Episode 97: Art in the Age of Artifice
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't do? How is it connected to religion, psyche, and...
28 Apr 20211h 26min
Episode 96: Beautiful Beast: On Jean Cocteau's 'La Belle et la Bête'
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 millennia old, is the topic of this Weird Studies epis...
14 Apr 20211h 21min
Episode 95: Demon Seed: On Doris Lessing's 'The Fifth Child'
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 be simpler. In the England of the 1970s, a couple...
31 Mars 20211h 26min
Episode 94: All is Mysterious: On the Moon Card in the Tarot
"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 this episode, Phil and JF continue their ongoing seri...
17 Mars 20211h 15min
Episode 93: Living and Dying in a Secular Age: On Charles Taylor and Disenchantment
In A Secular Age, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor tries to come to grips with the seismic development that transformed the world after the Renaissance, namely the secularization of the society...
3 Mars 20211h 28min
Episode 92: Glitch in the Matrix: A Conversation with Rodney Ascher
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 most innovative and visionary filmmakers working ...
17 Feb 20211h 27min
Episode 91: On Susanna Clarke's 'Piranesi'
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 filled with enigmatic statues, Piranesi is the sto...
3 Feb 20211h 24min
Episode 90: 'The Owl in Daylight': On Philip K. Dick's Unwritten Masterpiece
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." Last fall, as another foray into Dickland began to f...
20 Jan 20211h 10min
