Spectre Vision Radio

Welcome to Weird Studies,

a

podcast with with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martell.

For more episodes and to support the podcast, go to Weird Studies.com.

Thank you. Hi, I'm J.F. Martel. A quick note before we start, or maybe a question. Who are you? What are you? Do you have a soul? Is there something about you that can't be reduced to something else, something that isn't you? Are you a unique creation, self-existing? Or just an aggregate of disparate experiences,

ideas, and beliefs that the historical circumstances of your birth have cobbled together

to manufacture the illusion of you? These are questions that Phil Ford and I explore in this

episode of Weird Studies, where we discuss Lisa

Ruddick's essay, when nothing is cool, published a few years ago in the Point magazine.

In this piece, Ruddick, an English lit professor at the University of Chicago, describes a certain

mood, a certain ambiance or style that pervades contemporary literary studies departments.

And while neither Phil nor I work in English departments, we both knew exactly what she was talking about. Across the academic world,

as Phil can attest, or indeed in other sectors like the media industry that I work in, something like

this mood prevails. Well, what is it? Well, it's not a particularly good

mood. It's a kind of listlessness, almost a kind of nihilism. It's a feeling that nothing really

is anything deep down, that the essences that perhaps once gave substance to the things in our world have

somehow departed, leaving us with the impression that nothing has an interior, that everything

is hollow or flat or inessential. Even me, even you. We hope you enjoy the show.

My teaching is sort of relevant.

I feel like it's relevant to what we're talking about today because I'm teaching the undergraduate music history, well, one half of the sequence.

So the undergrad's at our institution take two semesters of music history, and the second half of which is from 1800 to the present day and I almost always

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