Episode 43: On Shirley Jackson

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 27 March 2019

⏱️ 76 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Shirley Jackson's stories and novels rank among the greatest weird works produced in America during the 20th century. However, unlike authors such as Philip K. Dick and H.P. Lovecraft, Jackson didn't cut her teeth in the pulps but among the slick pages of such illustrious publications as The New Yorker. On the other hand, whether because her most famous novel uses the traditional ghost story form or because she was a woman, Jackson only rarely appears in the litanies of weird literature, where she most definitely belongs. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss two of Jackson's short works, "The Lottery" and "The Summer People." The conversation touches on such cheerful topics as human sacrifice, the use of tradition to license evil, and the alienness that can infect even the most familiar things ... when the stars are right. Header image by Hussein Twabi, Wikimedia Commons REFERENCES The Weird Studies Patreon Shirley Jackson Zoë Heller, “The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson,” review of Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life American writer Mitch Horowitz Rhonda Byrne, The Secret Stuart Wilde, The Trick to Money is Having Some Seymour Ginsburg, Gurdjieff Unveiled Randall Collins, Violence: A Microsociological Theory James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War Homer, The Iliad Phil & JF at Octopus Books in Ottawa, 2015 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations “Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that happen to you.” David Lynch, Blue Velvet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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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.
0:20.8	For more episodes or to support the podcast,
0:23.3	go to weirdstudies.com. Welcome to Weird Studies, Episode 43 on Shirley Jackson.
0:57.7	I'm J.F. Martel. Just a few remarks before we start.
1:03.7	Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco in 16, but lived in New England for much of her life.
1:09.8	She was a prolific author, publishing six novels and dozens of short stories before her death in 1965.
1:15.8	Her most famous works are without a doubt the lottery and the haunting of Hillhouse.
1:21.4	In our conversation, we compare her to David Lynch and briefly to H.P. Lovecraft, but another author we could have mentioned is Edgar Allan Poe. More than any other American writer I've
1:26.7	had the fortune to read, surely Jackson exemplifies
1:29.9	the kind of effortless dread that Poe innovated in English literature. But this isn't to take
1:35.4	anything away from Jackson's undeniable singularity. Her work confronts us, not with an ordinary
1:41.7	world in which weird things happen, with a weird world in which
1:45.5	any notion of ordinariness ultimately proves to be a veil we use to blind ourselves to what's
1:50.7	actually going on.
1:52.4	The conversation you're about to hear focuses on two of Jackson's shorter works, the aforementioned
1:57.6	lottery, which I first encountered in a book on writing decades ago, but only read in earnest recently.
2:03.6	And the summer people, a subtle example of weird fiction that it's chilling and mind-opening best.
2:10.0	This ended up being one of those wide-ranging conversations whose end point neither Phil nor I could predict,
2:15.9	and those are a lot of fun to record.
2:18.5	Hopefully, they make for good listening to enjoy the show. Patreon, motherfuckers, why aren't you joining?
2:49.5	Is that?
	...

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