Episode 63: Faculty X: On Colin Wilson's 'The Occult'
At its simplest, what Colin Wilson calls Faculty X is "simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present." Yet its existence is evinced in all those phenomena that modernity...
8 Jan 20201h 19min
Episode 62: It's Like 'The Shining', But With Nuns: On 'Black Narcissus'
The 1947 British film Black Narcissus is many things: an allegory of the end of empire, a chilling ghost story with nary a spook in sight, a psychological romance, and a meditation on the nature of th...
18 Dec 20191h 34min
Episode 61: Evil and Ecstasy: On 'The Silence of the Lambs'
The Welsh writer Arthur Machen defined good and evil as "ecstasies." Each one is a "withdrawal from the common life." On this view, any artistic investigation into the nature of good and evil can't re...
4 Dec 20191h 7min
Episode 60: Space is the Place: On Sun Ra, Gnosticism, and the Tarot
Somebody once said, "No prophet is welcome in his own country." Whether this was true in the case of jazz musician and composer Sun Ra depends on whom you ask. With most, the dictum probably bears out...
20 Nov 20191h 26min
Episode 59: Green Mountains Are Always Walking
"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around a lake." This line from Wallace Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" captures something of the mysteries of walking. It points to the undeniable yet ba...
6 Nov 20191h 20min
Episode 58: What Do Critics Do?
What is the role of the critic in the world of art? For some, including lots of critics, the figure exudes an aura of authority: her task is to tell us what this or that work of art means, why it matt...
23 Okt 20191h
Episode 57: Box of God(s): On 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'
Raiders of the Lost Ark is more than a Hollywood movie made in the summer blockbuster mold. As Phil says in his intro to this popping Weird Studies episode, the film is "a Trojan horse of the Weird, e...
9 Okt 20191h 30min
Episode 56: On Jean Gebser, with Jeremy D. Johnson
The German poet and philosopher Jean Gebser's major work, The Ever-Present Origin, is a monumental study of the evolution of consciousness from prehistory to posthistory. For Gebser, consciousness ...
25 Sep 20191h 19min
