Weird Studies

Heraclitus of Ephesus was one of the great pre-Socratic thinkers. Called the Obscure and the Weeping Philosopher, he left behind a collection of fragments so mysterious and pregnant with meaning that ...

9 Touko 20181h 21min

American filmmaker Rodney Ascher is a master of the weird documentary. Whether he be exploring wild interpretations of a classic horror film in Room 237, bracketing the phenomenon of sleep paralysis i...

2 Touko 20181h 28min

M. R. James' "The Mezzotint" is one of the most fascinating, and most chilling, examples of the classic ghost story. In this episode, Phil and JF discover what this tale of haunted images and buried s...

25 Huhti 20181h 16min

M. R. James has been hailed as the unrivalled maser of the classic ghost tale, and his powers are at their zenith in "The Mezzotint," a story that first appeared in his 1904 collection, Ghost Stories ...

23 Huhti 201828min

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 id...

18 Huhti 20181h 24min

The plan was to discuss the introduction to Aleister Crowley's classic work, Magick in Theory and Practice (1924), a powerful text on the nature and purpose of magical practice. JF and Phil stick to t...

11 Huhti 20181h 16min

JF and Phil discuss Graham Harman's "The Third Table," a short and accessible introduction to "object-oriented ontology." Phil takes us on a tour of his closet, we discover that JF's kids are better a...

4 Huhti 20181h 12min

For as long as they've been pounding the crap out of each other for good reasons, humans have also been pounding the crap out of each other for fun. Everywhere, in ever age, elaborate systems, rituals...

28 Maalis 20181h 6min