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The Nonsense Bazaar

The Nonsense Bazaar is a bravely paranoid, neon-colored voyage into irrationality and the imaginal by way of conspiracies, cults, UFOs, magic, mysticism, and the secret history of our silly world.

If you’re at all into the paranormal or supernatural you’ve heard the name Charles Fort. After all, his name has become synonymous with the study of anomalous phenomena, or “Fortean” phenomena. He basically invented the genre. Over the course of four books published towards the end of his life Charles Fort documented hundreds of cases of strange doings: fish falls, mysterious airships, teleportation, and much more, while arguing for a radically agnostic perspective on life and reality: we don’t know anything. But who was Charles Fort? Well he was a soft-spoken weirdo of a writer and a jokester, at times a quiet homebody and at others hopping trains and ships and travelling the world, even dueling a fellow in South Africa. More than anything, though, Charles Fort was a writer and a hell of a writer at that. He was an artist with a love of language who used language to break open people’s minds well before they were ready for it. Charles Fort absolutely rules.

Because we forgot to say it in the episode, our main source is Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented The Supernatural by Jim Steinmeyer. It’s great, go read it.

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