Science and Creativity: Do Animals Have Culture? Part III

Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

PRX

Arts

4.6 • 675 Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2018

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

An ode to animals, read by the late poet Marianne Moore.

Plus, since the dawn of humanity, more or less, people have used representations of animals to tell stories. But some artists have wanted to buck that trend, depicting animal stories from the animals’ point of view. Laline Paull is one of these artists. Her novel The Bees was dubbed "Watership Down for the Hunger Games generation,” but it might be more accurate to call it 1984 in a beehive.

And Chicago filmmaker Jim Trainor thinks that authentic animal behavior provides all the plot an artist needs. In his short, hand-drawn films, Trainor supplies narration from the animals’ perspective. But instead of the high drama of Laline Paull’s work, Trainor’s protagonists are utterly deadpan, even in grim situations. In one film, a lion taking over a pride remarks drily, "I killed my girlfriend's children — which is to say, I killed all the children of all of my girlfriends." Both Paull and Trainor get most of their facts right, but that’s not what’s important about their work. The artist’s role is to imagine how others feel — other people, other creatures — and try to share that empathy.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	from PRX.
0:07.8	This is Studio 360.
0:09.8	I'm Kurti Anderson.
0:13.2	On this Studio 360 podcast Extra, we are presenting a special series of stories about science and creativity.
0:20.6	We're looking into the question of whether animals, animals who aren't human, have culture.
0:27.9	And here is our third and final part of the current series.
0:32.6	The fish weighed through black jade.
0:36.7	Of the crow-blue muscle shells, one keeps adjusting the ash
0:40.5	heaves, opening and shutting itself like an injured fan. That is Mary Ann Moore.
0:46.4	The barnacles, which encrusted the side of the wave, cannot hide there for the submerged shafts
0:52.3	of the sun, split like spondglass.
0:55.3	She was a giant in American poetry in the last century.
0:59.4	Despite writing notoriously difficult poems, Moore became famous,
1:03.7	famous enough to throw the first pitch at a Yankees game at age 80 in 1968.
1:09.2	Along with baseball, Moore was also a big nature buff. She read natural history,
1:14.5	went to biology lectures, and she especially loved the American Museum of Natural History in New York
1:19.9	where she would study the dioramas of habitats. She'd like to talk to animal experts and to kids
1:26.5	visiting the museum.
1:28.2	In a series of poems from the 1930s, she wrote about some of the exotic animals she found there,
1:33.8	the Arctic ox, the pangolin, which resembles an armadillo, and the gerboa, a giant-eared rodent that looks like a cartoon character.
1:43.4	Here's more reading her poem rigorous
1:45.7	about reindeer. We saw reindeer browsing, a friend who'd been in Lapland said,
	...

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