Speechification

Australia is increasingly seeing itself as an Asian country, switching focus from the US and UK to the giant markets on its (extremely large) doorstep. This is certainly a good thing, enabling a rich cultural exchange (as well as untold riches in trade too of course). Yet it can sometimes be an uncomfortable relationship, and this programme is sometimes an uncomfortable listen accordingly. It concerns the contemporary so-called ‘yellow fever’; or rather the nature of white Australian men who are persistently drawn towards ‘Asian women’. Some of the attitudes on display here are more neanderthal than oriental, you have been warned.

Masako Fukui, the producer and narrator, bravely puts herself in the frame too, wondering if she might even be part of the problem, but also “fearful that there won’t be much left of me … if I rid myself of my exotic identity.”

It’s not necessarily the most academic investigation of a slice of psychology that could either be fathoms deep or impossibly shallow, yet it’s a frank, sometimes funny, exploration of a particularly awkward genre in human relationships.

(Oh, and the ABC are syndicating the exemplary and moving Don’t Hang Up, as you’ll hear on the end. Remember, you heard it first(-ish) at Speechification. Don’t touch that dial etc and so forth.)

Radio Eye: The Madame Butterfly Effect (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)

After listening to the little Will Self gem on walking from La Guardia airport into Manhattan, with some serendipity this piece turned up on ABC Radio National shortly after. It’s also about walking, but a very different kind of walking, and a different kind of storytelling for that matter. Centred around four different voices telling walking stories, it’s a slightly pretentiously based around Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, rather unnecessarily, but it’s worth it for the stories. It’s also interspersed with vignettes - of great marches during the ’30s depression, a bit of Iain Sinclair and Laurie Lee - and beautifully recorded, as ever.

Two stories are told by a student tracing her walk following the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, and an itinerant street performer from Poland, who wanders around from city to city. (I’m less interested in him, but I know that’s largely due to my own deep-seated - but entirely reasonable I think - prejudice against street performers.)

But it’s the other two voices that really capture the ear. The softly-spoken casualty of the music industry is fascinating - a great storyteller. Having left behind a life that had become debauched and empty, he ends up trudging alone through the bush for 3 months, the walking helping to strip his life back to its absolute core. He describes it as feeling himself unravelling, only stopping when he begins to find a little too much in common with the old bushmen of the fences out in the border country of Australia, who would be alone for months on end. They used to say that when they started putting two plates down for dinner, it was time to come in.

Then another great character, an inmate talking of life in prison - the notorious Long Bay in Sydney - and the seemingly endless walking around the prison yard. 3km of solitude - “gangster laps” - punctuated with stolen banter, every day. Or of hearing the footsteps of a new cellmate echoing down the corridor. He’s great. “I mean, that’s all you’ve got left … your walk and your word.”

Oh and make sure you stick around for the short bonus feature: some bloke convinced ABC Radio National to give him a series on looking for decent pubs in the middle of nowhere, called “Where can I get a drink around here?”. So here he is, in the middle of nowhere indeed, but in a town briefly transformed for the race meeting that rolls in once a year. Just listen to the voices.

Radio Eye: Two feet and a heartbeat (mp3)

What’s the backbone of Radio 4? Is it the agenda-setting news and current affairs? The groundbreaking comedy? The bloody drama? The Archers? No. It’s the half-hour documentary features. No contest. The docs are the bright thread of curiosity and enquiry that holds the whole clever thing together. Here’s another lovely example: from a series about important psychologists, this one’s about Stanford professor Albert Bandura, whose work was enormously influential, especially in developing countries (MP3).