Episode 9: On Aleister Crowley and the Idea of Magick
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 Apr 20181h 16min
Episode 8: On Graham Harman's "The Third Table"
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 Apr 20181h 12min
Episode 7: The Unspeakable Mystery at the Heart of Boxing
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 Mar 20181h 6min
Episode 6: Dungeons & Dragons, or the Reality of Illusions
The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga was one of the first thinkers to define games as exercises in world-making. Every game, he wrote, occurs within a magic circle where the rules of ordinary life are ...
21 Mar 20181h 19min
Episode 5: Reading Lisa Ruddick's "When Nothing is Cool"
Phil and JF discuss Lisa Ruddick's "When Nothing is Cool," an essay on the postmodern humanities and its allergy to essences -- especially that personal essence we call soul. Maybe the soul is a heap ...
13 Mar 20181h 9min
Episode 4: Exploring the Weird with Erik Davis
Scholar, journalist and author Erik Davis joins Phil and JF for a freewheeling conversation on the permutations of the weird, Burning Man, speculative realism, the uncanny, the H. P. Lovecraft/Philip ...
7 Mar 20181h 21min
Episode 3: Ecstasy, Sin, and "The White People"
JF and Phil delve deep into Arthur Machen's fin-de-siècle masterpiece, "The White People," for insight into the nature of ecstasy, the psychology of fairies, the meaning of sin, and the challenge of l...
21 Feb 20181h 20min
Weird Stories: Arthur Machen's "The White People"
Weird Stories is a series of readings for Weird Studies listeners who want to dig deeper into the themes and ideas discussed on the Weird Studies podcast. In his seminal essay "Supernatural Horror i...
19 Feb 20181h 37min
