And there was a spread with this actress… JAD: A short time later, Prama is flipping through this fashion magazine.ĮUGENE THACKER: Lucky Magazine. JAD: To which I was like, cool! At least one person's reading the book.ĮUGENE THACKER: But I really just try to keep my head to the ground and just keep writing, just doing what I'm doing.ĮUGENE THACKER: Ok so now-let's pull up Lucky Magazine. PREMA MURTHY: And included in that list was Eugene. JAD: It was an article in which actually the writer of the show, Nic Pizzolatto was asked, ‘how did you create that character of the nihilist police detective?’ And he lists a bunch of things he was reading at the time. PREMA MURTHY: And all of a sudden I see this article about the True Detective director. JAD: So Prama goes online, clicks around. JAD: She's like, we're they listening in on us? PREMA MURTHY: I was like, this replicates so many conversations we've had in the car. JAD: That's Eugene's wife, Prama MURTHY, my sister-in-law. PREMA MURTHY: And I just remember watching it and being like, wow JAD: He goes on these rants about how there's no order in the world, how humans are just this accident and we have to deal with that. And at the center of the show is this character is this character Russ Cole, this Louisiana detective, who is one dark dude. JAD: The show True Detective comes along.
[ TV CLIP, True Detective, unknown character: There's all kinds of ghettos in the world. So he keeps his head down, teaching, writing, but then, some things happen. And as expected, beyond a few philosophy types, no one really pays attention. It is dark, it is dense, he writes it as he says, for no one. JAD: Ok, so Eugene writes this book in 2011.
ĮUGENE THACKER: Not as much as I should be. At one point, he goes into this deconstruction of how different types of black metal deal with this thought.ĮUGENE THACKER: I don't know, it's something, a way of thinking I've always found really intriguing and ironically kind of inspiring.ĮUGENE THACKER: On my better days. JAD: And in the book, Eugene traces this idea through all these different horror movies, from slasher films to sort of more supernatural horror. JAD: That there's no inherent meaning to anything.ĮUGENE THACKER: That it just doesn't matter.ĮUGENE THACKER: The most difficult thought. This all might be purely arbitrary, an accident. That there might not be a purpose to things or to your life or to our existence or to the cosmos. What in philosophy is often referred to as nihilism or pessimism. And the world that we live in that we define in terms of humanity doesn’t care about us.ĮUGENE THACKER: Right. It's darker than that.īROOKE GLADSTONE: Your hypothesis is the greatest horror is that nothing exists and nothing matters. JAD: But not in the Hollywood, boom! sense. JAD: It’s kind of a hard book to describe, but if you had to sum it up in a sentence?ĮUGENE THACKER: It's about the end of the world. īROOKE GLADSTONE: In the Dust of This Planet. So the story begins a couple years agoĮUGENE THACKER: called In the Dust of This Planet. JAD: Meaning: at a certain point if you do this kind of work you have to ask yourself…ĮUGENE THACKER: If you knew that this would not be published, would you still write it? How committed are you? And then, after a slow long period of acceptance, I started to think, maybe I should write books for no one to read. He'll use words like "exegesis" and "ratiocination." And so the family joke is that he writes books for no one.ĮUGENE THACKER: I think the joke started out, I write books that nobody reads. Eugene is a hard-core scholar of philosophy and he writes these books that sometimes can be a little dense. JAD: I just want to point out that the two of you are in head-to-toe in black right now. And I asked Brooke to join me cus it just felt like her kind of story.īROOKE GLADSTONE: I’ve been wearing black since I was thirteen. JAD: We talked about this very weird thing that happened to Eugene. I'm an author and professor at the New School in New York City. JAD: So I’m gonna start with a conversation that Brooke Gladstone and I -This is Brooke from On The Media-That she and I had with my brother-in-law Eugene.ĮUGENE THACKER: I'm Eugene Thacker. I thought in this podcast, I’d wander a little bit. Robert is out of town today, so it’s just me.
JAD ABUMRAD: Hey this is Jad Abumrad.This is Radiolab, the podcast. It’s not a typical Radiolab episode, and yet like every great Radiolab episode, it feels like it’s about now somehow more so than things that are being made now that are about now.