Are there other Weird Studies listeners lurking around here? It’s a relatively recent discovery for me and I am having such a good time in the archive.
@kissane I’ve only been able to listen to a handful, but it’s been crunchy and sharp so far! The King in Yellow one was a real highlight for me. (ty for the recco!!)
@tealtan@kissane I had not been keeping up because I also do not really like pod casts, but omggggg (I listen to ONE pod cast with something like regularity and I will tell you what it is if you want. It's like, not the secret name of god or anything). Anyway I'm off to murmur about black stars, strange moons &c
@tealtan@kissane [sidebar: does "In Our Time" count as a pod cast? I tend to think of it as more of an eternal and implacable feature of the landscape. Did we really know a time before it? Can we conceive of a time in which we exist, but it does not? Melvin Bragg has always been here, a kind of cultural Tom Bombadil if you like]
@shiftingedges@kissane Currently having a crisis of confidence in Weird Studies. J.F. recommended James Herbert’s /The Dark/ as being good – genuinely scary – save only for some dated ‘80s-style sexuality.
It’s horrible. Not in an interesting way. Just flat and badly written.
@shiftingedges@marick I liked the Temperance card episode a lot (cybernetics!) but I’ve mostly had the best time with the ones that address single works of fiction/film/music. The Secret History one is an exceptional reading of the book, the Machen ones have been great, likewise the John Carpenter, Brian Eno, and Alan Moore episodes. The Mechanical Dollhouse AI one is aces.
[I feel the usual compulsion to disclaim various imperfect aspects because of the “every data point reveals your true inner character” network dynamic but nah.]
I don’t really like podcasts, but I often really enjoy a podcast (but just one)
I came across Weird Studies in my routine but usually fruitless search for crunchy thinking on the psychological/cognitive structures of traditional otherworlds and the entities inside them—not the super-domesticated psychoanalytical/interpretative mode that focuses on what they represent but teardowns of how these constructs actually function on their own terms
So not eg “[monsters or whatever] represent this symbolic layer/serve this social function in literature” but how do they work, what angle on the world can be derived from the way they appear in folklore and lit, what is the shape of their alienness. (WS does this exceptionally well with their Machen and other episodes.)
Which I mention here because maybe some of you have references that also work on that level and if you do please link them, I am always hungry.
Add comment