Weird Studies (intro)

..."the weird" is both a quality ("El Topo was really weird") and a way of seeing things. It can be nothing more than a willingness to suspend usual habits of perception and judgment and hang out in the weightless spaces between certainties.

This is how Phil Ford explains the weird. He's a musicologist at Indiana University and one of the co-hosts of the podcast Weird Studies. The other co-host, J.F. Martel, is a filmmaker and author of the book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice.

Weird Studies is the name of a podcast, but it's also just a great name for a collection of topics that seem to go well together (David Lynch movies, Lovecraftian horror, magic & occultism, certain philosophical orientations, dream analysis, cyberpunk science fiction and many others).

In this discussion, we will introduce some of the core ideas of Weird Studies. For a general intro, here are a couple of episodes from the podcast to start with:

Episode 4 Interview with author Erik Davis: https://share.fireside.fm/episode/CiesHdrI+fwq77YPx

Episode 135 Interview with Victoria Nelson (author of The Secret Life of Puppets):
https://share.fireside.fm/episode/CiesHdrI+mD1hjOVY