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"Let the red dawn surmise / What we shall do, / When the blue starlight dies / And all is through." This short poem, an epigraph to "The Yellow Sign," arguably the most memorable tale in Robert W. Chambers' 1895 collection The King in Yellow, encapsulates in four brief lines the affect that drives cosmic horror: the fearful sense of imminent annihilation. In the four stories JF and Phil discuss in this episode, this affect, which would inspire a thousand works of fiction in the twentieth century, emerges fully formed, dripping with the xanthous milk of Decadence. What’s more, it is here given a symbol, a face, and a home in the Yellow Sign, the Pallid Mask of the Yellow King, and the lost land of Carcosa. Come one, come all.
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REFERENCES
Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow
Weird Studies, Episode 100 on John Carpenter films
Algernon Blackwood, “The Man Who Found Out”
Susannah Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, Thought Forms
Weird Studies, Episode 140 on “Spirited Away”
Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
David Bentley Hart, “Angelic Monster”
M. R. James, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad”
William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow
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The work of Sappho, Pindar, and other remarkable Greek lyric poets makes us question everything we think we know about poetry, what it is, and what it does.
Episode 25 Quiz:
https://literatureandhistory.com/quiz-025
Episode 25 Transcription:
https://literatureandhistory.com/episode-025-lyrical-ballistics
Episode 25 Song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO7YW3l7I8g
Bonus Content:
https://literatureandhistory.com/bonus-content
Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/literatureandhistory
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The plan was to discuss the introduction to Aleister Crowley's classic work, Magick in Theory and Practice (1924), a powerful text on the nature and purpose of magical practice. JF and Phil stick to the plan for the first part of the show, and then veer off into a dialogue on the basic idea of magic. Along the way, they share some of the intriguing results of their own occult experiments.
REFERENCES
Photo of JF's "large sum" cheque
Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice
The Gospel According to Thomas
James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion
Erik Davis, "Weird Shit"
I Ching, The Book of Changes
Joshua Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage
The Shackleton Expedition
Grant Morrison on how to do sigil magic
Alan Chapman, Advanced Magick for Beginners
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding
Joshua Ramey, "Contingency Without Unreason"
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande
H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
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In 1977, Philip K. Dick read an essay in France entitled, "If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others." In it, he laid out one of the dominant tropes of his fictional oeuvre, the idea of parallel universes. It became clear in the course of the lecture that Dick didn't intend this to be a talk about science fiction, but about real life - indeed, about his life. In this episode, Phil and JF seriously consider the speculations which, depending on whom you ask, make PKD either a genius or a madman. This distinction may not matter in the end. As Dick himself wrote in his 8,000-page Exegesis: "The madman speaks the moral of the piece."
REFERENCES
Philip K. Dick, excerpts from “If You Find This World Bad You Should See Some Of The Others”
R. Crumb, The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick
Emmanuel Carrère, I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick
“20 Examples of the Mandela Effect That’ll Make You Believe You’re In A Parallel Universe”
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Weird Studies, "Episode 9: On Aleister Crowley and the Idea of Magick"
Weird Studies, "Episode 4: Exploring the Weird with Erik Davis"
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Sun Ra, Space is the Place
Zebrapedia (crowdsourced online transcribing/editing of the Exegesis)
Ramsey Dukes (Lionel Snell), Words Made Flesh
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
Bernado Kastrup, Why Materialism is Baloney
Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits
Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”
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