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Friends, So happy to share an extended contemplation about fiction and this podcast, and then one of my very favorite book tour events with you: a live conversation about horror, transhumanism, and Hawk Mountain in Dublin with your fav death expert Caitlin Doughty and nonfiction writer/cultural critic Mark O’Connell.
It was a sold out event and one of my favorite on the tour, which will continue in the UK in September. (I’ll also post one of the other tour dates as exclusive content for patreon patrons only.)
SHOW NOTES
WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ? One of the greatest horror novels – which, like Hawk Mountain is also not really a horror novel – is Disgrace by JM Coetzee. Don’t read anything about it, just get it and read it. It’s incredible.4
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? I talked about the horrors of technologies – as well as its occult promise and beauty – with anthroposophist writer Andrew Linnell on AEWCH 183.
MORE ON CAITLIN AND MARK If you follow the links to their respective AEWCH episodes you’ll find lots there -here’s Caitlin Doughty on AEWCH 174 and Mark O’Connell on AEWCH 105.
Against Everyone With Conner Habib is funded exclusively by listeners like you. Do you find value in this show? If so, support the podcast. SUPPORT THIS PODCAST viaPatreon
Friends,
In the midst of the Hawk Mountain book tour, visiting cities and longing for the pastoral. In Swedish journalist Marit Kapla’s absolutely stunning book Osebol, she chronicles the lives of the 42 people who live in Osebol, a tiny village in Sweden. And she transmutes their words – already poetic – into poetry. Line breaks, important pauses, stray and lovely observations. In Osebol, you get the slow life beauty of the remote, where a chance meeting on the road can be a day’s major event. Marit shares what she’s learned from talking to all of Osebol’s inhabitants, and we talk time, depth of experience, nature, and more.
I hope you love this episode as much as I loved having this conversation.
SHOW NOTES
WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ? I read a poem on the episode from Arun Kolatkar’s absolutely beautiful book,Jejuri– and I highly recommend you get and read it.
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? Before he was a Twitch sensation, Hasan Piker and I talked about growing up surrounded by bullies on AEWCH 36. I’m reminded of it here as a flipside to the romanticism of small town life.
Friends, Hawk Mountainis now available in the US in book and audio formats!
(Irish/UK/Australian readers, you have a couple more weeks to preorder/wait until it comes out on the 21st!)
So…I made myself the guest, and my friend and collaborator Una Mullally, who is an expert interviewer, asked me the questions. This was an extremely satisfying conversation — the kind of experience I always hope my guests will end the show feeling — and I’m honored to have had it. What comes up? The horror of high school, Kate Bush, the mystical presence of animals, Meister Eckhart, the soundtrack to my novel, time and manipulation, and more.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a better interview, to be honest.
And? THERE ARE NO SPOILERS! Somehow she managed to turn this into a great conversation about literature without messing with it.
The US tour starts next week, and I’ll post a normal ep then too. Until then, enjoy, and go get the book and come to the readings and tell your pals and say hello!
One of the New York Times’s 12 Books To Read in July 2022
“Hawk Mountain is a suspenseful, shocking and ultimately poignant study of anguished conflict, both domestic and internal. Incisively written and intensely imagined, it’s the novelistic debut of a real original.” – Ramsey Campbell
“The opening lines of HawkMountain plummet you into an atmosphere of creeping dread and precarious restraint that won’t let up until the final, shocking moments.” – Caitlin Doughty
“A moving and unflinching portrayal of a man caught in a trap of his own making, but willing to do almost anything―to almost anybody―if it will keep him from having to face up to himself. HawkMountain is a wonderfully bleak and beautifully written debut.” – BrianEvenson
“A brilliantly disturbing, expertly crafted literary noir that will stick with you long after you put it down. Conner Habib has written a flawless meditation on the fruitless, but eternally human, effort to kill off the parts of ourselves we cannot love―literally and metaphorically. I love this book.” – Sara Gran
“HawkMountain is deft horror, made of precise strikes into our most vulnerable psychic terrain… Finally, a horror story that knows cisheteropatriarchy is the villain!” – Andrea Lawlor
“Tender, horrifying, utterly transfixing.” – Kelly Link
“Dripping with menace from the first page, this story of childhood enemies meeting up fifteen years later is utterly enthralling. Brilliantly written with homoerotic undertones, this savage tale is uncompromising in its reflection of teen friendships and isolation, and unflinching in its examination of the delicacy of the human body. There is gold among the gore. I found it compelling, shocking, and beautiful.” – Liz Nugent
“Conner Habib writes with an hallucinatory precision, and a kind of merciless humanity, about the poisonous work of repression. His forebears-Poe, Highsmith, even classical tragedy-are clear, but his originality is clearer still. Hawk Mountain is a work of strange, glittering darkness.” – Mark O’Connell
“A deeply disturbing yet, somehow, soaring novel I won’t soon forget. It plumbs the depths of traumatized characters trapped within our damaging culture. I couldn’t look away, even when I was looking from between my fingers.” – Paul Tremblay
Against Everyone With Conner Habib is funded exclusively by listeners like you. Do you find value in this show? If so, support the podcast. SUPPORT THIS PODCAST viaPatreon
Friends,
As I get ready for the release of Hawk Mountain, I find myself wanting to talk to writers more and more. For advice, for good company, and honestly just because I’m so excited.
So for this episode, I talk to the much-celebrated author of the novel Memorialand story collection Lot, Bryan Washington! Memorial is a sort of negative universe version of Hawk Mountain – it uses time in a similar way (but different!) and examines the unsaid in a similar way (but different!) and the outcomes for the characters are very, very different (but similar!). After reading it, I felt enlivened and heartbroken at once. So then I read his story collection, Lot. Then, right away, I invited him onto the show.
Bryan and I talk about desire, identity in fiction, the way writers are asked about process all the time, the productiveness of marginalization, movies, and more. This is one of my very favorite episodes.
What a great conversation.
SHOW NOTES
WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ? Bryan and I are both deeply influenced by film. One filmmaker I bring up on the show is Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the notorious and deeply driven melodramatic auteur. I love his work, and I love this book of interviews with him, TheAnarchy of the Imagination.
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? There are some deep parallels on this episode with themes touched on on AEWCH 149 featuring Carmen Maria Machado, although Carmen and I go at it in an entirely different way!
WHAT SHOULD YOU LOOK INTO FURTHER? I talked with Samuel Delaney about fiction, sexual identity, and philosophy years ago, before I had a podcast. Here’s the whole conversation!
Something that we do on this show a lot is express the way the spiritual, economic, and political interpenetrate. Usually when people or podcasters do that, they look at magical and occult parapolitics; and that invariably becomes funneled into messages of conspiracy.
But that rabbit hole is almost always just a variation of materialism because they privilege material conditions, material conspiracies. They focus on the manipulation of the world as it is by political agents instead of reflecting on the spiritual reality.
What if, instead, we moved past a focus on material conspiracies with spiritual dimensions and into the way true artists are working with the constitutive forces of being human, and the artistic presence of nature, and the invisible consciousnesses that sustain everything?
To talk about all of this I invited Marko Pogačnik onto the show*. He’s best known as being appointed as one of the few UNESCO Artists For Peace, and also for founding the OHO art Movement in former Yugoslavia – a group that included such iconic figures as Tomaž Šalamun and Slavoj Žižek.
Marko’s artistic work is a conscious communication with the elemental beings and the places they are intertwined with and co-create. He practices something called lithopuncture, which seeks to calirfy the presence of elemental beings and heal the spiritual being of the earth using cosmograms. He also offers spiritual exercises in the form of Gaia Touch exercises… and if you don’t know what any of that means, we talk about it extensively on the episode,
His books are filled with exercises you can, and should, engage with as you read.
Enjoy this wonderfully bizarre and love-filled episode.
(*While I’m taking a little break from the series on Irish magic, since it’s proved even more trickstery than my other series, this still touches on Ireland and fairies. They pop up and express their importance. That series will be ongoing, so expect more to pop up soon.)
SHOW NOTES
WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ? A parallel to Marko’s work can be found in director and comic book writer Alejandro Jodorowsky’s healing work, which I mention on this episode. And the best introduction to that work is his book,Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy. It’s a fantastic, bizarre, and thrilling tour into Jodorowksy’s workings.
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? An episode about spiritual art and technology informing each other is AEWCH 113 with sculptor and radionics practitioner, Duncan Laurie (he wrote a great book on the subject or radionics, too!). This recording is from years ago that I turned into an AEWCH ep, and it didn’t get as much attention as it deserved, I don’t think. So it’s a bit of a hidden gem amongst the episodes.
WHAT SHOULD YOU LOOK INTO FURTHER? What would a science that engages with the elemental kingdom look like? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s method of science is brought forward at The Nature Institute in New York State, and though it often doesn’t recognize, explicitly, the elementals, it definitely goes all the way into spiritual perception. It’s a beautiful and vital initiative.
MORE ON MARKO The best place to find more on Marko is, of course, his website, which has extensive links to his books, his public events, and his biography. Marko is a founder of the legendary OHO Movement, an art movement which also had Tomaž Šalamun and Slavoj Žižek as members. And here’s an interview with Marko about his work in Art Margins.
Against Everyone With Conner Habib is funded exclusively by listeners like you. Do you find value in this show? If so, support the podcast. SUPPORT THIS PODCAST viaPatreon
Friends, Since 2019, I’ve lived in Ireland. It’s a country being pulled away from Catholic traditionalism and towards humanistic tech neoliberalism. But the spiritual Celtic landscape has never gone away, either. Here, the supernatural, paranormal, mystical, and occult still hold their strange and potent sway. But where they were once “contained” by religion or traditional belief structures, now they don’t reside in the same place in Irish experience or psyche. Where does magic “go” when it’s displaced? So here’s my series on the spiritual realm of Ireland, which will be looking at Ireland’s spiritual landscape specifically, and how that gives us a picture of the spirit and modernity in general. The first in the series was AEWCH 186 with Dr. Andrew Sneddon on Irish witchcraft and belief.
I’m so excited to share this episode with you, friends.
SHOW NOTES
WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ? With so few books of anthropological scholarship on fairies in Ireland – ones that don’t merely dismiss the phenomena out of hand – Dennis’s book is a standout. So your best bet is to go way back to anthropologist Walter Evans-Wentz’s kind of sort of classic book, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. Evans-Wentz’s big book is a favorite of academics, lay scholars, and para researchers because of its rigor, and shows up in the strangest places.
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? A great episode, I think, that pulls apart belief and disbelief, magic and where it hides in plain sight, is AEWCH 141 with religious scholar Jason Josephson-Storm. (BTW, I really, really love that episode!)
MORE ON DENNIS To be honest, info on Dennis is pretty hard to find! But here’s a good long review of Running with the Fairies. And here’s an issue of The Irish Theosophistfeaturing some writings on fairies. I didn’t know about the publication (from the 19th century) until I read Dennis’s work.
Against Everyone With Conner Habib is funded exclusively by listeners like you. Do you find value in this show? If so, support the podcast. SUPPORT THIS PODCAST viaPatreon
Friends,
Since 2019, I’ve lived in Ireland. It’s a country being pulled away from Catholic traditionalism and towards humanistic tech neoliberalism. But the spiritual Celtic landscape has never gone away, either. Here, the supernatural, paranormal, mystical, and occult still hold their strange and potent sway. But where they were once “contained” by religion or traditional belief structures, now they don’t reside in the same place in Irish experience or psyche. Where does magic “go” when it’s displaced? Welcome to my series on the spiritual realm of Ireland, which will be looking at Ireland’s spiritual landscape specifically, and how that gives us a picture of the spirit and modernity in general.
WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ? Two books on the conflation (and consequences) of withchcraft and fairies in Ireland are about Bridget Cleary – a woman burned to death by her husband in 1895 after he suspected her of being a changeling. First is The Burning of Bridget Clearyby Angela Bourke, and second is The Cooper’s Wife Is Missingby Joan Hoff and Marian Yates.
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? The obvious choice in AEWCH 98with Thomas Waters on the victims of witchcraft and the witchcraft of victims. Thomas is a scholar of witchcraft in the UK (and thankfully also examines the way beliefs in the UK permeated the places it colonized) and there are plenty of parallels here, especially in how magic “hides” by moving its use into new cultural corners and contours.
WHAT SHOULD YOU LOOK INTO FURTHER? Since we’re kicking off the series, it’s best to refer you first to the site of the The National Folklore Collection here in Ireland. It’s a huge site with tons of different directions and magical rabbit holes to go down.
Against Everyone With Conner Habib is funded exclusively by listeners like you. Do you find value in this show? If so, support the podcast. SUPPORT THIS PODCAST viaPatreon
Friends,
In the midst of 2022, so many of us are seeking peace and meaning. So here’s my series on one meaning-rich tradition and religious stream: Christianity.
But this will be a different sort of Christianity: occult and esoteric Christianity. Some of it might look familiar. Some might seem absolutely bizarre. All of it, I hope will stir a feeling of warmth and depth of meaning for you, whether you feel any affinity with Christianity or the occult. The first episode in the series is AEWCH 181, featuring Rev. Patrick Kennedy from the Christian Community – a religious tradition informed by occultism. The second, AEWCH 182, was on with writer and spiritual teacher Lisa Romero. The third is AEWCH 183 on Christ and technology with tech worker-turned-spiritual-philosopher Andrew Linnell. And the fourth, AEWCH 184, is an examination of esoteric christianity and friendship in the Holocaust and now with historian Anne Weise.
Now we turn to the very practical fruits of esoteric christianity: how it can flow into cultural, political, and economic life in lasting and powerful ways. The name for this is social threefolding, a process articulated by Rudolf Steiner in the early 20th century based on principles in human life.
To discuss social threefolding I invited Seth Jordan onto the show; Seth is an educator and writer at The Whole Social. In the spirit of threefolding, I ask three times: Why do we have no idea of how to move forward?
SHOW NOTES
WHATBOOKYOUSHOULDREAD?A great introduction to social threefolding can be found in Nicanor Perlas’s book, Shaping Globalization: Civil Society, Cultural Power, and Threefolding. Nicanor was a presidential hopeful in the Philippines and has received the Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize), the Outstanding Filipino Award, and the UNEP Global 500 Award for his work. He was also Seth’s teacher and is a lucid writer.
WHATOTHERAEWCHEPISODEYOUSHOULDLISTENTO?Well, two of them:One of my favorite episodes of the show is AEWCH 76 with money historian Conor McCabe where we talk about the phenomenology of money. I had Conor back on the show a year or later to discuss how to reinvent money and economics with anthroposophical economist, John Bloom, on AEWCH 110.
WHATSHOULDYOULOOKINTOFURTHER?Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) is an initiative that came from biodynamic farming (an esoteric christian approach to agriculture) and social threefolding. It’s incorporated other traditions and thinkers along the way, as exemplified by this good article on CSAs. As Susan Witt, from the EF Schumacher Society says: “One of Steiner’s major concepts was the producer-consumer association, where consumer and producer are linked by their mutual interests,” she explained. “And oneofSchumacher’smajorconceptswas‘todevelopaneconomywhereyouproducelocallywhatisconsumedlocally.’ We began to see CSA as a way to bring these key ideas together.”
And one of the farmers at a community farm elaborates the principles:
Newformsofpropertyownership—The land is held in a common by a community through a legal trust. The trust then leases its property long-term to farmers who use the land to grow food for the community.
Newformsofcooperation—A network of human relations replaces old systems of employers and employees as well as replacing the practice of pledging material security (land, buildings, etc.) to banks.
Newformsofeconomy(associative economy)–The guiding question is not “how do we increase profits?” but rather “what are the actual needs of the land and of the people involved in this enterprise?
Against Everyone With Conner Habib is funded exclusively by listeners like you. Do you find value in this show? If so, support the podcast. SUPPORT THIS PODCAST viaPatreon
Friends,
In the midst of 2022, so many of us are seeking peace and meaning. So here’s my series on one meaning-rich tradition and religious stream: Christianity.
But this will be a different sort of Christianity: occult and esoteric Christianity. Some of it might look familiar. Some might seem absolutely bizarre. All of it, I hope will stir a feeling of warmth and depth of meaning for you, whether you feel any affinity with Christianity or the occult. The first episode in the series is AEWCH 181, featuring Rev. Patrick Kennedy from the Christian Community – a religious tradition informed by occultism. The second, AEWCH 182, was on with writer and spiritual teacher Lisa Romero. And the third is AEWCH 183 on Christ and technology with tech worker-turned-spiritual-philosopher Andrew Linnell.
For this episode, I turn to the value of esoteric christianity and friendship and its opposite: Nazism.
Alfred Bergel was a painter murdered in Auschwitz – a wonderful artist, actually, whose work might be largely disappeared by his murders had Anne and a few others done the work of reconstructing his presence here.
Anne did this via research at the Karl König Institute since Bergel was close friends with König, the Jewish anthroposophist who started – through his guidance, encounters, and inspiration from Rudolf Steiner – Camphhill Communities, where people with what many of us would call “disabilities” live around the world. Camphill Communities are among esoteric christianity’s most beautiful offerings to the world. Follow links below for more information.
Through König’s archives and Anne’s work, Bergel’s life can be reconstructed and revitalized in part. Anne found mentions of him in Konig’s letters and family diaries, in poems and stories. She found other holocaust survivors and the notes of others who had died in the holocaust about Bergel. She also, on the journey (and in her book) in revealed instances of others in the camps comforted by esoteric christianity and anthroposophy (indeed some of the people in the camps were put they because they were anthroposophists).
This is an episode rooted in history, relevant for today, in both its picture of friendship and Christ, as well as its revelation of the inverse and how evil works.
SHOW NOTES
WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ? I was moved and disturbed by Peter Tradowsky’s short book, Christ and Antichrist: Understanding the Events of Our Time and Recognizing Our Tasks. It’s a portrait of the presence of evil in the second World War, as well as the challenges that face us in our moment. I only ask that you keep yourself in a feeling of protection and love before you read it; it’s intense. There are some points of contention between Tradowsky and what Anne says on this episode; I find them helpful to think about.
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? I did an episode of the show with my best friend, Jeb Havens:AEWCH 161 and I’d say that’s the best outline of a spiritual friendship I can offer.
WHAT SHOULD YOU LOOK INTO FURTHER? Camphill Communities – developed by Alfred Bergel’s friend, Karl König, with guidance and inspiration from Rudolf Steiner – are among the most beautiful contributions of esoteric christianity to our world today. The idea of Camphill is that people with “disabilities” are whole people. To put it in the words of Rudolf Steiner in 1924: “The only possible grounds we can have for speaking of the normality or abnormality of the child’s life of soul, or indeed the life of soul of any human being, is that we have in mind something that is normal in the sense of being average. At present there is really no other criterion. That is why the conclusions people come to are so very confused. When they have in this way ascertained the existence of ‘abnormality,’ they begin to do – heaven knows what – believing they are thereby helping to get rid of the abnormality, while all the time they are driving out a fragment of genius.”
Against Everyone With Conner Habib is funded exclusively by listeners like you. Do you find value in this show? If so, support the podcast. SUPPORT THIS PODCAST viaPatreon
Friends, In the midst of 2022, so many of us are seeking peace and meaning. So here’s my series on one meaning-rich tradition and religious stream: Christianity.
But this will be a different sort of Christianity: occult and esoteric Christianity. Some of it might look familiar. Some might seem absolutely bizarre. All of it, I hope will stir a feeling of warmth and depth of meaning for you, whether you feel any affinity with Christianity or the occult. The first episode in the series was AEWCH181, featuring Rev. Patrick Kennedy from the Christian Community – a religious tradition informed by occultism. The second, AEWCH 182, was on with writer and spiritual teacher Lisa Romero.
One of the main wellsprings of meaning in our time is also one of the main vampiric forces in our time, sucking meaning from each day at the same instant it offers it up: technology. How do we find our way into the spiritual aspects of technology? Does esoteric christianity have an indication?
I’m so excited to share this episode with you. It goes deep into the challenges – and pathways through them – of our time.
SHOW NOTES
WHATBOOKYOUSHOULDREAD?Normally I wouldn’t throw you into the deep end with the reading, but let’s face it: with this episode, we’re already in the deep end! So, a great supplement is Rudolf Steiner’s lecture series,The Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman: Human Responsibility for the Earth. It’s a lot to take on if you’re new to esoteric Christianity, but as with most occult truths, you sometimes just have to not-know in the reading and contemplation until you find your way to knowing via experience. See how it goes for you!
WHATOTHERAEWCHEPISODEYOUSHOULDLISTENTO?I did a whole series of episodes on tech back in 2020, and the one that stands out the most for me in relation to this episode is AEWCH 112 featuring writer Peter Bebergal. We discuss what occult technology but never quite get to the precipice of the rabbit hole Andrew and I go down into here. So I think the episodes compliment each other really well.
WHATSHOULDYOULOOKINTOFURTHER?There’s an easy spiritual exercise offered by the esoteric Christian group, The Researchers of Truth called the Introspection exercise. It’s done a bit differently by anthroposophists, but I think the Researchers version is so simple that it’s a great place to start if you’ve never done meditation or spiritual exercise before.
MOREONANDREWThe best way to engage with Andrew’s work is by enrolling in one of the MysTech study courses. But you can also read the MysTech journals which feature Andrew and other contributors, and you can subscribe to the monthly MysTech newsletter.
Conner Habib 