Speechification

Robert Krulwich is the older, funnier one from WNYC’s Radio Lab, a show we’ve featured here quite often. He’s also NPR’s science specialist and makes terrific science inserts for shows like Weekend Edition and Morning Edition. We don’t make science programmes like this in Britain. It’s clever and funny and formally bold: Krulwich builds a short piece about neuroscience and the integrity of the self around Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: a nicely arranged collision of science and art. The MP3 is here, there’s a programme archive here and a podcast here.

Only Radio 4 could come up with a programme described as “A light-hearted look at the history of the footnote in western literature”, and on April Fools’ Day no less (MP3). Yet it has all the hallmarks of the well-made one-off: bizarre attention to detail, strange obsessives, and occasionally over-reaching presentation tics (I’m generally fond of programmes that examine things impossible to replicate on radio - this programme’s tinkling, sotto voce attempt at ‘footnotes’ is a good/bad example).

The usual R4 suspects crop up (Hello, Lynn Truss!) but so do more interesting types, like the logorrhoeic Kevin Jackson, who I could listen to forever, and the always-entertaining Terry Pratchett, who claims to have introduced footnotes to the theatre (Dr Evil’s father springs to mind). A pity more time wasn’t spent examining the future of footnotes, currently experiencing a bit of a renaissance thanks to Wikipedia and friends.

My first post to Speechification: I hope you enjoy. Expect more of a literary bent, perhaps.

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)

Here’s a little Irish jewel from before the tiger roared. Professor Denis Donoghue, a Joyce scholar (now at NYU), reading a talk about the author recorded in 1984 (the series was repeated last Summer). There’s something precious about this: it’s a fascinating talk but it preserves the fustiness and melancholy of Ireland in the decades between independence and the arrival of all that European money in the eighties. Like a time capsule from Dev’s Ireland (MP3).

Here’s another quickie. I heard this one in the car and it had me sort of chortling (gurgling?) with pleasure. Not because it’s funny (although it is) but because it’s almost perfect radio. Presenter Vivienne Parry’s a proper grown-up broadcaster with a personality, opinions and loads of wit. She oozes confidence and pleasure in what she does (and she used to present Tomorrow’s World!).

In this half-hour feature (obviously my favourite kind of show, looking back through Speechification’s lengthening archive), she asks “what did the doomed heroines of all those Victorian novels actually die of?” and she rounds up a bunch of fascinating doctors and literary types to provide some answers. This is precisely what I pay my licence fee for (MP3, Real).