[Music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a podcast about bugs and life, not necessarily in that order. Yeah, I usually say books and life, but this time around it's a little different. That's because our first guest is David Rothenberg, philosopher, musicologist, clarinetist, and professor who has written a new book called Bug Music, How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise. It's also got a CD that, well, it doesn't come with it, but it's a really fantastic companion piece. David's really a neat writer. It's a fun book to read for me at least. It answered some neat questions I've had about sort of the structure of sound and music and how we hear it and how we create it in a sense out of the natural world. It'll make you listen to things differently, which is all I can hope for at my age. We had a really fun conversation talking about his career, and I also asked him what his favorite species is to make music with, because insects are not the only people. Insects aren't the only animals he's played along with. One thing that I want to point out during the conversation, there's a digression about a guy named Tim, and in David's book, he brings up the character, the person, a man named Tim Blunk, who, well, he was a terrorist in the 1980s, and the amount of years he spent in prison mirrored the amount of time that some of David's cicadas, well, the cicadas David writes about, stay underground, and he saw some neat connections between those. What's more interesting is that when David found out where I live, he mentioned that Tim, who was released in prison, lives in the same town. So we may end up seeing another guest spin out of this episode in case any of you wonder where I keep getting this litany of neat and interesting people to talk to, it really just comes from talking to people. You end up making connections and, well, I would say building webs, but that's arachnids and not insects. But anyway, on with the show. Our first guest today is David Rothenberg, and he's followed by Clive Bennett, who I will introduce after David Segment, and I hope find some way to thematically draw these two guys together. For now, the virtual memories show conversation with David Rothenberg, author of bug music. My guest on the virtual memories show is David Rothenberg, author most recently of bug music, How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise by St. Martin's Press, along with an accompanying CD. David, thank you for coming on the virtual memory show. Thanks for inviting me. To start, why don't we, well, why don't you just talk us through the thesis of bug music, the idea of the book itself? Well, this is the third in a trilogy of books that I've written about music and the animal world. The first is called Why Bird Sing, investigated Why Bird Sing from the point of view of science, literature, and music, and how all these different human ways of understanding nature each have a whole different perspective on what it is that requires and makes birds do this important phenomenon that we experience of them that's so important to their lives. And in the end, I kind of conclude that birds sing because they must, because they have to. It's of their very essence. That the singing helps to define what the bird is, and that the most common answer to people will say, "Oh, male birds are singing to attract mates and defend their territories." Kind of, rather than answering the question, pushes you away from the phenomenon. You think you've explained it by saying what it's for, and then you forget how each species is doing something so different, so special, so unique. All of a sudden, they're all the same. So obviously, this isn't really explaining what's going on. Why are there so many differences? Because each species has its own aesthetic, its own sense of what it considers beautiful, and male birds are singing, and it does help attract mates, but the singing is more than just the function. It's a whole aesthetic process that evolves together with the appreciation of this phenomenon. Birds only sing a certain way. The males are singing because females like just this certain kind of song. This evolves throughout nature. Each species has its own sense of what beauty is, and that kind of idea guided all these projects, and the second one was about whales singing underwater, particularly humpback whales with the longest, most elaborate song or musical performance in the animal world, only discovered by humans in the 1960s. And the fact with whales is we don't actually know why they're singing. Males are doing it. We assume it's to attract females, but in the 40 odd years, humans have studied this. No one has ever seen a female whale show any visible interest in this phenomenon. Sometimes the other male whales are interested, and they come together and do different things relating to the music, but females, they show no response. Now, scientists may say, well, why should you expect to see anything? It's not about seeing. It's just important anyway. Possibly, but as you know, science believes in evidence and collecting data. If you see nothing, why keep promoting this theory as if it's obviously true? It may be for some whole other reason. So the third book was about insects, a kind of sound that might seem the least musical of these three to most people who come across the idea. But in fact, it's a kind of sound that people have loved for thousands of years and reflected upon and valued, even though it's a whole series of noises and words and clicks and thrums. And in fact, what's so interesting about this book is the things that I thought were kind of strange and odd. People have been very willing to accept. It's much more normal than I thought. I thought the CD was very strange. All these odd sounds that were at the limits and edges of music for most people. But in fact, it's probably the best selling of these three CDs. I hadn't really picked up on how the sounds I really like today's electronic pop music. It sounds like a dubstep, like what my 14-year-old son listens to. It sounds like the CD. And I wasn't really thinking of it in those terms. It makes perfect sense when you listen to it afterwards. Of course, you hear all this music you're working it in, but it really comes from bugstep. And these sounds are ever more musical to humans. Somehow, we've expanded our sense of what kind of sounds count as music. And so it's a better time than ever to put forth the argument that humans might have learned important musical ideas from insects. Which is something I propose here as not something I intend to prove, because you can't really prove that as much as pointing out how so much of what bugs are doing is really the roots of what human music is based on rhythm, repetition, variation, cool kinds of sounds and timbers and tones that we really kind of latch on to. One of the points in the book is the sort of the Western fixation on harmony and melody, which is a very different idea than what the insects produce. Can you sort of go into the what you think we really derive from that? Well, in a way, that's a kind of, you know, sure that's in the book. It's a little bit of a cheap shot when you act like what is Western music today? It's all kinds of cool noises and weird things. But the traditional idea is that she go back to the medieval or Renaissance period and Western music developed harmony and made it more important than even melody and then rhythm. And you developed an entire kind of musical approach where there would be chords, a harmonic center of a piece that would then move somewhere else. You'd modulate from one tonal center to another. Now in most of the world's music that never goes on, so you have the story that the great, great Indian virtuoso went to here at Western Orchestra and they hear them. They're playing all in one key and then after two minutes it moves to another key. He just has to get up and leave. What could be so wrong? It's the most wrong possible thing. My friend Ben Mandelson, who was a pioneer in world music, he had this slogan when he had an early world music band called Three Mustafa's Three. They said four-fifths of the world cannot be wrong. They never quite defined what they meant. I think what he meant is the music has no harmonic movement. It doesn't have all this modulation from one chord to another. No chords, just rhythm and groove. And the other day I was in New York and heard the Festival of the Desert, all these musicians from Mali and Morocco. They're all playing this groove music. It's like a primitive blues. They call it like a primitive kind of blues with no blues progression, no 12-bar chords. But it's actually more raw and organic and it grabs you in a way that once you add harmony, it does not. The harmony pulls you away from the roots of this. And you could extrapolate that the roots of this kind of steady one chord kind of blues that you also hear in people like John Lee Hooker. I could go back to, you know, Katie Dids, bushcrickets going this could be the origins of the regular beat and the percussion sound that we like. You more often hear evolutionist psychologists say, oh, the speed of human rhythmic music is based on the gate of people walking across the savannah, something like that, or the heartbeat, or things like that. Well, those seem to me as equally as arbitrary as you could just be hearing this this more of insects beating and repeating. And you recorded, I heard, you know, some Katie Dids singing at night. And it's kind of a regular beat, but also a little irregular, like really the best rhythmic music is regular and irregular at the same time. Well, what would you say your musical influences were both growing up and now? In terms of like music I'm playing or in this story. In terms of how you developed over the course of your career. I mean, I started getting interested in jazz and improvisation strangely enough when I didn't get into the orchestra in junior high school, like I wasn't good enough. And then I also, we were fortunate in Westport, Connecticut here, where I grew up in having a famous jazz record store that is run by the same woman. Now it's called Sally's Place. It used to be, used to be Sally's little enclave in a department store called Cline is a local department store when I first encountered Sally and her records. And I thought like I'm interested in jazz. Let's go see what kind of jazz clarinetists are going on here. And they were all very radical and extreme. So I thought this is what you're supposed to listen to, because I was like 15 or 16 and these records were of Anthony Braxton. And he was considered the best clarinetist in the 70s and totally radical experimental stuff. So I said, I should get interested in this. And then I got interested in Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman. And they actually had this kind of mixture of free jazz with a kind of roots kind of rhythmic quality. And it's this bluesy root side of their music. I think it makes them ultimately so influential. And Don Cherry, you know, as original promoter of what later became world music, was able to pick up any instrument from all across the globe, make it sing and make it really come alive. And so those musicians had a lot of influence on me. And then later a lot of, I liked for some reason, a lot of jazz that came from Europe, a lot of it on the ECM label, things like Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, and this band Oregon that was like half chamber music and half jazz. And these influenced me. And in terms of nature, you know, in Connecticut is where Paul Winter lives, who was a pioneer in the 70s of playing along with birds and whales and wolves. And I got to meet him when I was maybe 17 years old or so. And I got really interested in that. I didn't do much with it for like 20 years before I came back and thought I should play with nature also. Is he still around? Yeah, he's around. He's in the field. Does he know what you're doing? Oh, yeah. And yeah, he's a big supporter. And in the book on whales, I think I give the fairest account of Paul Winter's career that anyone's really written about how he early on was a jazz musician, then he started getting into these more spiritual and nature things. And he was kind of, you know, a forerunner of what became new age music, but his music is much more organic and jazz like and really better musicians, more personality and less kind of trippy and yoga like, you know. And so, at the same time, a lot of the music world thinks it's all new age and it's too watered down. Just the idea of something that goes down. They don't know what to make of him, you know. They don't know what to make of me either, you know. I don't have no music world reputation. Except I did, you know, a few years ago, make a record on ECM, my favorite jazz label, which is just clarinet and piano with Marilyn Crispell. It's all improvised. It's all, and she's a great musician. And it was a, I really felt something I always wanted to do, something I never thought I would do is record on this, my favorite label, because it was just total chance of confluence of things. And I hope to do more things with them, although it's, as with all parts of the record business, it's hard to get anyone's ear and believe in your project. And how do you balance the writing, the music, and the professordom? Well, if you're a professor, if you're a professor at a research university, like the New Jersey Institute of Technology, you're encouraged to do your own work. It's part of the job. It's not just teaching us to do your own creative research. And I've turned my research into something that leads to books that are oriented towards the general public and doing my own kind of music that's in between all these areas. And I also, since writing the bird book, in which I kind of criticized scientists for not asking the deepest questions about animal sound and the connection to music, although a lot of scientists were angry with me when I did that and said, you don't know anything. How dare you criticize us. There were a few who said, you're right. Let's do your project. Let's look at your questions. We're putting you in charge of this group. You work with our students and our postdocs and do some projects. I said, okay. And so now, just this year, we're publishing our first official scientific technical papers on this research into trying to understand bird song from a more musical perspective. Can you share any of the conclusions of that? Or is it a little too essential? Basically, in this paper, in this paper, it's sort of suggesting that it's very hard to quantify in the way that bird song scientists like to quantify. It's very hard to quantify the musical aspects of the more complicated bird songs, like mockingbirds and nightingales and butcher birds of Australia. But it can be done, basically. And there's a recent paper that this group published in Nature that was covered in the New York Times saying, which comes out of this same group, although I'm not part of that paper, arguing that both in animal communication and animals learning language and communication and humans learning language and communication as babies. The transitions between one sound and another may be the most important part of how the communication happens, which is a musical idea. That research came from talking about the same kind of thing. So it doesn't have my name on it, but it's part of the same thing we talked about that. And they turned it into something that got a lot of attention. Science moves very slowly compared to someone like me just writing a book saying, "I'm interested in this. Let's talk about this." But to actually write these scientific papers takes years of careful analysis of a lot of numbers and it's kind of methodical, a little bit boring, sort of against my more spontaneous approach. Let's just get out and play. You can have one musical encounter with a whale or a cicada and lead to a beautiful recording. A success. Here it is. We made it. It's live. We didn't fake it. And it's great. But if you want to turn it into science, you have to do it like a hundred times and then statistically analyze what's going on. It's more boring. Peer review process and everything else. Yeah. Even before peer review, I'm just talking about the analysis of the data. Does the whale really respond to what the clarinet is doing? I can make one recording, play it for you, print out the sonogram and show, "Look, obviously, he's doing something responsive here. But to make it scientifically valid, you'd have to do it many, many times." Control group. Yeah. Control group of whales. One of the notions that intrigued me in the book was the idea that insect music in a sense kind of bridges the gap between analog and digital sound, as we know it. We hear it as a wave and yet in a sense it's composed of bits, of a horde or swarm of insects making this out of my sort of over reading. No, that's just some truth into that. I don't think I say it exactly explicitly, but you're on to something there. At least in the sense that a music is made by a bunch of individuals when no person is exactly in charge, no individual exactly knows what's happening. No Katie did his guiding, this overlapping rhythm of Katie did. And yet you hear something that's organized somehow. And I talk about some of the mathematics that underlies that, that makes it happen. When I've described that to certain audiences, especially the more spiritually mited types, they find it disappointing. What this equation explains how Cricut synchronized, you know, you're reducing nature to a machine. I said, "No, I'm not. I'm showing how this amazing mathematics has evolved and makes really cool stuff." Well, that notion of emergent order. Yes, the emergent order exactly. And that, you know, it doesn't mean that you're demystifying it to me. It means like, "Isn't this so cool that this can happen?" Yeah. The idea being, again, that they're such, they have much smaller brains than we do in the idea that, you know, something so beautiful is packed into, you know, a relatively limited set of responses. Yeah, you don't need, it's not about the brain. Yesterday I was recording all day at the Dreamland Studio, famous rock and roll studio in Woodstock. We're recording with Pauline Oliveros, who's 81 years old. She's like a pioneer experimental composer and performer. It's like the female lesbian John Cage, you know. She's a famous, like, you know, just a famous character. And she's only getting more like a jazz musician and more relaxed as she gets older. Less to lose. She's just like, "Let's go play." And we're talking like, "Okay, actually we plan this out." You know, "I don't want to think. I don't want ideas. Let's just make some music here." And she's playing a giant electronic accordion with all these digital sounds. She plays at the Museum of Modern Art Thursday night. There's a big picture of her in the New Yorker with a bunch of weird artworks. I'll have to look for it. No, it's on the upcoming events page. It's the biggest picture of a performance event in this week's. And she's just so fun. And we did three concerts before this, and so we did a recording session. And it was just so kind of pleasurable and like no issues, like no thing to worry about. She's totally the opposite. She's like, "Okay, let's just do it here." You know? It's just so fun and interesting. But I thought it was just funny saying like no ideas. We're playing here. Let's not discuss. And yet she started a whole school of thought called deep listening, the whole Institute about a way of listening to the world that really relates to all the stuff that I'm doing with her own terminology and discipline, which you'd have to ask her about to really understand or to be another upcoming guest. Yeah, she would be totally worth a visit to Pauline Oliveros in Kingston. And so, and again, you know, part of this whole project, something that people don't often grasp or bring up is a lot of it's just bringing together disparate kinds of people to do things, like either in events in the story, connecting things otherwise don't seem connected. Like one of the key characters in your book, if you want to discuss Tim. Yes. And there's a story that isn't in the book about how this happened, which is that I was trying to understand how could I grasp what it's like to be like the cicadas are underground either 13 years or 17 years, different species, these periodic cicadas, and then they come out millions of them all at once. What do you feel like to emerge after all this time underground? This story is a little confusing, which is why it's not in the book, but I'm telling you that. I'm thinking about this, writing the train in from where I live in Cold Spring, New York, into New York City, and someone just sits down next to me and says, "Excuse me. Can I ask you a question?" Which is not the way people usually talk on the commuter train. And he said, like, I noticed everyone is like talking on his little phones and like they're typing on these screens, like, "What is this? I haven't seen this guy. I haven't been here for a while. Where have you been?" And he goes, "Oh, in prison? How long were you in prison? Oh, 17 years." And then I sort of thought like, "Oh, this guy would understand." And at the same time, I said, "Oh, I have a friend who was in prison for 13 years." And then this recently released prisoner kind of relaxed and said like, "Oh, okay. I could talk to this guy." And then that made me think I should get Tim into my book. But that since that's a convoluted tale, I took it out of the book. It's easy enough to just say, "Oh, yes, my friend who was in prison for 13 years." And then we decide to make a little film about this, which is now going to go to a bunch of festivals. It's a 30-minute film about the connection to one man who was in prison for 13 years. And then emerging into the world, how this compares to Cicada's emerging. Of course, there's no connection between these stories nominally. And I told Tim, I said, "Tim, I'm thinking of putting you in my book." But you know, it is kind of trivializing all your suffering in jail because we're talking about insects and there's you. And maybe it doesn't make any sense. Do you think I should do it? How do you feel about that? He said, "Absolutely. No one else wants to talk to me about this. Nobody cares." And as we now know, he lives in my hometown. So, you know, there's a possibility he'll be talking to us. And also, what's very interesting about his story is no one ever wants to talk about to reform terrorists because something, you know, Tim went to prison for trying to blow up the Capitol and he and his group did succeed in blowing up part of the Army War College in Baltimore. So this was in the 80s. And, you know, now anything related to terrorism, you get much worse treatment. You're never going to be seen then. We're never going to be seen then. Yeah. And the thing is like, you know, is there such a thing as a reform terrorist and what's this all about? He did these things because he was opposed to what the American government was doing in Central America in the 80s. Like a lot of people were really angry. He wouldn't say what he did was right. He still doesn't support those policies. But, you know, he also says like, you know, you know, I did my time. You know, this is, you know, what do you want? I did my time and I know it was wrong and I'm doing other things now. He also didn't kill anyone. That's right. You made a big point about that. But still, you know, you can, you know, look at the crimes that are treason today, you know, you know, revealing the fact that the government spies on people, you know, that can put you in jail for life or or a leaking video of a helicopter. Yeah. All this kind of stuff, you know, leaking things in a world where everything is constantly leaked. These are now considered treason, you know, and so, you know, it's important to consider these stories. And so what the way to get into this story is like, what does this have to do with bug music? You know, well, couldn't you have left this out? If you're writing about insects and music and the answers, of course, you could have. But one of the things about all these projects is I take something that seems kind of obscure and perhaps only of specialized interest and show how you could be interested in this and leads you to all kinds of other places that are not where you expect. And that was a big part of, you know, the way I, like, I don't want to write these books, they lead you in odd directions. And it's not so perhaps like a rigorous argument proving that insects gave us rhythm and noise, but it's a way of telling the story that kind of, you know, mirrors how I kind of weave through it. And then I try and bring all these people together. Yeah. And we do, we did live performance and events. The last book I did was called "Survival of the Beautiful." And it was about evolution and beauty, the idea I said earlier about each species having its own aesthetic sense. I kind of make a larger principle out of this and show so much of evolution is not survival of the fittest, but survival of weird, cool stuff that, as no, didn't have to be there, would evolve because there's a sense of aesthetic preference going on in nature. Something Darwin realized very well, but most biologists tend to downplay because it doesn't sound useful to them. Therefore, they miss a lot of the points of what nature really is about. And we had a big conference at NYU, we brought so many different kinds of people there, introduced them to each other and present that this topic kind of connects science and philosophy and religion and arts and things like that. And so it was really important for me, both in the writing of the books and in presenting them to the world, to bring many different kinds of people together. Yeah. And once again about how it fits into your studies, did this mirror anything you're teaching at NJIT? Yeah, I'm often teaching about related things. You know, and it's a little known secret for those of you who are contemplating becoming professors on humanities and obscure things that are not known as being practical or very employable, like philosophy. And that you, you know, I have a PhD in philosophy and I applied for 150 jobs 20 years ago, got one interview and one job, which I have until this day. And it was at a school I knew nothing about, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJIT, it was an engineering and technical university. Why would someone want to teach humanities and the arts there? Well, the fact is, is a very good reason to do that, is they really let you explore what you want. They don't tell you what to do. You have a huge amount of freedom to explore one's own track. And that's really helped me have the time and encouragement from my job to write these really interesting kinds of books. If I was teaching in a philosophy department at any more straight ahead university, they would say, you can't do music, that's not what philosophers do. You can't write these odd books. And this is outside the limits of what we accept here. So don't do it. They wouldn't take it so seriously, but NJIT is more open because they're more technology focused. So the humanities can define themselves wherever they want. So those of you who want to do something a little unusual, I would encourage exploring those kinds of positions. They can be better than you imagine, more free and more encouraging to unusual directions. Speaking of unusual directions, you're moving to Berlin. Yeah, I'm on sabbatical for one year. Every seven years professors can take a year off and hopefully your institution supports you. And so I'm going to go live in Berlin for one year to work on the things I'm usually working on, but in a different atmosphere. And one thing I'm going to do there is some of the things I talk about in this book is bring together those who study animal communication with the vast electronic music community. People in Berlin is the center of electronic music of all kinds, taking noises very seriously in a musical way. It's the same thing that scientists are doing when they're trying to understand animal communication. By and large, these people do not spend much time with each other. They know they're in the same city, but they don't attend death on something to that. Everyone's going to those, I guess. Dafft punk, they probably like bug music. I know this book is finding its way into the hands of musicians. I know that the two guys in Wilco are reading it. Has it been received? What's the idea? I think they're not quite sure what to make of it. They kind of like the idea. People review this book. They tend to talk about the idea rather than the book itself, but a few people say, "Look, it's kind of more interesting than you would think. It's really readable. It goes around." The CD is much more successful than I would have thought in the age where nobody's supposed to be selling any CDs and it's all kind of weird electronic noises. But in fact, it's not as weird as I thought as I mentioned earlier. Well, my wife enjoyed listening to it. And most of the electronic I listened to, she refuses because she's convinced it's going to give her a grand mile seizure. So she was happy to have something that's more, you know. That because it has too much, this kind of regular electronic beat. All that's very big in Berlin. We'll see like this. The whole genre's of music where everything has to have this 4/4 beat and it's kind of all based on that. And I look forward to being in that atmosphere and seeing what happens. Actually, one of the questions I had about the record, and it's something that you also bring up in the book a bit. With the record, you're recording bug music and then applying some transformations to them and accompanying them with your own music. Is there a point for you where the transformations that you apply, just slowing something down or changing the pitch a little, make it inauthentic, I guess. Is there a point where you decide, "No, this is not--" That's an excellent question. There's two kinds of pieces on the CD. There's several of them that are live, which means they were performed live. The first piece is Cicadas in Virginia and my son is playing the iPad and I'm playing clarinet. We just recorded live. We recorded a few hours of these live things. I picked what I thought was the most interesting one just by listening to it. To present that as a live track, I can't change it too much. That's what happened. I tweaked the sound. I master it a bit so certain frequencies come out, but I'm not changing what was played. But another group of pieces are constructed in the studio. I will take some insect sounds and carefully make music out of different things, cut and paste things together. Or on some of those pieces, the sounds are not actually from insects. They're totally electronically generated, but with this insect aesthetic sense in my mind after listening to so many of those things, you can't always tell which is which. But there's a lot of things I wouldn't do, which is just like sample an insect and to play regular melodies on it. Like, you know, Graham Ravelle did, who guy became a famous film composer, he wrote this, he made this record, The Insect Musicians, where it's much more like, you hear these things that has made in the 80s on simpler technology, which sort of nominally based on insect sounds, but pretty much sounds like a synthesizer of the period. So I would want the music to be influenced by its source material, so it would be different than something I would do without having those sounds. But a lot of that is a matter of personal taste rather than an absolute sense of what's authentic and what's not. But what I do feel is that the kind of sounds I decided I liked that I would present as music changed because I listened to so much insect music and thought about these questions. I wouldn't have made the CD and used these sounds before embarking on this project. If you listen to the previous, you know, the whale record, you know, it doesn't have these kinds of sounds, and it's also influenced by whales, the other one's influenced by birds, so I change what I'm doing because of all these creatures. Do you see it as a progression at all? Or are they simply phases? They all fit together, like it's not like there's no whale and bird on this, but it definitely, and even yesterday when we were sitting up in Woodstock listening in the afternoon to the unusually rich chorus of insects that I was hearing in a totally different way after spending several years on this. I mean, one can always change one's mind, but it's definitely changed what I think of as music, and it's changed how I listen to the world, and I think it's pushing towards what I always learned from John Cage where he said, you know, you should listen to the whole world as a vast musical composition. There's no such thing as silence. All these sounds are music. And I wouldn't go as far as he, you know, does or is accused of doing by taking all judgment away. You know, he says you must free yourself from your likes and dislikes, like a kind of Buddhist co-on about, you know, don't think of what's good and bad. I'm obsessed with what's good and bad, or what I like when I don't like. Most of it all, I don't like, so if I'm going to do it, I have to really figure out why does I like certain things and not others, and really spend time picking and choosing. I don't accept just any sound in my own things. I don't mind when people do that, but for me, I want to pick and choose. You want a craft? Yes, I really believe in it, and I'm really interested in the fact that sound manipulation becomes so easy, and people can just do it on their phones today, that we'll get a more refined sense of what it means, and a more deeper aesthetic of sound and how to work with it, and possibly the next book I write is going to be about something like that. And that was actually my next question. What's the next book? I'm not sure, but it may be about sound and sound effects, and in a kind of metaphorical way, like we'll tell stories about maybe totally metaphorical about sound effects, like delay and reverb and chorus, and kind of riff on these ideas, not in any sort of technical way, not discuss how it's technically done, but kind of use them as metaphors or something. And I know that doesn't make much sense, but that's kind of part of the idea. I'm sure when we were pitching bug music, it was a little like you want to do. Yeah, exactly. When they saw the other books, like, look, birds, whales, and now bugs, people said, yeah, I don't like bugs, what are you talking about? I said, and these cicadas are coming, it's going to be a big publicity opportunity, and they said, what's cicadas? This is ridiculous. And people don't remember their 17 years' cycles. And there was much more publicity for these cicadas than anyone imagined, because of the world of social networking and things like that, that it was totally over the top, and I predicted it was going to be that way, but most people didn't believe me. I said, it's going to be big, you're watching seats, the kind of thing people like today. And it's in the east coast, so we're all centering over. It's like the center of media, we think it's so important, right? Yeah. Yeah, how did you enjoy the summer's emergence? Oh, it was, you know, all the events we did, it was just much grander than I ever imagined. You know, what sort of events did you do? Well, the first one was a concert at the Judson Church in Manhattan. We had a lot of these people in the book there. We had just a few live cicadas there. They had just come out, so they wouldn't cooperate that much, but they were there. And it was just a great eventful of people. And then we did you know, a bunch of TV things on the PBS NewsHour and New York Times video, and then we did a big festival at Mohawk, and then we, and in Kingston, we had a Kingston cicada festival, a whole day of events that was really fun. The mayor came out and made this proclamation, making this date, you know, Kingston cicada day, you know. And it was just amazing to see this whole thing. And then, and get to play along with them. Oh, actually, often I brought them live and they performed pretty well. Yeah. And then I made a lot of really nice films, a little video clips. And the best one actually was Never Broadcast, made by these freelancers called Prehensile Productions. It's on the website, thebugmusicbook.com website. There's one video that's just really, really beautiful. And it was Never Broadcast anywhere. And you know, because they were, they just made it on spec and they couldn't, by then they couldn't find anyone who hadn't already covered the story. But it's the most beautiful one. It's in the lower left corner, I say most beautiful one. And what did it, what qualities did it have? It just very beautifully shot the way they, the way the angles they used, the amount of time they spent on the sound. And they didn't try and force it like a, like a 30 minute TV thing, 30 second TV spot. Like, oh, look at this. And look at this. It wasn't so fast. And no bugs crawling into your mouth. They were crawling around. Yeah. Okay. But they weren't, you know, they weren't, they didn't force it. They just showed you what it's like and used the sound well. And they didn't interrupt it too much. The sound of these cicadas versus the 13 year cicadas that you experienced near the end of the book, when you're, you're hunting them down, differences in quality or. The 17 and 13 year cicadas basically sound the same as three related species. You hear them all at the same time. In the Midwest, some places in 13 years cicadas were in vast higher numbers than I ever saw around here. But some parts of New Jersey and Hudson Valley did get huge amounts, I think. Basically, three quarters of a mile from my home, where you couldn't hear anything and anything, but to me sounded, and I was very thankful in the book that you break down what the multiple sounds are and how they work. Because I kept having the, the aliens, ray guns and Mars attacks. Yeah. And the movie, that was basically the sound I kept, you know, falling back. Right. No, it's like that. And then you start to learn it's this whole complicated acoustic ritual that's much more complicated than anyone thought a bunch of insects could possibly be. Is there an issue, particularly with the fact that they just come out so infrequently, that for this particular study, you just can't do too much research given that you have a few weeks every 17 years. Yeah. I mean, for people studying them in one location, yes, but fortunately for the scientists and musicians working on this, every year they're coming out somewhere. There's different broods of them. So next year, we'll be able to go to Western Illinois and Eastern Iowa and there'll be a brood that comes out again in late May, early June, the year after kind of in East Texas, there's some that's as far west as they get, the year after there'll be many in Eastern Ohio, Western Pennsylvania, there won't be any in this area for many, many years. And do you have a favorite pet theory as to how the 17 year cycle? In the book I write about the theory I like the most, which is that it's a purely mathematical model about imagine a population of insects or anything in one open area, say during the ice age, surrounded by ice is one area, there's so many of them, they'll be very fruitful, a lot of mating, a lot of eggs will be laid, they'll all go underground. Let's just see if they come out different years. Some come out every five years, every after five years, seven up to 20. And then they made again, it goes on to the next generation. If you've run this model, just you know, so they're kind of competing against themselves after just a few hundred years, the prime numbers somehow win out just mathematically. So this could have something to do with it. But it is a totally theoretical model, there isn't any evidence for it. But neither is there evidence for the most commonly heard explanation, which is that the irregular cycles out with predators who tend to have more regular cycles. Yeah, there are those, that's because Stephen J. Gould wrote that in an article that was read by a lot of people. There's no evidence for that. And there are no predators of the cicadas that follow those cycles. If you're going to do like strategic ecology, the way they out with predators is there's just too many of them. No matter how many people are trying to eat them, people, raccoons, dogs, birds, there's so many cicadas that the would-be predators just get stuffed. So that, you know, it's just sheer numbers. And you have a, you've sampled some yourself, right? I haven't actually. Oh, you haven't. Okay, because you wrote about the... I wrote about it. It's best to eat them when they're freshly come out of the ground. And I didn't see enough of those fresh ones because they came out so early in the mornings and different places. But I had planned to have a whole cicada feasting portion of this. But some of my friends were scientists say, let's discourage this. Come on, we don't want to mess them up already. And you know, I think they've been alive for 17 years. Think of all the toxins they could have accumulated. So that's an interesting argument. Again, life in Northern New Jersey. We've got a lot of old bugs. Yeah. My final question, which species do you like collaborating with the most? Of any creature? Yeah. And people can fall into that too. I would say not talking about humans that, you know, humpback whales are most among the most grand creatures to try and engage with and to kind of play the clarinet, broadcast it underwater and listen to these strange unfolding songs that it's really grand and rare and unique experience. And one project that I'm working on this year is to put together the most, the highest quality whale song recordings that we can possibly find and could have published them, the CD, really long ones, like, you know, complete songs like 20 minutes. That together with a really beautiful visualization of the song showing the whole structures. People really see how musical it is. I don't think that's really been done as well as it could be. And just the songs unadorned? I'm not going to play along with a particular project. But I still using them in many performances in different ways and trying to show that there's more, more people should be doing this. It should be actually required. Part of everyone's any performer and composer's musical education. Let's deal with the music of animals. It's there. You know, if you're denying it, you're closing off a lot of musical inspiration and possibility. And of course playing with humans, you know, has this, you know, unique possibility everyone can do what they want and decide to do something different than we expect. But the music of animals is necessary in a way human music is never. And that these animals know the sound that really matters to them. They're sure what's right, what's good, what's necessary. And people are never so sure. We're always wondering, questioning our place in the world and thinking of doing something new. So the necessity and rightness of animal music cannot be ignored. Like this bird must sing this way, knows that it's right. Which a human can say, no, maybe I'll sing opera, maybe I'll, you know, I'll be a rock singer and I don't know which one's better or I don't know which is really right. Maybe I can sing with chords and harmony or maybe that's wrong and I'll just do sing a whole different way. Like with melody and rhythm and like we're not sure we don't know. We always wonder. David Rothenberg, thank you so much for coming on The Virtual Memory Show. Thanks for inviting me, Gil. And that was David Rothenberg. You can find bug music, the book from Saint Martin's press, while the bug music CD is from Gruen 122 and Terra Nova music. You can find both of those on Amazon or other media stores. Now our next guest is Clive Bennett, who is the CEO of Halo Pharma. Now in my day job I run a pharmaceutical trade magazine and Clive's company advertises in it. They're a manufacturer of pharmaceutical products for other drug companies to sell. And, well, I interviewed Clive in the middle of 2012 for a profile, sort of Q&A in the magazine, and it was a really strange conversation. He was much more discursive and thoughtful than, well, pretty much any CEO I'd interviewed previously. And so when we finished out by just asked him, just wondering, what are you reading? And that led to a pretty fantastic conversation off the mic. So I decided I would take a chance and reveal my secret podcasting identity to him, and ask if he'd be interested in recording an episode for the show. He was perfectly up for it. And so, well, last May, when I had to go interview Halo about another subject, Clive and I sat down for about an hour, basically my big question is how someone who is quite so literary and thoughtful, and, well, such a voracious reader, essentially, became the CEO of a pharma company. And I guess I wanted to cast that in terms of what an incongruous thing it is, but the more I think about it, I think it's really the fact that, well, I can't really account for why I haven't gone any further in the business world. I mean, nobody's made me a CEO of anything. I'm still the editor of a pharmaceutical trade magazine that I was when we launched in 1999, and I'm perfectly happy with it. But I do wonder about what it takes for someone who's cultured, I suppose, is a good way to put it, to advance in the world of business. And Clive moved into the sciences, and through the course of that became the CEO of this pharmaceutical outsourcing company. I know this sounds weird to combine Clive and David Rothenberg after that great interview, but I do think there's something to the notion of, well, the arts and sciences, I guess, and I think these two men kind of show different sides of that and show how you can kind of keep both of those things wedded within your soul and within the way that you choose to live. So, without any further ado, here is my conversation with Clive Bennett, the chief executive officer of Halo Pharma, about how on earth he became the chief executive officer of Halo Pharma. You have to trust me. I don't know how many other CEOs, you know, if I ask anyone what they're reading at best, I'm going to get a history book about the Civil War or the Steve Jobs biography. That's pretty much it. They don't read outside of, well, I got a lot of TPS reports I got to go through, or Harvard Business Review. There isn't a lot of... Well, I always, as a kid, like, read voracious. I'm sure you did too, right? I used to hide, when I had to go to bed at seven o'clock or whatever, I used to hide under the covers and I would sneak a flashlight up into my bedroom so that I could keep going. But it's hard to know why. I mean, serendipity really. I mean, and in a way, the English or the British school system that tends to stream kids. I mean, it was still the era of grammar schools versus secondary modern schools, so you take the 11 plus and you'd be selected based on sort of like an SAT down at 11 years old to be streamed. There was no shame in streaming kids. It was felt to be the best way of giving every kid the best opportunity because they'd be in a group that they could advance with together, not in a way so crazy. We had our gifted and talented programs and I was sort of back into these sorts of things. So you get streamed and stuff and then somehow or another in those early, first couple of years after 11 plus in the grammar schools at the time, some all powerful or knowing school types would sort of stream you. And in high school, you were streamed into three science or three arts. And this was just because people thought you had more of an aptitude for mathematics and the sciences than then for arts. And I've actually often wondered whether that was right. You know, I could have gone for me. For yeah, it was an accurate as to who you were. Was it accurate? Yeah. I mean, it's not reasonable to stream 13 year old kids. And for a third party to decide, we think you've got more of an aptitude for science as opposed to arts or vice versa. I mean, I liked music a lot as a kid. I was a good boy soprano. I had a very good voice. So I sang in choirs and one thing or the other. And in fact, when I was nine, I tried out Winchester College to go because at nine, they had an acceptance program and you could choose to go into Winchester as a chorister. So I tried out to go there as a chorus. And I was sung in Winchester Cathedral and all the rest of it. And in the end, my Latin wasn't good enough for me to go there free because I hadn't been going to a public school. You know, you know, private school, private school. And so at the age of nine, I thought done much Latin, you know. So my father would have had to pay for me to go there into Winchester. But you know, these points in your life, when there's this fork in the road, you often wonder what would have happened if you'd taken the other course. I mean, I think I could easily have gone to Winchester and whatever. And I could have gone into theology or some bloody thing, instead of which, you know, I wound up in science and really I'm atheist now. It took me a while to get there. It took me a while to get there. What was that process like? How I became an atheist became atheist, which is diving right into, you know, some oddball subjects, but yeah. Well, I guess I started reading in response to my who are young earth creationists. Yeah. And her father actually was involved in building this monstrosity of a young earth. Oh, the creationist museum? Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Why does he come? Why does he come? But I thought, my God, this is so nuts. Yeah, sooner or later, I've got to have a conversation. And I need to be prepared. There's wacky. So I found myself reading more and more evolution texts, actually. Dawkins, basically. And then from Dawkins, you sort of branch off into a bunch of other people. Or, and then that sort of takes you to Hitchens. You know, you wind up reading Hitchens, because Dawkins refers to Hitchens and vice versa. And what are you selling? You find yourself in this maze that whatever. And the more I read, the more totally obvious to me that it was all, you know, a fabrication. So, and I've never had the conversation with you. But you're confident enough in yourself now. And yeah, where it is. Yeah. There's a late life deconversion, I guess, as I saw you. Yeah, my parents have methods. I was brought up with them and the methods, you know, methods. In my teens, I liked a girl who was silly. And so I drifted in Church of England. And actually, I still, I liked Church of England much better than Methodists, because I like the art, the liturgy. I still sang, and I continued to sing in Church. And if we sang Merbeck, which goes back to whatever century Merbeck was, you know, 14th century or whatever. And the beauty of the chant and all the rest of it. And to sing that, you know, on a solo basis in Church, even as an adult, you know, I would relish a Sunday when I had the opportunity within the liturgy to sing Merbeck. But it's the language and the music and whatever that is. As opposed to the notion of salvation. Yeah, yeah, it's still attractive. I mean, if I was in England, I would have no problem going to a cathedral service for even song, you know, even songs, particularly nice service, because it's typically sung, you know, end of the day and, you know, shadows are lengthening and whatever, you know. But not because of anything else, you know. What do you see? Well, what's been your... Oh, we still didn't deal with science, really. Oh, yeah, cool. Because actually, well, because it's arts and sciences, but the real, because I like languages in the end. I mean... You just didn't like Latin early enough. Not early enough, but I really wish that I'd done classics. I mean, you know, I have Rosetta Stone Latin. I just don't apply myself enough to it, but I would really would like to do that. But then once I was on this course, then I wound up doing science. And I guess I find you probably the same. I'm sort of an omnivore about things that interest me. There's stuff all over the place that's interesting, right? And I get distracted by all these things that are interesting for sciences like that, because you have this opportunity to be inquiring all the time. Why this, then why that, and how can you prove that that's really the case, and when isn't it true, and if it's not true then, then, you know, and it goes on forever, right? But in enough of a way that adds up, you know, way that things make sense, or is there still enough of a black box in terms of, you know, biology, chemistry, and everything else that you were once involved in? Yeah, but you just, I mean, it's just great to be able to continue to inquire, I suppose. Yeah. Oh, I'm happy to be living in this day and age where there's, you know, the amount of resources we have just in terms of I'm interested in subject acts, and you can find someone who was written on, you know, and that ends up tripping you on to another one, another one. What do you find, what's the biggest difference between U.S. and U.K. from your years living here now? Well, I say North America generally. Okay. Because I make a distinction between North America and then the U.K. I mean, I feel much more North American. You feel much. I hate to say freer, because that's sort of silly. And I don't mean freer in the NRA, mold, libertarian free as opposed to this. Yeah, I don't mean that. I don't mean that. I mean, expand. I mean, there's just a large, I mean, these are huge countries, and it's not, everything's not prescribed. You don't feel limited in any way. When I go back to the U.K., I really love it from a nostalgic perspective. And there are things I always want to go and do. Like, well, the last, last time, the last time, but when I'd been reading, I'd seen a, I'd seen a performance of Richard III in Stratford in Ontario. And Richard was one, was played for the first time that I'd seen by a woman. One of the long-term actresses from the cast, you know, from the company, from the company. And I thought it was very good, kind of, but I found Richard to uniformly evil. Okay. You know, Richard spends a lot of his time talking to the audience, right? And giving you access to his innermost thoughts. And at times through the play, he is charming to various people. I mean, he was Anne, or whatever, over the casket of her recently slain husband, and kind of talked, Anne Neville, I guess, talked her into starting a relationship with him, which, you know, from historical point of view, as an actor, of course, several years, difference between those things. But, you know, but what I found was that she playing Richard was never charming. She was always kind of odious, in keeping with the Tudor myth, right? So, or the Tudor characterisation of Richard. And I thought, well, that's, you know, that's, let's start convincing. So, I'd like to see some, is there a way that Richard could be played in a way where he is more convincing when he means to be convincing and charming or whatever? But anyway, this led me to read several biographies of Richard. And then, then that ties, you know, and in those, you know, his boyhood home was a place called Middleham Castle in Yorkshire, in Wensleydale, which is a beautiful part of the UK. And, of course, he died at the Battle of Bosworth Field, outside of Market Bosworth, sort of in the southeast of Nottingham, sort of thing. Sorry, sir, southwest of Nottingham. And so, when I was last in the UK, I went both to Middleham to my wife, insisted that my wife come with me on a day out to go to Middleham Castle, and we went and round that very interesting. And we also went to Bosworth Field and, and walked the battlefield. And now you, you read recently that they found Richard himself subsequent to that, wonderful. Under the handicap parking spot. In a handicap parking spot in Leicester, where he'd been, you know, taken, strapped naked over the back of a horse after that battle. So there's always something that, you know, when I go back to England, there's something like that, historical probably, mostly. Yeah, it's a weird notion, even just coming into England or into Europe, when I just look down from the plane there, I get that sense of history, I suppose, where in America, my town was founded in 1742, where I live in New Jersey. Yeah, the line I used to, or I've once heard, was in America, 200 years is a long time, and in Europe, or in the UK, 200 miles is a long distance. That's right, it's 35 miles from the long time. Yeah, so again, for us, it's 200 years old. Oh my god. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, interesting that I don't know so much for rest, but in England, it's that the whole thing is like layers of leaves, in a way. In the sense of a continuity, a strata. Yeah, because as you, you know, you see these shows on TV and whatever about, you know, archaeology, and people will dig down, and as they go down, they'll find, you know, a 16th century home that was there, you know, Tudor era home, it was the foundations or whatever, but then they keep on going down, and they suddenly find a Saxon village from dating from the 9th century, you know, and then they go down, oh my god, there's a Roman mosaic onto this, you know, and of course, nothing's laid out quite on top of everything else, but there's always layers that go back. And what are you reading nowadays? I've rolled my Kindle in there. Let's take a look. Well, there's a new translation of Canterbury Tales by Peter Aykroyd. Oh yeah? Do you read Aykroyd at all? No, but I also have very, very, very little of the Canterbury Tales, which I have always been meaning to get back to. As I told my... Did you, as a kid? Yeah, in school we had to, and for some... You had to deal with it in the original... Right, and they're the old English, and it's, it's, I was telling the guest from a few weeks ago, by the time this airs, a few weeks back, that I've actually also never read Dante, but I have the Clive James translation out now, so I'm, you know, in a big... I've got a funny story there. Oh yeah? Yeah, I worked for a great guy, like the most, I don't know, most empowering, intellectually stimulating, open guy, you know, you want to model yourself on the journey, and there was Christian Eretle, French guy, obviously, from Alsace. He put it from the Dow Chemical Company, and I was very proud of myself, because I plowed my way through the Comedia Divina. Sorry, Divina Comedia. I always want to put it the adjective after the nail. So, the Divina Comedia. And, but, you know, and that's a lot of reading in English, and it's a little obscure, you know, I mean, it's not like an easy read, right? It's not, it's not James Patterson, and I read this, and I was talking to him one day, and I was very proud of myself, and I just said, I just finished reading it, you know, and he said, yeah, he says, you know, I said, I know why you're, and this was completely ours, like he, there's, no, no, this was just, we were just two guys talking, and he said, and he said, no, I understand, you know, that, you know, that's, that's great. He said, but I read it in Italian as well, and it, it works so much better in Italian than it does in English, and he was just telling me, I mean, it was just, I mean, you know, it was a privilege for me, actually, because, when you sit down and learn Italian, you'll be able to read it and enjoy it that much more. It, you know, it did, when not surprisingly, Dante write, wrote my story in Italian, and then, by the time it got translated into English, he was a great guy, and he spoke, he spoke English perfectly, you know, obviously, French, and he spoke Spanish, and perfect Italian, good enough Italian to read, you know, and very, very good German as well, so at least five European languages, a total fluency, 11, it's a great guy, tragically, he just dropped dead at late 40s or 50 maybe, or whatever, he went back to the Dow Chemical Company, went fishing with his son after work, and said, I feel strange, and dropped dead. Harder brain. Brain, and his brother had died, his two-year-old or brother had died in a similar way, two years previous, they both died at almost same age. I had a friend who dropped of an aneurysm like that, there's just no warning at all, she just started speaking in tongues, and then fell down on the sidewalk and died, yeah, do you find a lot of readers in our pharmaceutical, chemical industry, do you find a lot of culture conversations, or do you generally have to look outside? Do you think that people tell you they're just reading Steve Jobs' life, I mean, do people feel that it's some way expected that they be reading that business stuff, because they're all business, I mean, I sometimes think about that about colleagues? You would think that, but with me, they all know I'm the strange guy who reads all sorts of oddball books, so if they were reading something out of the ordinary, they would, in all likelihood, tell me. In my editorial in the magazine, I put a little what I'm reading box in there, and I always put in my non-farmer readings in addition to pharma ones, and I've actually met people at trade shows who've come up and said, oh, I read the leopard after you wrote that thing in the magazine, and yeah, so it's one of those, and they always try and tell me something from the last 30 or 40 pages of a book, so I know they actually finished it. Yeah, someday I should fool with them, I'm a proost in there, but I'll see. But yeah, it's business people, which I guess is another question of how you make the transition from science into management, but again, managed to just stay creative, or at least to have outside interest. A lot of people I meet in management seem to be, that seems to be their life. I mean, usually it's, you know, family on top of that, but it's generally TV or where they're going on vacation, as opposed to having time to sit down and read something. To me, it's sad. I, you know, but that may be why I'm in my particular niche and not, you know, advancing too far in this world. So what are you reading? What's on your Kindle? Yeah, so yeah, I remember several people, but I recently read Peter Aykroyd's Life of, I don't know if you remember, if it's Saint Sir Thomas More or Sir Saint Thomas More, but I think it's Saint Sir Thomas More. I think that's the right way around. And that was, and I had that, I read that because I sort of, well, I've got Richard III, and of course, that was the end of the Plantagenets, and then it comes with Henry VII and the Tudors, right? So I sort of drifted into a sort of an interest in the Tudors, and of course, a very interesting person in all of that is Thomas More. And his willing must go to the block rather than sign up for- You read those Hillary Mantle novels yet, that Wolf Hall, and then bringing up the bodies, those are Cromwell's ancestor generations- It's in the present tense order. You got me, I haven't read them yet, but people seem to dig those books, and that comes a few generations after More. I think that's Wolf. I opened one of those. Yeah. And it was written all in the present tense, and I found it contrived, and I didn't buy it. That could be an issue, okay. But you know what I mean? Oh yeah, no, I'm down. I understand entirely. So if you pick that up and you say, oh yeah, that's the style. Yeah. That didn't work. But then in that book, it taught, you know, obviously it's talking about Thomas More. So then, you know, one of Thomas More's best known works was Utopia, so now I've got bloody Utopia up there. That's public domain, at least. I've read the last, well, I probably paid $1.99 or something, but I haven't read the last 30 pages yet, but I started reading it. And also, somebody who was a great friend of Thomas More was Erasmus. Sure. Yeah. So that's the- But it's just like- The web, you know, you start moving from person to person, and you find all these great- So I've got proof of folly here, which is his best known work. Praise, praise of folly. Praise in praise of folly. Yeah. Yeah. Which Thomas More loved in praise of folly, what did I say? Proof. In praise of folly. And Thomas at campus? I don't know. His, the imitation of Christ? No, I know, but didn't know what else it was. Yeah. Well, it's ascribed to a number of different people. Gotcha. Bernhard of Clairvault, who died in the wrong time frame for it to have been here and whatever, but it's Thomas at campus as the guy who's normally credited with it. So I'm actually in the process of reading that. So actually, I'm sort of reading a few chapters of the imitation of Christ and a story from the Canterbury Tales, sort of going back into this. But, but, but Peter Echwood's translation of Canterbury Tales is just into the modern English prose. So it's very accessible. You know, give that a look. And it's a fun reader. I mean, it's an enjoyable read. It's not hard work, like trying to read it in sort of middle English or whatever. When do you have time to read? Got a lot of transition between here and Montreal. Is that a? Yeah. Well, and yeah, any any time early morning, late at night, on a plane on a train, I'd say the train, well, I work as well. But, you know, it's just, it doesn't seem to be any great limitation in my ability to read. I mean, people when people say they don't have the opportunity, there's no time because they're so busy or whatever. It's just, it's not true. I'm with you. I, I, it's just a choice, right? That's how I live. It's a choice, right? Of course, I'm the guy who spent most of last year getting a library built in the downstairs of my house so that I, yeah, the rec room and a guest bedroom and we started with, well, can we put some shelves in here? By the end, we knocked down the wall between them and built this giant library to accommodate my stuff and my wife's stuff and allow us to just sit downstairs and read surrounded by books. That's great. Yeah. It's, it's, I realized once we put the first set of shelves in, I was allocating what goes on the primary shelves where I, my work table would be, which is, I'll send you pictures because it's, it's really, you know, it's one of those maps of my brain moments where I had the Shakespeare on the first tier, the ancient Greeks, the Romans above that, and then it spills out into Prus to Nabokov and a few others and all the Russians and then the Philip Roth. Yeah. It sort of radiates out in terms of what it means to me. But once we put the first shelf up and I started putting things there, it occurred to me that, oh my God, this is the thing I've wanted my entire life. I didn't even realize it till now. I just wanted one place that, you know, it's one thing when you have, you know, these temporary bookshelves and other, but just having one place dedicated to that. It's, you know, a great life crisis. I always rambled it. It was now about to be 10 in the library in our house. Yeah. She calls it the bookstore. And there won't be any left by the time she's an adult. She likes to do that. You got to promote, you know, all the other nerdism you can get them, get them reading. What are you reading? Right now, I'm on my fourth reading of Moby Dick. I just read Robinson Crusid. Which I've never read. Oh, you should. I know. I should with a lot of stuff. I don't know why. I don't know why I saw me decide how it really needs to be Robinson Crusid. You're lost on a desert island. I, you know, yeah, well, you know, I've got a, because I'm me, my idea of a vacation is going down to Annapolis to my grad school, St. John's College, and spending four days talking about Moby Dick with 20 other students or 20 other alumni and two of the tutors from there. Last year was Flannery O'Connor, who I had never read before. And it was, it was fantastic. And it was the first time I'd gone back to St. John's for something like that. And it was really life-changingly good. So I decided, well, I'll see what they're doing this year. And it's, again, two of my favorite tutors and Moby Dick. So I'm sitting down with that. And then, um, and what you do? You just, you put up, well, you put out an opening question. They just ask, it's a room, a table with 20 people, 20 students, alumni, and two tutors. And one of the tutors asks an opening question. And we just, we talk for two or three hours. And that's it. That's a vacation for me. I don't know. That's, I'll get away for a couple of days, drive down to Annapolis, walk around my old stomping grounds. And no, I mean, I get what he meant at the time. I really don't feel it when I read him. I read him last year, one or two of the novels, one or two of the better known. And I just, it may be that I was reading too quickly or that I'm too jaded as a modern reader. I mean, yeah, I mean, yeah, there's a sense that it's become so incorporated into writers that, you know, yeah, you don't feel the uncanniness of what he was doing at the time. It feels like, oh, yeah, that's old hat now. That said, I read The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford last year, which is one of the early unreliable narrative stories told really fragmentedly by this lead character. It's written in 1915. So it's leading up into, at the time he was writing it, leading up into World War One. But it's really just about a man who doesn't realize that his wife is having an affair with this captain. And it's being narrated by the man who's been cheated on. And it's told Ford Maddox Ford, he's the one who did parades of The Good Soldier. It begins with the line, this is the saddest story I have ever heard. And it's amazing. And it's one of those things that if you could go with the, oh, unreliable narrator, I'm used to it, you realize at the time that he was doing this, no one had-- This is a British TV pro. You may have. They did parades end recently, which Tom Stoppert adapted another of Ford Maddox Ford's trilogy, which also, I think, covers World War One. And I'm a huge Stoppert mark. Recognize the storyline from that. It's a good one. It probably has been made. I just tend to read the book before catching a movie. But that was one that, again, for that era, and reading it realizing the sloppiness of the narrator was very, very carefully contrived by the author. It's an amazing work that I'll go back to. This book of Hemiwhere I read was probably death in the afternoon. No, it happened. See, we're living in Mexico or whatever. And there's this brick who should hate the bullfight, whatever. And having to take all these visitors out from Europe or whatever to go to the bullfight. My father enjoyed going to it. Yeah, I read death in the afternoon. And then that sort of captured my imagination, knowing a little bit more about what was going on at the bullfight. Yeah, did it work artistically or more in terms of the culture and the history? What did you feel you were getting? More Hemingway's love of the bullfight and his personal commitment to the people don't understand this. You all feel a start to know people with your cookie cutter objections to the air-conditioned nightmare as well? Yeah, just don't get it. It's one of my favorite Orwell essays inside the whale, not inside the whale. England, you're England, where he talks about British culture and national stereotypes and what it means to be British. He's writing in 1940, I think, so it's a very pertinent question. At the time, he has a line about how the Chinese are addicted to gambling and the Spanish aren't variably cruel to animals. A few others are like cruel to... Okay, yeah, the bullfighting thing, I guess, that's where it's coming from. I suppose that's what he means. I think what else you have on the the Kindle, besides the... Well, here's the mission, but something I learned from it. Yeah. I suddenly had this, I thought, I have a great agatha Christie forever. Not since I was like a teenager. Not me, not me. I suddenly had this hankering, it's like, you know, I need a burger or something, to read Agatha Christie. And I thought, Agatha Christie, what would I read? So I read 450 from Paddington. I mean, it's actually a quick read. But it seemed like from another world, I've taken it off here already. This is a woman writing in England in the '50s and the way she imagines the men talking down to the women, does not translate into North America 50 years later. You know, describing Emma Krakanthor, the sort of lady that was so often underestimated by men, that she could, that she would really be a good homemaker, you know? And you think, God, this is only 50 years ago, 50 years ago. But on the other side, I mean, on the other side, the pond is still not where you are here, you know? What have I got here? Buddhism for dummies. Again, not quite atheism, not quite, you know, this movie. No, no, no, no. Canterbury Tales. Well, it's a number of complete works. Have you, did you read Silent Spring? Have you read Silent Spring? The Rachel Carson? I've read, I've got the edge of the seal here. I mean, I've previously read Silent Spring. Back in, I went to a hippie-trippy eco college, so yeah, that was part of the... It looks kind of dated now, but it reminds you about DDT and the way it is. It's a while ago since I read that, but I've got the edge of the sea, and I've got something else, the sea around us as well, because she's really a biologist fundamentally, right? So actually her descriptions of the natural world and the wonder of it, sort of tying well with Dawkins and so on and so on and so on. And I just read an article in Al, has it called Outside? You know that magazine outside? Yeah, yeah. Occasionally, you know, I'm in an airport and I picked that up and I read the articles. There was a great article about the first American ascent of Everest, like a gang ascent of Everest, and they were going to go up via the South call. Well, the leader, the supposed leader of the expedition, his name escapes me. It wasn't Carlton Dorna, but it was a name kind of like that. The plan was, and he was leading it, was to go up via the South call, the normal route up, the one that already by the, this time the sherpas were calling the milk round or something. And then two other peaks, the way they'd raise the funds was because they were going to hit in a two-week period, they were going to do the three highest peaks in the intermediate whatever. And Hornbein and a couple of other guys didn't want to do that. They wanted to go up a new route that they had all collectively figured out. Called the West Ridge. And so they had a bit of a falling out as to what they were going to do. And Hornbein and another guy wound up going up this West Ridge route. And in order to do that, they actually got to their sort of, well, they went up from base camp to the camp number two or whatever, and then they had to divide with them going over into Nepal and going up this bloody way. But they got themselves into a real fix. And so at the end, they had to make a run for the, you know, they had to climb for the summit and there was no way back the way they'd come. They couldn't, it was too steep. They didn't have the equipment to go back where they'd come from. And they had this one opportunity to go up and over and go down and to meet up with people who would come up the South Pole and go to one of the camps down that way. And so in that book, in that article they talked about this book here, which is by Thomas Hornbein, which is Everest, the West Ridge, which is Hornbein's only account. He was the rebel that was determined to go up the West Ridge. It's an old book now. I mean, it was written, I don't know, when this occurred in the 1960s or something like this, and he wrote this sort of enormous... But he survived it, so that's a good... He did survive because they managed to get up over the top. It was touch and go. I mean, one of them lost all their toes, you know, because they froze and whatever. I like Graham Green, too, although I've got the heart of the matter on here. All well and green, this 40s or whatever, 30s and 40s, mid-century English. Well, I'm a huge mark for the third man, which is part of why I was thinking of going to Vienna before going to our show in Germany this fall. But a woman I interviewed a little while ago for the show, she was part of a rock band, a strange music group in the early '90s. And the album she recorded with them was adapted from the end of the affair. The number of the songs is sort of adapted lyrics out of that. I thought, "Oh, well, that's actually much more literary than I expected." But yeah, I haven't read much green, otherwise. It doesn't appear. Just haven't had the time. Just as one of those things I know I have to sit down and start, but there's Le Corre and all these other guys. I mean, apparently his new work is getting sad. Bing English, you know. Yeah, do you find that sense of people assuming certain cultural things about you here because of your accent, because of where you're from? Well, people immediately pick up online in British. Yeah, is there an assumption that he must be intelligent? He has that, okay. Because that's what we tended to do, you know, until the last biggest 10 years or so where people stop coming to America. My winery will be called Lake Isle. I haven't talked about that before, probably. No. A wife and I bought 35 acres in Prince Edward Kennedy in October. Really? Yeah. Just interested in making wine, you know. So I'm hoping to grow some grapes and whatever. It's nothing coming new wine growing here with global warming. I'm not sure about global warming because Sarah Palin's pretty convinced it's not happening. But in a bar, I'm looking at her. But it is getting warmer, and so Niagara is getting warmer. And Prince Edward Kennedy has become, and gradually probably more viable. They've been growing grapes there for the last 10 years. It's a pretty rigorous place to grow. They have a barrier of the vines in the winter, unlike Niagara, where they're just fine. But we bought 35 acres there. And for a long time, I always liked the lake Isle of Innisfree. Oh, yeah. So we wanted to call the house, you know, Innisfree or whatever, and so on. And because it's an island now, and it's in the lake, it just occurred to me, hey, this is... Lake Isle, like Isle Winery works. So this is a collection of compounds by Yeats, but it was really Lake Isle of Innisfree that got them in there. Oh, and here's another book that came out of Thomas Moore that I haven't read yet. The Scale of Perfection, Hilton. I don't know that. My 1396 with an essay on the spiritual life of medieval England. I'm ready. These raw books that as I was reading through the life of Thomas Moore, I was buying all these books referred to. So I am reading the Embrace of Falling and Imitation of Christ. And Imitation of Christ is sobering anyway, philosophically. It's just philosophy, really. I mean, it's obviously a very... It's what they're talking about in the prologue that there's a very gentle person, Thomas at campus. Well, it's just an example. It's vanity then to seek after and to trust in the riches that shall perish. It is vanity, too, to covet honours and to lift ourselves up on high. It's vanity to follow the desires of the flesh and be led by them for this shall bring misery at the last. It's vanity to desire a long life and to have a little care for a good life. It's vanity to take thought only for the life which now is and not to look forward to the things which will be hereafter. Well, you've been forgotten here after. But even in a... It's usually an epicurean way of... of seeing things. The oftentimes mindful of saying, "The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing, strive therefore to turn away from the heart and the love of things that are seen, and set it to one of the things that are not seen." Think a thinking humbly of oneself. This was actually the passage more that really struck me. It's naturally in every manner of desire to know but what profiteth knowledge without the fear in his case of God. Better of assurity is a lowly peasant who serves God than a proud philosopher who watches the stars and neglects the knowledge himself. He who knows himself well is vile in his own sight. Neither regardeth heed and regardeth thee the praise of men. If I knew all the things that are in the world and were not in charity, what helped would it be? Before God, who was a judgment according to my deeds, rests from inordinate desire of knowledge for therein is found much distraction and deceit. Those who have knowledge desire to appear learned and to be called wise, many things there are to know which profit little or nothing. Foolish out of measure as he who attended one of the things rather than those which served with soul self. Many words satisfying not the soul but a good life fresh at the mind and the pure conscious give great confidence. But there's a lot of things about vanity and how you want to be perceived and how hollow it is. It reminds me of reading Marcus Aurelius last year. My big move last year was to start reading the Romans which I had managed to avoid. Aurelius, what did you read? Did the meditations, just sitting down. I read that number of years ago but I haven't gone back to. It was the summer of that Levy, Virgil, and gosh somebody else. Yes, yes in fact I forgot I had read the metamorphoses for the first time which I managed not to do for 41 years. But it works so much better in the Latin. I wish. That was my thing. I never get overbooked Christians. Yeah, it's one of those things. Would you be able to, wouldn't you love that though? Oh yeah, well reading Clive James, the one who just translated the Divine Comedy, he's got a book, a book of essays called Cultural Amnesia. A wonderful, wonderful book. I'll get you a copy of that at some point. I keep a stack at home about the people. And it just barely mentions the, well if you're learning German, this is probably the best person to read because it's just language after language like that. He seems to have just taught himself over the years and you just feel that, oh wow, I guess I could have devoted myself the same way or that guy's a mutant and has some great ability to pick this stuff up. Being an American, it's a built-in excuse not to learn any other language. But yeah, I tried, I had ancient Greek, I had some Russian, I can translate Cyrillic, which once got me in with the Princess of Yugoslavia. Well because I studied Russian my senior year of high school and studying ancient Greek a few years later to get in, when I was going to St. John's. You know, there's enough similarities between just the Greek alphabet and what Cyrillic became. Years later, I met Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia at a press event for another magazine I was working on and dazzled her with my ability to transliterate Cyrillic. And it turned into one of the funnier episodes of my life just for an afternoon sitting in a conversation with this woman and realizing the only thing that got me going was the... Sounds like the start of an episode of the pick of it. Well I have a short story I've tried to write about this for a million years, which I think I'm finally ready to do. But yeah, it's just having some, when I go to the local Greek restaurant and I see what they have on the satellite feed coming in, I'm like, I can actually transliterate, not necessarily read, but at least I get some idea of what's going up on screen. It makes other Americans suspicious, so I try to hide this whenever I can. But it turned in, just to carry a pressure capability. Yeah, I didn't take up Hebrew, which I should have, I mean I've learned enough to do my bar mitzvah, but never continued with it. No, I go for the high holidays every year, take my father, I can do well enough from the Hebrew there, but it's... It's not an embarrassment. Oh, I'm always an embarrassment. But anyway, I should be going... Have you written that stuff? I finally wrote a short story two weeks ago for the first time in 20 years, I've finished something. I need to go back in the two scenes that need to be added, but I had such a wonderful experience at the Art Institute in Chicago when I was out there for bio. I hit upon my fictional alter ego a few months ago, I finally found a name for the guy I can dump all these experiences on and then warp them into art and not make them me telling a story. It just worked, I felt the whole thing on the way back from the Art Institute. I'm like, "Okay, okay, this one thing that happened, I'm gonna change this into something else and make it art." And spent the night just writing away the laptop. Did enough of it a few days later, finished it up, thought I will get back to this in a few weeks and sit down and do the stuff that needs doing, but this is done for what it is. Yeah, I've got other ideas now. One hit me just the three tones that a Toronto subway car has to let you know that the doors are about to close is very reminiscent of a song by Jane's addiction that I heard back in college. And I thought, "Yeah, there's an Abe Lesser's story in here somewhere. Abe hears this and something happens, he remembers something from college, something else goes wrong and he stuck on the subway." And yeah, once I was able to just get that little jumping off point from what is factual versus I don't have to be factual, I can make something art, it'll be true in as much as it's art. The great realization I had was that I don't need to write something that's going to last 100 years. That's the nature of the thing I wrote about the artist. Who knows? To me, I wrote a comic story, it's a funny episode about Abe and his girlfriend in the art institute and it is what it is. That was my big acceptance and realization. If this stuff grows into a couple of bigger stories, that's fine. But I don't have to fulfill the destiny I'm supposed to have in my teenage years of being the great writer who's going to write the American. Doesn't matter. I have a nice job that takes care of me and lets me travel. I get to meet interesting people. Yeah, it's going to be so actualized. A huge chunk of my life, my midlife crisis was the acceptance of there's a passage from Hegel that I read back in grad school that hit me when I was 23 or 24, but things at that age don't mean as much as when you're 40 and beyond. Even without children, which I understand is still a, you know, what limits me from some of the actualization that real people have had. Hegel quotes Gerrita with this line about to be great one must limit oneself and to Hegel, the incomplete person is the person who retains infinity because he's afraid of closing down any avenues. You want to retain all possibilities so that way you can become something great, but that person is actually hollow and empty. And I knew that at 23 or 24. I was just reading there from a limitation of crime. And that's the thing you want to know, no, no, I have to be this, but I also have to be that you become real over time. That's vain by Thomas, the campus. So for me, again, people ask, you know, is this podcast going to be something you make this? The top 0.1% of podcasters make more than I make doing contract pharma. I'm never going to make a living at it. This is one last comment. I went back to the UK and I had been and I was just about up to here with guns per head, magazines and background checks and all the rabid fighting and whatever. This was what was all top of the news programs, all this stuff, you know, it is. And I went back to the UK and I heard these guys in violent disagreement with one of the talking about what was going on that day in parliament. And the most high profile story in the UK, the same day as all this was going on with guns and new town, was a proposal by the British government to increase the number of children per teacher that could be in a kindergarten. But to raise the educational requirements, we're finishing. He's on his last comment. We're going to leave in a minute. Yeah, we did the Alta's thing at the beginning now. But to raise the educational requirements of the kindergarten teachers, I thought, I've got to sit and listen, this is wonderful. But this is the worst thing we've got to talk about today. And there's people getting angry about the fact that this was the way it was done in France, back to steering. We're going to be coming one of those? Well, no, no. And there's no proof that it turns out, you know, a better kid at the end of it. Right. But then the way we've been doing it. Lastly, Frenchman. Clive Bennett, thank you so much for coming on The Virtual Memory Show. I appreciate it. And that was The Virtual Memories Show. It'll be a new episode every other Tuesday, if I have anything to say about it. The next one will be our 9/11 special, provided the two guests I've tentatively planned to interview actually come through. If not, it will be a literary erotica episode. Well, we'll think of something. Anyway, you can find out more about David Rothenberg by visiting davidrothenberg.wordpress.com. And Rothenberg is R-O-T-H-E-N-B-E-R-G. And you can hit bugmusicbook.com for more about his new book and CD. I really recommend them. They're a good read and a good listen. And if you need pharmaceutical manufacturing services, I highly recommend Clive's Company, Halo Pharma. That's at halopharma.com and they're in Parcipony, New Jersey and Montreal. Okay, that's probably more of a plug than you need it because none of you really need to have pharmaceuticals manufactured, but Clive's a good guy, so there you go. You can subscribe to The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes by searching for virtual memories and clicking through to the show's page. And if you go there, do me a favor. Fill out the ratings and reviews of the show because I appreciate any feedback I can get and there's only two reviews up there right now, so I seem like a loser. Virtual Memories Show is also available at our website, chimeraabscura.com/vm. If you visit the site, you can make a donation to the show via PayPal, which will help offset my web hosting and travel costs and occasional microphone purchases. If you make a donation, you will get a shout out on the next show. And I will send you a copy of a short story that I wrote. I'm thinking of making some merch, t-shirts, mugs, et cetera, but really, if you guys like that sort of thing, leave a comment and maybe I'll put that together. The show is also on Tumblr at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com on Facebook at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and on Twitter at VMSPod. Until next time, I am Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [Music] [Music] [Music]
