Speechification

On Radio 3 they’re having a sort of Summer season of short essays from 100 clever and/or important people. It’s all part of a real festival called Free Thinking that takes place in Liverpool at the end of October. In her contribution Marina Warner talks about the commodification of art and concludes (in two minutes flat) that the visual arts are less commodified than writing. Clever and persuasive. The other essays are all here. Contributors include: Phil Redmond, Stuart Maconie, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Germaine Greer and quite a lot of very interesting people I’ve never heard of (MP3).

Worth noting too that Radio 3 will most likely chuck the whole lot away once the festival is finished since that seems to be standard practice with the station’s speech output: especially scandalous behaviour when you consider that this cerebral stuff must have a residual value of close to zero. Write to your MP or something.

Radio National recently dusted off a few archive programmes to mark the work of producer Tony Barrell. I’ll post a few of the shows here, for sure. This one’s a beauty - on the life and work of photographer Edward Muybridge, and thus the nature of time. Some charming moments, not least a few shards of Philip Glass cross-fading into the sound of a train. But also some mind-boggling insights into time itself, from scientists and skateboarders. An absolutely lovely piece of work.

Radio Eye: The Space Between Time [mp3]

The Ken Nordine is worth the price of admission alone. Actually so is the Patrick Gibson/Laurie Anderson piece at the end.

The Night Air: Museums [mp3]

This is just lovely. I could listen to old men remembering interesting lives forever anyway, but one of these old men invented Minnie The Minx for The Beano. And the others drew or edited or wrote storylines for The Dandy at DC Thompson in Dundee. Morris Heggie and Dave Torrie both edited The Dandy (in 71 years the comic has had four editors), Bill Ritchie and Jim Petrie were artists and Walter Fearne worked his way up from storylines to Managing Editor. What a life to look back on… (MP3)

Presented by Natasha Mitchell, All In The Mind is ABC Radio National’s weekly psychology programme (or, “the mind, brain and behaviour”), and is always worth a listen. This particular episode featured an interview with Jonah Lehrer, who wrote last year’s popular science bestseller Proust was a Neuroscientist. The book essentially argues that certain artists and writers anticipated some of the great discoveries about the mind and brain that took place in the early 20th century. Lehrer - something of an over-achiever himself, and editor-at-large for SEED magazine - looks at the work of Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Auguste Escoffier, Gertrude Stein, and Paul Cezanne, and what, with a bit of imagination, they might have foretold about perception, representation, memory and the nature of the psyche. It’s a fascinating discussion.

(And though Proust was in no way a neuroscientist, of course, his implicit understanding of the power of smell and taste recalls the 2007 Boyer Lectures we blogged about here, featuring Prof. Graeme Clark’s work on contemporary understanding of the senses. Oh, and All In The Mind also has its own blog, where Mitchell wrote about this episode.)

All In The Mind: Proust was a Neuroscientist (mp3)

Roger Law, he of Spitting Image, takes us on a visit to Dafen, the “art factory village” in China, where expert (and not-so-expert) fakes/replicas are churned out for the world market. It’s splendid radio. Mr Law is a little more spontaneous and bouncy than the average radio voice, he clearly knows what he’s talking about and is more mischievous about the morality and economics of the whole thing than a normal correspondent might be. Lovely, lovely. It would have been nice if there could have been some pictures on the Radio Four page though. I can’t believe no-one took a camera. Ah well. MP3 here. (And some Reuters video of Dafen here.)

I don’t often listen to the whole of Radio 4’s ‘Broadcasting House‘ programme (because smug reviews of newspapers usually annoy me), but I was glad to catch the final five minutes of this morning’s edition. Paddy O’Connell interviews the artist Jonathan Yeo, who unveiled his portrait of Blair yesterday. Here is a recording of just that final four-minute segment (MP3).

Photo: Reuters

In this slot, Jonathan Yeo talks eloquently about the way the poppy in the painting subverts the New Labour rose, as well as being an allusion to the the war(s) for which Blair will be remembered.

We don’t often share just a short clip of a programme, and I wonder if you think it works. In case you did want to listen to the show in its entirety, the stream is now online too, and Broadcasting House has its own podcast too.