Pod Academy

To begin at the beginning:

It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

[Under Milk Wood]

2014 is the centenary of the birth of the poet Dylan Thomas.

Scarlett MccGwire went to talk to Dr. Leo Mellor who writes and teaches about 20th century literature, particularly Anglo Welsh Literature and modernism, at Murray Edwards college Cambridge, where he is the Roma Gill Fellow in English.

She started by asking him what’s so special about Dylan Thomas that the centenary of his birth is being celebrated around the world?

Leo Mellor

Dr.Leo Mellor: I think it is to do with the way he brings a particular intensity to language. To the way he writes poems, that force or push language into moments of unexpected power and beauty and strangeness. He makes us see everyday things as strange again and he helps us see a beauty in things one would not normally consider beautiful.

 

 

Scarlett MccGwire: Like?

LM: I suppose you could think of his most famous radio play ‘Under Milk Wood’ and how he takes the average life of people in a little town there. Petty jealousy, their loves, their desires, and transforms them into something that is funny, beautiful and terribly moving -  it’s just one night, in one little bible-black town.

The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

SM: Do you think he captures Wales?

LM: He captures a certain part of Wales but he also turns Wales into a place that is shaped by Dylan Thomas’s way of looking, thinking and feeling about things. This is not reportage, this is not the lives of people as lived in the 1930’s and 40’s in his formulation of 'South Wets Wales' and Swansea. He takes things from an area and he transforms them.

SM: Under Milk Wood is celebrated around the English-speaking world, so it’s much bigger than Wales isn’t it?

LM: Yes, because it’s a way of using radio, using a medium, where you don’t get to see anything. You get to see, in your mind’s eye, the characters who are constructed through how they speak and how they describe other people, and sound effects. So, it’s a play that is apparently about a small seaside town in west Wales, but uses a medium to do something quite incredible.

SM: He is most famous for Under Milk Wood, but also there are poems.

LM: It is important for us to remember how long his career was. He died age 39, but he was writing poems as a teenager, and these are not adolescent works, these are published in the Volume 18 Poems and they are amazingly good. I will read the first stanza of the first poem from the 18 poems I see the boys of summer

I see the boys of summer in their ruin

Lay the gold tithings barren,

Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;

There in their heat the winter floods

Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,

And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.

 

These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,

Sour the boiling honey;

The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;

There in the sun the frigid threads

Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;

the signal moon is zero in their voids.

 

I see the summer children in their mothers

Split up the brawned womb’s weathers,

Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;

This podcast is a conversation between political cartoonist Martin Rowson and writer Neil Gaiman, originally recorded for Index on Censorship.

In it, Gaiman and Rowson talk about Alan Moore and Milo Minara, whether comics are unrepentantly in the gutter,  how the work of Hogarth and Gilray speaks across the centuries, how the bible contains more shocking stuff than they could make up, and how as children and teenagers they were enthralled by Judge Dredd.

.......................

Martin Rowson:   I wanted to talk about various themes. I wanted to talk about the visual and I wanted to talk about offence - how things are offensive and why they are in different ways. Have you caught up on this nonsense over here on Hilary Mantel’s short story the Assassination of Margaret Thatcher?

Neil Gaiman: Yes! I thought it was wonderful. I haven’t read the story, but I’ve read an interview with her and saw the thing from Sir Lord Emperor Bell.  I thought it was wonderful that column inches in newspapers were being given to a short story.

Neil Gaiman (pic by Mika Stetsovski)

There’s part of you that’s going, as long as people are getting upset, then a medium is not dead. And as long as a poem could send the editor of Gay News to prison in 1979 you knew that poetry was not dead. And as long as Tim Bell can call for the arrest of Hilary Mantel for writing a story you know that the short story is not dead.

Having said that, what for me immediately flashed up was some of these cases in America - some stuff that I’ve dealt with directly and some stuff that has just crossed my screen - where people would find themselves essentially arrested for ‘thought crimes’. Where people would write short stories -  in which people would die, in which illegal sexual acts would occur, in which bad things happened -  and find themselves under arrest, find themselves losing their jobs.

MR: It’s happening here, people sending texts about legal practices like fisting, it’s illegal to send a text about a legal practice like fisting.    Likewise.  I was tweeting last week about how grateful I was that Tim Bell showed himself to be so indestructibly stupid to actually say somebody’s got to be investigated by the police because of something they’ve made up in their head, which hasn’t happened, which isn’t real. I’ve got a quote here, “A nice easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up.”

We’re both of an age where we can remember they were impounding Robert Crumb coming into Britain in the late 70s.

NG: The last Robert Crumb thing that I remember was about 1987 or 1988 and it was particularly notable because on the one hand customs were impounding Crumb stuff coming into the country and it was stuff being imported to tie in with a BBC 2 Arena special on Robert Crumb!

MR: I always feel very uneasy about attempts to make the medium respectable. I actually think when there are Arena specials about Robert Crumb, that’s when the medium is dying. Attempts to turn what is essentially a specific genre which works in a specific way within the ecology of all fiction, shouldn’t be up there with the Booker Prize. It shouldn’t be treated as if it is respectable. That’s probably the satirist in me, because in the word of newspapers, I am down in the servants' quarters drinking Mackeson, while my journalist colleagues are up in the drawing room drinking schooners of sherry!  But you are a global star, treated with respect by a large group of people – don’t you feel that you should being doing something to get your books burnt in the high streets of America and indeed Britain?

NG: You covered three different things here. You’ve nipped carefully from topic to topic. The first is comics as gutter medium, yes or no?

This podcast is part of our Rupture, Crisis and Transformation series looking at new perspectives in the field of US Studies, drawn from the event of the same name at Birkbeck, University of London. It is the keynote presentation  from world-renowned author Caryl Phillips.

The conference organiser Anna Hartnell, explains

Anna Hartnell: Caryl Phillips is a major contemporary writer whose large body of fiction and non-fiction explores  various aspects of his own Caribbean, British and now American identities.  Though coming in from a different perspective from Wai Chee Dimock [the other keynote speaker at the conference, whose presentation you can find here], he has been involved in thinking about the United States, in various de-centered ways, that are really helpful for this particular conference.

Bart Moore-Gilbert: Caryl is one of the most interesting and thought-provoking writers around today. Born in the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, he was brought up in Leeds and studied Literature at Oxford before moving eventually to the US. He has worked for a number of institutions in the US, and is currently professor of English at Yale. He is actually a colleague of our first keynote today.

Caryl’s complex background of multiple cultural affiliations have given him a very distinctive and authoritative perspectives on the range of issues which are germane to this conference, including the ways in which racial, class, national diasporas, and national identities, get re-articulated in times of rupture, crisis and transformation. He has explored these preoccupations in a wide range of genres, including drama, fiction, screenplays and a variety of non-fictional modes, notably autobiography, travel writing and literal criticism, genres which characteristically co-exist in a relation of productive tension and collaboration in much of his work.  This dual track pattern of output is reflected in his two most recent books, the novel ‘In the Falling Snow’ of 2009 and the non-fiction collection ‘Colour me English’ of 2011.

The importance of Caryl’s work has been recognized in a number of prestigious awards, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, James Tate Black Memorial Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. So distinguished is Caryl’s CV that I thought I had to find one blot on it and eventually I discovered that he is a passionate supporter of Leeds United. [Laughter] But we can forgive him that, I’m sure. So, the title of Caryl’s talk is ‘The Star Spangled Banner‘ and I think this is going to offer a writerly rather than academic perspective on some of the new directions in US Studies, which are suggested by notions of crises, rupture and transformation. So, please give a big hand to Caryl Phillips. [Applause]

Caryl Phillips: Those of us who grew up in Britain have been spared the ordeal of having to hear the dreary tones of the national anthem ‘God Save the Queen’, on any kind of a regular basis. Dating back to 1619, the author of the national anthem is unknown, but the anthem first appeared in a published version in 1744. I’m just about old enough to remember when God Save the Queen was played at the end of films in the cinema. At such moments, we were expected to stand to attention, before filing out of the auditorium and onto the streets. Mercifully, this practice became obsolete before I was out of short trousers. In recent years, I’ve seldom had to endure the drone of the national anthem. As a nation, we hear it before the kick-off of England football matches. We also hear it on the rare occasions, at least prior to 2012, that a British athlete won a gold medal at an athletics championship or the Olympics. We might hear a snatch of it on the news whenever the monarch turns up on an official visit. But the fact is, God Save the Queen probably reached the height of its popularity during the heyday of the British Empire when nearly...

This podcast is one of two keynotes at the  Rupture, Crisis, Transformation conference on the future of American Studies held at Birkbeck in November 2014 [the other, Caryl Phillips on the Star-spangled banner can be found here]

Rejecting ideas of American exceptionalism, Wai Chee Dimock looks at the work of author William Faulkner in a world context, seeing him as a regional writer.  In doing so, she is able to explore how his is the voice of the defeated southern States of America - a thesis she develops with reference to things he said and wrote while in Japan in 1955  (then a recently defeated nation).

American novelist William Faulkner was born into an old Southern family in the US. The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) are perhaps his best known works and in 1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for "his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel".

Wai Chee Dimock presents a radically new reading of Faulkner, and it was an important contribution to the theme at the heart of the conference, "At the end of the 'American Century', how do we understand the United States?"

 

Wai Chee Dimock has written on every period of American literature, from Anne Bradstreet to Star Trek.  She also writes movie reviews for the Los Angeles Review of Books.  She argues for a broad conception of American literature, embracing a variety of time frames, bringing together materials both high and low, and scales both local and global.  Her work has appeared in publications ranging from Critical Inquiry to Salon. Dimock’s book, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (2006), received Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association and the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association.  This approach is further developed in a collaborative volume, Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007). She is now working on two book projects, ‘Weak Theory,’ and ‘Low Epic: World Literature as Downward Recycling.’

This Podcast is part of our Rupture, Crisis, Transformation series drawn from the conference of the same name held at Birkbeck, University of London in November 2014, offering new perspectives on American Studies.  It is the paper given by Pieter Vermeulen.

This presentation was followed by a panel discussion in which Pieter was Joined by Georgiana Banita.

Pieter's paper explores the institutional challenges facing American studies by interrogating two of the key figures of the anthropocene imagination as it is taking shape in American culture - the future archeologist and the future historian.

If the former will be left to read mankind’s geological footprint after its extinction, the latter will (less dramatically) chronicle historical errors that will turn out not to have been fatal. These figures recur in contemporary American fiction (from Teju Cole’s Open City to Max Brooks’s World War Z), but also in, for instance, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization. I show how these figures convey anxieties and desires unleashed by the radical reorganization of knowledge production in the present and how they point to the crucial role of narrative in apprehending the anthropocene: not as a device to impose meaning, but, as a way of inhabiting the present as the object of a future memory.

The 'Rupture, Crisis, Transformation' series was produced by Jo Barratt with Lucy Bradley

Pieter Vermeulen is Assistant Professor in American Literature at the University of Leuven. He works in the fields of critical theory, the contemporary novel, and memory studies. He is the author of Romanticism After the Holocaust (Bloomsbury/Continuum) and Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form (Palgrave Macmillan). He is currently working on three edited collections: on the dynamics of memory studies, on the institutions of world literature (for Routledge), and on the notion of the creatural (for the European Journal of English Studies).

This Podcast is part of our Rupture, Crisis, Transformation series, drawn from the conference of the same name offering new perspectives on American Studies, held at Birkbeck, University of London in November 2014. .

In Petrochemical Gothic, Georgiana Banita addresses the new, shifting interface of American Studies and the emerging field of Energy Humanities. Through a discussion of the anti-humanist HBO series True Detective, the paper shows that at this juncture American Studies must inevitably absorb the ethical narrative of diminishment and limit so closely interwoven with the Anthropocene and hydrocarbon culture. Yet in placing this show in a broader context, I argue that American Studies should respond to the formless menace of peak oil with an erudite historiography of energy concepts and a molecular hermeneutic capable of detecting energy traces in deep (literary and visual) subtexts.

From the derelict refineries that form the backdrop of iconic film noir shootouts to the morally saturated finale of David Fincher's 1995 thriller Se7en, where giant power lines index the primal wiring of the human mind and its high-voltage potential for irreparable destruction, an intriguing pattern has emerged around the imagination of energy and evil. The roots of this entwinement can be found in fictions of the dark romantic period, whose obsessions with exhumation and excavation resonate with the Gothic inflections of Southern literature in the mid-twentieth century at the height of the oil boom.

The eclectic traces of this energy unconscious surface in the first season of True Detective, which drapes the literary idiom of the Southern Gothic over a sacrificial Louisiana landscape in a state of terminal environmental decline and moral exhaustion. Leaning upon a growing archive of petro-environmental photography, the series' refinery landscapes intimate a systemic, non-localizable infestation initially associated with isolated human wrongdoing, but then gradually expanded to a morally bankrupt psychosphere as pervasive as petrochemical fumes.

The series unpacks a variety of energy discourses both within and outside traditional American Studies—geochemical, ecological, thermodynamic, and cosmological—to complicate familiar narratives of energy ultimacies. It negotiates forms of gratification and exploitation in ways that link natural detritus to human depression, and the sinister post-industrial anthroposcene of toxic Louisiana to the perverted minds bred by this poisoned soil. Ultimately, I would argue, it helps us understand how the energy imaginary has invisibly shaped US literary and cultural history, and devise a melancholy methodology to anticipate its exit.

The podcast was produced by Jo Barratt with Lucy Bradley

Georgiana Banita

Georgiana Banita is Assistant Professor in North American Literature and Media at the University of Bamberg. She studied and worked at the University of Konstanz, Yale, and the University of Sydney. She is the author of Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11 (U of Nebraska P, 2012) and co-editor of the forthcoming collection Electoral Cultures: American Democracy and Choice. She is currently completing her second book, a study of how the oil industry has shaped the development of transnational American literature, and she has published widely on US, Canadian, and global energy cultures, including oil movies, petrofiction, energy photography, comics about strip mining, and the role of energy rhetoric in US presidential elections.

Is technology pushing us too fast? Do we need time to catch up and get to know how the technologies we use actually work?    How do we understand technology in the the overall depictions of America in crisis?  Does the narrative of 'progress' get in the way?

Chairing the panel, Dr Zara Dinnen reflects on Richard Linklater's film, Boyhood, to demonstrate the change in technologies we use. Filmed over 12 years, Boyhood presents technologies from gameboy to ipad - but it not only shows us media, it is media.

For Lev Manovich, ‘the speed with which new technologies are assimilated in the United States makes them “invisible” almost overnight’. The panel discussion considers technological conditions of crisis in US culture, and crises of technology in the twenty-first century. The 2008 economic crash made visible the technology of speculative finance, just as wikileaks, Manning and Snowden brought to light the cyclical machinations of contemporary technocratic geopolitics.

Dr Zara Dinnen (University of Birmingham) opens the panel with some reflection on technological slow time, before introducing Dr Clare Birchall (KCL) speaking on ‘Data Crisis’, Dr Kristin Veel (University of Copenhagen) speaking on ‘Information Crisis’ and Dr Seb Franklin (KCL) presenting ‘Networks, Black Boxes, Switches: on the Metaphors of Empire’. After these short talks there is a discussion and Q&A.

This Podcast is part of our Rupture, Crisis, Transformation series offering new perspectives on American Studies.

The podcast was produced by Jo Barratt with Lucy Bradley

16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence is an international campaign, spearheaded by the United Nations,  which takes place each year, and runs from 25 November, (International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women), to 10 December (Human Rights Day),

‘16 Days Campaign’ is used as an organizing strategy by individuals and groups around the world to call for the elimination of violence against women and girls.

Pod Academy's Isabella Grotto went to talk to researcher and campaigner, Betsy Stanko, Honorary Professor of Criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London and to Diana Nammi and Sara Browne of IKWRO (Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation) which works on so-called 'honor based' violence such as forced marriage, domestic violence and female genital mutilation.

They looked at the shocking levels of violence against women in Europe, described earlier this year in the research report, Violence against women:

an EU-wide Survey and at the work Betsy Stanko has done in quanitfying the economic costs of violence against women.  

Refuges in the UK are closing, and cuts in legal aid have had a devastating impact on women's safety.  But Betsy Stanko says this is very shortsighted, and not only as a moral issue.   The costs of violence against women and children reverberate down the generations.

Here is the transcript of the podcast:

Isbella Grotto:  Earlier this year the EU issued a report on violence against women, which made headlines in the UK and beyond. Based on interviews with over 40,000 across 28 EU member states, it revealed that one in three women had reportedly experienced some form of physical or sexual abuse since the age of 15.

Betsy Stanko: I think what’s important about the recent EU study is that one has some comparative data; but also what we find in that study is it seems like the countries where the conversation about violence against women is the most advanced, that is they talk about it as something that is common in their lives, they actually have the highest numbers of reports of violence against women. So Sweden has high figures in this study, the UK has high figures and I think that has something to do with enabling women to name what experience they have had better than women in other countries, where they just think it’s something that women endure, it’s just part of their lives and it’s not an unusual thing to be named. What we’re saying is that it’s common, but it’s also something that we don’t want.

IG: As early as the 1990s Betsy’s research focused on investigating the issue of violence against women from an economic perspective. In particular, it sought to analyse the cost to society of these crimes.

BS: I did my first walk up Fifth Avenue in 1971, I started a refuge for battered women in 1978 and I’ve done lots of work around rape and sexual violence as well. I think we, as feminist researchers, spent a lot of time trying to quantify how much violence against women there was, a lot of work on naming it and changing the concept and moving it from “that’s just what it’s like to be a woman” to “we would like to be able to not have this in our lives.

By the Nineties it was always a debate around how much, how prevalent, and to me I thought, well, prevalence is one thing, but actually it’s a hidden cost; not only the consequences in terms of how you bear that cost, that is individually as a woman you bear that cost, but I was trying to move the argument from: “it’s an individual problem” to “it’s a societal problem”, because the consequences are actually very costly, particularly in a welfare state.

Now, not only has that been borne out over time, but actually there are different discourses now, in terms of thinking about the issues. Even in a troubled family discourse, that is,

"Nature has been defined as a woman, and both nature and women were then defined into objectification and therefore into objects of violence. Ecofeminism is a celebration of the creativity of nature and the creativity of women,"

says Dr Vandana Shiva, world renowned Indian environmentalist, activist and scientist, in this conversation with Pod Academy's Lucy Bradley about her book, Ecofeminism (co-authored with Maria Mies, Zed Books).

This podcast, which also includes the presentation by Vandana Shiva at SOAS, in October 2014, is produced and presented by Lucy Bradley.

Vandana Shiva has written many books, (including Staying Alive-Women, Ecology and Development;  Monocultures of the Mind;  and Soil not Oil) and Lucy started by asking her how this book, EcoFeminism, came about:

Vandana Shiva:   Well the book has a very interesting genesis. Maria Mies had written Patriarchy and Capital Accumulation on a World Scale, I had written Staying Alive and that had done very well and it was the first time a title was connecting, the issues of the paradigm of development happening to women in the third world and what was happening to ecosystems in the third world. Zed [publishers] asked if both of us could do a book combining North and South perspectives. Of course we didn’t have the time to actually sit together so we just decided to write our chapters and share them every month.

And it shows there are common patterns [being experienced in these different places] because we’d write chapters and they’d be about the similar phenomena. And one was in rich, rich, rich Germany and the other was in India - which at the time we wrote it was not part of this ‘shining’ India campaign – and the book chapters then just fell into place, not because we’d planned and said we’ll write chapters on this, but because both Maria and I do thinking engaged in activism.

There’s an illusion that you have to be either an intellectual or an activist and the two don’t meet. In my view, real reflection of the world we’re in can only come from engagement in that world, not by sitting in an ivory tower and imagining you know all. When you don’t write with a vested interest, when don’t write because you are serving some master, when you write in the freedom of your mind and your spirit, with a deep connection of compassion and involvement and inclusion with every being and every person whose being trampled on you don’t get dictated [to].

Lucy Bradley: And what’s the main thesis of the book?

VS: Eco feminism is really looking at the dominant world view and structures it has created which have been driven by the convergence of capitalism and patriarchy, and looking at it from the point of view of nature and women. This is for a number of reasons, first because the oppression of nature and women served the building of this paradigm; nature was defined as a woman and both were then defined into objectification and therefore into objects of violence. Ecofeminism is a celebration of the creativity of nature and the creativity of women and it is basically in a way waking us up to see the illusion that capital creates.

The new edition of Ecofeminism of course is an update. [But] everything we said –whether it was the violence had just gotten worse and whatever we said about alternatives have just flourished better, and I’m sure if we were to reissue twenty years from now, I don’t’ know if we will be around, but the two trends will just have deepened.

LB: You have anticipated my next question, is ecofeminism gathering momentum?

VS: when we wrote ecofeminism there was a whole new generation of young women who were fed up with academic feminism which had in a way totally turned it’s back on the women’s movement. We mustn’t forget that women’s studies grew out of the womens’ movement and in the early days ...

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Revelation. But what about Josephus or the Book of Enoch?  Did you know that the Bible with which we are familiar is not the complete story? Or that there are mistakes in the accepted version? And did you know that Jesus had a brother, James?

Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot talks to Dr. Joel M. Hoffman, author of The Bible's Cutting Room Floor about how some theological writings were left out for political or theological reasons, others simply because of the physical restrictions of ancient bookmaking technology. At times, the compilers of the Bible skipped information that they assumed everyone knew. Some passages were even omitted by accident!

The writings not included are more numerous than those that actually made it into the bible - The Bible's Cutting Room Floor explains how the 150 Psalms are just a 'best of' collection