JF MARTEL
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A filmmaker and a professor talk art and philosophy at the limits of the thinkable.

"Weird Studies" is a scholarly field that doesn't and can't exist.

The Weird is that which resists any settled explanation or frame of reference. It is the bulging file labelled “other/misc.” in our mental filing cabinet, full of supernatural entities, magical synchronicities, and occult rites. But it also appears when a work of art breaks in on our habits of perception and ordinary things become uncanny. 

​The Weird is easiest to define as whatever lies on the further side of a line between what we can easily accept from our world and what we cannot. And it defines an attitude towards whatever lies on that side of the line: a willingness to remain suspended between explanations and abide in strangeness.
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RECENT EPISODES

EPISODE 91 | ON SUSANNA CLARKE'S PIRANESI
JF and Phil explore the mysterious world of Susanna Clarke's incredible new novel.

EPISODE 90 | THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT: ON PHILIP K. DICK'S UNWRITTEN MASTERPIECE
Phil and JF discuss the novel that would have been Philip K. Dick's magnum opus ... if he had written it.

EPISODE 89 | ON ISHMAEL REED'S MUMBO JUMBO, OR, WHY WE NEED MORE MAGICAL THINKING
JF and Phil discuss Ishmael Reed's masterpiece of conspiracy fiction.

EPISODE 88 | ON NEIL GAIMAN AND DAVE McKEAN'S MISTER PUNCH
A discussion of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's 1994 graphic novel, The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch.

EPISODE 87 | GLYPHS, RIFTS, AND ECSTASY: ON ARTHUR MACHEN'S VISION OF ART
JF and Phil talk art and ecstasy in this episode on Arthur Machen's aesthetic treatise, Hieroglyphics.

© 2019 J.F. Martel. All rights reserved.