Minisode Twenty-six: Twilight Knowing

Literary Friction

Arts

4.9 • 593 Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2021

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the wake of the COP26 summit in Glasgow we are thinking a lot about climate crisis and the role literature can play in galvanising people to take action. We want to think about how fiction, poetry, and non-fiction writing can approach climate crisis beyond showing how terrible it will be in the future - is there a way to write about the subject that's not only disaster fiction? How do we move out of what Jenny Offill calls 'the twilight knowing' into full comprehension? Listen in for our thoughts on all this plus lots of recommendations for books that address the climate crisis either directly or indirectly. Find a list of some of the books we talked about at: https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/minisode-26-twilight-knowing

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Literary Frictions. I'm Octavia Bright, coming to you from pitch, dark London,
0:17.8	because we're apparently saving daylight now, which means basically it's time to either get my
0:22.7	SAD light out or go to bed at 5pm every day. So yeah, I'm thrilled about that. Hi, Carrie. How are you?
0:32.5	Yes, it's dark. It's dark in Oxford too. And yes, I am reminded just how dark it gets after daylight
0:40.0	savings. And there was some kind of ruling in the EU, which I guess we're not in anymore,
0:45.9	that countries are going to have to permanently go onto either summertime or regular time
0:51.4	in a couple of years' time. So it might be changing. That's interesting. I don't know.
0:56.5	I'd be even happier if they could just find us a couple of hours of extra daylight to tack on
1:01.2	regardless. I don't really feel what time it is. Less possible. Come on, just stretch it somehow. Pray to Helios,
1:09.5	make it happen.
1:18.7	Yeah, or we could do some kind of thing where we work during the dark and we can be outside all the day during the light.
1:22.8	Yeah. Or maybe just don't work through the winter.
1:29.1	Maybe winter is just a time for being outside in the sunlight and then just hibernating like the bears. Yes. Well, because not to get too much into this, but last Christmas when we couldn't do
1:35.7	anything and it was cancelled, I just had two weeks off at home not working. And it was delightful.
1:42.0	Yeah. So maybe that's it. You know, you just live with the light. Yeah, it makes such a big difference if you can do that. And you naturally get hungry at like 6.30, tired by 9, and then you get up at 6. Well, it's still dark, isn't it? You get up at 7. God, it's so miserable. You just sleep all the time. Yeah. I'm going to go to sleep until June, right?
2:15.4	Yeah, okay. How are you? Yeah, I'm okay. I'm just grumpy about the weather. And we said we weren't going to talk about it so much, but I can't help it. Well, is darkness the weather?
2:17.4	I feel like it's connected.
2:19.0	Yeah, it is, isn't it?
2:19.8	But I feel like it's connected. Yeah, it is, isn't it? But I feel like it's something at least people in our hemisphere can relate to rather than outside of our like very
2:24.9	particular region. Small weather system. Yeah, it's true. All our northern hemisphere friends,
2:32.6	you probably feel our pain and all our southern
2:34.8	hemisphere friends. Congratulations. Enjoy every minute of it. Please do. But before we get into it,
	...

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