Spectrevision Radio

Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.

For more episodes or to support the podcast,

go to weirdst. This is Phil. This week we are talking with Victoria Nelson,

whose novel Neighbor George we discussed in episode 128. When I first learned about Neighbor George,

I was surprised to realize that Nelson wrote fiction as well as the deeply learned nonfiction

that I had got to know about a decade earlier. It turns out that Victoria

Nelson is a woman of parts. She is novelist, short story writer, memoirist, editor, and independent

scholar with a master's in medieval studies from the University of Toronto, but no academic

union card, as she calls it in this episode.

Nelson, one of the true originals of American ladders, has always caught her own path as a writer and thinker.

Her 2001 book, The Secret Life of Puppets, established her voice, by turns shrewd and amused,

lyrical and visionary, as a unique presence in intellectual life, and it developed ideas that we are still wrestling with now, 20 years after its publication.

In the first chapter of The Secret Life of Puppets, Nelson writes, quote,

much as we might like to ignore the fact, the gods are ours. It seems to me that this

crystallizes the book's main idea. Whatever a sanitizing historicism might say, the old

practices of theurgic magic, and the Neoplatonic mysticism they served, are not just the quaint

superstitions of a less enlightened age. The old gods and diamons are ours

still, whether we like it or not. The ancient theologic practice of insoling effigies of human

beings, like puppets or statues, became heretical and was banished from the zeitgeist. But it stuck

around in what Nelson calls the sub-Zythegeist,

in critically disavowed genres and media, pulp novels, video games, and the like.

...