For years now, I've held out hope that one day I'd turn into a regular blogger. Alas, it never happened, nor do I think it is likely to happen at this point. I'm a slow writer. It takes me months, sometimes years, to write even a brief essay, and the spontaneity required for steady blogging is just not part of my programming. When I finally have a solid piece of writing, I tend to look for an established channel in fear it may be the last thing I ever write. Such is life.

This site still gets a lot of traffic, though, so I thought I'd post a quick update on what's going on these days in Martel Land. The Weird Studies podcast, which Phil Ford and I launched in February, is doing quite well. Apparently there was a niche, and those who dwell therein seem to really dig what we are doing. We just put out a two-part conversation on Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker. Previous episodes include a long discussion on the weird with Erik Davis; dialogues on the work of Philip K. Dick, Aleister Crowley, Arthur Machen, David Lynch, Rodney Ascher and Lisa Ruddick; explorations of such cultural phenomena as blood sports and Dungeons & Dragons; and a lot of other things. Upcoming episodes will take on Zen Master Dogen's classic fascicle Genjokoan, William James' wonderful essay, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" (it doesn't), and that curious phenomenon Erik Davis once referred to as the "alchemy of trash." We also have some great guests lined up, including Joshua Ramey and Lionel Snell (a.k.a. Ramsey Dukes).

Last fall, the great Michael Garfield (another guest in the wings) kindly invited me to reappear on his podcast Future Fossils, and the episode, which deals with Bladerunner 2049 and Stranger Things 2, was released just a couple of weeks ago.  More recently, I had the pleasure of taking part in a group discussion on Darren Aronofsky's film mother! with the bright folks at Cosmos Co-Op, headed by co-conspirator Marco Morelli. That should be available soon; I'll provide a link when it is.

The very same Marco Morelli was awesome enough to edit and publish my extensive correspondence with philosopher Christopher Yates (yet another future WS guest) in the web journal, Metapsychosis. This is something we're very proud of: an in-depth exploration of how movies (and other forms of art) open up new worlds even as they connect us to the one world that binds them all. It's a #longread, but one which many readers have found rewarding.

At the end of last year, I wrote a piece on Thomas Ligotti for an anthology that writer and artist Jamie Curcio of Mythos Media is editing (and writing an awesome introduction for). The book is titled Masks: Bowie and the Artists of Artifice. We're hoping it will come out some time next year. My current writing projects include a long-form (i.e., book-length) essay on the concept of the Real as well as monographs on Decadent aesthetics and the figure of the nerd. I'm also starting to research an essay on brutalism which will combine modern architectural theory with the theological ideas of Tertullian and the work of French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux. That should be cool.

Finally, I deleted my Facebook account earlier this spring and have no intention of revisiting that bright abyss any time soon. You can, however, find me on Twitter most days.

Hello friends. Long time no see.

Weird Studies, a new art and philosophy podcast I've been developing with professor of musicology Phil Ford, is now live. New episodes will appear every other Wednesday. Eventually, we may crank it up to one a week. 
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Here's the "About the Show" copy:

Phil and I have been recording material for the show since September. We decided to launch the show with two episodes, a short "Introduction to Weird Studies" where we discuss the concept of the weird outlined above, and a longer, crazier one titled "Garmonbozia," which intersects Twin Peaks: The Return with the creation of the atom bomb to say something about the underlying mood of the present age.

Our modus operandi is to discuss whatever topic strikes our fancy in the hope that others will dig them as well. Upcoming themes include Arthur Machen's terrific novella The White People, the occult power of Dungeons & Dragons, the spectre of nihilism haunting contemporary academia, bloodsports, and lots of others. Over the last couple of years, Phil and I have indulged in a correspondence that passed the 100,000-word mark a while ago. This is our way of taking the conversation online to see what happens. 

Some serious acknowledgements are in order here. Joseph Cook did an amazing job designing our logo, and Matt Melanson gave us an awesome illustration that conveys the weird mood. My brother Pierre-Yves Martel wrote the theme music and the transitions between segments, and my wife Lesley Halferty recorded the intro and outro. Big thanks to all four for freely lending their formidable talents and skills to the project.

First post in way too long. I thought I'd revive the blog with a quick update on what's happening.

New Doc Series

It's been a busy year in TV land. For one, I am in postproduction on the last of three episodes I wrote and directed for a new television series entitled Skindigenous. The show explores ancient Indigenous tattooing traditions around the world. My episodes focused on Polynesia, and I had the pleasure and high honour of spending time with some of the great masters of the art in that part of the world: the Sulu'ape family of Samoa, Gordon Toi of New Zealand, and Keone Nunes of Hawaii. They taught me tons, and I'll be forever grateful to Jason Brennan, Nish Media, my co-directors, our excellent crew and the beautiful people of the South Pacific for a rich and humbling experience. I'll write more about Skindigenous as we ramp up for broadcast on APTN in early 2018.

Spanish Edition of Reclaiming Art

In February, Ediciones Atalanta released a Spanish edition of Reclaiming Art under the title Vindicación del arte en la era del artificio. By all accounts, Fernando Amansa Salomó did an excellent job with the translation. Jacobo Siruela's publishing house is pretty much my dream publisher, so uncannily do their offerings seem specifically tailored to my personal obsessions. Having my work appear in their catalogue therefore qualifies as what David Lynch would call a "beautiful thing." So far, Vindicación has gotten a surprising amount of mainstream attention (here's one example for Spanish readers), and the book seems to  be finding a good number of interested readers, many of whom have taken time to write and share their enthusiasm about the book. That too is a beautiful thing.

The Weird Studies Podcast

Musicologist  Phil Ford and I are in the process of creating a new podcast, Weird Studies, wherein we will discuss art, philosophy and the occult in a contemporary context. Phil and I both have a strange attraction to the weird and value the affordances it grants those who choose to look at the world through its lens. In our prep work, we've been tossing around such potential conversation pieces as the discovery of electricity, the Tunguska Event, hermaphroditism, Hiroshima, the new Twin Peaks series, and the I Ching.

Among many other things, Phil is the author of Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture, a brilliant and erudite work on the concept of hipness in music and the arts which I couldn't more heartily recommend you acquire and ravenously consume.  You can also get a taste of Phil's singular intelligence and wit at Dial M for Musicology. Personally, I think it's high time that something like this podcast sees the light of day; Phil and I have been engaged in an energetic correspondence since 2015, and we need an outlet for our insights.

New Work on Ligotti

Finally, I'm immersing myself once more in the fiction of the great Thomas Ligotti, for an essay to appear in an upcoming anthology edited by James Curcio and Jack Marsh, PhD. Bearing the tantalizing title Masks: Bowie and the Artists and Artifice, the book gathers up the results of some deep delves into the mystique of artistic persona as it relates to creative work. Last fall, James and I had a long conversation on the nature of art at Modern Mythology. Check it out if you've a mind for some shop talk from inside the mask-n'-mannequin factory that is the aesthetic enterprise. Philosopher Jack Marsh and I are also working on a new project, but I'll wait until things have developed a bit more to talk about that.

There's more, but I'll stop there. Consider this post an assurance that this site and its author are both alive and kicking.

Wallace Stevens’ poem “A Postcard from the Volcano” is a beautiful meditation on matter and memory. It brings to mind the philosophy of Henri Bergson. The poem suggests the existence of memory in inanimate objects. Or more precisely, it proposes a conception of memory that has nothing to do with "information" stored in the mind. Memory must rather be imagined as expansive, extended, material, atmospheric. It is memory that contains us, not we who contain memories. The past is a presence. The past is real.



​The poem's narrator is reflecting on the mansion in which he lives and plans to die:

We knew for long the mansion's look   
And what we said of it became 
A part of what it is ...

In the future, the narrator muses, the house as an entity will include all he has said and thought about it. Which is to say that the experiences through which an object manifests to us are constitutive of the object itself as an autonomous entity. Objects take shape in experience (human experience being just one variety), but they do not exist “within” our experience, “within” us as subjects; rather, each experience of an object expands that object, allows it to express its being, objectively. 

All of the elements that make up the mansion exist on their own, experienced or not: Stevens is no idealist. But the elements can only constellate as a mansion — a homely one for the narrator, a haunted one for the children of the future — through encounters with human beings who are themselves similarly constituted. 

In other words, all things substantiate themselves in encounters, in meetings, as Martin Buber wrote. It is through human experience that a house learns to be a house, that it learns to be homely or haunted as the case may be, just as it is through the strange sentience of the house that we become home-dwellers, which is to say human beings. A person coming upon a house is an encounter, but it is an encounter between equals at the primal level.

A new house feels cold and dead because, as an object, it hasn’t yet learned to be a house. It is a house in form only, which is to say a design, an intellectual ideal, the concept of a house given material consistency. When we say that a house feels lived-in or homely, we are saying something about the house itself, not just about our impression of it. The house has come to life as a house; it knows itself as a house. It has a genius loci, a spirit of place, indistinguishable from it.

Later, having been abandoned and then occupied anew, the mansion in the poem will hold as part of its being all of the memories formed in conjunction with it. My guess is that nine times out of ten, this is what we mean when we speak of ghosts. "Children," Stevens writes, "[will] speak our speech and never know,"

Will say of the mansion that it seems   
As if he that lived there left behind   
A spirit storming in blank walls ...

The mansion confronts the children with all of its past that is real and, in a sense, ever-present. Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining reveals this with a force equal to Stevens' poem in the form of the Overlook Hotel. 

Upshot: there is no interiority. Belief in interiority, in private unextended subjectivity, is a modern conceit. It is a human attempt to reclaim the centre that humanity once imagine it occupied. In fact every private feeling, every “mental impression,” is an objective material event. Matter is spiritual. Matter is a thinking substance through and through. Everything is alive. "All things shining."

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ADDENDUM -- Some readers have expressed confusion at my statement that Stevens' poem suggests the absence of interiority.

I don't mean that thought, feeling and imagination do not exist. What I mean in these notes is that our "interior world," what appears to we modern people as a private realm that is closed off from the world of objects, is not actually closed. Our thoughts are already out there in the world, objects among objects or forces among forces.

The idea is that mind is an aspect of the universe, not the exclusive property of private subjects (Descartes). The universe includes psyche; it doesn't oppose it, nor does it exist in a separate order from psyche. In the poem, the narrator's thoughts about the house do not belong only to him: they belong also to the house, which preserves those thoughts as part of its own being. And they belong to the children of the future who will inhabit the house. After all, if those children "will speak our speech and never know," it follows that the narrator himself speaks the speech of other beings without knowing it. "There is no interiority" means that there is no disentangling subject from object.

My publishers at North Atlantic Books have informed me that the ink is drying on a deal for the Spanish rights to Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. The Spanish edition of my book will be published by Jacobo Siruela's Ediciones Atalanta, a wonderful publishing house boasting an extraordinary catalogue of world literature old and new (the fact that they publish Robert Aickman's much neglected fiction alone makes them heroes of mine). I'm told that Atalanta plans to release the book in early 2017.  

The year-and-a-third since Reclaiming Art was released has been a trip. For one, I've made a lot of new friends. I've also discovered that the preoccupations which led me to write the book are shared by many. The Spanish edition heralds the beginning of a new chapter in the life of the book, connecting it with a new readership.  

In other news, Metapsychosis, a new and ambitious literary venture spearheaded by my brothers-in-arms Marco Morelli, Jeremy Johnson and Natalie Bantz was officially launched yesterday. For the occasion, Jeremy penned a beautiful editor's letter and Marco released a galvanizing video monologue that plays like a genuine sorcerous invocation. As a member of the creative team, I've had the chance to peruse the content that will grace the interface of the journal in its inceptive phase. It's going to be something. And I'm not just saying that because I have a piece appearing in it, although that is also true.

The first of Metaphsychosis's offerings include a marvellous new poem by the great William Irwin Thompson entitled "Four in the Morning." It is, in my opinion, one the clearest distillations of weird realism I've come across. That it conveys the atmosphere of a nightmare is entirely appropriate. Four a.m. is the end of the Witching Hour. The witch-wind has blown through the room and one is left to ponder what just happened in the predawn dark. This is the hour that gives the lie to every philosophical system, intellectual model, and expert opinion. It unveils a reality no brain-shaped box can contain. Four a.m. does not call for the old anthropic hubris but for something else, a form of courageous humility, a willingness to concede to the forces that teem around us unseen all of the autonomy, self-existence, and agency which we as a species would prefer to claim for ourselves alone. As Dr. Bill puts it at the end of Eyes Wide Shut: "No dream is ever just a dream."