SUNDAY, JUNE 9th 2019
5PM


ERIK DAVIS
WELCOME TO THE WEIRD


ZEBULON


With the sharpness of a scholar and the openness of a seeker, Erik Davis writes and speaks across a breadth of heady topics, bringing an easy erudition to the esoteric and expansive. His latest tome High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies – just published by MIT Press and Strange Attractor – explores the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson and charts a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s.

Between the apocalyptic mutations of the present, the emergence of what philosopher Graham Harman calls “weird materialism,” and as psychedelia, esoterica, and other uncanny cultures continue to expand into popular consciousness, the weird has become a key zone of contemporary thought and experience. At this free late afternoon salon, Davis presents WELCOME TO THE WEIRD, a “gateway” of a slide lecture that riffs on the historical, conceptual, and aesthetic considerations of living in weird times.

Limited copies of High Weirdness will be available for purchase.

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Erik Davis is an author and award-winning journalist based in San Francisco. He has been talking, writing, and presenting about alternative culture, spirituality, and media technology for over thirty years. His books include the landmark Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Crown) and The Visionary State (Chronicle). He explores the “cultures of consciousness” on a weekly basis on his podcast Expanding Mind, and earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University in 2015.