Weird Studies

In this episode, Phil and JF discuss Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's novel The Shining. That they are doing this eight years after starting the podcast is weird in itself, so fundamental is Kubrick's "chamber epic" to the modern weird in general, and the hosts' specific interests in particular. Well, as the Overlook Hotel's former caretaker Delbert Grady might put it, consider the situation corrrrected.

Visit Weirdosphere to enroll in JF's upcoming course on Deleuzian philosophy, starting May 7 2026.

Support Weird Studies on Patreon

Interstitial Music: "Corridors" from Pierre-Yves Martel's Weird Studies Volume 2.

REFERENCES

Stanley Kubrick, The Shining

Jan Harlan, A Life in Pictures

Stanely Kubruck, Killer’s Kiss

Alberto Giacometti, “The Palace at 4am”

Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy?

Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism”

Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie
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We regret that we were unable to release a new episode this week. Episode 211 will drop on Wednesday, April 29, and will be devoted to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a film we have long wanted to revisit in depth. In the meantime, we are pleased to offer Phil’s spirited reading of M. C. Richards’ essay “Wrestling with the Daimonic,” discussed in our previous episode and available only to Patreon members until now.

This recording is shared with kind permission from Wesleyan University Press. Visit their website for details on The Crossing Point and other works by M.C. Richards.

To support Weird Studies and get access to exclusive essays and bonus episodes, visit our Patreon page.

And go to Weirdosphere to learn more about JF's upcoming course on Deleuzian philosophy, which starts on May 7th, 2026.
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In this episode, JF and Phil bring together two visionary essays on the daimonic and the imaginal: Cristina Campo’s “On Fairy Tales” and M.C. Richards’s “Wrestling with the Daimonic.” What emerges is a conversation about imagination, personhood, and a world shot through with meaning. Notably, this episode opens with a discussion of what your hosts mean by "imaginal."

Phil’s reading of Richards’s essay can be found on our Patreon page. Thanks to Wesleyan University Press for permission to share this with our listeners.

Go to Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page to preorder his marvellous new album, Weird Studies Volume 3.

Click here to sign up for JF's seminar on Henri Bergson, happening on the Mutations learning platform on Saturday, April 11, 2026.

Click here for details on JF's upcoming Weirdosphere course, "What is Philosophy?".

Music in this Episode

"Scavenger," from ⁠Weird Studies Vol. 3⁠

"Domes and Spires," from ⁠Weird Studies Vol. 2⁠

References

M. C. Richards, American artist and philosopher

Cristina Campo, Italian poet and essayist

M. C. Richards, “Wrestling with the Daimonic” 

Cristina Campo, “On Fairy Tales”

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”

Weird Studies, Episode 8 on Graham Harmon

Susan Chang, The Tarot Podcast

Ramsey Dukes, The Little Book of Demons

“The Boy Who Knew No Fear,” fairy tale 

Una Voce, Catholic movement 

Franz Liszt, Hungarian Pianist

Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller

William Shakespeare, Othello 

M. C. Richards, Centering

Robert Duncan, American poet

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In this episode, Phil and JF discuss Haruki Murakami’s “Cream,” from First Person Singular, alongside Jorge Luis Borges’s classic tale, “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Together, these two stories occasion a meditation on time, perplexity, and the strange possibility that meaning isn't found at the end of the maze, but discovered only in the course of wandering it.

Photo by DMzlC via Wikimedia Commons.

Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page, home of Weird Studies Vol. 3 (to be released May 22, 2026).

Joel Plaskett's website and Substack

References

Geoffrey Cornelius, “Chicane: Double-Thinking and Divination among the Witch-Doctors,” in Divination: Perspectives for a New Millennium, ed. Patrick Curry (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 119– 42. 

Joe Leduc's Blood Oath 

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”  

Haruki Murakami, “Cream” 

Marc Augé, Non-Places 

Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic 

Phil Ford, “The View from the Cheap Seats at the UFO Show” 

Nicholas of Cusa, “On the Quadrature of the Circle”  

Ethan Weed, “A Labyrinth of Symbols”

Kids in the Hall, “Premise Beach” 

David Lynch, Twin Peaks: The Return  

David Lynch, Lost Highway 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Don Giovanni 

Weird Studies, Episode 66 on “Diviner’s Time”  

Gottfried Leibniz, Theodicy 

Quentin Meillasoux, After Finitude 

Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of Tarot 
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Kenneth Batcheldor was a British clinical psychologist who, during the final two decades of his life, investigated the paranormal through direct experiments in table-turning. The final fruit of that work was an essay, compiled from Batcheldor’s notebooks by Patric Giesler, entitled “Notes on the Elusiveness Problem in Relation to a Radical View of Paranormality.” Published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1994, it remained unknown to JF and Phil until Shannon Taggart called their attention to it quite recently. Since the theory Batcheldor presents here with admirable lucidity is deeply attuned to ideas they have been discussing on Weird Studies for nearly a decade, they decided to devote an episode to it. The core idea is by far the weirdest of all—in a sense, it is the weird itself.

Read Batcheldor's essay on the Weird Studies Patreon.

Visit Weirdosphere to enroll in Phil's upcoming 5-week course, "A Musical Tarot."

Pierre-Yves Martel's Weird Studies: Volume 3 will be available for preorder on March 13. Visit his Bandcamp page for details.

REFERENCES

K. M. Wehrstein, “Kenneth Batcheldor” in Psi Encyclopedia  

Kenneth Batcheldor, “Notes on the Elusiveness Problem in Relation to a Radical View of Paranormality,” ed. Patric Giesler, The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 88, no. 2 (1994): 90-116. 

Kenneth Batcheldor, “Contributions to the Theory of PK Induction from Sitter-Group Work,” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 78 (1984): 105-122. 

George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal 

Quintin Meillassoux, After Finitude 

Joshua Ramey, “Contingency Without Reason: Speculation after Meillassoux” 

Kenneth Batcheldor, Videos of Table Tipping 

Weird Studies, Episode 24 with Lionel Snell 

David Lynch, Wild at Heart 

William James, The Principles of Psychology

Tom Cheetham, Imaginal Love 

A. Irving Hallowell, Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View 
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