK Chesterton, Orthdoxy Herman Hesse, Siddhartha Andrew Osmond, BFI Guide to Spirited Away Special Guest: Meredith Michael. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE!" Tired of failure and self-loathing? Want to be rich and famous while having a good time all the time? Wondering how to turn your banal opinions into Transcendent Truths? Look no further than this special, exclusive episode of Weird Studies, where we reveal, once and for all, the secrets of ART-POWER! 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 T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop SHOW NOTES Ramsey Dukes, BLAST Your Way to Megabuck$ with My SECRET Sex-Power Formula James Raggi's statements on artistic freedom in tabletop roleplaying games: Proud to Commit Commercial Suicide 2023 and On Potential Inclusivity/Morality Clauses in RPG Licenses David Cronenberg, "I Would Like to Make a Case for the Crime of Art" Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey Alfred Gell, The Art of Anthropology Susanne Langer, “On the Cultural Importance of the Arts” Weird Studies, Episodes 73 and 74 on Carl Jung’s Theory of Art Kodo Sawaki, Japanese zen teacher Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams John Dewey, Art as Experience Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key Neil Gaiman, “Make Good Art” Leon Wieseltier, “Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture” Eugene Vodolazkin, Laurus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What better way to ring in the New Year than with a freeranging discussion of the dreaded thirteenth arcanum of the tarot? Of all topics, surely death needs the least introduction. Or does it? To those of us who inhabit the castellated compounds of post-industrial privilege, it is perhaps too easy to forget the uninvited guest who skulks in the shadows, touching each of us in turn as he sidles past. "Nothing is certain except death and taxes," Benjamin Franklin once wrote. He was joking, of course. The truth is that death is the only certainty. Click here for information about JF's upcoming talk at the Last Tuesday Society. Header image: Detail from Harry Clarke's illustration for "The Masque of the Red Death," from the 1919 edition of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination. SHOW NOTES Brian George, Masks of Origin Chris Leech, The Gnostic Tarot Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot Rachel Pollack, Tarot Wisdom Rachel Pollack, 78 Degrees of Wisdom Edgar Allen Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death” Weird Studies, Episode 2 on Garmonbozia Steven Spielberg (dir.), Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark Weird Studies, Episode 137 on Sunn O)))’s “Life Metal” Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth Thomas Browne, “Urn Burial” Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of Tarot Sallie Nichols, Tarot and the Archetypal Journey Clive Barker, Hellraiser Weird Studies, Episode 116 on “Blade Runner” George Gurdjieff, Armenian mystic Body without organs, philosophical concept Elizabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy Weird Studies, Episode 126 with Matt Cardin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We recorded this episode in early December for our Patreon subscribers, but as it's the closest thing to a Christmas special we're ever likely to make, we thought we'd slip it into everyone's stocking this year. In it, we discuss the Ford family's most recently acquired Christmas ornament (which Phil mistakenly calls a luminaria), gazing into the Christmas tree, the loneliness of little worlds, the mystery of incarnation, Colin Wilson's "Faculty X," and the utter weirdness of British Christmas specials. 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 T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop REFERENCES Erik Davis, A Brief History of the Phantasm Colin Wilson, The Occult The Dog House UK, TV series The Christmas Lantern Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What Evil Dead 2 is to the Baroque, Sunn O))) is to Brutalism. Or more like: if the likening of Evil Dead 2 to the Baroque felt like a stretch in episode 136, the brutalist bona fides of Sunn O)))'s drone metal are incontestable. In this episode, their 2019 masterpiece Life Metal frames a conversation touching on 20th-century avant garde music, the tactility of sound, the metaphysics of the Kickass Riff, Aztec aesthetics, the virtues of impermanence, and of course, the sublime beauty of brutalist buildings. 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 T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop REFERENCES Sunn O))), Life Metal Theatre of Eternal Music, musical group Daniel Albright, Panaesthetics Brian Eno, Imaginary Landscapes John Wray, “Heady Metal” Nyarlathotep, Lovecraft character Byung-Hul Chan, The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism Fred Wilcox (dir.), Forbidden Planet H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness Godfrey Reggio (dir.), [Koyaanisquatsi](imdb.com/title/tt0085809/) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"We are the things that were and shall be again." So a demonic flesh puppet tells Ash and his allies in a memorable scene from the classic splatstick flick Evil Dead II. In addition to being a rollicking piece of entertainment, Evil Dead II is an expertly crafted film whose director used every tool and technique to generate a cinematic experience that is – as the tagline went – "2 terrifying, 2 frightening ... 2 much!" In this episode, JF and Phil court the absurd by turning a fun 80s horror movie into a statement on the dread aspirations of matter and a shining example of the modern baroque. 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 Sam Raimi (dir.), The Evil Dead II Weird Studies, Episode 121 on Mandy and the Bandwagon Joe Bob Briggs, American movie critic Chalres Ludlam, American actor Weird Studies, Episode 88 on Mr Punch Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets Joseph Cermatori, Baroque Modernity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Victoria Nelson saw it first: Popular culture teems with occult ideas, vestiges of bygone belief, fragments of ancient magic disguised as common entertainment. Her 2001 work The Secret Life of Puppets is in many ways the ur-text of weird studies, so prescient and probing it is even more relevant now than it was when it first appeared. In episode 128, Phil and JF discussed Nelson's wonderful first novel Neighbor George (2021). In this episode, Nelson joins the hosts of Weird Studies to talk about the vision that drove her to write Secret Life along with its equally insightful follow-up, Gothicka. 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 Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets, Gothicka, Neighbor George M. R. James, Collected Ghost Stories Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles Stephenie Meyer, Twilight series William P. Young, The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity _ Against Everyone with Conner Habib, episodes 202 & 203 James R. Lewis, _The Gods Have Landed Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire Honoré de Balzac, "Séraphîta" L. Ron Hubbard, founder of ScientologySpecial Guest: Victoria Nelson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With the term "weird studies" gaining currency inside and outside academia, Phil and JF thought it was time to discuss the philosophical method they've been developing on the podcast since 2018. Borrowing a term from Erik Davis, they call it weirding, and here set about trying to understand what it is, and what it means. David Lynch's fondness for crying, the practice of queering in cultural theory, the all-too-real phenomenon of "global weirding,"the spooky agency of artworks, and the tragic death of E.T. at the hands of Damien Hirst are just a few of the subjects touched on in the conversation. "Weirding" also happens to be the working title of the book your hosts are writing for Strange Attractor Press, as well as an eight-week series of lectures and discussions starting October 25th, 2022, on the Nura Learning platform. Header image: David Lynch, Mulholland Drive Link to the upcoming course: Weirding: An 8-Week Course With the Hosts of the Weird Studies Podcast SHOW NOTES Ludwig van Beethoven, 9th Symphony James Elkins, Pictures and Tears Eugenie Brinkema, The Form of the Affects David Lynch (dir.), Mulholland Drive Gilkes Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? Weird Studies, Episode 121 on “Mandy” Erik Davis and Timothy Morton, “Uncanny Objects” episode of Expanding Minds Coen brothers (dir.), Hail Caesar Esther Williams, American swimmer Weird Studies, Episode 120 on Radical Mystery Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest William Shakespeare, Macbeth Erik Davis, “Weird Shit” Pete Docter and Bob Peterson (dir.), Up Steven Spielberg (dir.), E.T. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Psychomagic Martin Buber, I and Thou Gilbert Simondon, Imagination and Invention Weird Studies, Episode 106 the Wanderer Charles Ludlam, “On Camp” in Ridiculous Theater Weird Studies, Episodes 14 and 15 on “Stalker Weird Studies, Episode 35 on M. C. Richards’ “Centering” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices