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
Episode 2: Garmonbozia
Phil and JF use a word from the Twin Peaks mythos, "garmonbozia," to try to understand what it was that the detonation of atomic bomb brought into the world. We use the fictional world of Twin Peaks a...
1 Feb 20181h 26min
Episode 1: Introduction to Weird Studies
Phil and J.F. share stories of sleep paralysis and talk about Charles Fort's sympathy for the damned, Jeff Kripal's phenomenological approach to Fortean weirdness, Dave Hickey's notion of beauty as de...
31 Jan 201832min
