Mark and Delia Owens, poachers, Zambia shooting In the early nineteen-seventies, Mark and Delia Owens, two graduate students in biology at the University of Georgia, were seized by the idea of resettling in remotest Africa. They organized an auction, sold their possessions, and used the modest proceeds to buy camping equipment and a pair of one-way air tickets to Johannesburg. When they arrived, in January, 1974, Delia, the daughter of a Georgia trucking executive, was twenty-four years old. Mark, who grew up on a farm west of Toledo, Ohio, was twenty-nine, the divorced father of a four-year-old boy named Christopher. Mark and Delia had scoured the map of Africa, searching for a site so isolated that its wildlife would have no knowledge, and no fear, of humans. In their book “Cry of the Kalahari,” which was published in 1984, the Owenses described their dreadful living conditions: “We rationed ourselves to seven gallons of water each per week, for bathing, cooking, and drinking.
Profiles: The Misfit The moving images on the camera monitor offered, I thought, a plausible depiction of one of the drawbacks of life in the Old West—an invasive urological procedure conducted without benefit of anesthesia. “A situation involving significant unpleasantness” was how David Milch, the creator of “Deadwood,” had described the scene being filmed on a soundstage at Melody Ranch Studios, in Santa Clarita, thirty miles northwest of Los Angeles. One of Milch’s inventions, Al Swearengen—or, rather, Milch’s conception of the real Al Swearengen, owner of the Gem Saloon, a tavern and bordello in the town of Deadwood, just outside the Dakota Territory, circa 1877—was about to have a metal probe called a Van Buren’s sound inserted into his urethra by Doc Cochran, a tormented physician on the verge of a breakdown. “You know, that one seemed to sail pretty goddam good,” Dourif said. “Go get ’em,” Milch said. “It isn’t just about witnessing a woman suffering,” he said. “When did you write this scene?”
John Steinbeck's bitter fruit I read The Grapes of Wrath in that fierce span of adolescence when reading was a frenzy. I was all but drowned in the pity and anger John Steinbeck evoked for these people, fleeing Oklahoma to seek work but finding nothing save cruelty, violence, the enmity of immoral banks and businesses, and the neglect by the state of its own people in the Land of the Free. The novel was published in 1939 and delivered a shock to the English reading world. But for years I did not read him. Earlier this year, when asked to make a film about Steinbeck for the BBC, I went back with apprehension. The peaks of one's adolescent reading can prove troughs in late middle age. We started filming with a small crew in Oklahoma, near the spot where the novel begins. In Steinbeck's day, this was part of the American dust bowl. In the novel, the Joad family are driven off their farm by the banks. What happened to the Joad family was an attempt to keep them and everybody like them out of California.
Carol Ann Duffy: 'Poems are a form of texting' Hardly a week goes by without a warning about how educationally detrimental it is for children to spend hours of every day screen-gazing and message-sending. But now there's a note of dissent – from the poet laureate, no less, who says she believes texting is an ideal springboard to good poetry-writing. "The poem is a form of texting ... it's the original text," says Carol Ann Duffy. Duffy, who became Britain's first female poet laureate in 2009, is passionate about the teaching of poetry in school. So, if texting is preparing children for a lifetime of poetry, are today's youngsters better at poetry than children in the past? Duffy says she owes her career as a poet to her exposure to poetry at school in the 1960s and early 70s, when she was growing up – and that's why she's determined to do all she can to further strengthen its place in the curriculum. Duffy says when she realised how much she loved poetry, she started to keep a notebook with her favourite poems in it.
Ghosts of Gone Birds: exhibition enlists artists to save endangered species | Environment They are all, alas, bleeding demised, passed on, no more, ceased to be, bereft of life and resting in peace. Like Monty Python's dead parrot, the great auk that author Margaret Atwood is knitting probably shuffled off his mortal coil, ran down the curtain and joined the choir invisible 150 years ago. But the loss of species also including the Hawaiian crow and Jamaican red macaw may yet help currently endangered birds, hope the organisers of an ambitious multimedia art project. The project is called Ghosts of Gone Birds and is the brainchild of film-maker Ceri Levy and creative consultant Chris Aldhous. If all goes to plan, they will have persuaded more than 80 artists to submit work based on extinct birds for an exhibition to be held in November. Levy, best known for his film Bananaz about the pop group Gorillaz, said he got into birds quite recently following a holiday on the Isles of Scilly with his wife.
Top writers tackle climate change in short stories Novelists from Margaret Atwood to David Mitchell are hoping to bring the dangers posed by climate change to life, through a new collection of short stories tackling the climate crisis. I'm With the Bears, taking its title from environmentalist John Muir's comment that "when it comes to a war between the races, I'm with the bears", will also feature stories by TC Boyle, Helen Simpson, Toby Litt, Paolo Bacigalupi and Kim Stanley Robinson. Out this October from radical press Verso, it is a response, said the publisher, to the absence of creative fiction dealing with climate change, an issue raised by Ian McEwan in the Guardian last year. Mitchell, twice shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, has imagined a near future in which oil sells for $800 a barrel in his story The Siphoners. Bacigalupi said that the topic of climate change is "so loaded with speculative uncertainties that it seems like there are unlimited potential stories to write and explore".
Björk: 'Manchester is the prototype' Originally formulated by scientist Edward O Wilson, the biophilia hypothesis suggests that human beings have an innate affinity with the natural world – plants, animals or even the weather. Yet it's not biophilia but good old-fashioned fandom that has drawn a small band of Björk obsessives to queue outside Manchester's Campfield Market Hall since 10am this morning. Not that there's anything old-fashioned about the woman they are here to see. A collection of journalists have already had a preview at a press conference in the Museum of Science and Industry over the road. It's a journey in the opposite direction from the one most music fans make, and one which speaks volumes about the complexity of Björk's work. At the museum, Snibbe is demonstrating the apps. Yet Björk didn't have such lofty aspirations in creating the project. That said, the change from a passive to an active listening experience is a radical one.
Why don't we love our intellectuals? | Books | The Observer One of the distinctive aspects of British culture is that the word "intellectual" seems to be regarded as a term of abuse. WH Auden summed it up neatly when he wrote: "To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, / Is a keen observer of life,/ The word 'Intellectual' suggests right away/ A man who's untrue to his wife." Auden wasn't alone in thinking that intellectuals suffer from ethical deficiencies. The journalist and historian Paul Johnson once devoted an entire book, Intellectuals: from Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (2000), to proving that some of the 20th century's most prominent thinkers were moral cretins. The fact that a nation that lives by its considerable wits should be in denial about its reliance on the life of the mind is truly weird. As a historian, Collini smells an ideological rat here, and traces the odour to an ideological belief in British exceptionalism. What this highlights is the intrinsic imprecision of the concept of the public intellectual.