Weird Studies/Request List

08 Mar 2022 03:59 - 24 Jan 2024 09:16
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    • This page is not about an episode; it's my list of things that I think it would be cool for the podcast to cover, and seem like they would fit in well. Some of them are things I know well and just would like to hear their take; in other cases I feel a real need for some kind of intellectual guidance or companionship. This is roughly in chronological order as I think of things.
    • Bataille's The Sacred Conspiracy
    • 'Pataphysics
      • structurally similar to Weird Studies – a general science of the exceptional
    • Alan Moore, Promethea and in general. He's probably the best known serious advocate of magic in today's popular culture, surprised he doesn't come up more.
    • Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian was weird enough to freak me out. Given the show's concern with nihilism, it should be required reading. Both this and No Country for Old Men have characters that are literal embodiments of nihilism.
    • Book of the New Sun or Gene Wolfe more generally.
      • Apparently neither host has read Wolfe, that surprised me. JFM in particular should dig Wolfe's weird Catholicism.
    • The Black Rider, Tom Waits/Burroughs/Robert Wilson
      • Or the entire Waits oeuvre come to think of it. But TBR would make a great episode. There's been at least one Burroughs episode Weird Studies/Naked Lunch
    • Mr. Burns
      • ok this is quite obscure but I thought it was great and one of the few artworks to actually be about the trash stratum.
    • Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer
      • They've discussed the movie Annihilation that was based on these, but the books are much weirder IMO.
    • The Prisoner
      • Fits right in with the general paranoia about control, technic, scientism, etc.
    • John Zorn, his work is drenched in hermetic stuff. Also Secret Chiefs 3 and other Zorn collaborators.
    • Christopher Alexander
      • Alexander's last masterwork, The Nature of Order , called for both an architecture and metaphysics with radically different assumptions than modernist materialism, one in which "centers" and "life" were fundamental aspects of reality. That sounds like a WS sort of thing.
    • The Fly
      • There is a Cronenberg episode, haven't gotten to it yet
    • Kafka
      • kind of a rival with Lovecraft in my mind in the cosmic horror department. Well, not that much of a rival, they occupy different literary ecological niches. Anyway Kafka is a key weird author of the 20th century, begs to be taken head-on.
    • Jim Woodring
      • and many other comix artists: Charles Burns, R Crumb of course, Kim Deitch, plenty of others. They've done an ep on a Neil Gaiman work, Weird Studies/Mr Punch, but this stuff is weirder I think, at least formally.
    • Harry Smith 's Anthology of American Folk Music
      • and Greil Marcus' theory of "the old, weird America". Kind of obvious but would be interesting to hear them tackle it. Also in this bucket, Wisconsin Death Trip
    • Warren Sacks' The Software Arts
      • OK, this one is not as bviously weird as some, and maybe out-of-baliwick entirely. But – it applies humanistic techniques to what is normally treated purely as dry technology. That seems to point in a vaguely weird direction.
    • Sloterdijk who has come up a few times on the podcast.
    • Magical Marx, by which I mean, various Marxist-related theories that take into account the weird kinds of agency found in Marx (or in capitalism itself). Zizek, Mark Fisher...I'm not at all sure who to read in this space. WS seems to mostly avoid politics, and there's nothing wrong with that, but at some point if you are building a worldview you have to confront it. And there's this: ‘A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto,’ by China Miéville
    • Firesign Theater hm maybe. Now I'm going back to my childhood, the things that made me weird. Mad Magazine ? Tom Lehrer? Not sure how much there is to say about those two, but Firesign would seem to have the necessary interpretive depth.
    • Bedeviled they talk a lot about the daimonic, here's a book that shows the presence of demons at the heart of materialism.
    • A Case for Irony there's a lot of disdain for cheap pomo irony on the show, but irony done right is foundational to being and the weird, this book clarifies some of this for me.
    • Carnivàle HBO show, lots of magic. I'd like an excuse to rewatch.
      • Before the beginning, after the great war between Heaven and Hell, God created the Earth and gave dominion over it to the crafty ape he called man. And to each generation was born a creature of light and a creature of darkness. And great armies clashed by night in the ancient war between good and evil. There was magic then, nobility, and unimaginable cruelty. And so it was until the day that a false sun exploded over Trinity, and man forever traded away wonder for reason.
    • Richard Dawkins is anathema on the show due to his militant and rather anti-intellectual atheism, but I maintain that The Selfish Gene is itself a Weird text, or should be.
    • Andy Kaufman
      • kayfabe is an important WS concept
    • Octavia Butler