coe204_povinelli-2.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Welcome back to this cultural energy podcast, where, Simone, how is creating our own sound effects?

Speaker2: [00:00:28] Ok, I just OK, I'm not sure I have the acronym right, but I think it is right. It's called a ASMR or Amser ASMR. I think it is. And it sounds for what? Well, you make these really subtle sounds near a microphone, and it's kind of like you can can this microphone like I'm rubbing my fingers fielder?

Speaker1: [00:00:51] Yeah, maybe I can

Speaker2: [00:00:53] Go

Speaker3: [00:00:56] Like

Speaker2: [00:00:56] This like little whispers and like little funny. Sounds like you. No, it's actually it's sort of creepy and kind of sexy at the same time. Like this? Here's one. Oh, that's like something you might hear on a AMS as like that.

Speaker1: [00:01:19] And I'm not going to look it up here.

Speaker2: [00:01:22] I'm telling you it's a real thing that I learned about, like two years ago that the youngsters are into. It seems to be something that girls do in particular. Oh, I know. And then we saw a little small example of it in that show where it's in Hawaii

Speaker1: [00:01:35] White lotus,

Speaker2: [00:01:35] White lotus. Yeah, there's a moment where the girls, the two young women in that are doing that while they're sitting around. I think they're kind of baked or something, but they start doing that just making like little sounds in each other's ears and ketamine. You mean maybe they're on? Yeah, maybe they're on ketamine. I don't know. I can't remember if they were sober or wasted, but they were definitely doing it anyhow. It's just like. But it's kind of for an audio file like yourself. I would think you might be interested in it just as a kind of a media space.

Speaker1: [00:02:03] All right. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Speaker2: [00:02:05] Yeah. And listeners can guess what it was that I was asked. I'm sorry.

Speaker1: [00:02:10] Again, there the side effects. But I really love those old sound effects. Banks would be when they had the little, the little door they would open the little steps they would.

Speaker2: [00:02:21] Yeah, that was really cute.

Speaker1: [00:02:23] Little miniature

Speaker3: [00:02:24] Doors.

Speaker1: [00:02:25] Well, I wish we could do that. I wish I knew that art, that art and craft and sound.

Speaker2: [00:02:31] Well, maybe we could build a whole studio in the garage or something where we could actually have that because I've seen some of those studios visualize and they did actually have some props in there that they would use, like a set of props. Right, right. Ok, I know you have a bunch of things that you want to

Speaker1: [00:02:47] Try to do, but but I also have to do reading for class. I tried to make this easier by coming up with a list of things, but now

Speaker2: [00:02:53] Preempting it with we'll get to that. We'll get to the list in just a I. But I want to ask you, do you know what yesterday was?

Speaker1: [00:03:00] Yesterday was two two to twenty twenty two. In other words, the most twos in a date until February 22nd. Twenty to twenty two.

Speaker2: [00:03:09] Isn't that amazing? It's a lot of twos and OK, just for like the whipped cream on top of that Sunday. What day of the week was it yesterday,

Speaker1: [00:03:19] Tuesday,

Speaker2: [00:03:20] Tuesday? Get it. Yeah. Oh my god, I know you had other stuff on your mind yesterday, but it was a kind of I mean, there were saying, Oh, it's, you know, sort of a magical day, an auspicious day. And then I was listening to NPR. I'm sorry, I don't like to say that in your presence, but I was listening to them. And of course, they brought in some expert. You know why? Why are people so interested in this and this sociologist? Nothing against sociologists, but just this guy's position was he's like, Well, you know, human beings since time immemorial have been interested in pattern. Why is that, you know, great professor of social science? Well, it's because back during our evolutionary times, we had to look at patterns in the sand to see whether the footprints might be from friend or foe, whether we might hunt that deer or whether it might be there to destroy our clan. I mean, like the reversion to sociobiology and the evolutionary story of humanity was just it was so abrupt and I was like, Come on, you guys, couldn't you done something better about pattern seeking and why

Speaker1: [00:04:21] You've been

Speaker2: [00:04:22] Watching to 20 22 on a Tuesday is exciting for people. Give us something.

Speaker1: [00:04:28] And the number two, ever since we discovered we have two hands and two feet and two eyes

Speaker2: [00:04:33] And two ways of defecating, maybe because that's what's the other, what's the other number two? I mean, colloquially to say

Speaker1: [00:04:39] There was this article I found once, and I think it was in one of my intro anthropology courses, and you had to kind of get deep into it because it's very technical. But at the end of it, it suggested, and I do not know why this just came to my mind. It suggested that the decision for humans to make speech through their mouths was kind of arbitrary, and it could have been through their butts. No, I swear to God, I swear to God, it's a published article. Somebody find it. It's out there.

Speaker2: [00:05:09] What was it? You're saying? This is like a really technical description of why we didn't do like but speech instead of oral speech?

Speaker1: [00:05:16] Well, in the in the more being rich districts of the world, they really. Ok.

Speaker2: [00:05:24] I mean, is there any creature that vocalizes with there, but there probably is, but I can't name one. I mean, other animals do. Here I am. Here I am complaining about sociobiology. Then I'm like, Oh, let's talk about animals, right? I mean, but animals do vocalize through their mouths like cats. Cat's meow. They don't like fart out there.

Speaker1: [00:05:47] Man, that's why I have to read that paragraph. Like three times. That's saying what I think it's saying. Wow, it's out there. I swear to God I could not have invented this. I remember reading it anyway. So lots going on in the world today. Let's do a quick hit, Simone. Quick thoughts on the following topics. One of them is going to come as a surprise.

Speaker2: [00:06:05] Is it going to be the invasion of Ukraine?

Speaker1: [00:06:07] No one on my list. Invasion of Ukraine. So many give us your take on that in 30 seconds.

Speaker2: [00:06:12] Probably not a good. Not a good luck. I mean, but I will say my complaint to the the general media out there. I've been looking seeking actually a deeper backstory as to why Putin is doing this now.

Speaker1: [00:06:28] I have little theory

Speaker2: [00:06:29] And the only, well, you know, my dad had the best theory I've heard, actually, which isn't really even a theory. It's just a speculation. He's like Putin thinks he can get away with it. He thinks that Biden is soft and now is the moment and that no one's really going to do anything substantial about it, and he's just going to take that shit back into his own space. Yeah. I mean, yes, he's he, I guess, feels threatened by NATO, but it's not like Ukraine was like, let's sign the documents and get enrolled with NATO. I mean, there was nothing sort of happening on that front that I've heard about it. It's not like there are any substantial moves in that direction. So it's like, why now? And I got this piece about like, why wait till after the Olympics? Because you don't want to insult your kind of frenemy China. But the best I've heard in the kind of general media is no one understands Putin. No one knows what he's thinking. He's a cipher. He's a black box. You never know what he's going to do. I'm like, Really? That's again, that's the best you guys can come up with. Like, give me some analysis.

Speaker1: [00:07:26] Here's my little theory. And this, of course, is framed by our friend of the pod, Doug Rogers and his work.

Speaker2: [00:07:33] Oh, and you're going to say Alexei, but OK, well,

Speaker1: [00:07:36] Look, I'm sure those things to say about it too. But yeah, but I think, you know the heart of it, there is a kind of, you know, if I may use the term analogy politics in the sense of, I think a lot of it is about both leveraging, you know, Russia's natural gas supply into Europe, meaning the Europeans won't stand up to them because their gas gets cut off. But also what this is done is drive up the world oil prices really effectively, and that makes a petro state like Russia very happy.

Speaker2: [00:08:05] I know, but not if no one in the world, or at least none of the richest countries in the world are going to be buying your shit. Like if you're not going to buy, they cut down the Nord Stream.

Speaker1: [00:08:15] Well, that hadn't been out. They stopped it running yet. That was just, I

Speaker2: [00:08:19] Know, but they put a pause on it. So I don't

Speaker1: [00:08:22] Know. I think I think at the core of this is some kind of fossil fuel play would be my argument, and we may not know exactly what the play is for.

Speaker2: [00:08:30] Well, OK, I can see how you would go there. And it does make sense given your background and your orientation sort of theoretically,

Speaker1: [00:08:40] But you have a hammer. The world looks like a.

Speaker2: [00:08:43] I know what you're saying everywhere there are nails, but it's also like why Ukraine like these are not. I mean, that doesn't make sense in a narrow political sense. I mean, trying, trying to create international strife in order to drive up oil prices does make sense from Russia's petro state point of view. But if they're going to be sanctioned out of being able to sell any of those goods, then then that doesn't OK. Anyway, that's probably enough. I don't even know if there's a hot takes. Those are like those are sort of like greasy takes on the situation.

Speaker1: [00:09:16] Those are those are air fried, deep fried fried. Yes. Ok, good thoughts on the bitcoin price collapse. Simone, how bitcoin losing a lot of value recently. Pretty volatile. I know you've got thoughts. I know. Are you thinking a lot about blockchain?

Speaker2: [00:09:30] I don't know. I just remember several years ago these people who are like, you know, these kind of techno utopian Silicon Valley people like a couple of some white couple from the valley, I'm sure, like in that industry, wanted to travel the world on bitcoin, right? And this was a long time ago. Like, I'm going to say, maybe 10 or 12 years ago. Is that possible? It was like early, early, early bitcoin. And so this was the dream. It's like this unified currency. And I kind of saw the appeal at that moment where I was like, It's like Esperanto, except for money, like it's all going to be universalized and smooth sailing. I mean, remember when Europe did not have the euro and you had to change money every time you use the border? It was interesting but difficult and challenging. Sometimes you come in in the middle of the night and you got no money in the country where you are.

Speaker1: [00:10:17] They also didn't really use credit cards back in the day, so you just had you had bags of change. Just like all the pockets of your clothing,

Speaker2: [00:10:23] If you showed up, if you cross the border with Franks and ended up in the land of lira, you are like whatever you were going to go hungry that night. So yeah, I don't know the collapse. I guess it doesn't surprise me, but I don't know if I have a hot take on why exactly it has crumbled other than perhaps the stock market is less interested in speculating on such speculative futures.

Speaker1: [00:10:44] Yeah, I don't know. I think it'll come back. There's so many people who bought into this ideology, and it's it's frustrating again, from a political perspective,

Speaker2: [00:10:54] Because it uses so much

Speaker1: [00:10:54] Power, a huge amount

Speaker2: [00:10:55] Of power electricity that

Speaker1: [00:10:57] It's mine and it's hilarious. I was reading this man a great forthcoming book and maybe episode eventually of the podcast we'll talk to. Alex Johnson has written this great book about the data industries in Iceland and how, like, they're incredibly high tech and high secure environments. And yet, and this is so Iceland, some thieves like broke into one of these lists. Yeah, I remember they stole a bunch of coin servers.

Speaker2: [00:11:23] Yeah, that was hilarious. It was really and they were just they were they weren't stealing because they were stealing the servers

Speaker1: [00:11:29] Of the servers. So they just like pushed open a window and just grabbed them and ran away. It's very Iceland.

Speaker2: [00:11:36] That's kind of like that big prison break that happened in Iceland a handful of years ago to remember. Like, they don't really have high security prisons. They have these sort of prison slash sort of, I don't know, carceral spaces, but they're like kind of unlocked. I'm not going to say they're fully unlocked, but they're barely locked, right? And so this dude just walked out and managed to get to Keflavik and got on a plane and just flew to Brussels or something.

Speaker4: [00:12:01] Yeah, he

Speaker2: [00:12:02] Literally flew the coop right straight, like he went straight from prison to a plane with no one stopping him.

Speaker1: [00:12:09] And in fact, that plane had the prime minister on it. Yes. The other a little bit of bit of

Speaker2: [00:12:13] Funny, though this is all love and affection for Iceland. Don't, don't take it the wrong way.

Speaker1: [00:12:19] Could we all know?

Speaker2: [00:12:21] Yes. The fact that they don't lock

Speaker1: [00:12:23] People up and throw and it's not it's not a security state. They believe in reform. They believe in care. Ok, here's my last and it's Iceland related in a way. Here's my last bit of news to share and to get your last bitcoin of news. And that is a certain celebrity. Not a great a celebrity, but a celebrity. We almost met in Iceland. Once a woman named Lindsay Lohan, Lindsay Lohan is apparently gotten on Tik Tok. I know everybody on this podcast both loves Tik Tok and Lindsay Lohan, but bear with me here and said that the entire world has been pronouncing her name wrong the whole time. Her last name is not pronounced Lohan. It's low end Lohan. There you go. Oh, Lindsay Lohan, I just thought, people want to know that.

Speaker2: [00:13:10] Wow, I feel edified. How come she didn't announce this before?

Speaker1: [00:13:15] I just think she was waiting for a good Tik Tok launch.

Speaker2: [00:13:18] I see this is her launch on Tik Tok,

Speaker1: [00:13:20] By the way, Lohan.

Speaker2: [00:13:22] All I know is that Lindsay Lohan was mean to an 11 year old Icelandic boy, and that is unforgivable.

Speaker1: [00:13:29] I have come on about that. Yeah, there were

Speaker2: [00:13:31] Some true people

Speaker1: [00:13:32] Witnessed it. There were some tales of her behavior was

Speaker2: [00:13:34] Bitchy to this little kid. Yeah, like, yeah, it's not cool, Lindsay.

Speaker1: [00:13:38] Especially if you weren't in the parent that was the parent trap she was in, right? That was her big break.

Speaker2: [00:13:43] Why wasn't she on like Herbie the Love Bug, too?

Speaker1: [00:13:45] Oh, and mean girls. Well, she was maybe playing her.

Speaker2: [00:13:47] Yeah, no, she was. But she was like, the nice girl.

Speaker1: [00:13:49] Oh, right. Well, you

Speaker2: [00:13:51] Know, I mean, she got in with the mean crowd, but she was the sweet one being

Speaker1: [00:13:55] Mean girls. That long

Speaker2: [00:13:57] Turn. It is a farce. I knew it. I knew she was acting in that movie.

Speaker1: [00:14:01] So our guest today on the podcast is the amazing Elizabeth Ravanelli, a dear old friend. We had her on the podcast six years ago. Can you believe that? Or maybe five and a half years ago, and the episode was the day it launched. We recorded it shortly before the twenty sixteen presidential election. We launched it the week after. So if you go back and listen to this episode, you will hear us probably at our most unreliable and despondent and choking back tears. And you know, where is the conversation with Beth was? Was lovely because we all lived in this world in which we couldn't imagine Donald Trump would be elected president, right? And here we are. On the other side of that whole experience for the moment, you know, in the brief,

Speaker2: [00:14:45] Less naive than we were

Speaker1: [00:14:46] Entire Trump period. For some, Trump is re-elected.

Speaker2: [00:14:50] It's like the interregnum between Trump numb to something.

Speaker1: [00:14:55] Yes, that dude.

Speaker2: [00:14:56] Let's not say that. Let's not say that.

Speaker1: [00:14:58] Yeah, I don't want to. I want

Speaker2: [00:14:59] To do some like

Speaker1: [00:15:01] Burn, some burn something or some digital sage here to clear that out. But Beth is back with a really fascinating new work called The Inheritance, which has been described as a graphic memoir. She describes it as a visual essay. It is a lot of pictures and some very impressive words. And we go deep into it about her family and much, much more.

Speaker2: [00:15:26] And I believe in the show notes, we're also going to create a link to the film version of the book.

Speaker1: [00:15:32] Correct. There is not a publicly available version, but she is showing it around. Ok. All right. I've got some links to some of the Caribbean film collectives that she sent me, some upcoming events there.

Speaker2: [00:15:43] It's going to be screened.

Speaker1: [00:15:44] Yes. Ok, cool. Well, not that. Not the inheritance, but the work she's doing collaboratively with her colleagues in Belize. One. Ok, so all right, which you don't know is that Beth is, you know, well-known as a political theorist, anthropologist, a philosopher less known as a graphic artist.

Speaker2: [00:16:01] That's just going to say is that Beth made the images in the book, and I didn't realize that as I was reading the book, I was like, Who's the illustrator? Like, These are really cool, and I don't know if it's when we were talking to her, if it was after we shut off the mic. But no, we found out that she did. She did all the drawings, which was pretty

Speaker1: [00:16:20] Incredible, and she did all the visuals in the and in the film to come to you. So she did all the editing and the soundtrack to the film. If you get to see it, and I hope you do is amazing. A lot of the songs are her sister Sharon songs and special Easter egg for those of you willing to listen through to the end. Beth kindly sent us one of Sharon's songs that you use in the film, and we're going to use it as the outro music in the episode too. I did a little tweak to it, a little remastering. It sounds pretty good, I think, and beautiful. So what a talented family. There are six of those. Ravanelli is not a donkey among them, which, by the way, is a line from the book. So right when I say that you'll get that. Yeah, if you

Speaker2: [00:17:00] Read a book that comes up in something. It's definitely in the book. Yeah, right? Which was a little abstract.

Speaker1: [00:17:06] I'm sorry, donkey. I like to start with it with an inside joke with Beth. It's one of those things, of course. So sim, I think we're at that point where you might want to say, go back. Hey, cultures of energy, folks, we have a very distinguished guests, in fact, the guest who holds the belt for the most downloaded episode of Cultures of Energy, that's one Beth Pavitt Ali. And I don't know if you knew that Beth, but one thing it

Speaker4: [00:17:49] Proves

Speaker1: [00:17:51] One thing. It proves that we had known, but maybe the world didn't know is that a ravanelli is no donkey?

Speaker4: [00:18:00] No, it's very much of a joke.

Speaker1: [00:18:05] Thanks so much for being back with us, Beth. This book, The Inheritance is amazing, and we can't wait to talk about it with you.

Speaker2: [00:18:11] Yes. Ok. And on that note, I mean, it is an unusual piece of work and it's it's fantastic. And it's actually I was thinking about the right word. It's quite mesmerizing. Actually, it's that kind of I'm going to say it's a graphic novel or at least in the style of a graphic novel, but you can correct me if you'd like to, but it's definitely an illustrated narrative, perhaps a memoir. I'm not sure if you would call it that either of your family history and the permutations of race and colonialism and settler liberalism in the United States, and connections back to the old world in Europe. So what we wanted to begin with is by asking you about its backstory, like how did you come to this? How did you come to create this marvelous creature called the inheritance?

Speaker4: [00:18:55] Well, you know, there are two back stories, both of which are really important. On the one hand, there's a story about the origins of the book that would start in 1984 in Australia on really on a particular beach mud pill, which is a beach just on the other side of the Darwin Harbor, where I was sitting with some and women, older women at the time and we had just met. They were asking me about where I came from and they were telling me about where their ancestral lands were. And in the conversation, two things happened. On the one hand, they were when they were describing how their families related to lands, both where we were sitting and then further southwest. And then I said, Wow, this sounds so much like the way that my grandparents talk about how we're related to a little village up under the Alps. There was this immediate connection. There was like what they were first like, what are you talking about? Like white people don't. And I was saying, I have clans, we have clans. We relate through particular families. It's not national. And so we're having this conversation. So but at the same time as we were connecting around this, what seemed to be a shared relation to subnational modes of belonging to landscapes? What also was apparent and what we talked about really in the very few days we were together was the the different ways that settler colonialism and white supremacy addressed our different ancestral heritages.

Speaker4: [00:20:52] So, so the the the the the dynamics of shared modes of belonging and the different ways of shared modes of belonging were slotted into the infrastructures of of colonialism, white supremacy and et cetera. You know, what's the what's the foundation of our our relation, my relation with Belgian and Caribbean folks in Australia, on the other hand. So that's been going on. So this conversation has been going on for a very long time since 1984. But on the other hand, more immediately was the rise of heritage capitalism, white nationalism and a progressive ecological left turn to pre capitalist pre-Christian traditions, European traditions. So. And here I'm talking about, like in the 2000s, when you when we saw the rise of DNA capitalism like both addressed to black Americans and white Americans. But I was thinking, What's going on with the white American thing here, right? This this? Oh, I thought I was an ex, but I took this DNA sample and I'm a y.

Speaker4: [00:22:08] So you know, the commercials you see a person, a white person dressed in a kilt and then, oh, never mind, they're in lederhosen, right? So I was thinking about that. And then we saw the rise of this, this virulent white nationalism. And I started thinking about what's the relationship between this white nationalism and this heritage capitalism with white nationalism claiming that it had its culture too right? And that defensive, I would say, almost white counter Counter-Reformation move. And then it was also thinking like on the progressive ecological left, like a lot of in the art world in particular, a desire to look relook at pre-Christian, pre capitalist European modes of belonging to land. So ecological practices, commenting practices and et cetera. And I thought I thought, You know what? This this this white turn to white heritage needs to be? I don't know. Sometimes I said, slaps myself. I thought, you know, there's I mean, the insidious side was apparent around white nationalism, but there's a certain kind of insidious side to the heritage capitalism and maybe a bit of needs more thought side of our ecological left. So. So those two, those are the two big back histories to the book.

Speaker1: [00:23:48] Well, it's incredibly well-crafted. And I wanted to just ask a little bit about that to kind of about. Method of storytelling here. And one of the things that I think is really special about the inheritance is how you really capture the childhood feeling of being small, and part of that is just in the graphics, how you do it and part of it's in the storytelling, how as a child, you're observing these dramas, you don't really understand you're becoming involuntarily enrolled in ancient dynamics and disputes, and you want to become kind of fully vested in the family, but also sometimes just to escape. And I wanted to ask you how how it was for you to kind of recover that perspective again from a period of being later in life. I mean, was that a challenge to sort of find your way back to your childhood?

Speaker4: [00:24:32] Unfortunately, not. Ok? Oh no. You know, the book the book, I'm assuming not everyone has read the book, but the book is organized in three acts. In the first act saturates the viewers readers situate them in this in the household of Little Elizabeth, and more particular, it situates them in the hopefully the same visual scene that Little Elizabeth was captured by. That is this framed image hanging in there her den, her, her family's den and and little Elizabeth trying to figure out literally, what's it an image of, right? One of the things the book is trying to do is indeed give evoke the affects of the capture of images before there's a language of description or narration. So. Right. So so there. Before she has language. Little Elizabeth is captured by the drama of an image, but the image doesn't have a linguistic frame to it. It's it's a set of wiggly lines. You know, you find out it's topological map of of the region where her ancestral villages. And you notice I talk about talk about little Elizabeth. I don't talk about myself. That's right. Oh, yeah, yeah. So there's that should tell us something about the way in which the book and I think about the splitting that occurs when a dominant scenery, a dominant setting can't be captured by a single narrative or single overarching truth. And that's really what the whole book is about. There's not a undisputed ground on which this the sense of that image makes sense, and thus the little kid in there, the me little Elizabeth, can never go back to that original sense because it wasn't there. So, you know, it's it's the the I was that's what I was trying to do is trying to to demonstrate this fracturing that occurred at the core of of this little kid. And and and also to argue that although this is a particular instance of that fracturing, that fracturing lies at the core of all identity claims.

Speaker2: [00:27:24] I think that that fracturing comes across really beautifully in a passage. I think it's an act one where your grandfather is telling you the story of his eye, which I won't go into because I don't want to

Speaker4: [00:27:35] Know, too.

Speaker2: [00:27:36] That's oh, that's OK, too. So Papa, and he says he says nothing. I'm telling you Elizabeth is a lie, but he wants you to remember the story. And then you have a little Elizabeth. I should say, has this line? He didn't have to worry. I would never forget not knowing what he was talking about. And that kind of it's so powerful because it really it resonates with that kind of lack of that sort of that miss comprehension, that kind of gap and understanding when we're young and trying to clock into the grownups world of this kind of surreal historical mystery that's so kind of nebulous and try to capture. I wanted to ask.

Speaker4: [00:28:14] I think that can I? Yeah. Well, the way you know, it's fabulous. It's that gap in understanding that constitutes a child's coming into subjectivity, right? Mm hmm. Which in my family in this story? The gap in understanding isn't a gap. It's it's it's the shattering of understanding because you we often think of the kid pre linguistic kid as slowly making sense of where they are, where anything else is. So what is an image? What's not an image? What what should be foreground? In a visual scene, so what, what of all this visual scene, should I be focused on that is what comes to the foreground or the background, and that's in the very beginning, I say, you know, it took a long time before this image even emerged in the foreground, right? It was just part of the background. And then it slowly emerges the foreground and then the what is that? So the linguistic framing of of visuals and visual scene? Now in my family, then you OK, it comes to the foreground and you say, OK, what is that? An act one is all about how there was a dispute at the core about what you're seeing. So it's this. It's that, no, it isn't. Yes, it is. And so what? What comes to foreground is not the framing devices, but rather the affects that s'attend the stakes of the framing device. And although the this book is is certainly focused on a particular history of those kinds of disputes, and what the book also really wants to do is say, we all have in some ways, access to the affective stakes of the dispute of what these images of history are. Right? Mm hmm. And so like what how how might we affectively return to those gaps so that we can open up history into its disputes, right? Mm hmm.

Speaker2: [00:30:30] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's that's fantastic. I mean, I found myself as as I was reading through the inheritance. I mean, reading it as a human being, but also reading it as an anthropologist, I kept finding these or thinking I was finding these moments where I was like, Aha, here's some of the moments that led led Beth toward anthropology led path toward becoming a social theorist. But I realize I'm sort of psychology. You are trying to do this meta reading, but I think many of us approach texts like this and that way trying to interpret the author and then there the trajectory that they followed. So in some ways, it's a kind of an unfair question, but I'll throw it out there anyway. That is what what are the experiences that you think kind of most formed you toward the anthropological project if we want to call it that or toward social theory? And then a kind of second part of that is how does a recasting reiteration of of a childhood, a little Elizabeth's childhood fit in with a kind of grander project of of of anthropology writ large, however you wanted to find out. I'll leave that in brackets, but the kind of memoir into the larger project of of anthropology as a practice?

Speaker4: [00:31:43] Yeah, you know, that's it's interesting. I I would say that the inheritance and I have said the inheritance is a the as an explanation about why when I arrived in Australia and met the older men and women who are no longer with us or with us in a different way. Belgian women and men, why there was this immediate feeling of wholeness at homeless and an immediate understanding that I had to reconsider narratives about my home, i.e. my ancestral home. The the the intensity with which I was told I had to identify with a place I'd never been to, a place that no one could agree what to call, you know? So that double ness that the book being both why? Oh my god, I I know this place intimately. And oh my god, this is calling on me to reconsider everything I know about my intimate relation to my own family history. Ok. So on the one hand, I would say that's what the book is. Trying to explain that to people who know what I have done subsequent to this history, right? And also just to tell a story. So if you don't know what I've done, you don't know any anthropologists, you'd still be captivated by it.

Speaker2: [00:33:17] Yes.

Speaker4: [00:33:18] Ok. Now, on the other hand, in terms of the discipline of anthropology, I have to say I think the book tells a story about why philosophy was so important to me and why when I showed up in Australia as a philosopher, remember I, I was just out of college. I did a BA in Oh my god in, you know, St John's great books.

Speaker2: [00:33:41] Oh, OK, that was the Santa Fe, a reference I wanted to ask you about that.

Speaker4: [00:33:45] Yeah. Ok, thank you.

Speaker2: [00:33:47] Thank you. Yes, totally.

Speaker4: [00:33:49] Yeah. So, so so I did the great books in Santa Fe in nineteen. Day before, before Santa Fe became an outdoor art gallery, and so I was doing the great books piano, I was doing the great books in the middle of these intense settler colonial struggles and politics and publics, which was super interesting, right? Well, you know, very dramatic, I would say. So I think the inheritance for grounds, how basic questions about the relationship between what existence is and how the the social organizes and distributes values and, you know, basic values like whose lives matter and whose lives don't matter, whose life's words and whose lives imaginaries of care, matter and don't matter or for me, originally philosophical questions. Mm hmm. Both in terms of like a classic epistemology, like how do we come to know what is and then how do we distribute value based on the different and competing ways of knowing? So there's a section in the the grandma grandma section subsection. So an act to grandma, I really try and foreground this. The problem of who's forms of care and survival and intimacy come to matter, come to be considered a value or resigned as neglect, you know, these kinds of things. So in the section where grandma is trying to teach little Elizabeth how to take care of a cut like she's cut her finger like Elizabeth, cut her finger and she says, Elizabeth grandma, says Elizabeth. No need for medicine. The dog he lick. It's good and you can see my little mother hanging out and you know the next little pages where grandma is like, Why aren't you in school? And little is business, I'm sick. And she and grandma says, Oh, you're sick, OK, we'll get up and help your grandma clean the house and the, you know, little tiny like vacuum cleaner.

Speaker2: [00:36:13] Yeah. And start sweating, girl. Pretty much like,

Speaker4: [00:36:16] Yeah, start sweating, sweat it out, right? Only to be, you know, yelled at by by my mother. Like, What are you doing? You're going to kill her and my grandmother saying, you don't know anything about survival. So the argument about the very conditions of the world that you're in and and depending on what conditions of the world you think you're in? How do you care for yourself and others? Now these these, of course, there are anthropological questions, but for me, originally they were philosophical questions.

Speaker1: [00:36:48] That's right. And there's so many rich layers to this project. Just as you're saying, one of the ways in which I could tell that it wasn't sort of just an anthropology project was what I expected to happen at some point. And this is just my own tell from where I'm coming from is I thought, Oh, she's going to go visit her ancestral village and there's going to be a kind of reckoning with that sort of the arrival in that in the home country and then sort of reframing. But it really isn't that I think you did go and maybe you want to talk about it or not. But I mean, that's not what the book is about. In fact, there's a kind of sense of stubbornness that pervades the entire account of your family that really resonate, as I was mentioning by email to you with my own family, too. These are the kinds of, you know, settler liberals, if you want to call them, who are often desperate, poor people on the run from something worse, you know, conscription and the Austro-Hungarian army, for example, they end up in the United States. They show up later and they're in the thick of something and in a series of kinds of racial exclusion and and in class inequalities that they also are victims as well as perpetrators of it some level. So I would just want to maybe ask you about that sense of stuckness and whether that was something you were trying to convey.

Speaker4: [00:38:00] You know, it's so very interesting. I'm working with my colleagues on a new project that will take a long time to complete, although early iterations were already coming out and we call it the two clan project. And in a nutshell, what it does is it follows my clan. So I'm a seminars of only through my paternal grandfather and I'm a Bartolo Ambrosi through my paternal grandmother because in in these villages up north under the Alps, they not only, you know, not only were right to regulate these villages, organize copy familia or the forco, but the the families themselves would break into clans for a lot of different reasons we don't have to going. So so what the two plan project is doing is is following the ancestral presence so present with a nest of my clans and of Caribbean clans, from the emergence of settler colonialism to the present. And if you do that, this question of stuckness take advantage recruited becomes super interesting, for instance. Absolutely. Like my, my, my family, the pope. Nelly's embraces others in cortisol. Low cortisol. They they were in the frontier between these maneuvering warring violent empires, states, principalities, et cetera. And they're they're carted irregular. So I would have to say this. So in Trentino, from about the 12th century onward, villages would be would request and be given what we call to do regular and the carpet. Where were the rules that the copy familiar copy for the heads of the households got together and wrote about how they would regulate their common lands and the very small private properties people held? So they were they were semi-autonomous peasants.

Speaker4: [00:40:24] Napoleon came over in the, you know, in eighteen hundred and eighteen or one he freed, say my my ancestors from their freedom because he said, you're futile. These are the commons is feudal form of association and you saw I'm going to liberate you into private property and, you know, self-possession that so we were we were liberated from our freedom. Ok, but but something that something that Glenn Coulthard notes, who's a DNA critical indigenous theorists is that my ancestors were dispossessed and radically so they were dispossessed of their ability to operate as a common to their own autonomy over their own lands. Absolutely dispossessed. But they were dispossessed into proletarian ism right now. If you parallel this with my CODEPINK colleagues in Australia, they weren't dispossessed into proletarian ism. They were dispossessed into extermination. Right? Mm hmm. Or that was the attempt. So why does this matter when we think about stuckness, take advantage of recruited into. Well, because in order for was my was my only clan were my only clans. Ambrose's clan stock. Well, they had the opportunity to follow the roots of settler colonialism laid down by others, right? So they could take advantage of the dispossession of the Seneca right and the history of that dispossession in what is now called Buffalo New York right. In order to scoot out of the ongoing violence in the frontier between you, not yet fully Italy.

Speaker4: [00:42:20] Lately we know now and the crumbling and half hinged Wall Street Hungarian empire, right? And they were able actually to have mobility and radical mobility. Could they go over to Buffalo? They'd send up. They set up the knife for any business. They'd go back to court or solo, whereas say my carbin, colleagues do not have that form of mobility during that same period. They were shot out. They were interned. Other forms of control were being experimented with, such as the removal of children. So, you know, yes, and when my client comes to the U.S., they were not the kind of bodies that the US wanted. So, you know, nineteen twenties we have we have the emergence of, you know, another like white panic. But this white panic around immigration is is a northern European. And so we were not the kind of people necessarily that the U.S. in the turn of the century wanted, but we very quickly became so. So I guess that's, you know, I hear what you're saying, Dominic, but part of me thinks, Hmm, yeah, no, it was the book price really give you a sense of what it was to be a white body out of place, but also by the time. And this is three by the time little Elizabeth subjectivity is being formed out of these on, you know, incommensurate narratives. She is already a white American, so. Know, so, so and that and in that three part of Act three is describing how, you know, my father would say, you know, he's we've come down to the South.

Speaker4: [00:44:06] So we're in Shreveport, Louisiana, and my father would tell us about how everyone in the South with bigoted and how being bigoted was bad. And we thought, OK, being bigoted is bad. And and he would say, you know, the world is is large and America's large, and I'm going to take you all over America so you can see that the world is not the South. And he would every summer we'd get in our blue Bel Air station wagon. You drive us across the West. But one of the points the book makes is, you know, funny but serious way is that the road, literally the roads he's taking us down to see the U.S. and it's, you know, it's in. It's non bigoted, larger, capacious goodness. We're we're being built for white people and being built through Native American lands, right? Right. So so literally, we were seeing the America that white Americans wanted us to see. And in that movement, that movement was a also a a force of displacement and disruption to black communities, to Native American communities and et cetera. So, so I don't, you know, if you look at if you look at both from my grandparents generation, which they're moving back and forth following these these infrastructures of settler colonialism and then my own family moving around right? I don't know how stuck we were.

Speaker1: [00:45:36] Yeah, I guess. I guess I meant more kind of emotionally stuck, but I totally take your point. I mean, what I think is so impressive about the book is you show empathy for the dislocated ness and sort of the conviction of dispossession that say your father has at the same time that, yeah, he wasn't in danger of being lynched. I mean, this is the, you know, this is the real difference, but not all dispositions are equal. So. So the book, I think, makes that point really powerful.

Speaker4: [00:46:00] Just at this point is really important because the the weight of the book or one hopes the weight of the book pivots between sorry shuttles between the grandparents. So you have grandpa who's like, you never forget you're strong, you know, mountain girl from cortisol and and and you're tough. And no matter if anybody you know, slices your eye open, you can just show it up to yourself. You know, that kind of like me and and then my grandmother, whose stories were really about the the dispossession of forms of care of sociality and then my my mother's grandparents who were just dispossessed from our family altogether, like they just weren't even allowed in. But but what? But the book ends by saying that and it really ends with the grandmother saying she gave me the opportunity to understand the psychological and social consequences of dispossession like the the the affective, the psychological, the social consequences of dispossession. But it took me sitting on that beach in 1984 to to understand the the historical consequences of multiple forms of dispossession. So I I actually I'd rather actually read the very last thing if that's OK, because I yeah. So it was my grandma offered me an insight and well, inheritance doesn't come from the past.

Speaker4: [00:47:47] Inheritance is the place we're given in the present. In a world structured to care for the existence of some and not of others. My grandma offered me an avenue into this insight. It took many other to force me to begin to use it. So, so, so yes, the book tries to really is a I don't want to discount the affective and social consequences of dispossession. That's the whole point of the book. But in Act three, I tried to say, OK, now let's look at a broader arrangement in assemblage of dislocations such that we can see that they're not simply parallel forms, but entangled and embedded forms. Yeah, we were dispossessed, but we were not stuck. And not only that, but we were continually lifted up in our dispossession, right? So Napoleon dispossessed, dispossessed us. Where do we go? To Buffalo. Right, right, right. America doesn't want us, where do we go up the class hierarchy? Because the way in which whiteness becomes absorptive in as a as a strategy of white supremacy and settler colonialism, so. So that's really the heart of the book is how to acknowledge the stakes of dispossession without falsely making all forms of dispossession equal, right? Mm hmm. Right? Absolutely.

Speaker2: [00:49:26] And I think one of the other key things that comes across, especially in your grandmother's wisdom and wisdom, in her words, is dispossession is not just from territory, but from kin as well. And one of the most striking and heartbreaking things that I remember from the book is when she says, I think she says it to little Elizabeth that this trip, you know, come into America, this country has taken all my children and it's given me nothing. It's given me nothing in return because she's been, I don't know, in prison, maybe as too strong a word, but she's not been given autonomy in America. And it brings me to there's so many powerful, important stories of racial exclusion and inequality in the book and class inequalities and and including environmental injustice in many ways, like the, you know, the spread of the suburbs and white white colonial suburbs into the wet wet woods that you and your siblings played with played in it as children. But one of the other things that comes across very strongly throughout all these family dynamics is the law of Poppa and the patriarchal forms. And I'm also remembering this image of the it's grandpa and your dad and their fists have morphed into these sort of grotesque giant fists as they're as they're fighting over their table, and it's just like their bodies have become, you know, these little little limbs and the fists are just grotesque. And anyhow, I want to ask you about patriarchy in this, the kind of constellation of how it works out in the in the book.

Speaker4: [00:51:03] Yeah. Yeah, it's part of the back story of the book too is is a so tricky. So on the one hand, part of the back story is to say, Well, you know, we want to you know you white nationalists want to go back into history, in part because further you go back, the more the law of the father emerges and with it, a heteronormative don't even bother racist, normative, but you know, a patriarchal heteronormative framework or one. You can imagine that you can project back and say that you know this. This heteronormative, patriarchal form was the basis of of Western society. And wow, in my family, we saw the echoes of of of this not merely like patriarchal, but primogeniture. Well, how do we say it in the anthropology primogeniture? Well, yeah, the Great Gatsby are the first because in my family, my father was the first son. His father was first son. His father was. So we are the first sons all the way, but not me all the way back. So so there was a reason in my family that this the the the law of the not not just the law of the father, the law of the first son matter, right to be more specific. And and although the law of the first son was disrupted in eighteen oh one, it continued to play an overbearing role. Even when my family started going back and forth and setting up the knife grinding business in Buffalo because that knife grinding business was organized around the first son, he was boss right? Or the widow, which was in the old Carter days.

Speaker4: [00:53:07] If your husband died the first son, you know, the captain died, but the kids were too small. The widow stood in for right. That was the only time a woman could be, you know, coming to the regular come into the the governance meeting was if she was literally the voice of the deceased husband. And in my family, Candida was my great grandmother. She functioned in that role. So so this this form that technically no longer existed and had an existence in eighteen oh one or eighteen hundreds continue to exist in practice in my family, in this knife grinding business, and it continued to to echo in my own family. In 1964, when we were in the south, and I'm just a little kid, so the meaning, the consequences, the affects of patriarchy were in the forefront and thus also in the forefront. Like what was your stance going to be on this and why would you identify or not identify with this? Why would you try and keep it going or not keep it going now? If you were the first son, you might have some investment in this. But if you're the fourth daughter who like me, you know you would think, what? Who is this for? Who is this?

Speaker2: [00:54:34] It's a good question.

Speaker4: [00:54:36] Yeah. Who's four? And what other possibilities exist in the world now? You know, one of the great things about having it being in the foreground, like having this, you know, like this, the the primogeniture patriarchy so intensely in the foreground in your life is that that there wasn't any really grey or gray area. But, you know, but that said, I have to say that said the exclusions created by by this system create all sorts of identification relays that they're kind of uncanny. So I was talking to my father this this summer for the first time in a while. But anyways. And I told him that because, you know, the the law, the father, the law of gender, you know, the way it operated in our family because it excluded me from the hunting trips. Ah ha ha. Yeah, because it did that. I have the rest of my life compensating. That is my entire life is organized around carving and we hunt and we make things to the it's like it's all compensatory. So so in some ways, I'm very invested in the very lore of the father that I was excluded about. So part of what we have to do is is is think you know, the rational, the rational relationship between, say, what gender or sexuality or sex you are and these in patriarchy and primogeniture, a kind of patriarchy based on primogeniture, but also the very complex relay's of ID that emerge out of it.

Speaker4: [00:56:25] So you could say in my family, I'm the most invested in this history. Not, not really, but but. But I've organized my life around a kind of form of it because the other thing to remember, whatever we say about patriarchy in the West, one of the things we do in court hoping is to try and and keep strong, compelling and palpable the ancestral present of their ways of relating to land in their ways of relating to land or picked up by the father and the grandfather. So you pick up your land and your mode of belonging to your, your totem or your dreaming and your your land through, you know, your cargo, which is your father, father. And then you can also you look back to your mother's father's land, but you really pick him up with the father. So so that's another level of complexity. Like, reject the law of the father in in relation to this European ancestry, support the law of the father in relationship to being indigenous family. Very complicated. You know, and and part of what we're doing with the two clan project is to try and say why what might seem to be a contradiction, like critiquing it here, but supporting it there isn't, when you put it in relation to these histories of race and settler colonialism. Mm hmm.

Speaker2: [00:57:51] Yeah. It makes total sense, actually. It totally does.

Speaker1: [00:57:55] So, Beth, I wanted to ask you about this as a kind of experimental project if you think of it as an experimental project and we know that a lot of folks, including ourselves here on this on the other end of the Zoom today are are people who who seem to feel there's a certain urgency in moving beyond just writing conventional academic essays and books. But your academic essays and books have done very well. They're very popular. People really like them. So the question could be, you know, why? Why move into this model of doing something that again, at least resembles in certain respects a graphic novel to tell this story? It definitely resonates with so much of your other published work, which also wrestles with the inheritances of of late liberalism and, as you put it, settler colonial infrastructures. Is there something kind of unique that you think this format sort of offers in terms of that struggle with that inheritance? And that is the second part of this because you've already been talking about this amazing work with the carving film collective. I wanted to ask you if if you see this, this project, the inheritance as as part of or how does it relate to this other project that obviously are investing a lot of time and attention?

Speaker2: [00:59:05] And right now, we should also mention that the inheritance is also a film.

Speaker1: [00:59:09] Oh my god, it's a great film. It's a really great film. Thomas Bartlett, as you said, made this this film version of it, which I think is really powerful.

Speaker4: [00:59:17] Well, Thomas did the yeah, Thomas and I did the soundtrack, and then I did the the kind of montage editing thing.

Speaker1: [00:59:24] Wow. Oh, cool.

Speaker2: [00:59:25] Even more impressive, it was beautifully done.

Speaker4: [00:59:28] You know, the the visual the visual basis of the inheritance is, Oh my, oh, the grammar this morning. Where where is my grammar? There's a reason the inheritance is a is a visual essay. And that is because the problem the the the relationship between visual understanding and linguistic understanding insofar as they can the gap between constituted a certain gap in subjectivity is what the book was trying to do. So I originally when I first the first draft of the inheritance had very, very few words in it. The experiment I had in mind was to replicate the effects of being within a visual scene, but having no means of narratively framing it or narratively closing the frame. Right? Mm hmm. So I wanted people to be flipping through it, going, I kind of know where I am kind of don't know what's going on, right? Because that was exactly what was happening to Liz Little Elizabeth kind of know what's going on. I kind of don't know what's going on. I kind of know some of this language. I don't know this other language which the film tries to do. The film also tries to get you in a more hallucinatory relation to the images. But then it had people read it or look at it, and it seemed it need more words. So I added more world. So I would say that the visual nature of the inheritance comes from the point of the inheritance.

Speaker4: [01:01:19] And I would say my academic writing is written because the point is my academic work needs to be written, although all my books have all these diagrams all over them because I think, Oh, we'll see. The diagram will make clear what I'm saying and people say, I understood everything you were writing until I got to the diagram and then I think, Oh, really? That's what I thought that would help. The Kamin films are the reason we are doing films. You know, I've talked about it in other places, but we're doing films for a very particular reason and they allow us to act out the ancestral present and they allow us to act it out without a script because we have different levels of literacy and competency in traditional like angle like ancestral languages, settler languages like English and then Creole, which we all share. So, so making films allows us to intervene in settler narratives without being tied to settler literacy. Now, both of the Carter being are, as Lindy Irwin says, calming films are true with a little bit of story in them, meaning they're based on the lives we share and we know, but we give them a little narrative order called the inheritance. What I say in the very beginning is that this is not a history, and indeed many things in the book are factually wrong or or contested. And then there are other projects that I've done that are simply fiction.

Speaker4: [01:03:14] Say, there's this little video I made called The Origins of Bigfoot, which you can find online very short, little animated film. And currently I'm working on this. I don't know what to call it. Project writing project drawing project called tentatively called Alice Henry and The Chronicles of the Western Plateau, or something, which is fully wack. A Doodle fiction with whack, a doodle drawings and just whack a doodle. Both Bigfoot and and Alice Henry raised the question of What stories do we need now and how should we? Stories now in a period of climate toxicity, climate collapse, i.e. the ancestral catastrophe of settler settler colonialism and white supremacy. And and again for me and we can't go into this today. But for me, the the one of the questions that are raised when I look across the kinds of work I do, like academic work and film work with Carter being and the inheritance is drawing book and then Alice Henry and the origins of Bigfoot as whack a doodle fiction is How do we how do we not fall into the trap of saying all of these are there's a there's a smooth, homogeneous space or territory across these forms of work. For instance, court iBuying films are based on, as Lindy Irwin says, they're based on true things, i.e. they're based on their their ancestral relations, to their totems, to their lands, to the narratives that form those lands.

Speaker4: [01:05:01] And these these narratives are true, and we know because when we go there, you can see how the geography has been formed by, say, what the barramundi sisters did or what she held. A young girl that dressed up as a boy did literally shape the lands. Now that's true. The origins of Bigfoot, in which I tell the origin, like, where did Bigfoot come from? That's just the story, right? And the whack a doodle, Alice Henry, which I'm really enjoying. It's just a story right now. How do we really grapple with leave aside the academic writing and say drawing and memoir and other forms of of nonfiction? How do we think about the relationship between what we would call fiction and what for so long has been called myth, right? Especially in the critical world in which sometimes these forms to sit side by side, so are being filmed, sit alongside videos that are, you know, reimagining in powerful ways, reimagining human and non-human relations. So I guess for me, different different projects demand different voices and different modalities with exploring or think. But at the same time, one has to reflect on like, how do all of these sit in relation to other forms of narrative, other modalities of of of thought within, you know, white supremacy and settler colonialism? Like how do we not just make this smooth relationship between them? All right. I always go on for too long.

Speaker2: [01:06:45] I told that's yeah, no, no, that was the equivalent, right? No.

Speaker1: [01:06:49] And that's really important. That point you just made about

Speaker2: [01:06:51] The other thing that's really important, Beth. And you may not know this, and I'm really glad to hear about the Bigfoot story because you may not know that Dominick sitting here actually identifies partly as Sasquatch.

Speaker1: [01:07:03] Well, I have been identified by several other people as a Sasquatch. I don't.

Speaker4: [01:07:09] So I.

Speaker2: [01:07:11] He's good. He's got his own post-human identity, complex work. He's working out here.

Speaker4: [01:07:17] Girl, you need to go look at my little video.

Speaker2: [01:07:19] I will immediately. I will immediately.

Speaker1: [01:07:22] But but more seriously, this point that that every project deserves its own voices and modalities is so right on. And I just that's how that's been our feeling, too. And it's hilarious when you realize when you go to Barnes and Noble and you realize that this sort of nonfiction genre is dominated essentially by memoir and self-help. I mean, talk about settling liberalism. I mean, it's just, you know that and how how to try to tell the kinds of complex stories political environmental that we're trying to tell without sort of giving oneself over to those two genres, I think is really?

Speaker2: [01:07:57] Can I can I ask a little detour? Beth, did you do all the drawings in the book? Yeah, yeah. Oh, cool. So I got a lead with her. You're great. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, they're

Speaker4: [01:08:06] Fantastic. Yeah. You know, that's the that's part part of the trouble I always have. Well, I always have. I sometimes have answering the the question you last asked, is that in my family, we always drew people were the in the film, the songs you hear in the background or my little sisters I love.

Speaker1: [01:08:27] I love those songs. Could we please get a soundtrack? Yeah, they're beautiful. I was actually like, I was. I kind of I was like, I've heard these before. I scroll to the end. I was looking Sharon Paul Vanilli. Yeah, OK. And then I looked Sharon, Paul Vanilli. I can't find it. So we have to get these songs out somehow.

Speaker4: [01:08:42] Oh yeah, you know what? We could put the soundtrack on this podcast. Yeah.

Speaker1: [01:08:46] Oh, that would be so amazing, please.

Speaker4: [01:08:48] You can just listen to it. But you know, she she wrote and composed and produced those songs in her little room, which she was like, I don't know, 13, 14 12. Oh, wow. So you know, that's we were one of those kinds of families in which everyone assumed that everyone could draw or paint or compose songs or whatever. And drawing and making what people might say is artworks has always been part of my practice. I just see have seen no reason to weaponize them into any

Speaker2: [01:09:26] Weaponized them, into galleries, museums.

Speaker4: [01:09:29] You know, like, I'm happy to weaponize carbon and we can take over the galleries. I mean, because it has some, you know, it does a lot of amazing work. But yeah, so yeah. So yes, of course. Like, listen to me, of course, the drawings are good I can draw, but everybody in my family can draw, you know, different styles, right? But some amazing siblings I have.

Speaker1: [01:09:56] Oh yeah. And so such a gift to be able to learn something about your family. I know you. I know you're resisting the memoir form the pure memoir form for good reason, but I do feel like it's a real gift to learn so much about your past Beth, and to learn so much about your incredibly thoughtful, you know, not struggle, but just work over time to kind of understand your family. And again, that's the sort of thing that really brought it home to. He is just this weird. Your book returned me to my youth and sitting there going, God, these families are surreal, like, what's the fuck is going on here? And you know, why are these people the way they are? Why do they seem to be so angry? And why do they seem to be so like wrapped up with the past? And these are the kinds of things that's really hard to get at through conventional academic prose, and I think you do an amazing job.

Speaker4: [01:10:40] I think there are there are writers who could get at them. Probably not me in an academic mode. Can I just can I just as the end, just continually remind us that and this is super important for me because of the first thing I said, which was in some ways, the prehistory of this of the inheritance sits on the shores of Mudville across the harbor from Darwin. On the one hand, like, yeah, why the fuck are people so obsessed with these histories? You know, they and this obsession really shattered many people in my family and my white family. On the other hand, Dominic Corby is all about keeping the ancestral present strong, compelling, important, right crossing down through generations. We are our life project is passing the ancestral present to the next ancestral presence. And so I guess for me, it's not a question of simply of. Well, just. You know, get over it. I once had an ex of mine once said, why don't you all get over it like your family if their family wanted to all get over it and just, you know, it seems so psychologically and effectively difficult and sometimes devastating. Why don't you just dump it?

Speaker1: [01:12:20] And in the words of Papa for Burger, the past was for suckers.

Speaker4: [01:12:26] Past was for suckers, right? And again, for me, what's important is that we always put the evaluations of the ancestral present in the ongoing infrastructures of settler colonialism and racism. Because if we don't, then I think we draw a false equivalence between the what's done by holding on to one kind of history and what's done by holding on to another.

Speaker1: [01:12:58] That's where we have to end it, I think, because that's not going to not going to get better than that. Beth, this has been such a pleasure. We could we could go on for hours, I think, and we should at another occasion. But thank you so much for being with us, for taking the time for sharing your work, as always. And it's just incredible to to be sharing presence with you and to just hear the passion that you bring and the creativity that you bring to your work. It's genius. Very simple.

Speaker4: [01:13:26] Thank you, and thank you both for continuing this blog. It's, you know, it's so vital to so many people. So I always love talking to you too.

Speaker2: [01:13:37] We love we love talking with you too. And I know that our listeners will love listening. So thank you for taking the time.

Speaker1: [01:13:42] The Crown is yours, Beth.

Speaker3: [01:13:44] Yes, I wait, and you're here with me. We're running through the briefings. The St. Mark's islands like blacktop and of Disney. I ride if you stay here. You walk the road, I wonder. I'm changing all the time, this from paddleboard to yellow line.

[01:14:36] It's lovely. Not to climb,

Speaker3: [01:14:41] But high is just kind. I'm singing in my mind, southern lullaby. After four to the two. Smooth laughter, like smooth glass, it's only words to shatter fast. The image is child food shelter. The image, child, you so I'm changing all the time from paddleboat to your

[01:16:20] Slightly. Not to sign going to

Speaker3: [01:16:25] Hide is just dying.

[01:16:49] I wait and you're here with me, happiness I seldom see.

Speaker3: [01:17:04] The sounds of silence like blood, I'm thinking in my mind,

[01:17:19] I'm a southern lullaby, the

Speaker3: [01:17:24] Melodies I seldom find.

[01:17:35] These I sell the. I wait here with you.