Weird Studies

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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This is the first of three episodes on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to be released in the course of the next several months. Focusing here on The Fellowship of the Ring, our hosts discuss the first leg of Frodo's journey into darkness, paying special attention to Tolkien's prose style, his modernism, his commitment to a truly magical realism, and his penchant for the weird and the tragic.

Image: "Lothlorien" by Tessa Bronsky, via Wikimedia Commons.

References

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring  

Algernon Blackwood, English writer  

Weird Studies, Episode 204 on “On Fairy Stories” 

Peter Jackson (dir.), The Lord of the Rings 

Ursula K. LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea 

Friedrich Nietzsche, History in the Service and Disservice of Life  

Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives 

Carl Jung, The Red Book  

Lord Dunsaney, The King of Elfland’s Daughter  

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto  

David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram”  

Steven Chow (dir.), Kung Fu Hustle 

Donna Tartt, The Secret History  

Lost Lakes, YouTube Channel 

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This episode was recorded before a live audience at Indiana University Cinema as part of Weird Academia, a series of events that brought much high strangeness to Bloomington, Indiana, in January 2026. The discussion followed a screening of Ken Russell’s 1980 cinematic fever dream, Altered States. In it, JF and Phil explore the weird intersection of mysticism, psychedelics, and institutional science, and they close with a brief Q&A with members of the audience.

Visit Weirdosphere to enroll in Phil Ford's upcoming course, A Musical Tarot.

References

Weird Academia and the Center for Possible Minds

Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Roger Penrose, physicist and mathematician

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

Samuel Delaney, Dhalgren

Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics and Matter & Memory

H. P. Lovecraft, American writer

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Clement Greenberg, American essayist

G. K. Chesterton, English writer

David Cronenberg (dir.), The Fly

Michael Garfield, podcaster, writer, musician

Weird Studies episode 205 on the Hierophant

Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets

Neil Gaiman, American Gods

J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories"

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In this episode of Weird Studies, we turn to the fifth Major Arcanum, the Hierophant, symbolizing tradition, instruction, and the exoteric aspect of spiritual practice. Drawing on Meditations on the Tarot and other sources, we question the easy opposition between tradition and revolution, exploring instead how inherited forms can foster genuine inner growth, and how an interior revolutions may renew traditions from within.

To reserve seats for Weird Academia events, visit the website of the Center for Possible Minds.

References

Johann Sebastian Bach, F# minor Fugue from The Well Tempered Clavier Book 1 (played by Rosalyn Tureck) 

Richard Wilhelm (trans.), The I Ching

J. R. R. Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings

P. D. Ouspensky, The Symbolism of the Tarot 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church

Our Known Friend, Meditations of the Tarot

Plato, "The Seventh Letter"

Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of Tarot

Dogen, Instructions for the Cook

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Weird Studies, Live at Illuminated Brew Works 

Franz Liszt, Hungarian pianist 

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria vol. 1 
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