Episode 118: The Unseen and the Unnamed, with Meredith Michael

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2022

⏱️ 76 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by music scholar and Weird Studies assistant Meredith Michael to discuss two strange and unsettling short stories: J.G. Ballard's "The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon" (1964) and Ursula K. Le Guin's "She Unnames Them" (1985). Their plan was to talk about three stories, but they never got to Phil's pick, which will be the focus of episode 119. The reason is that Le Guin and Ballard's stories share surprising resonances that merited close discussion. From opposite perspectives, both tales put words to a region of reality that resists discursive description, a borderland where that which is named reveals its unnamed facet, and that which must remain unseen reveals itself to the inner eye. Support us on Patreon Find us on Discord Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack REFERENCES J. G. Ballard, “The Giaconda of the Twilight Noon,” from The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Ursula K. Le Guin, "She Unnames Them," from The Real and the Uneal Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), The Birds Jung's concept of the collective unconscious Walter Pater, The Renaissance Ursula K. Le Guin, “She Unnames Them” in The Real and the Unreal Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution M. C .Richards, Centering Weird Studies, Episode 35 on Centering Weird Studies, Episode 81 on The Course of the Heart Weird Studies, Episode 84 on the Empress Linguistically deprived children Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy Samuel Taylor Coleridge's thoughts on on imagination and fancy can be found in Biographia Literaria Special Guest: Meredith Michael. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weird studies. This is Phil.
0:53.8	This week, we're each picking a short story and discussing
0:57.1	our picks together in much the same ways we did with her song picks in episodes 79 and 80. Only this
1:04.3	time we are joined by Meredith Michael, who you may know as our production assistant, or attendant
1:10.0	to the mysteries, as she is known on the
1:11.9	Weird Studies Discord. I know Meredith as a doctoral candidate in musicology who works with me at the
1:18.1	Indiana University Jacob School of Music. Meredith is a brilliant young scholar who is writing a PhD
1:24.3	dissertation that develops an intriguing idea about music and outer space.
1:29.3	Now, social theorists from Max Weber onwards have told us that in our modern and disenchanted
1:36.3	age, the Enlightenment Dream of Reason has chased myth from the universe and transformed and
1:41.3	unsulled cosmos into mostly empty space. But in her research, Meredith
1:47.2	finds that at just such a historical moment, we find composers, among other artists, looking to outer
1:54.0	space and finding it teeming with new myths. One of these days, we're going to do a show on that.
2:02.6	But today, though, we decided to talk about stories. Meredith chose Ursula Leguins' She Unnames Them. J.F. chose J.G. Ballard's
2:09.7	Jakonda of the Twilight Noon. And I chose Stanislav Lam's The New Cosmogany. We didn't have
2:17.1	time to do the last one, so we're saving that for our
2:19.7	next episode. But for this episode, we're talking about the other two, and playing our usual
2:25.4	glass bead game of finding the resonances between them. I'm not going to summarize the plot of
2:31.2	these stories here as we do that in the episode that follows. But I will say
2:35.6	that what emerges in our conversation is an apprehension of those extraordinary states of experience
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Phil Ford and J. F. Martel, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Phil Ford and J. F. Martel and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.