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It's Like 'The Shining', But With Nuns: On 'Black Narcissus'
Episode 62
The 1947 British film Black Narcissus is many things: an allegory of the end of empire, a chilling ghost story with nary a spook in sight, a…
6 years ago
Evil and Ecstasy: On 'The Silence of the Lambs'
Episode 61
The Welsh writer Arthur Machen defined good and evil as "ecstasies." Each one is a "withdrawal from the common life." On this view, any arti…
6 years, 1 month ago
Space is the Place: On Sun Ra, Gnosticism, and the Tarot
Episode 60
Somebody once said, "No prophet is welcome in his own country." Whether this was true in the case of jazz musician and composer Sun Ra depen…
6 years, 1 month ago
Green Mountains Are Always Walking
Episode 59
"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around a lake." This line from Wallace Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" captures something of …
6 years, 2 months ago
What Do Critics Do?
Episode 58
What is the role of the critic in the world of art? For some, including lots of critics, the figure exudes an aura of authority: her task is…
6 years, 2 months ago
Box of God(s): On 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'
Episode 57
Raiders of the Lost Ark is more than a Hollywood movie made in the summer blockbuster mold. As Phil says in his intro to this popping Weird …
6 years, 3 months ago
On Jean Gebser, with Jeremy D. Johnson
Episode 56
The German poet and philosopher Jean Gebser's major work, The Ever-Present Origin, is a monumental study of the evolution of consciousness f…
6 years, 3 months ago
The Great Weird North: On Algernon Blackwood's 'The Wendigo'
Episode 55
No survey of weird literature would be complete without mentioning Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). As with all masters of the genre, Blackw…
6 years, 4 months ago
Lobsters, Pianos, and Hidden Gods
Episode 54
"All things feel," Pythagoas said. Panpsychism, the belief that consciousnes is a property of all things and not limited to the human brain,…
6 years, 4 months ago
Astral Jet Lag: On William Gibson's 'Pattern Recognition'
Episode 53
William Gibson's Pattern Recognition was published in 2003, in the wake of 9/11. You would think that a novel about the early Internet's eff…
6 years, 5 months ago