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Grief books, my father and friend's deaths
This is a jam roly poly. My father loved traditional English puddings influenced by histime at Cambridge in the late 1950s
One of my best friends died when I was 19. My father died when I was 20. I witnessed the last breath of both of them. I heard the death rattle. The rattle is aptly named, I think to myself whenever I hear the term.
I was reading an essay by Mayukh Sen, Grief Books*, which made the observation that many of us acquire grief books. A piece of writing that ferries us around through loss: allowing us to feel less alone.
Sen writes:
My father had been sick with lung cancer for three years, the final of the many illnesses I had seen disturb his body since I was a child. The inevitability of his loss did not suffer its blow. I was 25 when he died and I could count the people I knew who had endured the loss of a parent before that age on one hand. His loss felt unbearably cruel in a way I could not articulate. So I became cruel to the world in return. If a friend expressed sympathy in ways that felt incorrect to me, I killed them off, the excision a bid for self-preservation. Any generosity I had was reserved for those who had touched grief like, even strangers.
Myself, when my father died, I did not know a single friend my age who had lost a parent. I did not know other friends who had lost close friends either. And while I did not excise friends in the way Sen describes there were plenty of friends who I judged could not or did not understand the circumstances very well. Where as some others - strangers even - did understand.
For grief can be very singular and difficult if not impossible to share - although the willingness to share, can be a shared impulse. Still on that day, when I read that page - juggling the distractions of an autistic son bouncing along an overground train - I recognised a truth in the way I had used books as grief books. I recognised the genre of grief books he describes (cancer writing; the memoirs of grief, such as The Year Of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion). I felt for a few moments a spasm of grief and recalled the death moments of my friend and of my father. Moments that never truly leave me.
I’ve commented that there are events which occur when afterwards you feel changed. Perhaps changed enough to feel a different person. The first kiss, the first love; the first death of a loved one. That these seminal changes are hard, if not also impossible, to relate to people who have not experienced them.
My father found some comfort in reading what Sen describes as a genre of “cancer writing”. He read John Diamond* as he was dying of cancer. My father could relate to Diamond in a way he could not to us, with our lives ahead of us. Cathartic and sad every time my father read a new piece. Both losing an inevitable race at the same time.
I remember my early set of grief books being CS Lewis’ Grief Observed, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. I am not religious, but I still recommend people to CS Lewis - particularly if they have a Christian faith - today. I had grief food. Memories of grief food. Stodgy British puddings like jam Roly-Polys, bread and butter pudding, and spotted dick conjure my father’s joy and sweet tooth at such dishes. In my cupboard, I have an inexpensive and well used bowl from my dead friend. She would have been happy it has been so well used.
Grief books can come in all forms and shapes. Sen’s grief book became Five Morsels of Love by Archana Pidathala*
Sen:
Pidathala makes grief central to her work without overstating the systematic motivation. I marvel at her strength. “Every time we meet,” she writes of her and her cousins, “we reminisce about the morsels ammama would feed us and unanimously agree that we will never have or find the same taste in anything ever again.”
She lays bare the cool logic behind the impulse to cook in death’s shadow: death reminds us that we are lucky to be alive. To remain alive we must eat.
A sense of wonder pervades every page of Pidathala’s book. She is more concerned with joy than death. One gets the sense that cooking, and the act of writing about it, has taught her to live again.
At the end of the essay he writes:
“When my father died my two closest friends confessed that they were terrified. One didn’t know how she’d handle what the loss did to me because she never had a best friend who had lost a parent before. “Don’t worry,” the other reassured her, “it’s like we’ll get to meet a new person.”
…
But the inverse of my friends maxim holds true too: those of us who grieve may change ourselves but the world around us shifts.
...
I am now able to acknowledge that this cookbook was no diversion but rather a guidepost clarifying my grief. Maybe I’d have the will to write about it one day I told myself as I read over it over and over again the sound of my fathers voice dimming in my memory. So now I have.”
I often think about when I will write about my father’s death, my friend’s death. I’m starting to make a piece of theatre work around it. Sen made me think. And so now I have to.
*John Diamond’s obit in the Guardian (By Jay Rayner) starts: “The journalist, writer and broadcaster John Diamond, who has died aged 47, did not battle his illness bravely. Nor was he courageous in the face of death. He developed cancer and, despite treatment, it killed him.” Diamond was married to food writer, Nigella Lawson.
*Sen’s tweet about the essay collection, In the Kitchen, published by Daunt Books.
*The website of Pidathala’s book: five morsels of love
Rishi Dastidar on life, poetry, and writing | Podcast
Rishi Dastidar and I chat about life, poetry, writing and poets always having another job. Rishi gives advice on how to be a poet, embracing Insta poets and whether last lines are harder than first lines, or second books harder than first books; and why we love lists and why we need to pay more attention to verbs.
He is open to offers from companies seeking a Chief Poetry Officer.
A fascinating and wide ranging chat from this leading British poet.
Transcript below (unedited, expect typos). A podcast audio version available here and below.
Links to Rishi’s books: Tickertape here and Saffron Jack here. His twitter here.
Rishi Dastidar’s poetry has been published by Financial Times, New Scientist and the BBC amongst many others. His debut poetry collection Ticker-tape and his second book is Saffron Jack. He is chair of the London writer development organisation Spread The Word. Rishi edited the final part of the Nine Arches Press writers’ trilogy, The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century. (Blog on that here). Rishi is also head of brand language for Brand Pie.
Ben Yeoh:
Hey, everyone. I'm really super excited to talk to Rishi Dastidar. He's a poet, he has two books published, Ticker Tape and Saffron Jack. He chairs spread the word. He's also edited a book on poetry craft. So Rishi, welcome.
Rishi Dastidar:
Hey Ben. Lovely to be with you this afternoon.
Ben Yeoh:
Great. So poets always have another job it seems. I think you've talked about this, it's poets slash something else. Like, is this a good thing? Does the richness of life make you a better poet?
Rishi Dastidar:
So yes. So it starts on the basis that there is no way that anyone could make a living from just selling their poems. So there is a necessary need for anyone who calls themselves a poet to have alternative forms of income. Now, if you work towards it, if you're fortunate, hopefully, that the secondary sources of income can be quite closely poetry adjacent. So teaching in a university, teaching in a school, performing, performing your poetry on stage, on screen, possibly even. And maybe even perhaps lending some of your poetry and your voice to adverts, for example. And that's a fairly accepted and a way of being for lots of people who practice and work as poets now as well. My contention is that as an artist [Inaudible]…
…I think it is something in such that it would benefit, there is a benefit to be had from more poets getting that secondary or getting that income from things that aren't necessarily poetry adjacent. So I jokingly suggest slash civil servant, not even jokingly suggest you know, roofing, nursing. I happento work as a copywriter in advertising and branding. So yeah, it's slightly more adjacent than others. But I think it's notable and I think a lot of notable poets have brought those other working lives into what they write and how they write as well. So yeah, I think the model of just being a poet who's largely as academic is only just one model and we should have more models of doing poems.
Ben Yeoh:
Should there be more corporate managers in fact?
Rishi Dastidar:
So this is partly for me because I would quite like to have the title of chief poetry officer. So to any viewers of this who are in a position to hire please do consider me for said role and I will bring magic to all your corporate communications of varying and different hues. A bit more broadly, yeah, I think if you think of poetry as a way of thinking and a way of thinking that is slightly different from one you might get when you're thinking about creative writing, more generally. I think bringing more and different modes of creative thinking into corporate life into business life more generally is a useful thing, partly for giving you different tools and different modes of thinking to get to different results. But also some fundamental level, acknowledging that business, yeah, it's never just rational, there is emotion in it. And it's interesting when you dig beneath a lot of what passes for commentary and talk on culture building, for example. A lot of the thread there is, Oh, these things called emotions, how do we manage those away? How do we channel them productively? That's a very corporate thing to do, isn't it? As opposed to maybe acknowledging them more and actually thinking, how do we actually recognize and use them in ways that might not necessarily be seen as just pushing them out from this domain as fast as possible. And art in its broader sense is useful for that. And I would say poetry is one of those skills and toolboxes that you can actually bring to think about that and start to do that.
Ben Yeoh:
I've read some stuff about some poets being afraid of these Insta poets. Like I'm not afraid of the instant poets, are you're afraid of the Insta poets are there in fact, even Tik TOK poets? I should have looked this up. I'm assuming that probably must be by now, but should we be afraid of the Insta poets?
Rishi Dastidar:
Oh, no. Not at all. So this is a semi recurrent thing that happens maybe every 18 months or so where somebody rediscovers Insta poetry and decides that it is a terrible thing or at least a dangerous thing because it's stuff that doesn't necessarily look like what they believe poetry should be and it has the temerity to be popular and it has the temerity to then crossover and sell. I mean, (Inaudible).
Now, my take on it is, is that Insta poetry is perfectly valid as a type of poetry. I mean, it's slightly odd just even still calling it Insta poetry because after all, you know, the corollary of that would be well, okay no, I prefer book poetry, who says that no one says that. More substantively though, a lot of people's critique of Insta poetry is positioned as an aesthetic critique, you know, this is rubbish, this is a dog roll, this is shit. But actually what's encoded within that is actually something that's closer to an elitist critique.
Because when you actually look at who is writing as to poetry, and of course who has become successful and popular through Insta poetry as well, more often than not tends to be writers, voices of colour from marginalized backgrounds who bypass the more traditional editorial gatekeeping channels to find an audience, to find an audience with their aesthetic, with their poetry, which has happened to be popular. And so it might not be to your taste, that's absolutely fine with me, but please do not think that Insta poetry is the harbinger of the decline of civilization because it really, really isn't. I always hope that people discover poetry that they liked through Insta poetry, but then they discover that there is a world beyond that. If you like Rupi then hopefully you go on and discover other writers who are away from her different from her as well. Insta poetry as a gateway drug? Yeah, I like that.
Ben Yeoh:
So actually that leads me on to do you think poetry, British poetry on deep global poetry then, have this challenge of a diversity of voices and what should we be doing?
Rishi Dastidar:
So, well, that's a big question to start to unpack. Let's start with the global. I think that simply because what is very clear is that those of us in the Anglophone world, we bluntly do not read enough poetry outside of the British American tradition because we do not read enough poetry in translation, but that's frankly, part of the wider problem that we don't read enough literature in translation full-stop.
And so you know that there are tremendous poets working in languages other than English that never reach the readership, even amongst poets that they deserve, just simply because they haven't yet been translated into English and the barriers and the bottlenecks that there are to do that. But absolutely, you know, my writing of poetry has got better by attempting to read more poets outside of English in translation. And also tentatively trying translations as well, you know because that is a very, very good discipline to actually discover more work and discover more artists. So, yes, absolutely, there is a whole sea of poets out there who one is not familiar with.
In a specific UK context, there has been, I think up until about 10, 15 years ago, there had been a big lacuna, which was the poets of colour, writers of colour had effectively been overlooked in telling the story of poetry in the British Isles, but basically, writers of colour had not even been written out, just not been considered. And so, yeah, that has changed, that is changing. And we're starting to see the fruits of a lot of work by writers and activists before, in pushing people forward in developing and bringing more voices to readers, you know, broader audiences and winning the TSA prize last year and like a book, winning the Ford for last year as well for her best single poem. But that's the tip of what has been a 20, 25-year project to actually start to say to the wider British poetry establishment. There is a whole thriving set of poetries and poetics that are out there that you are not yet fully recognizing. And that is changing, there is still plenty of work to be done, but it is getting there and getting better. And I think bluntly, you cannot tell a credible story about the history of British poetry now without recognizing that large scene that writers of colour have provided since the 1950s and sixties onwards, especially.
Ben Yeoh:
Yeah, I think I agree with all of that. It was quite a while back now, but I remember first discovering ghazals and Sufi poetry. And, you know, this tradition, which stretches back so far has a performance element to it, followed by, you know, millions of people, right. But outside of the English language or visual poetry, you can't look at any of those original haikus or written in Chinese or Japanese poetry and not say, well, wasn't that visual poetry before we in the Anglophone world would have even thought about visual poetry. So I think that's on global and obviously the British poetry, true. So I guess you could argue poetry is one of humankind's oldest art forms and considering, Oh, oral poetry, there's an argument that maybe it's his oldest art form, and maybe you've had some version of the Insta poet every two years ever since the start of that. There were some arguments that I guess that it's one of the smallest art forms that at least in its elite form has this niche readership. I mean, what do you make of that? Or maybe the converse is perhaps if you consider rap as poetry, there is not that. And I was reading one opinion that argued that the advent of rap and hip hop, and to some extent, those forms of art was the reaction of black artists or artists of colour finding essentially a poetry expression, but in a different form. So I'd be interested in seeing, like, do you think is one of the oldest art forms is poetry really small today or is that perhaps it's more diffuse if you think about it in terms of a larger art form.
Rishi Dastidar:
Yes. I tend towards the latter. And again, I think, to some degree, that question comes out of effectively post hyphen modern inheritance in the sense that what you see from the 1920s onwards, is effectively poetry becoming more and more elite than it had been up until that moment. And this is not to deny the power of the art that comes out from that period of post-first world war onwards. But there is absolutely an inflexion point that you can detect that where our data even further back than the beginning of hip hop, actually to the moment which pop music, rock and roll moves out of the music hall and moves into something that looks much more like wider society. And there's an absolute, absolute crossover point. So there's certainly [Inaudible 13:16] British poetry where you have that happening and you have the rise of the movement, so the last, obviously white male movement of British poet. And gradually you see pop music, almost taking that space that poetry once had, and you see poetry running more to the Academy, running more to art school thinking art school theories, and meanwhile, people's hunger and desire for music and speech and song is being satisfied through pop music as well.
So poetry in its broad sense is still there, it's present, it's around, it diffuses an absolutely brilliant word to actually describe it because we know it's there in songs. We know it's there in adverts around us. We know it's in hip hop and rap, but the elite pursuit that we call poetry, yes, it's by definition has got a lot smaller. But I think one of the things that isn't often a compliment to the point is that now, it's not more in terms of thinking in terms of attitudes with what you might describe actively more than this post-modernist visual arts movements and visual arts thinking. And of course, that's where a lot of critical attention and cultural elite cultural formation attention is paid. And so you have this weird dichotomy where have people who call this thing called poetry and because it's practice by very few people, they give off the impression that, of course, it's a very elite pursuit, but then you actually stop and think about it in that poetry is a lot wider and it's a lot bigger and there's a lot more of it around.
Ben Yeoh:
Yes, great. I think I agree with all of that as well. So I like lists, you like list, Saffron Jack essentially started with a list and continues with list. What's up with lists? Should we be interested in list poetry? Why do you like lists so much?
Rishi Dastidar:
List poetry, yes. I mean, list poetry, list poems, not quite as a genre of poetry in their own right. But do they exist as a thing that's recognizable? Yes. Do I write a lot of them as well? Yes. As a sidebar a review does stick in my mind of my first book where I did said it's hard to [Inaudible], can't really disagree with that. Lists are wonderfully powerful because they are orders, they are a tool of making sense of the world. They are the ultimate weapon if you are a control freak who feels that they are out of control. Just by the very act of putting something down in some sort of order, you're suddenly making a claim against kales, suddenly making a claim against entropy almost, in terms of, I, for this moment can [Inaudible] this moment in time and actually grasp things and put them together in a way that starts to approximate sense, approximate logic, approximate flow. And so I think that's why they have their appeal more than everything else. And especially in times and in situations where you feel on the edge of chaos and you feel things spiralling out of control, there's nothing more powerful, but reasserting that control through doing that. And you know, if you think of a fundamental level, what the poets do, we're observers as much as we're anything else. So poems are bluntly lists of images, lists of sensations, lists of memories that we're refound, recontextualize, reasserted. And some of us are better than others at fundamentally disguising that they are lists. I am particularly bad at not disclosing them.
Ben Yeoh:
So Saffron Jack is a long-form poem. Some of humanity's greatest artworks have been long-form poems, but I think arguably today, the long-form poems have gone, yours excluded, there's very few of them. Where have they all gone? Should we be bringing them back?
Rishi Dastidar:
They haven't gone. What has happened is that the publishing industry prefers to call them something else because they might be more salable in different ways. I could point you towards Robin Robertson's Booker prize-nominated novel, The Long Take. It's written in verse. It doesn't necessarily have…
Ben Yeoh:
It's not a novel it's a long-form poem…
Rishi Dastidar:
It doesn't have anything that you might recognize as traditional prose characterization. It doesn't do much by way of plot. And when you look at the way that it's arranged on the page, lots of white space between lines. Why is it called a novel? [inaudible] one of our great poets and editors. But presumably, someone somewhere had a commercial discussion around, you know, what if we positioned this as a novel, we're far more likely to have success than the…
Ben Yeoh:
Bigger market for novels.
Rishi Dastidar:
Is bluntly the case. I mean, sort of knowing your field, [inaudbile] lots of interesting monologues, the opposition to those monologues, but then when you actually break them down and look at what they're doing on the page, they're poems as well, and they flow through and they have poetic effects as well. But just because they happened to be delivered by one person standing on a stage, and they've been published by a Mathew Ramika, we call them a play, we call them a monologue instead of a poem. You know, I mean, again, this comes back to the idea of poetry being diffuse and it's very diffused and this means it's harder to actually see where it is actually a poem in disguise to something that's more commercially palatable.
Ben Yeoh:
It's become like one of those symbiotic creatures, which has just squirrelled its way and all sorts of other art forms to audit survival because you don't name it. Speaking about saffron Jack, long-form poem, ideas, do you think there was just one major idea flowing through Saffron Jack? Was that how you kind of thought about it or came about or is it kind of a lot of mini ideas, which kind of coalesced? Talk me through how you kind of thinking about the themes and what saffron Jack's about.
Rishi Dastidar:
Definitely the former. The poem is an attempt to try and answer the question, what would it be like to set up your own country, call yourself King of your own country? And I know that [ ] a lot of megalomania on my part, but for a long time, I've been fascinated by these things called micronations. So places like Sealand, even San Marina, these places which look too small to be viable countries, and yet they call themselves countries. And when you look at micronations, in particular, there's always something interesting going on in terms of why someone just decided that they could be American and Australian, but they can't move to or immigrate to a different country.
So instead they decide that they must set up their own principality and do so in a backyard or in Sealand's case, in this [ ] The sort of person who finds themselves feeling that atoms being rearranged just by the pattern of words on a page, by the sound of words hitting the air. Chances are you're going to like poetry and you will find poets types of poetry that work for you. And I am absolutely a high mantra of poetry. I don't care whether, what turns you on is the absolute avant-garde language gains of JH Prin or whether it is, you know, Ruby Cow and other Insta poets. I am just happy that you are now in the world of poetry and enjoy it enough. You will start to find lots of other people who have that similar atom rendering, atom changing effect on you. If you're moved enough by that experience to start to want to produce it and create it yourself, the fundamental thing you must do is read, read, read, read, read, read. And you will find that the more you read the better you get at writing poetry.
Because it's only by reading that you actually discover what you like, what you don't like, what is possible on a page, what isn't possible on the page. And something that people who had just been setting out often say is, oh, but if I read too much then I'm going to end up sounding like those poets. And that's a necessary stage of any artistic evolution. Any writer who's published goes through a phase of sounding like their heroes, sounding like their idols. The trick is you have to push through that phase to actually start to get to a place where you start to sound like you and you start to sound like your voice, your obsessions, and things that are really animating you. And that can be a long process. Absolutely. My friend, Joe Bell talks about the fact that becoming a poet takes something like 10 years of reading and writing and dedicating yourself to it, which means... And knowing what we talked about at the top in terms of the lack of rewards. And that need for having an income outside of poetry means that it's a vocation and it's something that you have to really want to do outside of thinking, I'm going to write a bestseller because chances are, you're not. And so, that tends to winnow people out a bit that tends to leave the people who are obsessive stroke dedicated. But, honest to goodness, don't be scared. Don't be scared of coming into this world. Don't think that poetry isn't a thing for you, don't think that you're going to be asked, ahh, yes but what is the subtext of what you are saying of what you are writing every time? Because that's only a question of concern to people teaching English. Poets don't ask you about subtext. Poets don't care
Ben Yeoh:
Yeah. And even established poets writers, we all worry. Like, do we really have a voice? Does this sound like X or Y? I mean, in some ways these are kind of concerns which never go away if you are a reader and a writer.
Rishi Dastidar:
Exactly, exactly so.
Ben Yeoh:
Any newsletters, pamphlets, or magazines that maybe people want to get into, we should look at, in fact, so I hadn't even prepared this. Look, I have one (Inaudible) it’s coming on screen now. I have a business day job. But keep poetry around for me because you never know when that might help. So obviously that's what I would recommend. And obviously, you're linked with them. So that's a bit of a bias one. So if there's any other, so Realto, we'll put that in the links actually, we'll have something
Rishi Dastidar:
So there's plenty of places that you can go to, to start to discover the world of poetry. I mean, the poetry society is the most obvious sort of initial starting point. It is the UK's dedicated member organization for poetry, for the promotion of poetry as well. They publish the poetry review, the UK's leading journal. And so taking a subscription out to that gives you an immediate sense of what is going on now in contemporary British poetry. Then also it gives you a sense of the spread of activities and aesthetics that people are interested in. Purchase also help organize a whole raft of writing groups around the country. So if you want to become more active, that is absolutely a place to go. Hopefully, reopening soon, I should say is the national poetry library at the South bank. And it is the UK's main library for poetry. And you'll be able to get from the most collections that have been published since 1950 onwards and all the latest additions of the magazines. And for those of you outside of London, Leeds has a very good poker library in the university managed still. I think its poetry library is about to open soon as well. So those are well worth checking out.
If you're moved enough to actually want to start writing, then do check out the poetry school, the UK's main provider of poetry education. Plenty of courses at all levels, beginner, intermediate, advanced taught by poets and many poets I should say, who are writing now, they got their starts by doing school courses. I was one, I spent a lot of my formative years writing as many poetry school courses as I could get my hands on while I'm still learning, but while I was doing that. And yeah, the realtor, as well as you know, I am biased because I'm a contributing editor then, but three times a year we give you a very good sense of what's going on in terms of British and international contemporary poetry. So yeah, plenty to choose from there. And of course, like we've been saying all the way through in terms of poetry is the fierceness. You will hear poetry on the radio, poetry places, a great vehicle for finding stuff out. Gal jet Nagra on radio four extra has a regular slot where he digs into the BBC's archives and brings us more poetry bits and pieces like that as well. And of course, social media, like we said, at the start, you will find poetry on Insta poems or poetry on Instagram. Go there, look at that. There's plenty of poetry on Twitter as well. Go there, have a look there, plenty going on.
Ben Yeoh:
Great. Yeah. Twitter poetry is a great happenstance thing I've found. So I actually, this, I guess, turned out to be one of the themes of our chat is the fact that poetry is much more alive in the world and in our lives than we might think. But I had a question here about what we thought the social function of poetry is. So that kind of brings it all together that do you think it has a social function? I guess we're going to be arguing, yes, but I'd be interested to see what you think it is, what does poetry do for us?
Rishi Dastidar:
So, and I think it's something that people have been coming back to more, especially over the last 10, 15 years as it's felt that more of our working lives and professional lives have started to get more regimented and more prescribed and more broken up and most of us, especially working on white-collar jobs are in a world of targets and fairly abstracted PRI bloodless language. I don't think it's an accident, but there's all of that going on. People are hankering for something that is a lot wilder and a lot more untrammelled and a lot freer of those sorts of constraints. So I think there's that. I think the wider social role of poetry as a space to actually say things which it is hard to say in pros, to acknowledge vulnerability, to acknowledge pain, to actually articulate emotions, memories, sensations, which if you put them in pros, would be so harrowing and so gleeful that people wouldn't want to engage with that. But by making them poems, people can come in at the site and start to engage almost in a more safe way as well. And so start to open up those things.
So poetry is a form of witness, I think is absolutely vital, poetry as a way for overlooked, unheard voices from unheard communities is another thing as well. You know, claiming space that might not otherwise be achieved through more rational means of persuasion. I think there are all those functions that are there as well. I mean not to recycle Shelly's legislators' line but poets have a role in terms of dreaming of what future scenarios future states might be... Oh, and Pointing to suggesting the weird gaps and abstractions in language, you know, the gap between rhetoric and the truth on the ground. Most good poets that you ever meet, are acutely interested and are acute to those wild gaps between what are corporation claims and what they actually do, what a politician claims and what they actually do, that as well. Poets as canaries in languages [ ]
Ben Yeoh:
Yeah. I think that's a very coherent argument for the vitality of poetry and its function today kind of never more important and maybe never more alive. I hadn't quite thought about it like that. So yes, for sure. Great.
Rishi Dastidar:
One more point. I was just going to add one more point to that as well in that, yeah, If you think about the internet being such a text-driven medium, you think hypertext markup language is what it is and yeah, we read so many web pages. Twitter is a text-driven medium, as much as it is anything else. It is therefore unsurprising that the oldest form of putting words together, which is poetry, suddenly has a renascence as well. We're living in a much more language-driven age. So the oldest form of putting language together, having a [ ] I think those are absolutely connected
Ben Yeoh:
Instagram tried to get in there with their visuals, but actually visual poets got all over that as well. So yes, and actually audio because even in the audio thing, you've got this clubhouse and all of that. Going back even further or the oral poetry and all the rhetoric and stuff, so yeah. Poetry, the original social media. So coming to our last, I guess a couple of questions here, what I'm going to put on one of your other hats which is your copywriting hat, I guess, and how that links. So I didn't really know there was such a thing as brand language. So I'm interested in that. And I didn't know that there were grammar memes either, and I didn't know that verb should be a superpower. So I don't know whether you want to comment on grammar means brand language, verbs as a superpower and what the world of copywriting has to say about the world.
Rishi Dastidar:
Right. So I have lots of views on lots of those. The grammar memes I think is probably, so let's recast it this way. When you look at an average day on Twitter and you look at lots of memes flying around, how do they actually work? Why do they actually work? It's because they're fucking around with syntax, to put it crudely, they're doing something interesting with syntax that just jolts you out of your comfortable reading. And so that's the property that suddenly makes them [ ] so that's yeah, exactly. It's a poetic effect. Brand language, I think commercially in corporate land, we're very familiar with the idea that a logo of visual identity is something that all organizations should have as a means of carving out some sort of unique distinction, unique visual distinction. Brand language is an attempt to do that verbally for the language that an organization might use in written communications and in spoken communications as well. Now, is it a lot harder to cast something out that is unique and distinctive through language? Yes. But at the same time, I can say to you, for example, if I sent you an email so how D Ben, this is John Lewis polymer. You would know instantly, hang on. That's not right. That's not how John Lewis speaks. As it was John Lewis you would expect them to say, dear Mr Yo, hello, how are you?
And that's all brand language is. It's finding the way or the particular vocabulary, but also the grammar and syntax that actually starts to make that organization's personality come to life. And you can geek out on that sort of stuff as much or as little as you want. But when you start to look at that world, you see those organizations with stronger, better, more creative brands have given as much thought to the words part of the communication as much as they do to the design and the art direction part of the communications as well. And this is why there is absolutely a cross over between copywriting and poetry as well. I presented a documentary for radio four last year, which investigated those links between advertising and copywriting and how you can find lots of poets tucked away in advertising. And again, to bring us back, right now there's a moment where brands are using poets as a means of their interest as a means of actually communicating sincerity and death. But also it points to the fact that we are, again, poetry is diffuse. If the commercial world is using poems, it's there for a reason.
Ben Yeoh:
We should definitely write to Nike and say, the chief poetry officer, we've got one here. And verbs as a superpower. Do we not pay enough attention to our verbs?
Rishi Dastidar:
Yeah, we definitely don't pay enough attention to verbs. And if you want a quick tip to improve your writing, no matter what you're writing, it's to use more verbs. And I think people don't because they're doing words and subconsciously that means that they know that they're on the hook to actually do things, rather than be obstructed away in various other verbiages. But if you're struggling, just actually, what happens when I change a verb, what happens when I use a different verb and you'll suddenly start to see whatever it is that you're writing, lift and change.
Ben Yeoh:
Great. Okay. And so coming to our final question, which is what does being productive look like for Rishi? What does a good poetry writing day look like? Well, it could be a good copywriting day as well. I don't know if you mix and match the two days as well, but maybe if you've got a good poetry writing day, you know, does it include running as a food, everything, what does your very best day look like?
Rishi Dastidar:
My very best day? I mean, I don't think I have separate copywriting and poetry days because my style as a writer is to get first drafts out very, very quickly and then continually work on them as we go. And so poems, especially are things that arrive in-between times. And in that space between meetings in that half-hour between briefs or something like that. So it's rare that I have a special day where this is a poetry day. But a good day, a productive day probably features a run at the beginning of the day, hopefully, features a decent breakfast. And then hopefully at my desk by nine and maybe one meeting, maybe no meetings and a relatively quiet on slack and email. So I can just actually knock around for a couple of hours
Ben Yeoh:
Does that involve reading as well? Would you read a bit, does that help the writing? And there was one person, I can't remember who, who said a good writing day actually starts with the first half of the day as reading, again, in an ideal world.
Rishi Dastidar:
No, so for me, I know that my productivity dips after lunch. So after two o'clock is going to be reading, admin and that sort of hopefully subconscious, deeper thinking. Rare is the good thing for me that emerges after two o'clock. It does sometimes, but generally speaking, I find better words in the morning.
Ben Yeoh:
Sure. And do you have a... In the previous place, was that your writing desk, do you have a writing desk or? I kind of know that actually, cause I've seen it on Twitter poems because they will hit you anywhere, you know, little phone poems done on like whatever notes or stuff around is also a favourite kind of medium, but I guess you'll get back to your writing desk and transcribe it if you can.
Rishi Dastidar:
Yeah. I mean, I've written first drafts on tops of buses. I've written first drafts on tubes. I wrote most of the title poem for Ticker Tape on a journey from our front hole on a bus, on a tube, in the foyer of a cinema, in the cinema seat and then all the way back as well. So they can arrive anywhere. But at some point, there has to be some sort of consolidation and that has to happen at the desk. So even if the act of creation isn't happening at the desk, the act of moving into production, that has to happen there.
Definitely.
Ben Yeoh:
Great. Okay. Well, thank you so much for this conversation. I learned a lot and maybe quite thoughtful about poetry in the world today. Please do check out Rishi's books, which we'll have links to. And if you're interested in finding out about poetry, I think our theme is just do it, please do it.
Rishi Dastidar:
Absolutely. Thank you, Ben.
Ben Yeoh:
Great. Thanks.
Mya-Rose Craig, Birdgirl on joys of birding, activism and accessibility to nature
I chat to Mya-Rose Craig, aka Birdgirl, about her love of birding touching upon birdsong and the mysteries of migration. We discuss accessibilty to nature, activism what in birding terms is a “lifer” and how to “pish”.
There’s a transcript ( unedited) below and a link to a podcast version of this chat, plus links to topics we talk about. Links:
Black2Nature, Charity fighting for equal access to nature for Visible Minority Ethnic people.
Get Birding, podcast.
Ben Yeoh:
Hi, everyone. I'm super happy to welcome Mya-Rose Craig. She is one of the youngest British people to be awarded an honorary doctorate, an activist and a campaigner. She founded black to nature focusing on minority communities. She's currently hosting a podcast, Get Birding, on no surprises here on birding, with a host of celebrities and conservationists. And we're here to talk about birding, her life and what is happening in the world. So thank you. Welcome.
Mya Rose Craig:
Hi, thank you for having me.
Ben Yeoh:
Great. So I'm a real city dweller and I kind of think in this maze that is London, we have some birds, these green spaces. But I think it's kind of not the same necessarily as getting out into the countryside in nature. I was wondering, could you give us a sense of the joy of watching birds in the wild, particularly for those of us who maybe haven't experienced it before, or how it kind of came to be that you became so passionate about this area of nature?
Mya Rose Craig:
So I think nature's always played a very important part in my life. My parents are birdwatchers and my older sister was a birdwatcher and they've always taken me outdoors. And I live in the countryside but I'm also half Bangladeshi and as I got older, I really started becoming aware that there was just no one that looked like me in the countryside out in nature. And that was really upsetting. And that's kind of why I started doing activism, it was because of that magical feeling that I had when out in nature. So when I was little, it was always very fun and very exciting and my parents were very good about making it into a treasure hunt for me or something like that, where we were going to go and find the next bird. But I think as I've gotten older, I've really, really gained an appreciation for just sort of the peace that you get when you're outside. Cause you're separate from the stress of everyday life. You're separate from sort of the hustle and bustle of everything. It's just you and the outdoors. And I think that that's a really unique feeling that everyone should be able to appreciate.
Ben Yeoh:
I guess, in popular culture, there's been a strand of thinking that kind of makes fun of birdwatching or birding. And I guess there's been the sense that you mentioned it that has been very kind of old white man dominated and maybe a bit anoraks. I mean, what do you might say to those who might want to experience this joy you described earlier, but maybe the sense that this is not a community for them?
Mya Rose Craig:
I mean the funny thing is that the stereotypes aren't entirely wrong and I can think of like a hundred people off the top of my head who completely slot into that. But that's just like one tiny, probably quite fanatical subsection of a really large group of people. And they are the ones that would go out and say, I am a bird watcher, but there are lots of people who would never really think of themselves that way, who are in fact, bird watchers. Like if you have some bird feeders up in your garden that you like watching sometimes, you're a bird watcher. If you notice the birds flying over as you walk to work, you're a bird watcher. And I think for me, well, like the word birder really means is just someone who is aware of and appreciating the nature around them. And I think that that's something that a lot of people enjoy when you peel that label away.
Ben Yeoh:
So your suggestion is actually we're much closer to it in everyday life than we might actually think.
Mya Rose Craig:
Definitely. But I also think that stereotype does make people feel like they aren't green enough if that makes sense. Like one of the reasons I started my podcast was just because a lot of people said that they felt a bit too intimidated to get into bird watching because everyone seemed to know like they knew everything and they didn't even know where to start. Well, I've always stuck more with the viewpoint that like, you don't need to know the names or the Latin names or the calls of by heart. You just need to go out and appreciate it. But I also think there are so many different ways of enjoying nature and the outdoors that we don't really traditionally think about in the UK.
So I guess that typical way of engaging with nature is putting your binoculars on, putting your anorak on, going down to the local nature and staring at some small brown birds for a few hours. And I'm not going to lie personally, I do enjoy that, but there are a lot of people who don't. And one of the big things that my organization, back to nature does, is just sort of widen that perspective of what engaging with nature is in the first place. If you're playing football with your friends in the park, you're in the green space, you're still engaging with nature. If you're feeding the pigeons during your lunch hour, you know, we might not think of them as nature, but they are other animals and that's still nature. And I think as soon as you broaden that perspective, it takes the stress off and it makes you appreciate just how much nature there is around you, basically.
Ben Yeoh:
Yeah. I had a moment like that earlier this year, where was on the banks of the River Thames, which not in London, you don't sort of think about that, but you can walk on the foreshore and there's all sorts of nature around that, even in the middle of the city. I was wondering, do you have any favourite, I guess, birding moments or experiences, something which you kind of feel was kind of pivotal in finding your enjoyment here?
Mya Rose Craig:
I mean, I think that they've almost been like, this is very corny, sorry, but genuinely, I think they've already been like a countless amount of moments that I have loved over the years that I think when I was a child, there was a real just wonder still when looking at everything. I loved watching (Inaudible 06:23) that flown across from America as much as I enjoyed watching the ducks hanging out in my garden. And I think that that was just really magical because everything about birds and nature was exciting to me. My charity, back to nature, we run nature camps for kids from minority, I think backgrounds and we're bringing them out into nature quite often for the first time ever. And I think as someone who's always spent time outdoors and always spend time in nature, I think that really opened my eyes as to what an amazing experience that is for people to be experiencing the countryside for the first time. Cause a lot of these kids are having such a good time and they're again, filled with that sort of wonder that you are when you're a kid. And I think being able to relive that sort of childhood magic of being outdoors over and over and over with all of the kids that I work with is really special.
Ben Yeoh:
That sounds amazing. I've noted the same in some business people who I meet with where if they do reconnect with nature in some way, it often kind of changes the way they view things and you see the impact of what we do or our companies and things have on the world. And you can see that through reconnecting with those elements around us. So I learned some specific birding words recently, which I didn't know existed or what they were. And I was wondering whether you could tell me from your point of view. So one is a kind of technical thing, which is, tell me about ringing because I believe this is something that you are qualified to do from quite early on. And what is it? Why is it important?
Mya Rose Craig:
Yeah, so ringing or banding in America is basically a scientific study. So what licensed ringers do is they catch the birds in some shape or form. They take lots of different measurements from them, like weights, like how much fat they have on them, how much muscle, how long their wings are, how old they are, stuff like that. And they log all of that data and then they put a ring, a metal band around the leg of this bird. And it has a unique number on that. And that means that when another ringer catches the bird, at some point, there'll be able to access all the data that we've logged about it before. So basically, we're building up this massive database on information about birds and we learn all sorts of interesting things about loads of different species.
For example, it's been really important just in terms of figuring out where birds go when they migrate, which we know a lot less about than people think we do. But personally, I started it when I was very young. I was nine when I first started going and just sort of watching and wanting to take part. And the personal appeal for me was just being able to physically handle wild animals and just see birds at a completely different perspective. Cause obviously, we're not hurting them or even particularly stressing them out when we're catching them. But it means just for like five minutes or less, I'm able to sort of look a wild bird in the eye and it's very special. I really loved it. So in the UK, you can get your license when you're 16. So as soon as I was 16, I got my ringing license. And I've been doing lots of ringing since. This morning I was actually doing Raven ringing. I ringed, I think five different Raven chicks this morning and it was really nice.
Ben Yeoh:
Excellent. So what can you tell us about migration or what I guess ringing has told us about that? Is there some unsolved mystery that you would think, you know what, it would be really great if someone solved this, did you know that we don't know where these birds go or how they fly?
Mya Rose Craig:
Migration is just a bit weirder than people think it is. So for example, well, things that we would have thought historically that seemed very obvious have actually been disproved. So if we talk about black caps, for example, there are relatively common UK birds, you get them in hedges and gardens and just in the countryside and you get ones that you get in the winter. And the assumption would be, Oh, just like lots of other birds in the UK, they're here in the winter, they stay, they breed, they live here year-round, but it turns out that there is a population of blackcaps that migrate to the UK every winter and then they leave. And there is a separate population, the black caps that migrate to the UK every summer. So you've got weird things like that going on that we just never would have realised otherwise, but they're also were just genuine mysteries. So for example, the cookoo, which is like a very famous spring bird in the UK, for a very long time, we just had no idea where it was migrating to, what its migration route was. And it was probably only 10 or 15 years ago that we finally found out that they're migrating to the Congo of all places. And again, like we're discovering all of these things because of ringing.
Ben Yeoh:
That's amazing. I recall reading somewhere that we're not sure how birds do their complex navigation because you have birds who, they know where to go back nesting and they've never been there before. Like if in their first year of life. And you can partially confuse them if you move them from their nest and things. And we're still discovering things about that. I don't know if you know anything about that.
Mya Rose Craig:
I don't know. I'm not an expert or anything, but I do know that birds navigation or just birds, in general, are really interesting. I think it's sort of a very normal like human thing, but there's always a human assumption that we are the cleverest [ ] But birds can do so many fantastic things and there are loads of different hypotheses. So for example, people were trying to figure out if birds literally just using landmarks to figure out where they're going. Some people think that it might be like magnetic forces that basically creating like a little compass inside their head so they know where they're going. Whether it's just like a generational thing they're showing each other the journey. We're not a hundred percent sure there's loads of great ideas. They might all be true.
Ben Yeoh:
Yeah, I was reading, I think just this week there was a paper out showing that the crows, Crow family, has human-like intelligence is just, we need to ask them the right kind of questions. We don't have to speak in their language, so to speak
Mya Rose Craig:
You know, I love that take cause for various reasons, I ended up like researching quite a lot about Ravens last spring and it was so interesting and it was partially because that was a raven nest near my house that suddenly popped up during lockdown. I was suddenly very interested about Ravens. And there were so many fun facts where I was like, these birds are so, so smart. Like for example, even just the fact that Ravens have fun. Like they do things purely for enjoyment. I love that. Or they're sort of social, the way that they interact with each other socially. But the thing I found most interesting is the fact that Ravens have been proven to use tools which is interesting just because sort of tools is one of the ways that we as humans and maybe like chimps differentiate ourselves from other animals in terms of intelligence. So I don't know. I just thought that was really interesting, but Corvettes brilliant, they're great birds.
Ben Yeoh:
Yeah. It's really fascinating. And so I'm going to put you on the spot here as well. Cause I don't know necessarily you're going to know anything about this, but I realized I knew nothing really about Birdsong. So I was wondering whether, I know birdsong, sometimes they kind of use kind of for social learning and also kind of communication. And is also one of the things that we hear around. What would you have me know about birdsong and why it happens or anything about it?
Mya Rose Craig:
I also didn't know anything about birdsong until I did an episode on my podcast about it.
Ben Yeoh:
So we should all listen to that.
Mya Rose Craig:
But genuinely, I didn't know that much before. I've never been like a bird song person. I only knew a few songs. But I was talking to someone who is a Birdsong person, called Lucy Lapwing. And she was saying that a lot of the times, especially during springtime, what we hear as being very beautiful bird song is really a very sort of macho display from various birds as they all try to prove that they are the strongest and the most resilient and they're the ones that the female should go with. And they can get very, very territorial about it all. And it's the same with the Dawn chorus, which again, we're like, Oh, the Dawn chorus is so beautiful, but all of these birds are like shouting over each other. Again, trying to prove that they've made it through the fight. They're the loudest. They were strong enough to last through the cold and they're here to survive the next day. But one thing I did read about recently, which I thought was really interesting was just talking about how scientists were measuring birds brainwaves while they were sleeping and how the brainwaves were doing the same as what they do when they are singing, basically. And these birds were dreaming about the songs that they sing or their calls that they make during the day, which I thought was pretty interesting.
Ben Yeoh:
Okay, great. So I've got two more birding phrases or nouns I've heard about. So what is it, the expression “lifer” mean?
Mya Rose Craig:
So for lots of birders, birding is all about list, not that it's all about the list, but it gets very competitive and they keep lists of what they've seen and they're aware of what they haven't seen. Then you keep like country list, local area list, the world list. And like I said, it's all very competitive. And so a lifer is basically just a bird that you have never before seen in your life, a new bird in your life, I guess. But the sort of undercurrent tool that is like, yes, got another bird on my list.
Ben Yeoh:
Great. And then the last phrase I had or read about was “pish”, which I believe is a kind of sounds that some birders can make to attract birds or something like that.
Mya Rose Craig:
Yeah. I would love to know where you've heard that cause I've never even seen that word written down.
Ben Yeoh:
I may have made it up, during my research on birding. Maybe it's a myth, is it a myth?
Mya Rose Craig:
Oh, no, it's a real thing, but I can't even do it very well. So this is going to be very embarrassing, but pishing is basically, birders making a funny sound that makes the birds around you go, what's that funny sound. So they hop out into the open to try and figure out what that funny sound is. And weirdly there are not many sounds that do this, pitching is one of the few that pretty much always works, at least with lots of birds. And this is going to be very embarrassing now, but it's basically like a, pshh,pshh,pshh like over and over louder and quieter. And for some reason that always gets the birds out.
Ben Yeoh:
There's a scientific paper on that. Why are the sounds of... Maybe that's like the proto bird language that we haven't understood yet and is one of the things, he's like, Oh, they're asking us about the meaning of life. That's interesting. I'm going to find out about that.
Mya Rose Craig:
Yeah, it's funny because pishing is a very like age-old birding tactic. Like people would be doing it in like the sixties to try and get birds to hop out with bushes even back then.
Ben Yeoh:
That's the other thing about, I guess there's some thought about birding being a particular kind of British occupational, though I've seen that there's global birders. And there's been quite a long tradition that goes back this century, but it seems to go back even further in kind of nature writing, but it's kind of this long tradition of being close to nature and things. And I guess there's also been a tradition of nature writing in this country continued by the likes of, I guess Robert MacFarlane now and sketching back I think we've had people like Roger Deakin talking about wild swimming and things like that. Are there any particular books or works that have inspired you? Cause I know you're somewhat of a writer yourself.
Mya Rose Craig:
Yeah. I think Steven Moss, who is a nature writer wrote a very interesting column in the gauzy in maybe a year or two ago about nature writing and the British legacy of nature writing. Because he was basically asking, in the UK, we have this very, almost important tradition of nature writing, but is that now outdated? And do we need something better to represent the British public? Which I thought was very interesting but in terms of.
Ben Yeoh:
Nature YouTubing.
Mya Rose Craig:
Yeah. but I think a really good example of that new type of nature is Doris book, diary of a young actress, which obviously everyone adores but with good reason, it's a really good book and it's really beautiful. And I think most importantly sort of touching on what Stephen Moss was talking about is also really accessible. It helps you to understand why he loves nature so much without the assumption that you are also an expert in nature, or you have also spent your childhood wandering through the idyllic countryside and I think that's where things are going in the future. I also really love Stephen Moses writing. But yeah, you're right. I think nature plays an unusually strong role in sort of our sense of place and our sense of national identity within the UK compared to most other countries. And that's a very historical thing. Like not to go slightly off piece, but during my A levels, I had to study various Victorian poets and things like that. And that was one like it was someone who was living in India and he had painted this beautiful idyllic picture of the English countryside with the country manners and the rolling green fields. And I was like, that's what people think of when they think of the UK. That image is so strong within how we identify ourselves, I guess, even for people that never even been to the countryside. Which I don't really know why. It's definitely a thing.
Ben Yeoh:
And I think, I mean, talking about connecting to current and future generations, you know, through writing or through some new forms of writing is definitely, I think one way we could do that. So definitely recommend those books. But I think you've helped edit or collate a book yourself recently with a lot of other kinds of young voices connected to nature. Do you want to tell me a little bit about that?
Mya Rose Craig:
So I have a book coming out in September called we have a dream and it was something I actually really loved writing. It was very special to me. And the idea was essentially, there are so many amazing young activists around the world, especially young activists of colour or young indigenous activist that are just not getting the platform and the promotion that they deserve for the amazing work that they do. And I wanted to, I suppose, give them the opportunity to talk about the work that they were doing, and there was amazing range of the types of things. And there were people from literally all over the world. And so I spent about six months interviewing all of these different people and it was fantastic. And you went from really great grassroots, or what was once a very grassroots project that has become very big. Like there's a boy tackling deforestation via football in Kenya to have a very broad sort of system changing projects, like Alton Peltier in Canada, who's fighting for indigenous people's rights, especially to do with water. And I don't know, it was just amazing to speak to all of these young people about what they're doing because they're all so inspirational. And a lot of them are younger than me. It was fantastic
Ben Yeoh:
Now you know how other people feel when they look at you and you're younger than all of these others. That said, there's always kind of someone younger than you and there's always someone who kind of knows more than you, but that's okay. That's all good too. So do you have a particular maybe process as a writer, what does kind of a good writing day look for you?
Mya Rose Craig:
I think honestly like writing, cause I'm also writing another book at the moment, which is much more of a traditional book, but writing this book, we have a dream, was actually a very pleasant experience. And it was very structured and I was literally just recording Zoom interviews with people. Cause you know, we're living in the age of COVID, recording these Zoom interviews with people and typing up a profile about them afterwards. And I guess the most difficult thing really was like reducing these amazing conversations down to like
Ben Yeoh:
A few hundred words.
Mya Rose Craig:
Yes. Cause these people were fantastic. But I think in terms of what a day in life, like in terms of writing looks like, very messy, very disorganized writing whenever I have the time or the energy basically, which can be all over the pace. I have, actually just once, but I have jumped out of bed one morning thinking like I'm going to write now. But more common I've also stayed up very late suddenly with the energy to write. So it's, I don't know, it's been a really nice experience, very different.
Ben Yeoh:
Great. And then on non-writing days, I guess, what does a typical kind of birding day look for you, you sort of get out and then you've got a place to go to and some birds on a list or idea of what to spot and are you out there for a few hours with binoculars on eyes and things and how does one of those days look?
Mya Rose Craig:
I think it's totally flexible depending on what the goal is. Like not to be annoying, but I think, so quite often in lockdown, I've been doing a lot more like birdwatching. So just going out on a walk for half an hour for a few hours just walking through the fields and woods and stuff, seeing whatever birds I happen to stumble across. Which I didn't do that as much before lockdown. I think that that's definitely something that I've grown sort of an enjoyment of a patience of much more than before. And I think that's more what I'm talking about when I'm saying how I feel like nature is very meditative and how it was very peaceful and things like that. But there are also certain occasions where a very rare bird has turned up in the UK. Those are not peaceful days when my parents are getting up like at like three o'clock
Ben Yeoh:
To go a hundred miles this way
Mya Rose Craig:
Drive across the country to catch this bird just as the sun is rising. And hopefully to see it immediately and to celebrate seeing this new bird. And that can take between a few hours, to days. There are occasions where we've gone back over and over try and see a bird until we finally have.
Ben Yeoh:
Like famous celebrities, spotting, famous celebrity, bird spotting.
Mya Rose Craig:
Yeah. Basically.
Ben Yeoh:
And you've had some great travel adventures, cause I think you've seen like loads of birds around the world. I think I was reading, did you go to East Malaysia Borneo once, did you spot any birds there or I can't remember whether I misread that.
Mya Rose Craig:
No, you did. I'm very lucky, I've been to all sorts of countries. I've travelled quite a lot for birds, which we travel for birds to see birds and anything else we do along the way is just an extra. So when I went to Borneo Malaysia I did see an awful lot of birds, actually, it was a wonderful trip. And it was actually one of the, except Bangladesh, it was the first time I'd ever bird watched in Asia as well, or ever really been to Asia. And yeah, it was a really special experience. It was very different. But yeah, more importantly, the birds were fantastic. There were so much birds there.
Ben Yeoh:
I asked because it's one of the places that I've been to, but when I was in Borneo, I think they probably were sort of birds in the jungle. And I remember one and two, but it's not an element that I particularly paid super attention to. And I kind of now wish that maybe I did. I do remember seeing, it must've been some sort of bird of prey. I don't even know which one, but fly across and catch a fish in the river in front of us. And that was quite a moment. But it was also one of the trips for me that really understood how lucky I was, you know, having grown up in this country because passing through particularly, I was in some of the pristine jungle and around Kinabalu and places like that, just incredibly poor. And I can, in that time, this was over 20 years ago, you know, there was no running water and you camped where you were sort of camping. And that was kind of quite a revelation for me. I was a late teen. I was probably about your age, a late teenager seeing that. I don't know how you feel having experience with that and talking with sort of activists around the world and any observation on your kind of global travels there?
Mya Rose Craig:
I think, again, sorry, slightly off piece, but important. Something that was very important in terms of the creation of back to nature, was definitely like travelling and going to other countries because it gave me a much broader, much more international perspective in terms of getting people into nature, how British people think about nature, why people aren't getting into nature. And something that was particularly significant to me was that I went on a trip to Bangladesh. And I met so many Bangladeshi birders, naturalists, environmentalist, campaigners, who all really loved and cared about nature and the environment. And there wasn't a single one in the UK. And that was the moment where I realized that this wasn't like an international issue, Bangladeshi people don't just magically not care about nature. There is something very broad and very systemic going on within the UK or within Europe.
And I think that that was definitely a massive turning point for me in terms of going about setting up Black's nature. And I think more on the general point that international perspective almost always comes into play when I'm talking about the issues that I care about. Like one thing within the UK that I'm very aware of is biodiversity loss. Purely because I have been lucky enough to go to other countries and it has absolutely put into perspective how little by diversity and how little we have left in the UK, which is one of the reasons that I personally feel like biodiversity loss is such an extreme issue. I also talk quite a lot about indigenous people's rights and indigenous... I'm trying to amplify indigenous people's voices in terms of the climate change movement and the environmental movement and conservation. Partially because again, I have been lucky enough to go and visit these places and go and see their projects in action. And I've actually, I became an ambassador for the organization, survival international, which advocates for indigenous people's rights against conservation organizations, because that is such a big issue, in and of itself
Ben Yeoh:
Yeah, I was reading, there's a big project called project drawdown, which looks at some of the world's climate solutions and they sort of list sort of 50 or a hundred of them of which one of the most important is actually defending indigenous land rights. If indigenous people look after their land and have done much better than usually other owners of land. So by giving them back their land rights, that's actually a huge positive climate solution that we could look towards. So maybe the final question also, wrapping up is what other projects for the year or looking forward that you're kind of excited about. So we have your book, we have your podcast, we have another book coming up and you're an ambassador for various things. Anything else you'd like to highlight?
Mya Rose Craig:
I think genuinely the most, well, I guess there are two things, firstly Black's nature is going really well. We've gotten loads of funding to run camps this summer, partially because of coronavirus and lockdown and the effect that's had on people. We're going to be running so many camps this summer and I'm very excited about it. So I think that that's going to be great. Like we're going to be working with kids from London for the first time and things like that. And running longer camps. But I think on a more personal level, the thing I'm most excited for this year is genuinely just going to university in the autumn. Cause I've been in the gap year this year and I've been doing lots of work and stuff. But you know, same as everyone I've been in locked down. And then I'm just really excited to go off and study and to live in a new place and all that sort of thing. And that's in October so yeah, lots look forward to this year.
Ben Yeoh:
Great. That sounds amazing. So do everyone lookout for her book, we'll put links below, black to nature as well. If you're interested in any of the work that Maya's doing around that and get birding for the podcast as well if you want to find out any more about birds. So this just leaves me to thank you very much. It was really great to speak to you and I wish you all the best in all your future endeavours.
Mya Rose Craig:
Thank you so much. It was lovely to speak.
Ben Yeoh:
Great. Thanks, bye.
Fuschia Dunlop, understanding China through food
Soya braised pork. My recipe. Many Chinese families will have their own versions.
-understanding China through its food
-Sharks fin and Sichuan pepper a memoir travel book by Fuchsia Dunlop gives subtle and deep insights into Chinese thinking through food
-oppression of Uyghurs through food
-understanding the rare and exotic and why increase meat consumption is a trend is likely to continue
-understanding the sheer range and complexity of Chinese food
-How Buddhist thinking is expressed through food
-why understanding a little about the culture or cuisine of a food is necessary to appreciate whether it is “good” or not
Fuchsia Dunlop's travel and food memoir of China, Shark’s fin and Sichuan pepper, is one of the two best books I’ve read in recent years in helping me think about China today and its history.
(The other book is by Julie Lovell: Maoism a global history. Lovell has also recently translated an abridged version of the monkey King which is also really worth reading. The Monkey King is one of the four great classic novels of China the others being the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, and Dream of the Red Chamber. A great number I would go so far to say that the majority of educated Chinese people would have read or at least know the stories in all four books this observation indicates a quality infused in Chinese culture)
Dunlop immerses herself in Chinese food culture and commits to eating everything. While grappling with the tapestry of Chinese food and culture on its own terms she does not lose sight of her own British upbringing and lens insights to those of us who have never visited China to understand why some practices might be. Through the stories and experiences one can see how food and cuisine are culture and how they travel through the country and through the world
This is meaningful to me as the British born son of a Chinese Malaysian father and a Chinese Singaporean mother and I see this in the story I’ve related of how the dish of chicken rice came from roots in China via immigrants to Singapore, Malaysia and SE Asia and where it is now handed down to me in London.
Take the topic of eating everything and the potentially unsustainable food trajectory that the world is on
“...The Chinese do you seem to eat everything one must admit. But in a sense they are just a distorting mirror magnifying the voracity of the entire human race the Chinese word for population is people mouths and in China there are now over 1,300,000,000 mouths all munching away… it’s the same with timber, minerals and oil which feed Chinese economic development. China has become the worlds largest consumer of grain meet coal and steel. It may look rapacious but the Chinese are really just catching up with the greed of the rest of the world on a dizzying scale.
There is an equally rich and ancient strain of Chinese thought more than 2000 years ago the sage Mozi wrote of ancient laws regarding food and drink.
Stop when hunger satiated, breathing becomes strong limbs are strengthened and ears and eyes become sharp. There is no need of combining the five taste extremely well or harmonising the difference with orders. And if it should not be made to put your delicacies from four countries.
Confucius living at around the same time did not eat much and took care that amount of meat he ate did not exceed the amount of rice. His example has been used as a model for generations of Chinese children urged by the parents to eat up their rice or noodles and not be distracted by meat or fish…. And while businessmen and officials in early 21st century China stuff their faces with meat, fish and exotic delicacies, many people live at home on a simple diet of mainly grains and vegetables.
For the irony is that despite the conspicuous consumption of Banquet culture...the traditional diet of the Chinese masses could be a model for the entire human race.
...the way the older generation and the poor still eat... steamed rice or boiled noodles served with plenty of seasonal vegetables cooked simply, beancurd in many forms, very few sweet meats and small amounts of meat and fish that bring flavour to the table.
The traditional Chinese diet is nutritionally balanced and marvellously satisfying to the senses. After all my gastronomic adventures I don’t know if I can think of a better way to live...”
(Dunlops cookbook Every Grain of Rice is a tribute to this frugal healthy and delicious home cooking idea). She addresses the culture which values the “banquet culture”, and how rarity or the exotic is valued. And in parallel what has happened to the environment, and to some traditional “old” things - like architecture and building and “wet markets” - disappearing under “progress”. I can see from this that these trends seem very likely to continue.
In other parts of the book, Dunlop evokes in vignette the clash of cultures and riches within China that she sees.
This observation stuck with me.
“...As I waited in the courtyard for my lift to the bus stop the local butcher was doing his rounds. A slight scruffy man bearing two bamboo trays on a bamboo shoulder pole he shouted out “meat for sale, meat for sale''. He paused in the gateway and I caught a glimpse of his wares.
He didn’t have much to sell just a few rather mean looking hunks of pork and some bones. At the entrance to the roundhouse next door he discussed prices with two elderly men one of them frail and dignified in his threadbare Mao suit , ended up coming to a deal and then walked home clutching his purchase, wrapped in his hand. It was a single pork bone, a small one, with a knuckle at one end to which clung a few ragged threads of meat.
I thought back to the vulgar extravagance of [a meal]] in northern Fujian and the easy abundance of a rustic dinner the night before - the plentiful dishes of duck and chicken the steam pork that we had barely touched and my heart stuck in my throat…”
The challenges of China echo in the west and UK. Inequality, the meanness of western abbatoris and our own food supply. Dunlop also touches on how you need to engage with a culture, with a food or cuisine to be able to tell or appreciate it.
One aspect for me, is how Chinese value texture in a way that the west does not and a wastern palate does not appreciate bones, cartilage, cold, gloopy jelly fish textures (although the west has them eg oysters). And it goes both ways, this from a later time when took super accomplished Chinese chefs to one of the best western restaurants in the world (French Laundry)
“...it was a most difficult, a most alien, a most challenging experience.
We begin to talk about it in Chinese. They explain that they find the creaminess of the “sabayon” in the first course off-putting. And surprisingly, given the Chinese penchant for strong and salty pickles, none of them can stand the taste of the sharp Niçoise olives that accompany the lobster. “They taste like Chinese medicine,” they all agree.
They are shocked by the rare flesh of the lamb, although it’s the most perfect I’ve ever tasted. (“Dangerous,” says Xiao Jianming, who refuses to touch it. “Terribly unhealthy.”) The sequence of delicious desserts is an irrelevance for these visitors from a food culture without much of a sweet tooth. (The only dish they relish, curiously, is a coconut sorbet.) They are also mystified by the custom of serving tiny,personal portions of food on enormous white plates, and find the length of this meal served à la russe interminable.
I am struck by how much, at some abstract level, Thomas Keller’s food has in common with the finest of Chinese cuisine, in its magnificent ingredients, intellectual wit, and delicate sensitivity to the resonances among tastes, textures, and colors. But the physical facts of its expression, the sequence of dishes before us, might as well have come from another world.
“How am I supposed to eat this?” asks Yu Bo, puzzling over the red snapper that has sent me off into flights of ecstasy. He is as confused as a Westerner faced with her first bowl of shark’s-fin soup, plateful of sea cucumber, or serving of stir-fried ducks’ tongues. I’ve often seen this scenario in China, but this is the first time I’ve witnessed it from the other side.
The chefs are not as arrogant about their own prejudices as many Westerners are in China. Lan Guijun admits, “It’s just that we don’t understand, it’s like not knowing a language.” Yu Bo is even more humble: “It’s all very interesting,” he says, “but I simply can’t say whether it’s good or bad: I’m not qualified to judge.”
That last line sticks with me “It’s all very interesting,” he says, “but I simply can’t say whether it’s good or bad: I’m not qualified to judge.”
Not only does this apply to food but a range of cultural arts like parts of theatre and art, this can be applied to. But, interestingly when applied to food - you might think that food - high end food can be universally appreciated. I don’t think that is the case. Perhaps more particular high end food can be harder to understand without knowing the traditions it is working in.
Dunlop also examines the prejudice and tensions in China through food. Take a topic that has become increasingly controversial which is the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
“....I began to notice how often the Uyghur’s loathing week of the Han Chinese coalesced around the matter of pork for the Chinese of course porkis the staple meat to eat it on its own or stirfry with vegetables - they wrap it in dumplings, they use its bones for stock and its fat to flavour almost everything they eat. When the Chinese say meat. they usually mean pork unless otherwise specified. To the Uyghur, as Muslimsthe idea of eating pork is abhorrent. One taxi driver cocooned with me in the privacy of his cab assured me that if a true Muslim eats pork his his skin will erupt into blood-spouting boils that can be fatal.
...And Chinese have occasionally use the pork taboo to inflame Muslim sensibilities. During the cultural Revolution Chinese Muslims were reportedlyforced to eat pork and to drink water from wells contaminated by pigs. Although the Chinese authorities in no way condone such crass behaviour, many Uyghurs feel the government does not try hard enough to protect their feelings.
The Muslim taboo on pork reinforces strong social divisions between Uyghur and Han. Most Uyghur won’t patronise Chinese restaurants even those that claim to serve food in accordance with Muslim dietary laws.
You can’t trust the Chinese not to use any pork products whatever they say, a shopkeeper told me. And as for the Han Chinese they tend to see Uyghur restaurants as dirty. And so the two ethnic groups dine separately and don’t talk to each other.
Revulsion at the pork-eating of the Han Chinese is the focus for general anxieties about cultural assimilation and contamination….”
There is so much thoughtful observation in the book and of course fascinating detail about food.
Here’s a YT of Tyler Cowen and Dunlop plus guests, dining out and talking about her book and Chinese food in the US. Of note is Ezra Klein who is a notable vegan as well as media commentator and NYT op-ed writer.
Theatre, inequity, post-COVID build back
Short thought on theatre inequity: There are thoughtful threads from theatre peeps thinking about how the industry might build back better or differently as the pandemic has highlighted challenges (inequity, digital, freelancers). But, my 30,000 foot view is that this is not going to be the case. “Financial Winners” in theatre and performing arts are concentrated in a small number - reflecting other industries, but potentially even more acute - and the vast number of entry level jobs are difficult to access if you are poor or otherwise disadvantaged. Skimming the industry structure and entrenched stakeholders, I do not see this changing, so post-COVID I think it’s likely the industry settles back as before, with at best moderate change. Maybe that’s a reflection of many other industries too although - maybe strangely for an industry focused on creativity - I sense there may be even less change in theatre compared to other sectors.
Part of that might be because of the challenge of moving theatre to a digital format, or not - being mostly a live experience art form.
Education: formalists vs progressives
There are two divergent lines of thought about education: Should we be telling children facts and ideas and telling them to learn them or should we be encouraging them to discover knowledge for themselves?
How should we view knowledge? Is there a stock of knowledge which we need to record accumulate and pass on to the next generation or is knowledge fluid and transitory made useful when it is personally discovered and acquired?
How should we view learning? Is it demonstrated by the proven acquisition of facts and skills over the demonstration of a faculty with reasoning and solving problems?
And how should we view children? (Rightly or wrongly this is often about children)
do we see them principally as members of the society and participants in an economy for which they need to be prepared as adults in the making? Or is our role in their development to think less about preparation and more about cultivation?
For the progressives education is about supporting the ability to think critically and should be child-centred and focused on problem-solving for the formalist though it’s a process of importing and acquiring the skills and knowledge necessary for well-being and success in life it’s about instruction and acquisition of information and skills needed for the success of the society in which you live.
For progressives learning is natural it’s happening all the time and it’s what humans are programmed for children learn to talk for example without any teaching at all. For the formalists learning can be a hard slog. They contend it’s just a fact of life that there are some things you need to learn the hard way. There is complex information that we need to know to which there is no easy route. If you want to learn to write for example you need to understand the ways in which language is put together you need to know the glue that binds sentences the rules for making language work. This is not easy and you don’t “discover” it.
Does Khan academy, Udemy and “mastery” learning say anything about where education may go?
Thoughts on reading (3 mins, FT) Luck Kellaway: What is the point of Schools? Link here.
(3 to 5 hours) Education, A Very Short Introduction by Gary Thomas. Amazon link here.
ThenDoBetter Grant winner: Lorenzo Evans
Lorenzo has won a grant award for:
“Learning physics and mathematics in public, while fostering a community for like minded enthusiasts”
Lorenzo writes:
“….If you were to ask most people who are extremely enthusiastic about Mathematics and Physics, they would tell you that it has always been this way. In my case, it was the other way around- I avoided Maths as much as possible and thus never really looked at Physics as anything but "the science I think is cool, but can't do, because I don't like math".
So how did I get into these fields? By chance, via programming, and since then, an entire world has opened up, that I'm excited to continue exploring, and hope to entice more people to do this exploring with me!
One of the main methods I'm using to do so are social media, having started a twitter account for like-minded enthusiasts, through which I will be broadcasting Interintellect event links, and posting coworking links for people who want to see what the real work of learning Mathematics and Physics looks like (spoiler alert, it involves much paper and many pens).
What I'm doing so far is rather sprawling, currently I'm hosting public events via the Interintellect, through an internal community, called The Olympia Academy, currently doing a three part series on Quantum Computing, which is happening in tandem with QubitByQubit's Quantum Computing course, and I will be chronicling my learning in a set of public facing notes.
My Twitter: https://twitter.com/0xLEDev
Also:
What is something you understand, but think few people appreciate?
What I think I understand, that few people appreciate, is the sheer vastness of technological and scientific advancement lost to our civilization, because of the disenfranchisement of potential scientists, via the dilapidation of social (and scientific, in some cases) systems. I say this as someone who went from vehemently hating mathematics, none of those words chosen lightly, to being in love with it. Mathematics has not changed, and thus it must be me, and particularly, it was my perspective on these things, that changed: from the one I was given, to the one I was both given and instrumental in fashioning for myself. I think I am trying to prevent society from suffering from the full brunt of the loss it has set upon itself. I am aware, that others are well aware of it, but I have lived it. Quite frankly, with regards to the ability of society to direct minds to work they're suited for, it failed me greatly: I should have been a physicist.
Rebecca Giggs. Fathoms: the world in the whale.
Transcript below.
We discuss the award winning book, Fathoms: the world in the whale by Rebecca Giggs. Our conversation covers seeing the history of humanity through the lens of the whale, activism movements, and the poetic in writing. Whales as an extractive industry and why the book is not prescriptive in what we might do.
We play overrated/underrated. Rebecca rates: cicadas, snails, worms and plankton. We end with the process of writing. Why mechanical keyboards might help, and writing in bursts.
Rebecca's essays and writing have been in The Atlantic, Granta, The New York Times Magazine. Her recent work has featured our relationship with animals in a time of both technological change and ecological crisis. www.rebeccagiggs.com and twitter @rebeccagiggs
Amazon link here. Indie Bookshop.org link here.
Podcast audio version here:
Fathoms
A bold and lyrical exploration of our fraught relationship with the sea's most magnificent inhabitant, the whale.
Whales loom large in the human imagination. From a history of animals being harpooned worldwide to today's ecotourism operators and the work of marine biologists, whales have, for centuries, attracted myth, symbolism, significance, and exploitation.
But whales, and the waters they inhabit, are changing. Even as the international community draws closer to a ban on factory whaling, whales surface with disturbing news from the deep. Once-rare whale strandings, pollution and toxins accrued in whale bodies, plastics consumed by whales, the stress of exposure to industrial sound, and diseases contracted from livestock are direct results of human activity.
Incisive, provocative, and timely, Fathoms uses the story of the whale to examine our own story and that of the health of the planet.
Transcript (There are typos, and grammar is not edited)
Ben:
Hey everyone. I'm Ben Yeoh. Today I'm having a conversation with the most amazing author Rebecca Giggs.
Rebecca has published her first book, Fathoms: the world in the whale. It's already Prize-winning.
Her essays and writing have been in the Atlantic, Granta, and the New York times magazine. She's just simply awesome. Her recent work has featured our relationship with animals in a time of both technological change and ecological crisis.
So Rebecca, truly welcome. And I think we're going to start off with a short, reading from your book, so please take it away.
Rebecca:
Thank you, Ben. It's wonderful to be with you. I'm just going to read a little bit. I should show the cover. This is our beautiful - little glarey, I think in the light British - Hard back, appropriately, it looks like it's covered in, clingfilm, which seems kind of hygienic for this moment in the middle of a pandemic.
I'm just going to read from the preface, for about three or four minutes, and this is a scene that has to do with the decomposition of a whale's body.
On WhaleFall
A dead whale slips below the depth where epipelagic foragers can feed from it. The whale’s mushy body decelerates as it drops, and, where pressure compounds, putrefying gases build up in its softening tissues. It drifts past fish that no longer look like anything we might call fish, but resemble instead bottled fireworks, reticulated rigging, and musical instruments turned inside out. The whale enters the abyssopelagic zone. No light has ever shone here, for so long as the world has had water. Entering permanent darkness, the whale passes beyond the range of diurnal time. Purblind hagfish slink; jawless, pale as the liberated internal organs of other animals. Jellyfish tie themselves into knots. The only sound is the scrunch of unseen brittle-stars, eating one another alive. Slowly. It is very cold. Hell’s gelid analogue on Earth. The hagfish rise to meet the carcass and tunnel in, lathering the passages they make with mucus. They absorb nutrients right through their skin. The whale body reaches a point where the buoyancy of its meat and organs is only tethered by the force of its falling bones. Methane is released in minuscule bubbles. The ballooning mass scatters skin and sodden flesh below it, upon which grows a carpet of white worms waving upwards, like grass on its grave. Then, sometimes, the entire whale skeleton will suddenly burst through the cloud of its carcass. For a time, the skeleton might stay hitched to its parachute of muscle; a macabre marionette, jinking at the spine in the slight currents. Later, it drops, falling quickly to the sea floor, into the plush cemetery of the worms. Gusts of billowing silt roll away. The mantle of the whale’s pulpier parts settles over it. Marine snow — anonymous matter, ground to grit in the sun-filtered layers of the sea — sprinkles down ceaselessly. The body is likely to settle far deeper than any living whale will ever descend to see it. Rattails, sea scuds, more polychaetes, and eelpouts appear. No one knows from where. Opportunist octopuses bunt between ribs. Sightless, whiskered troglodytes, like ginger tubers, burrow into the surrounding sediment, which is blackened with fat and whale oil. From the dark come red-streamer creatures that flutter all over. Colourless crabs; their delicate gluttony. Life pops. It is as though the whale were a piñata cracked open, flinging bright treasures. On the body gather coin-sized mussels, lucinid clams, limpets, and crepitating things that live off sulphate.
Over 200 different species can occupy the frame of one whale carcass. A pink, plumed tube shrinks back into the gothic column of its name, the Osedax — Latin for ‘bone devourer’. Mouthless and gutless, the Osedax is nonetheless insatiable: it eats through its feet, which extend, like trickling roots, into the marrow. Some of the organisms that materialise on the whale are called ‘fugitive species’. Some live nowhere else but in dead whales, and a few are so specialised they thrive only within the remains of a single cetacean species. Others are found, very occasionally, at hydrothermal vents or around briny cold seeps on the sea floor — spots where life on Earth is theorised to have first begun, with a plethora of millimetre-high animals inhabiting a thin band of gas-enriched water.
After the whale’s soft tissues and cartilage are consumed, these tiny organisms broadcast their larvae into the sea to drift in dormancy; infinitesimal, barely perceptible, and hopeful (if the larval can be said to be hopeful) of finding more dead cetaceans. A whale body is, to this glitter splash of biology, a godsend; and an occasion for gene exchange. To think such extremophiles indestructible — too ancient or too deep to be affected by the impoverishment of the sea above — is to disregard their interaction with the corpse whales, which function as engines of evolution, and stepping stones for their migration between stringent, oxygen-poor habitats. Without whales, many kinds of detritivores fail to colonise new habitat. When their vents and seeps deplete, their kind will decline. These creatures exist, they have evolved, because of the fall of whales. Whales as transient, decomposing ecosystems that amass, pulse, twitch, and dissolve.
Ben:
That was beautiful. And covers like in a microcosm so much about your book. and that also has led to my first thought is your writing is really beautiful and you have these really glorious, sentences. do you concentrate on the sentence and kind of edit as you go along? Do you think of the PTO of your writing particularly sort of in book form a supposed to sort of essays or journalism, or is that kind of a natural way? You kind of think about this type of writing.
Rebecca:
When I started the book, I had an idea that it would be very straight science communication. So it would literally just be a book about the ways in which the lives of whales today reflect the anthropogenic change in the oceans. And if you go to the science section of your bookstores, you'll tend to these kinds of books there. some about physics, some about mathematics, some about biology, but the purpose of science communication is really to provide a kind of lucid clear description of a complex set of scientific findings. And so the tendency is to use quite direct and conversational language. And so I struggled on with that idea for, I suppose, the first 10 months of this project. And then there was one day, really blindingly hot day in Sydney. there'd been a heatwave, my little apartment was stultifying really hot. And so I went to the local library, and I was sitting downstairs in the state library, in the air conditioning and a friend who is a poet, just by coincidence. And he sat on the table next to me and we kind of had a chat and then we got back to our respective work and I just thought to myself, you know what, just for today, you know, given the fortuity of this, I'm going to try to write the science in the way that Aiden Rolfe, my poet friends would write the science. And I wrote that passage, which was the decomposition of the whale. and I tried to really embody his voice on the page. And once I had that, I really understood actually that what I was writing was not just a science communication book, but though it's kind of science, literate and science curious, it's very invested in the question of how do we represent the natural world? What are the narratives that we mobilize, within our culture when we encounter the science and what are the kinds of lyricism and, you know, language traditions that come out of our attachment with nature. so yeah, so that sequence really became the engine that then pushed into the rest of the project because, you know, whereas I had seen the death of a whale as a tragedy, of course, in the deep sea, it's kind of like spring comes, you know, like all these organisms just leap at it.
Ben:
All of this resource.
Rebecca:
Yeah, exactly. It's a big energy input and it's a turning point. It's, it's suddenly this huge act of fecundity. And, and that kind of like swivel from the tragedy to, you know, the new beginning kind of became a motif for the rest of the book.
Ben:
That's amazing. So I, another thing I think about your book, which is quite unique, -it kind of hearkens to that - because it doesn't strike me as science communication. It's science curious, like you say, but I wouldn't put it next to kind of climate change for dummies or something like that in the bookstore.
There's a tradition of nature writing. You have people who go on for walks, people will consider mountains. There's a little bit of that, but a narrative, there's almost a memoir element to your work. So I could place it within that tradition.
On the other hand, there's also a few books which are like a lens of history when you look at the world through something. So you look at it through the lens of a building or the lens of a geography or the lens of an empire or the lens of an item like salts or the seas or trade. And we see the lens of humanity through, whaling, which was really fascinating.
Are you conscious of those traditions?
Or do you think I just have this and this is the form I thought that would best express that kind of story.
Rebecca:
When I started, I'd never written any narrative nonfiction before.
I’d written short fiction and a couple of review essays, quite long essays, but, this was my first foray into this world. With hindsight, I should have bitten off something slightly smaller than the whale and the world.
When I started out - when I was stuck - a friend of mine gave me a piece of advice that I really just needed to write short sections as long as it would fit under the palm of your hand. He suggested that I work with this model of decomposing the whale. … taking all of the elements of the whale from, its lungs and the way that it inhales airborne pollutants to its blubber and the absorption of heavy metals that takes place as a result of organic phosphate run off in the ocean to, the baleens that are in the whale's mouth, which are like a mustache that's inside the top lip of some whales, which they use to feed with.
And those baleens have been used historically in the 19th century like the thermo plastic of the time they were taken out and remolded into all kinds of different products. And so I started with this sort of active decomposition and making these very short pieces, all focused on a different body part of the whale.
I was going along looking for the evidence of human contact, you know there's some amazing stories of very ancient weaponry in the forms of arrowheads being embedded into the flesh of living whales because they were speared but not killed when they were young.
Those whales can go on to live 200 and then when they eventually die - in their study by scientists, we find these artifacts of human culture - museum worthy and very important for historical reasons - actually in the flesh of these animals.
Of course it's all the plastic in their stomach as well, but at any length I had this decomposition.
And then as I got along with the book, I started reading a lot more natural history, particularly in that Eurocentric tradition that you're talking about. think you can locate some motifs in fathoms that are consistent with that history.
But there were some things that I wanted to push back on as well. That nature writing tradition comes out of a period of time in which nature was set up to be a place of retreat from urban modernity. And it was supposed to be reassuringly refreshing.
Ben:
A playground in a some way.
Rebecca:
A playground… but also a source of moral instruction. You could go there and kind of have an encounter with godly. And it was white able-bodied men in this narrative. And so you get from this a lot of adventuring narratives. A traditions of nature at grand scale - vigorous, expeditioning.
There's one chapter in the book, which is about digital culture and about experiencing the whale from within a crowd, particularly within an online crowd, what does it mean to share photographs of whales online, whales and dolphins.
And I wanted that to be there because I wanted to write from collectives. I wanted to write from collective experiences of nature. And I wanted to acknowledge that it's not just about the nature that's in the deep sea or in American national parks or European Alpine ranges. It's also, what we do in our kitchens that matter. What we do in back gardens and how we drive and work. It’s all relevant to what nature is today. And so is the digital sphere.
Ben:
I think we're going to touch on that individual in system, but one thing I'm going to pick up, which is really fascinating, which is your idea of decomposition, because it's a very strong sort of theme through that. I think that's amazing because essentially it means that your structure and form follow your process and the process of the wild.
Form, structure and content reflect one another in a really satisfying way. Structural form married with the writing and the education and the science and everything.
I think that's one other thing about the lens of the whale - viewing the human part of the relationship. You make quite a strong line of argument for how well was essentially one of the first extractive industries.
The whole life cycle of the whale embodies so much of humanity within it, whether it's chemicals or our ancient items - how it absorbs all that. … with this idea of extractives - do you think we probably haven't learned enough about how we did use the whales ?
…that also ties into - the successes or not of some of the green movement.
Do you think we did use whale essentially as an extractive industry before we really understood what we were doing?
Rebecca:
I think he way to answer that question, is to take you a little bit on the research journey of this book, which was that I thought as I believe, many people do that whaling was an artifact of the 19th century.
My picture of whaling was the Victorian era. It's the same time as like people were applying leeches to their bodies for medicine, and using smelling salts. And that is where I had popped Whaling in my mind.
And though I had heard of course, about the 1980s save the whale campaigns because I was born in the mid 1980s. I sort of vaguely conscious of that green movement, but I understood whaling to have tailed off well before that, as it turns out, that's not the case, many people attribute and believe that whaling declined because of some invisible hand of the market that came in, with things like kerosine and petroleum and thermo-plastic, and essentially replace the product, the products that whales were being used for.
So in the 19th century to take step back, whales were exploited for their oil and for their baleens. We talked about their baleens - these bristly mouth substance that was used in everything from surgical stitching to hula hoops and police batons.
Do you have this expression in Britain “to whale on somebody” That's from the canes that used to be used in schools as corporate punishment for children.
They were made from this baleen substance - so we whale on somebody to hurt somebody is to cane them with - literally -a piece of whale. Then the oil really was part of the late industrial revolution. It was a lubricant in machinery. it was used in textile factories, but most importantly it was an amazing illuminant and went into lamps and candles. It wasn't just an industrial product. It changed the conditions of production because once you had a reliable, long burning illuminant factory hours could be extended shop floor hours could be extended. It had a huge influence on not just the speed of automation, but the way the economy worked at large, then we jumped forward to the 21st century.
You think here are all these other cheapest substances that are going to replace whaling. That didn't happen. What ended up happening was the products that the oil went into, changed.
They became a different market, they became luxury goods. They got affiliated with the space race, which is bizarre. They ended up in the tiny little shutters that are on satellite cameras.
The proponents of the whale oil business really went to great lengths to get them into soap, and into margarine as well. So it was really a cornerstone of new hygiene practices and the diet of the working class.
But ultimately, we needed cultural change to affect economic change in this area because fossil fuels meant that we could exploit whales to a far greater degree. We could see them with faster ships. We had refrigeration on those ships. We could obtain species of whales that were much larger, and hadn't been hunted in the 19th century because we had big mechanical boats. and so there was a kind of Whaling Olympics. There was a surge in the sixties, of whale hunting, by a lot of major Western nations. There’s this lesson. We did need a kind of collective cultural change to enforce that pivot away from whaling.
Ben:
I actually think that one of the things that they teach very initially in economics, and then you forget is that markets and products are actually very social things. [A social science] They are governed by us. And even when you have supposedly unregulated markets, there are actually laws, either social norms or legal rules for what govern them.
I was very struck by your research and writing into this about how essentially quotas fail ed initially because they said, Oh, we're going to do quotas. And then you had over-whaling. As people tried to, essentially, they ended up decimating the whale population to try and get in before the quotas hit. And then you had this huge access surplus that you either needed to go almost full ban, which is kind of where we went.
So these are kind of unintended consequences to your point. It really was only solved from some of the social and demand change which went alongside that.
One other theme your book charts - not only the history of humans and the ecological crisis and the technological change, - but the history of a kind of activism, where whales are kind of seen as a symbol of activist success, but actually in your research and your writing, it seems to be much more complicated than that. Whales also reflect models of activism. What did you find?
Rebecca:
I think that it's common to look back now and view those anti-whaling campaigns as effectively benevolent animal welfare campaigns. Whereas in actual fact, they fit more neatly into a model of dealing with globalized environmental problems. So this, you have to remember as an era in which the ozone layer is becoming very topical, Chernobyl is only just in the rearview mirror. So that idea of kind of cross border radioactivity, is a concern. The acid rain clouds in some parts of Europe has similarly multi nation multi-state problems and saving the high seas - having some kind of connection to the planetary dimensions of the wider ocean was hard until we had a global animal like the whale to empathize with.
And I think about this a lot in terms of that question of how do you tell global stories now, because for myself, you know, when I hear about the melting ice caps, or I hear about levels of CO2 and, the atmosphere worldwide. It activates for me sadness and grief, - the dimensions of it are kind of too big to wrap my head around.
I find it is hard to empathize with the changing biosphere on that vast level.
Whereas in the early part of this book, I describe a whale beaching, in Western Australia, in Perth, where I'm from. I went down to see this beached whale. There were all these people standing around, it a macabre carnival atmosphere, all these families with their children, and some people brought their pets down, but there was an attitude that was “at last… here is the body …we knew there was trouble.”
We knew things were changing in the ocean. We heard vaguely about acidification or plastic pollution, but we lacked the kind of sensory apparatus to apprehend it.
We can't taste the oceans acidity, and we rarely, unless we go to the big plastic guys actually encountered the dimensions of microplastic and plastic pollution as extremes. And so the arrival of a whale on the beachfront had this kind of mood of…here is the body… here is the event that kind of gives flesh to our environmental conscience.
The activism of the eighties around whales was very much about a globalized environmental citizenry. It was intended to be about protecting things that you would never encounter.
You could feel for the whale, even if you lived in a high rise building in an urban environment, it mattered to you that the planet wasn't denuded of its largest animals.
I think that question of having empathy and compassion for the unmet thing is really sharp in this point in time, because we are going to be called to care for things in the future that we don't have either a genetic connection to, it's not about our families. They're not part of our tribe. We're going to have to care for people who live very far away from us. We're going to have to care for environments like the polar environments that are on totally uninhabited.
I wanted to revisit that, that moment in the eighties where it was possible to, feel meaningfully engaged with the planetary.
Ben:
You talked about the system through the individual. You see it through the Whale - through individual's experience and that chapter about the digital. Do you see much conflict between that individual lens? And I guess a lot of individualism, which has gone through the last decade or two versus how we all going to have to cope with this systemic change and dealing with these other entities, whether that's environment or people, or far away distant, both time and geography and, and otherness that seems to be coming together in sort of sharp relief.
And I think your writing reflects that, and you have some very interesting chapters on that. Are we going to see this conflict continuing through this individual lens?
Rebecca:
That's a great question. And I don't know that I've got a definitive answer on that. I, you know, I think that now
Ben:
You should be running for president, maybe if you did.
Rebecca:
What I have is writing. I am no good with spreadsheets. My talents lie here in words.
So I'm prone to read this as salient but people's connection to narrative - it’s that connection that activates their environmental conscience.
When a whale washes up - at the beginning of the book - I talk about this particular whale that washes up off the coast of Spain.
In its stomach there is a stupendous medley of objects. It has bits of bedding … coat hangers. Most saliently - it has an entire greenhouse that has been collapsed and it contains within it ropes and tarpaulins.
It has comes out of greenhouse district, which is effectively the salad bowl of Europe, where all of your Tesco's tomatoes and salad leaves grow over the winter.
I read that news story. And I thought to myself, if I had put that in a novel people would not believe it.
You have the 1980s fantasy Paragon of green devotion - the whale - and it's consuming literally the metaphor of our climate crisis. The greenhouse. The green house is how we talk about global warming, and that encapsulation of history and plastic and all these kinds of issues.
It really sung out to me as being important because we have these stories in our culture already about what it means when a whale washes up with someone inside it.
Leviathan. Lots of different cultures have these narratives of someone being swallowed by a whale and then undergoing a kind of moral turnabout. It matters to us. It sets up this kind of beacon of awareness when things like that happen in the real world.
Ben:
David Finnegan has said play writing today is all art in a time of climate crisis? That actually all art is somehow related to that, because it's a reflection of where we are.
On reading your book, I reflected that it's been like that for decades, if not centuries. And I would also add that other part that you reflect on is the technological change. So that actually in some ways, all our writing, our reflection of humanity and our art has reflected ecological crisis, ecological change, technological change over decades.
Rebecca:
There are the mental models of the technological world - very kindred within ecological conscience, too. Like my students- I used to teach creative writing at a university and we would talk about nature writing and my students would come to me and say, gosh, I can't name the trees. Like, I don't know the names of this eucalyptus ….
I look out into the world and I think I, these things are completely nameless, but because they were so embedded in the technological realm, because they had an understanding of feedback loops and, you know, they had an understanding of networks and a cybernetic consciousness. Ecology can very easy to them in the sense that they understood systems. I think actually a lot of nature writing craves, a kind of specialized language of terminology, giving everything the right name. Whereas I am very hopeful about the next generation that though they may not have that. What they have is a much more technical systems based way of thinking.
Ben:
I think we are definitely making progress. There's some things which gets worse, but there are a lot of things which I'll say also do get better.
Over Rated / Underrated. Animal Edition.
Snails.
Rebecca
Underrated.
Ben
You have had a pet snail. Yeah. Quite a famous. Now tell me about snails. Why underrated?
Rebecca:
We acquired some snails. My partner David was scheduled to do a performance in London in the middle of the year and when it was canceled everything got wrapped up. We still had these props from the performance, which were these living snails.
We had to care for them over those first few months of the lockdown. And they're kind of magic, little animals. They're you know, they're incredibly vulnerable. They're soft on the underside, and yet they've got this shell they can retreat into. And they were a nice little metaphor, I think in the moment of lockdown and feeling both like hard on the outside and sensitive oversight.
Ben:
Gender fluidity… Great. Okay. Snails, definitely underrated.
Cicadas.
Rebecca:
Yes. We're going through a once every eight year event in Australia a boom of green cicada - in Australia at the moment in new South Wales, which means that if I have to video call somebody out in the blue mountains, you know how the frame moves with the sound, it just doesn't move off the person who's in South Wales
This is the background sound of cicadas.
I think the scientist I was talking to the other day, he said he measured 95 decibels, literally the sound of a jackhammer within 20 meters. That was the level of sound coming from this once every eight year boom in cicadas.
Ben:
Yeah. Very surprising sound like the sound of people haven't heard the sound of koala also. Very, very surprising.
Rebecca:
Yeah, Brits think a koala is cute. I can only think it's because you've never heard one and make a horrible noise that terrifying and if you're camping and you hear them fighting, it's like listening to gargoyles, you know, go at each other.
Ben:
Koala cuteness overrated once, once you truly get to know them. Worms. Overrated, underrated?
Rebecca:
Underrated. I mean, they do so much amazing work and I read somewhere the other day that they can have eight hearts, eight hearts in the one body. I don't know if that's true, but I read it in a poem. Yes. So full of heart.
Ben:
Yeah. I think completely underrated and actually also extremely useful for science as well as the fact that they do do so much for us.
Rebecca:
Have you read the Ted Hughes short story about, the worm, the origin of the worm? It's like a beautiful short story. He talks about God having made the elephant with clay. And then at the very end, he kind of rubs his hands together to get rid of the last little bits of clay that are on his hands. And he makes these tiny little filaments and he just molds one into a tiny elephant trunk and he drops it and forgets it. And so that's worms are the elephant trunks, like these tiny little elephant trunks, just trying to find more clay to make themselves whole, it's a lovely story.
Ben:
I don’t know it. I will go read it. We'll do a final one here. Plankton or maybe particularly phytoplankton.
Rebecca:
Not an animal, I believe.
Ben:
Yeah. You called me out on that. So not quite an animal, but we will stick with living being.
Rebecca:
Under rated as well. Maybe I just love the animal world too much.
Often overlooked in its ability to absorb CO2 out of the atmosphere. We think a lot about forests as being part of the climate system and trees off setting you know our carbon emissions which is why reforestation or preserving old growth forest is such a flashpoint issue.
But plankton in the ocean is responsible for an even larger proportion of absorption of CO2 to the point where I think one of the, an IMF report that I was reading a little while back said something like an uptick of plankton of 1% would be the equivalent of adding 2 billion mature trees into the system for tree to grow that's. That’s huge. We should all learn more about the little plankton.
Ben:
Thanks for playing overrated underwrite - the living being edition.
Turning back to your book.
You had this pivotal moment - the whale and the beaching - a genesis moment for thinking about the book.
Do you think you wrote with a purpose for the book or what people might get from the book ?
Or was it a book you felt compelled to write ? It wrote itself in a way and now it's taking on a kind of life of its own.
Rebecca:
I think there are two questions there. There's my attachment to the project.
And there's also a question about what kind of activism underlies the book.
What do I hope people will change their mind about or take from the book?
In answer to the latter, I deliberately hold back from prescribing a specific set of actions. If people feel activated by this book, they're energized by this book to go and care more for the oceans. There's nothing in there that says, well, you need to, these are the steps, you know, you need to do X, Y, and Z. Although there are suggestions in there and the reason I didn't set out to prescribe something, so kind of didactically is that I think each of us needs to start where we are. And each of us has a different set of privileges, a different set of resources, a different network, that we can leverage.
When I talk to students about the book that it's starts with taking a bit of an accounting of what you have in front of you, and also what you're good at - what is the one thing that you have that you're uniquely good at that you could bring to this cause, So maybe you are the spreadsheet queen.
Ben:
Numbers will save the world!
Rebecca:
An hour to give to an NGO, to do their books or to but it also means engaging people on the other side as well. You can't just talk to your community, you need to be ready to generously engage with people who think otherwise.
Then there's the question of what my experience was.
I started out feeling like questions of trans-hemispheric, ocean pollution and climate change and I felt humiliated by them. I felt like they made me disempowered. They made me full of grief.
I think my biggest takeaway - these problems are occurring on such a scale - means that we have a capacity to make change on that scale as well.
We can individually change our consumption patterns in small ways, and it can have an effect all the way out in the deep sea and that is stupefying as well.
If I picked up a product off a supermarket shelf, sometimes I would think, I wonder how much water has gone into creating this product, or I wonder how much pollution has been caused in manufacturing this product.
Now I also think much more downstream, I think much more about where the packaging is going to end up… I'm more conscious of that sort of like legacy the other direction into the future as well as the past. It was a journey.
Ben:
And that is one of the things we are both distant yet very interconnected. … genetics we have in common with a lot more people - I was puzzling it through on the physics the other day that it's very likely that we breathe oxygen atoms or drunk water molecules that you and I have both drunk or breathe. And that whales would have drunk -
Rebecca:
If you were anti whaling in the eighties, you were against whaling nations, whaling fleets, whaling governments, if you're anti harming whales, now it knits you into a system of worldliness. That's so much more vast. It's about the weather. It's about consumption. It's about many more organisms than the ones we care enough to love and call charismatic animals. It's also about plankton. That model of worldliness - it doesn't need to be humiliating.
Ben:
How do you go about your work day?
This is not me. Some CEOs - some writers - they rise at 4:00 AM or 5:00 AM and write for two or three hours, Chuck out 1000, 2000 words. And Hey look, 200 days later I have my next masterpiece.
Do you have thought on how your writing process works or how even how your day is now?
Rebecca:
This book took me six years to write. I had a full-time job for about four of those years, otherwise I was working part-time. But I also took two, six month breaks and I think I needed those breaks to really grow some emotional conscience around what I was making and why it mattered.It was a long project, but it also needed downtime, you know, cumulatively over a year before it was ready to go.
My day-to-day work when I'm just writing and I haven't got anything else on my dance card is two, one and a half hour bursts. So it is a three hour burst of writing and that that's no other distractions. That's just me and the word document.
Ben:
Do you switch off internet, doors closed?
Rebecca:
I have an old fashioned egg timer that, I use. There are different kinds of hacks along the way when I'm really stuck and on an idea, I'll sometimes change the tools that I'm using. So I'll use a mechanical keyboard.
Ben:
Look
Rebecca:
You have one
Ben:
Look. [I have both types].
Rebecca:
Changing the media - I think that mechanical noise makes me feel more productive. An old fashioned typewriter thing. I'll sometimes change the tools. I don't do a lot of handwriting which I know some of my peers do a lot.
Ben:
Do you keep a notebook with you?
Rebecca:
I don't journal as routinely as some friends and colleagues do, but, I keep a notebook. What else do I keep? But it's very small. I sort of have two, I have one that's sort of ideas for non-fiction and then I loosely have this one that's about, about fiction, although it's been a long time since I wrote fiction. yeah, so I keep two notebooks with me. I also take notes on my phone if I'm out, you know, just using the notes app.
Ben:
[I know a poet who writes poems on notes]
Rebecca:
If I'm into something that's longer like an article or potentially a book chapter, I have something that's just loosely called a research memo that sits on top of the chapter or the essay. Yeah. It's just a cover page for the document, but that it's a sort of living document and it will include questions like, you know, what do I need to know to write this? What does the reader need to know? So for example, if I'm writing about, you know, the industrial history of whaling, I'm going to need to know a lot more than actually ends up in the chapter and so I may need to notice that things about the chemical composition of blubber, like to quite find degreed find detailed level. but then the reader is just going to need to be reminded of exactly what blubber is. Most people know what blubber is, but they sort of, you just need to sort of let them remind them that this is it's this fatty kind of envelope around the animal. and so I have this sort of research memo that that's outlining what I need to know what the reader needs to know. And I keep coming back to that, as a kind of, not an outline exactly but a kind of mission statement for the, for the work at large. and it becomes a piece of scaffolding that eventually gets pulled down, but that's been very helpful as well.
Ben:
Great. That's really fascinating. Thanks for those insights. So your books available us now, the UK already, already Australia, obviously you can get it from Amazon and online and all of that. but a lot of is also supporting independent bookshops because that's where, you know, a lot of interesting stuff happens. Is there any, a couple of independent bookshops you'd recommend people might look out, they also take online and post orders as well, if you want to support them. So, you know, I'm not going to just Amazon and we will use it as well. So wherever you're going to get it, first of all, get the book. But if you know, minded to, you might want to support an independent bookshop.
Rebecca:
Yeah, well, I will recommend as a new, conglomerate kind of interface called bookshop.org, UK, which is literally now all the independents have come together to use the one digital platform to sell, and it means that whatever you're buying off that site, you're buying to support a local retailer. so that's the easiest kind of way to go if that's your, if you're not already familiar with the local bookstore, I mean in East London, we have, we have some fantastic bookstores, down in Broadway, near London fields and in brick lane. but of course they're all shut up shop at this point in time. So, you can still, I think call and they'll give you recommendations, in fact, and they, you know, people are biking around books to their local suburbs at this point, which is really lovely. and yeah, I mean, I think, I think those bookstores are really cornerstones of literary community, and where you can support them. They're doing a tough at this point. So, yeah it's well worth reaching out to your local, and putting in a phone call and having a chat with a human being.
Ben:
The book is available now. It is Prize-winning. I'm sure it was going to win a lot more awards. Thank you so much for joining me in conversation.
Rebecca's essays and writing have been in The Atlantic, Granta, The New York Times Magazine. Her recent work has featured our relationship with animals in a time of both technological change and ecological crisis. www.rebeccagiggs.com and twitter @rebeccagiggs
Amazon link here. Indie Bookshop.org link here.
Previous blog on her book here.
Hand dryers and Bigly
Thinking Bigly has changed with the year. The conversation around flying has changed. My points about hand dryers have come to life.
Hand dryers are moderately better than paper towels in terms of life cycle energy and waste use, but are significantly worse in maintaining strong hygiene. Partly as people don’t use them properly and partly as the air blows droplets around. Some of them are also too noisy for children’s ears. But paper towels have more waste and have a higher life cycle carbon footprint.
Another change is China. The Chinese have now committed to net zero in 2060. This is a significant new message announced in the last few weeks.
