coe138_hartigan-returns.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Hello and welcome back cultures of energy, listeners and friends, friends of the pod, friends of our souls, cousins of the pod, friends to the world. We're so pleased to have

Speaker2: [00:00:36] You nephews of the pod, nieces of the pod. Second cousins twice removed to the pod. All kinship categories are very welcome. Yeah, including fictive ones.

Speaker1: [00:00:45] Actually, it's interesting that your your mom actually had that all figured out that once removed and the second and the third. And and she explained it and it's just like went flying over my head.

Speaker2: [00:00:56] Yeah, she just makes up a different story every time. Does she know? I don't know.

Speaker1: [00:00:59] Maybe, maybe it made sense when she said it. But for some reason, even though I've learned that about 12 times in the course of my life, it just refuses to stick. It just goes in one little ear hole and out the other ear hole.

Speaker2: [00:01:12] That's one of the many ways in which we're compatible is that kinship systems and categories also have always gone in one ear and out the other, no matter how many times I've learned them. And that's an embarrassing confession. As an anthropologist, I understand, but I just want to speak my truth here. I'm speaking

Speaker1: [00:01:26] My truth. What's funny is that I could tell you about like Bedouin marriage practices in terms of parallel cousins and cross cousin marriages and which are proscribed and which were prescribed. But, you know, encouraged

Speaker2: [00:01:38] High road mate, why don't you? I can't even do,

Speaker1: [00:01:40] And but I could not tell you like the ones removed and the second. So, yeah, I guess the more interesting kinship stuff, the more fascinating

Speaker2: [00:01:49] Kinship stuff sticks with, you know what I want to mention? I want to mention that we're speaking to you from Reykjavik, Iceland.

Speaker1: [00:01:56] We're going to get to that one.

Speaker2: [00:01:57] I just want to get there a little faster. Where we are, as many of you know, we're here for a premiere of our movie about a little glacier that couldn't write. That hasn't or that won't.

Speaker1: [00:02:07] The little glacier that doesn't anymore.

Speaker2: [00:02:09] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But I wanted to mention that there's a way to connect are being in Iceland to what we spend a good amount of time talking about in today's podcast via the figure of the Icelandic horse, not a pony, but a horse. And we were out driving around a little bit today on an errand and we saw quite a few Icelandic horses. And how did it make you feel? I mean, talk us through your feelings.

Speaker1: [00:02:35] I actually feel a strong sense of joy when I see those horses. But I see I feel a sense of joy when I see any horse. What are these ones are really cute.

Speaker2: [00:02:45] Yeah. What are some of the distinguishing characteristics of the Icelandic horse in your opinion?

Speaker1: [00:02:49] Well, OK, there's different stories about how they got here. One story is that they were shipwrecked by Spanish galleons that were cruising by and there was some kind of wreck and they came ashore and populated the island. That's one story I've heard, but they've been isolated on the island for, what, 500 years or so? Oh wow. Five hundred years. Yeah, I don't know if my I don't know if that's exactly right, but many, many centuries. And so they have very specific genetics and their genetics have been isolated and preserved. Yes. So they're very unique set of DNA Constellation. And as we are out seeing all these wonderful horses, we're also thinking about the work of our guest for today. Yes, which I think was your way of living and segue into this kind of introduction. Yes, because we have the famous John Hartigan, he's back. We call him Johnny.

Speaker2: [00:03:46] Sometimes Johnny Hartigan is back

Speaker1: [00:03:48] To love him so much, and he's such a wonderful dude. It's so brilliant. And he was one of our first

Speaker3: [00:03:54] Guests on the pod. And then he agreed

Speaker1: [00:03:56] To come back and talk to us about his new book, which is called Care of the Species.

Speaker2: [00:04:04] Yes.

Speaker1: [00:04:04] Minnesota Press Minnesota just out. I think last year and maybe this year anyway, just out. And it's got a really cool cover and it's got even better stuff in between the cover pages. Yes, and one of the things that John's been working on,

Speaker2: [00:04:21] You should say that the species involved there are corn. Yes, this is corn maze. So we talk a lot about corn and maize in Mexico in the first part of the podcast, Right?

Speaker1: [00:04:29] And we talked and we talk about Raza. Yes. Of mice like races of corn and the derivation of human race, as taken from none other than races of dogs and different races of horses. That's right. So there's a connection to the kind of species delineation.

Speaker2: [00:04:50] Yes, a lot of racial thinking before the 20th century was actually linked to the non-human rather than the human. So that's kind of an interesting bridge point to

Speaker1: [00:04:58] Little doggies and Little

Speaker2: [00:04:59] Cabello's thinking about human non-human relations, which we are increasingly thinking about in the human sciences.

Speaker1: [00:05:05] And in the book, of course, you link the human and, yeah, other animal species, but then also the species of corn plant species. So it's really cool stuff. But the other thing that John's been working on is that he's been working on horses in. Is it Galicia, is that word? That's right. Yeah. These horses that are kind of semi wild for part of the year as they're out grazing and getting fattened up, and then they come in for a shearing. I won't give it all away. But anyhow, he's been doing this really cool work on horse sociology. And so we were thinking as we were driving around today in Iceland, looking at the Icelandic horses, we're also thinking about John Hartigan, Spanish horses and one of the horses.

Speaker2: [00:05:48] One of the things I learned from the podcast that I don't think is giving away too much is that humans and horses have much of the same facial musculature. Yeah. And so they can make many of this many of the same kinds of or similar analogous kinds of expressions. They have a large, expressive range, which means that face is really important for horses in the way it is for humans. And you're supposed to not look at a horse too closely because it's it's both a sign of care, but also of an aggression, just kind of just like it is in humans. So I now know, especially when I'm dealing with these vicious small Icelandic horses that I should have never gotten near. I should keep my eyes averted until I guess I get close enough to make friends with them so they don't think I'm coming. Coming in hot. Right, exactly. Coming in hot. Starting up a ruckus. Something like that.

Speaker1: [00:06:38] You know, if we wanted to make yet another mesh like connection between Iceland horses John Hartigan and this podcast? Yes, we could direct our listeners back to an earlier podcast with Benedict Earthlings. Oh yes. Where we talk about his amazing movie called Of Horses and Men. And This is a super cool film, and Benedict Ellingson has now a new film out that's called Women at War. Yes. Maybe we're going to go see tonight, but anyway, he's a bona fide director and filmmaker. And so if you want to go find something out of the archives after listening to this John Hartigan pod and thinking about horses, you could go back and listen to Benedict Ellingson when we talk about that movie.

Speaker2: [00:07:23] That's right. Right. We are semi-professional podcasters, also amateur filmmakers. And so if that if all of that amateurism is kind of getting getting you down from time to time and you're really looking for somebody who does one thing or two things better, then check out Benedek Arlington's films because he is he does do a lot of things

Speaker1: [00:07:42] Like a real filmmaker,

Speaker2: [00:07:43] But he's a real filmmaker,

Speaker1: [00:07:44] Fake filmmaker. Yeah, we're trying.

Speaker2: [00:07:45] We totally don't anyone tell any of the Icelanders that we're fake because we're still hoping to see a movie. But and I will say all is looking well on that front, so we should have a really fun stuff to report next week, hopefully. Yeah, because I think the podcast will go out on Thursday, so actually be right before the screening. So maybe the week after we'll have a full debrief, but

Speaker1: [00:08:06] Still a full debrief.

Speaker2: [00:08:08] We'll get back with you sooner or later. So anything else to talk about? Anything else to mention from our jetlagged state here in the capital city of the most peaceful nation on Earth?

Speaker1: [00:08:19] Well, OK, I'll just say two more things about the Icelandic horse. Ok. Ok. Bring us. I mean, one of the other things that is similar to John Hartigan sources in Spain is that these Icelandic horses do roam around sort of semi-nomadic grazing during the summer, right? So they get a little wild and then they do a round up of them, which sounds really fun, and I'd love to go do it. The other thing is is that the Icelandic horse has a gate that is a way of moving across Terra that is distinct from any other horse in the world. And it's called a city with an umlaut elt.

Speaker2: [00:08:55] And can you describe what's different about it to people who don't know much about horses? What makes the gate so special? Is it very

Speaker1: [00:09:02] Fast? All right, there's OK. So there's four gates, there's a walk, a trot, a canter and a gallop. All right. And there are different speeds and they have a different kind of rhythm, and the tote is somewhere between a trot and a canter. So it's like two and a half if you think of them as speeds and settling two and a half. But it's sort of like a very fast walk. So like, have you ever seen like a Tennessee walking horse? They really lift their legs up really high and they kind of prance and they walk kind of quickly. But this is like that. Except speed it up. It's like a Tennessee walking horse, except going at about twice the speed. And it's super, super smooth. So it's like being on a it's like being on a little train or something like you're going along really fast, but it's not. It's not bouncy like a trot, and it's not quite as bouncy as a canter, either. So it's a perfect it's a perfect gait for riding. It's like a riding gait, and Icelandic horses are the only horses that can do it. And I always thought that it was something that they were trained to do. And so I thought, Well, why not just train other horses to do that? But it turns out that there's and I can't explain exactly how this operates. There's something genetic about the genetic makeup of the Icelandic horse allows them to do this. Quote that other horses, I guess they haven't found any who can actually do it or who do do.

Speaker2: [00:10:21] Wow, that's

Speaker1: [00:10:22] Interesting. Does that make sense? They have special programming for this gate. To me, it looks like their DNA. To me,

Speaker2: [00:10:29] It looks like they're kind of high stepping, but I don't know.

Speaker1: [00:10:32] It's a little it's prances. It's like a little. It is like a it's like a fast prancing.

Speaker2: [00:10:37] Yeah, it reminds me of like the Austrian, where the bones are still the prisoners, stallions and like when they do their formal shows and how they can do, they're kind of prancing. It reminds me a little bit of that.

Speaker1: [00:10:48] Yeah, although not so much

Speaker2: [00:10:50] Smaller, yes,

Speaker1: [00:10:51] Most horses, they're so little and so cute.

Speaker2: [00:10:53] They're the best. What's your favorite work of pony fiction, pony?

Speaker1: [00:10:57] Well, the Red Pony, John Steinbeck, of

Speaker2: [00:10:59] Course, is that is that really is that fully authorized by sixth grade girls everywhere?

Speaker1: [00:11:04] Well, it's a very dark story.

Speaker2: [00:11:06] Well, now I'm talking about like what you're like. So when you were a sixth grader obsessed with Pony is like, what was

Speaker1: [00:11:12] His favorite story? By the time I was a sixth grader, I was more obsessed with, like skateboarding.

Speaker2: [00:11:17] I know you're smoking cigarettes, and

Speaker1: [00:11:18] I was not, but I was. Yeah, I was definitely like, I was a skateboarder by then. But when I was not, let's say, eight or nine third fourth grade. Yeah. Misty of Chincoteague. Ok, that was a good one.

Speaker2: [00:11:29] I was looking

Speaker1: [00:11:30] For. I never really like black beauty, although I am reading Black Beauty Sabrina now, but it's really it's it's so antiquated and the language is just so stuffy and hilarious anyway.

Speaker2: [00:11:43] So after this podcast, if you're feeling like you haven't heard quite enough about horses, maybe you want to pick up Misty of Chincoteague or the audiobook and listen to that as you go. I'm sure there's an audio book probably read by a horse and just listen to that and let that let that put you to sleep tonight.

Speaker1: [00:11:58] And there's a sequel. There's like, I can't remember the name of the horse, but there's another island called Assateague.

Speaker2: [00:12:03] Yeah, assateague.

Speaker1: [00:12:04] Oh, but you could make some puns out of it. I'm like, OK, all right. Without going down any like weird pony

Speaker2: [00:12:11] Holes, let's turn to the awesome

Speaker1: [00:12:15] What's doing to the awesome Johnny Hartigan? Go, Johnny.

Speaker2: [00:12:37] Welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast, everyone we have on the line with us. Somebody who you remember from the early days of the podcast. He was our fourth episode and we were so glad to have him back. So much has happened. In the meantime, we have entered into a phase of neo fascism in this country. We have. Trump is saying yes, right? A lot of stuff has happened. A lot of it's been bad, actually. In the meantime, Flint still doesn't have water. But anyway, John Hartigan, so, so glad to have you back with us again, Howard. How are you doing, man?

Speaker4: [00:13:09] It's great to be back with you. I'm well. And yes, you know, thinking back on that prior engagement just reminds me of how much my thinking advance is through this kind of dialogue and conversation, not just with YouTube, but with other folks down there at Rice, with you, faculty and grads alike.

Speaker3: [00:13:30] Yeah, but mostly with us.

Speaker2: [00:13:33] Let's be clear.

Speaker4: [00:13:36] Absolutely. I think the big, the big you principally,

Speaker2: [00:13:38] Yes,

Speaker3: [00:13:39] Leaps and bounds. Yeah, right?

Speaker2: [00:13:42] And as I recall, John, I didn't even get to talk to you last time. I think you and Simone did that one together. This is

Speaker3: [00:13:47] Not any. So all the advancement

Speaker2: [00:13:49] Was was really Simone is actually not even me. But anyway, you know what? You've got a cool new book. You've got a cool new book out

Speaker3: [00:13:57] To talk about. So one of the important things that's happened since we last talked to John is that he has a new book out and it's got a brilliant title. The reference to which I think most all of our listeners will understand and I love it, and it's clever and brilliant. It's called care of the species. This came out in twenty seventeen from Minnesota, care of the species, races of corn and the science of plant biodiversity. And we have a very special copy because ours is hand autographed.

Speaker2: [00:14:27] Yes, an autographed copy.

Speaker3: [00:14:29] Everyone from from from John, you signed it yourself in blue ink. I have it right here in front of me.

Speaker2: [00:14:35] And so, so it's worth a lot of money as well. It's just I want to make an offer.

Speaker3: [00:14:39] It's an author sign.

Speaker2: [00:14:40] It's an author sign copy. Thank you.

Speaker1: [00:14:42] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker3: [00:14:43] Actually, if we go broke, we could. You could sell this on Amazon. You actually have to pay more for authors, son.

Speaker2: [00:14:49] You could buy a lot of genetically modified.

Speaker4: [00:14:53] You could. I've just tried to repay some of the debt I owe you intellectually, but it's also to underscore our common ethnographic terrain in Mexico. Yeah, in appreciation of that

Speaker2: [00:15:06] Appreciation, shout out.

Speaker3: [00:15:07] Yeah. So speaking of Mexico and speaking of corn, let's call it we can call it maize, as you do throughout the book. And I'm looking I've been staring at the cover of the book for the last ten minutes or so as we've tried to get our connection right. And I'm really appreciating even more deeply the cover because on the cover you, there's these multicolored are they called grains, the little kernels, kernels,

Speaker4: [00:15:36] Kernels,

Speaker3: [00:15:37] Kernels. Yeah, but juicy kernels, not the dry kernels like this is. This is like freshly picked corn. I think it's dry,

Speaker4: [00:15:46] It's bursting almost. It's, you know, they're swollen up. It's the endosperm. You know, it's what becomes the seed, actually, you know?

Speaker3: [00:15:56] Yeah, endosperm and seed and burston. That's exactly the feeling I get from this, because it's almost like a sensual constellation of these kernels kind of crashing into each other. It's a little orgiastic in a way, and they're all multi. They're all different colors and they've got different patterns and everything. And so I'm just really aesthetically appreciating maize right now. So our first question to you, John, is like, tell us everything about this wondrous, amazing plant called maize because it is fucking wonderful, really and pervasive.

Speaker4: [00:16:31] Yes, it's something we know an awful lot about because it's in most of our shop keeping units. You know, some some aspect of the corn plant, you know, corn syrup is just coursing through, you know, much of what we eat and, you know, a range of these synthetic products. So it's it's an emblematic companion species it can't reproduce without us. It is we have domesticated. It's such that it is sexually incapable of reproducing unless we we plant it at the same time. It's a very good argument for the kind of flip flop of or, you know, the inversion of domestication. Arguably, maize has us working for it because thanks to us, maize now dominates the planet. It's all over the globe and we are very attentively doing its bidding. So it sort of disrupts the idea that humans are just driving domestication for our ends. We might be be serving the ends of other. It's a species with a fantastically complex genome. It's full of of transposons, these jumping genes. So it was a very key species. It became an early model organism for geneticists. And you know, it's what keeps it going in a sense, in all of these, you know, endlessly inventive ways, the the amount of variation between any two of these Dave mice or races of corn is larger than that between us and chimpanzees, and it was able to achieve that and some nine thousand ten thousand years of domestication, which is rather remarkable because it took us a lot longer to develop that kind of genetic distinction with our closest primate cousins.

Speaker3: [00:18:28] Yeah. One of the other I'm looking for the quote right now and I'm not finding it, but you were quoting someone who is saying that maize is maybe it's I'm not going to get it wrong here, but I just won't even pretend I can't find it right a second. But maize is yeah, it's maize is sort of the the plant equivalent to maize is to plants in terms of their sort of dominant space in the planetary biosphere, as humans are to animals. That is, it's a kind of it's an apex species, if you will, among among the plant kingdom.

Speaker4: [00:19:04] Yes, it it absolutely is. And much of that dominant to the homogeneity of the hybrids like B7 three, which was the focus of the genome sequencing project that the US government undertook a few years back. But what sort of more intriguing thing about it is this array of diversity, which really just resides in these, you know, fairly limited geographical domains, largely within Mexico, where it originates. And that's where this concept of race gets formulated. The idea that there is so much diversity packed within a particular variety and that it's the product of the enormous geographical variation within Mexico, but also the ethnic variation. It's very clear from archaeology that groups cultivated this plant to be distinct from that of neighboring varieties, and it's also very clear that they did so by engaging in trade to draw on other pools of diversity of the plant from across the broad nation. So that's why they talk about it as having race or rasa. And of course, when I heard that I was like, Oh my God, wait a minute, what's going on here? Why are we revitalizing this plant? You know, I have to find out more, and gradually I find out, Oh, actually, race starts out on non humans. It starts out on dogs and horses and other domesticated species. And so that really required me to flip my thinking about what race is. And you know, basically, this book recounts that shift of thought also as well about genetics. You know, similarly, I thought genetics was principally about human beings, and I got that impression from reading great cultural anthropologists writing ethnographic about genetics. But really, it's mostly practiced on non-humans. And so in both of these regards, I had to shift out of my very anthropocentric notion about that and also U.S. centric notion about what race is

Speaker2: [00:21:27] Right and one of the interesting things you do in the book, which is really, really helpful as you go back to some kind of early modern texts in the Spanish tradition and reconstitute this relationship between this conceptual relationship between race on the one hand and care on the other. And of course, then care becomes a big thematic for you and indeed makes it to the title of the book. So is there something distinctively Spanish about that conceptualization of Raza, or do you think this is kind of more generally European and just something we've lost sight of over the centuries?

Speaker4: [00:21:59] Yeah, I think the latter so race comes out of, you know, northern Italy, southern France and through Spain, we get race through the French and we actually see it. So in in Darwin's origin of the species, which is the other kind of connotation behind the title, you know, something I'm trying to invoke there. He uses race extensively, but only on non-humans in origin of the species. It's it's it's races of pigeons and races of cabbage and certain races of dogs. So it was actually. Of in English up until his time, and I'm not sure why it dropped out, but yeah, you know, like through line, there is exactly practices of care. And the thing that unnerved me when I kind of realize this is that race indeed is the result of care of practices of care, the kinds of breeding that produces the distinct races that Darwin relied upon to explain how evolution works exactly come one from this kind of a vision of the plasticity of species and then to the cultivation of that towards a particular aim and end. And so, you know, what I think is gained from recognizing this about race is that, you know, very clearly it's not natural. It's used exclusively on domesticated species. But it also points out that we have to think much more broadly about what constitutes race and racial thinking. And so when we see it in practices of care, you know, that's unnerving at first. But it exactly gets at, well, you know, the plantation system, the fuel or the driver behind African slavery was exactly the care of a series of species sugar, cotton, coffee, et cetera. And so in that sense, I think it's pretty revealing, right?

Speaker2: [00:24:00] And you know, the other thing I wanted to mention about this, too, is that you couldn't have cited the study any better than in Mexico. Because as I understand it, Mexico is the historical origin of corn or where corn was first domesticated, right? And even in southern Mexico, which is close to our home, you know, kind of spiritual home in Oaxaca. And so it's very interesting how this theme of the La Sassa's of corn in Mexico becomes a kind of it has a nationalist imaginary attached to it, too. It's a kind of a matter of national heritage and national pride, especially when you're then talking about the relationship to kind of international agribusiness transgenic and all of that stuff, right?

Speaker4: [00:24:44] Yeah, you know, that was one of the real challenges because I had to sort out. So, you know, there's a lot of racial thinking in Mexico, too, and it's clearly evident here. So there are some things we associate with racial thinking and, you know, anxiety over the sexuality of the nation. You know, that kind of goes back to eugenics. And it's certainly there in Mexico. So I thought I got into this because I was working at a human genome lab and I hear about these Rosses de Mais and I hear a lot of public anxiety over the contamination of these Rosses by these, you know, profligate hybrids that are going to come down from the states and they are going to spew their Holland all over, you know, transform them sexually

Speaker2: [00:25:33] Only after they snort a lot of cocaine, though.

Speaker4: [00:25:35] Yes. Yes. Yes. So you know, what's intriguing is that the mestizos, you know, the Mexican population at large does not eat Rosses. They they eat a white processed maize, and the anxiety was was over plants that they don't come in contact with. These things are in remote or locations like Oaxaca, but, you know, as an emblem match, that kind of racial thinking. So but, you know, raw sort of works at a at a somewhat different level. So, you know, there's a lot about the constitution of these species that you know, agronomists use to really kind of think through how this plant is going to be responding to to a climate change. And so, you know, their work with that, you know, gets into the materiality of the plant. And so, you know, like, I had this kind of epiphany, you know, I've been working on this project for a couple of years and I would do my my presentation, you know, and I would say, OK, well, you know, here are the Rosses de Mesa. And it would show pictures of them and say, Oh, well, you know, there's fifty nine or forty three, depending on, you know, if you ask a geneticist, an agronomist, et cetera. And so that just shows that this has to be socially constructed because they don't know how many there are. And at one point I stopped and I realized, Wow, you know, actually, I'm completely ignorant of the differences between these races. I was ignorant or oblivious to the fact that there's the eight row varieties that grow up in the up above two thousand meters, the lowland varieties. And you know why those plants are so different. So I actually I knew nothing about it. And I was impeded in knowing more because I was working out of a U.S. analytical. Mindset about race being a social construct. So I had to get out of that and I don't, you know, just reject that entirely, it works quite quite well for thinking about the way race and nation are associated. But it also ended up being an impediment for me, understanding maze.

Speaker3: [00:27:54] I also there's a couple a couple of things that come to mind. First is in rereading this section of your book is a memory from fieldwork actually in. And I think it was in Oaxaca City and that was as we were kind of meeting with this fairly radical leftist group of young people organizing against the the the spread of these wind parks in Oaxaca. And we went to a kind of a central place. And I remember kind of going through their quote unquote office, which was kind of someone's house, but also kind of an office too. And they had their own DIY seed bank there where they were preserving all these raza's of corn. And they were really this one guy I remember was really proud to show us the corn. He's like, This is where we're saving our heritage, like, this is the real food of our people. And you know, there was a lot of sort of indigenous kind of racial implication in there, but it was clearly a point of real pride around preservation of, you know, indigenous identity, indigenous spaces and all of that stuff, right? But it was it was striking. And in reading, reading your book, it's just like it kind of it keeps bringing those sorts of truths back home again around the kind of the intersection of race and patrimony and mice and in Mexico.

Speaker4: [00:29:19] Yeah, you know, it's it's very deep and that kind of knowledge, you know, was obliterated through much of the nation, through the Hacienda system. You know, it was really, you know, the the landowner who operated the process of selection on the crops each year, you know, and so kind of knowledge of how they are bred, where you guys really kind of sequestered away and frankly lost for much of the nation? You know, yes. Well, Oaxaca is a place where you know that reservoir of knowledge is maintained. But you know, it's also this process of the homogenization of maize really to, you know, in a very racial sense, produce it as white. That's, you know, much like the way soap flour and sugar in the U.S. in the early nineteen hundreds were all, you know, mass produced as white instead of what they'd been before brown. And so there's a material way that that kind of blanking me into the plant of the maize really serve to produce racial ideology at the expense of those indigenous forms of knowledge.

Speaker3: [00:30:41] So one of the other very striking sets of arguments that you're making in the book is, you know, not just the kind of the co-creation or the cocoa construction, I guess, of of race and plant biology, but also the really long history and genealogy of the intersection between colonialism, constructions of race or the creation of race and plant forms themselves. So I'm thinking here of the space where you're talking about how back in the 50s and 20s and fifteen thirties, it was actually Spanish cattle, Spanish cows and then sheep. Soon after that were the original kind of lead colonizing agents as they sort of dispersed through the grasslands. And then you go on to talk about how it's really, you know, it's cattle who are sort of pushing out the hunter-gatherers of the region, right? In some ways like this, this kind of pastoralism and this, you know, agro logistic kind of agro logics are coming to nest there. And then and then we come into the era of mining and wheat gets cultivated so that, you know, the mules can be fed the wheat so that they can pull the, you know, quote unquote resources out of the ground to be sent back to the mothership. And so it's just an amazing sort of genealogy of the ways in which plants get articulated with colonialism and with racism, and with the kind of this sort of co-evolution, a companion species that we kind of maybe in some ways, I think in Danaher, it's reading like it's very historic sized, but I think here we get a really complex, different historical picture of that, that companion species origin.

Speaker4: [00:32:29] Well, thank you. Yeah, Guanajuato is a very fascinating zone because it's kind. You know, the fault line between the the Mesoamerican state, the central part of the country and the hunter gatherers America is to the north. And yeah, you know, it's again disrupting the idea of agency built around a very anthropocentric notion of humans driving it. So yes, you know, the cattle are looking for better grass and they're, you know, pushing this line and they're in the process, pushing out a lot of the species deer, fox, et cetera, that the hunting gatherers were relying upon. So, you know, the the Spanish are moving in, but you know, the Taurus guns are moving in as well. You know, the, you know, state peoples from the central part of the country, and they're the ones bringing the maize. And so so maize and wheat really kind of vied against each other as the cattle moved out. And the big difference was wheat required. Irrigation and in maize can grow, as we call it, a dry land crop. But the Spanish were very keen about producing wheat. And when you see the early kind of race race theorizing Francisco bolognaise, I cite early 1900s in Mexico. He theorizes that there are three races in the world and one is the wheat race to which they have much. He felt Mexico and the U.S. belonged a European race and then the the race of maize, the indigenous and then the rice race.

Speaker4: [00:34:18] So Asians. And you know, he makes incredible arguments about, you know, the the negative racial impact of eating maize for Mexicans. And, you know, trying to assert the primacy of wheat. So, yeah, you know, we see the plants are doing something along with these other domesticated species. And then what they're doing and their relative capacity to thrive is racialized in terms of a larger colonial and nation building dynamic. And that that's, you know, somehow is underlain by these earlier forms of exercising maize. So there's just no real clear line between when European racial thinking transforms everything because, you know, there's something racialized already about developing these distinct varieties. But the other thing is that, you know, when we focus in on the racial ideology of colonialism, it's, you know, on cost us, for instance, and in Ross's. So there's a lot of that excellent work on the Costa's paintings in Mexico, which depict, you know, 60 for different kinds of racial combinations. But the Spanish were referring to the cattle as as Raza's and the kind of through line for the bullfighting project is bulls are kept Costa. There are Rosses de Toros, but the valorous kind that can be engaged in the ring have cast or Costa. So, so clearly, these modes of thought, if you will, are not just kind of at the ideological level. This is something that people are tangibly engaging with in in the cattle and in the plants.

Speaker2: [00:36:17] Yeah. This is kind of throwback to pick up the theme of sexuality and reproduction a bit that Simone started with her cornpone moment with the cover. But I wanted to. Obviously, one of the points you make throughout the book is that humans fundamental interrelationship, entanglement co-dependence with maize, you know, has everything to do with the fact that they can't now sexually reproduce without our assistance, right? That's been part of this, the deal the two species have struck or developed over time. Yeah. And it seems as though, you know, the management of biodiversity now is becoming an increasingly important part of that reproductive labour. And I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about how climate change plays into this because obviously the management of diversity is probably been going on for a while. But now there seems to be a new emphasis on diversity and maintaining biodiversity as, in a sense, a bulwark against the unknown. You know what, we are going to find in the future? And so this idea, so do you see I mean, that seemed to be something that came up in a really interesting way in the book, and I loved it to hear you expand on it a bit.

Speaker4: [00:37:24] Yeah. Let me get back to the question of sexuality first, because of course, you took care of the species comes off of care of the self from fuko. And, you know, a lot of. Doing in this book is trying to work out trans positions of concepts. So I work social formation into species for formation with care of the self. Of course, it's attention to the kind of control of sexuality around constituting a philosophical sensibility. So, you know, I'm I'm there in this lab long bio and I'm I'm looking at these packets of Raza, which they get from simit to kind of get back a bit to the biodiversity question. It's a big storehouse for maize and wheat seed bank, if you will, and it says on the label something, I'm like, What something? What's going on here? And that's how they talk about this process of reproducing the plant using its own sexual material, getting the male pollen to fertilize the female plant. I mean, a flower. And so I'm like, Wow, OK. So here is his care of the self working out pretty much fruit code in terms, but also at the same time that sexuality that's the focus of this activity is obviously, you know, an engagement across species lines, and that's where I shift it to take care of the species. And in doing so, you know, I try to do a couple of things, you know, I shift away from George Marx's idea of follow the metaphor, you know, instead follow the species and to do that, literally not follow it as a series of constructs, but to ask what's going on with it sexually and how is it changing? And so, you know, with Mayes, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, this is the primary concern of the researchers there.

Speaker4: [00:39:26] How is this species going to be responsive to to climate change? Because we know Mexico is going to have a more unstable weather and hotter and drier and stretches. So what I was surprised to find is that in the botanical gardens, which are in a sense, the antithesis of the work, maybe they do not engage in breeding and they're very actively wedded to an attack, economical notion about the stability of species. They are seeing them vanish all around them. These species, and so they engage now in going out and collecting. And that collecting process is transforming the sort of old colonial botanical practices around gathering in samples. And it's anticipating exactly the extinction of these species. But they're there are recognizing that the process of seed banking is much more precarious than we understand. And and by that, I mean, when when you take a plant seed and you put it in suspended animation for 40 or 50 years, it loses energy to evolve. And so quite likely, when you plant it again, it will be exposed to a whole set of pathogens that have mutated and evolved in those intervening years, and it will have no capacity to defend itself against that.

Speaker4: [00:41:02] So the botanists are beginning to think about population much the way fuko articulates that concept, which importantly was an idea that came out of depopulation during the 30 year war. And you know, this problem of how do you repopulate an area that's been completely devastated in terms of humans, but now we're thinking populations somewhat differently. So they're they're recognizing that the Botanical Garden has an important role to play. But the seed banks that they're formulating through a very active circulation of this plant material, you know, can't simply be in isolation, but they don't have a basis to breed this stuff. So they're there are working out. How do you repopulate these plant species? And they run into in Spain in particular, a lot of confusion about, well, is this native or not? And, you know, plants are in motion a difficult question to to answer. So yes, you know, the botanical gardens are quite fascinating sites for seeing how people are thinking about plants and on one hand, trying to to maintain a taxonomic sensibility. And then at the other hand, think in terms of what I'm calling care of the species and attention to their interiority and importantly, their malleability. The responsiveness to. Changing settings and climates.

Speaker3: [00:42:36] I mean, John, I think you could write an entire book honestly about this process of solving using kind of queer theory, and it's it's fascinating. I mean, you could yes, I have no doubt about it. I mean, if you brought in kind of like queer theory and different sort of interpretations of sexuality, that's kind of the hermaphrodite ism that gets built into this idea of solving this because you, you point out so the plant sort of pollinates itself, but only through the manipulation literally of humans controlling the plant in different ways because the plant itself, if we want to give that agency, wants to pollinate through wind borne measures, right? That's it's supposed to drift across fields and play. But these humans are carefully watching it and controlling it. And I love this scene where you're with. Tanya is her name, and one of the key things is that you have to what is she call? Is she you have to bag the female growth. So she says, as soon as you see the female part emerge long before the silks come out, you need to cover it. You need to preserve it. So this is the time that you need to cover it. And then she goes and she covers over this female extension. And you know, if you wait until the silks are out, it's too late. You won't know anything about the pollen that fertilized it. So they're trying to preserve the purity not only of the rasa of this maze, but also the purity of the reproductive plant. It's like this kind of plant through centric chastity belt. I mean, you

Speaker2: [00:44:14] Get a veil on that plant. Wow, that's

Speaker3: [00:44:16] Impossible. It's just it's amazing. Anyhow, there's not really a question there, except to

Speaker4: [00:44:21] Say that it's just, yeah, you know, sex and brown paper bags is what it comes down to that it's kind of odd, you know? Yeah, you know, it's not just the purity of the plant, it's the possibility of generating knowledge about its reproduction. And that's kind of what sets care of the species apart from domestication and kind of maintenance of species being, yeah, you know, they have to get the sex right. And that's their basis then for figuring out what's happening with the biodiversity within this. So they're they yourself also not just to reproduce the ROS, but to move a little, you know, genetic portion from the Rasa into the hybrid variety, you know, and there's a fascinating sexual history to amaze, which is something, you know, I hadn't imagined a species having a sexual history. It's there and that's where we get hybrids from. And you know, hybrid is, you know, one of these other terms. You know, a lot of this. I'm like, Oh, like, I'm trying to do these trans positions and I way we've already been doing that because like, you know, cultural anthropologists pick up hybrid from botanists in the nineteen nineties.

Speaker4: [00:45:35] And, you know, we sort of naturalize it as one of our concepts. But really, you know, it's it's another case of these trans positions and I'm working here. But the sexuality, yes, you know, once they move that and so they self and they reproduce and reproduce until it gets more homogeneous and they can identify exactly with any particular plant which portion of that Ross is interacting and. And the key thing here about sex is that this is not transgenic where you're moving through a kind of surgical process portion of genetic material. This is old fashioned inbreeding and in one of the geneticists says that, you know, we're we're basically just doing what farmers have long done. You know, it's not very high tech at the level of the plants where you when you get to generate this afterlife of data, which is only possible on the basis of very rigorously controlling the sexual reproduction. You know, that's where it gets far more high tech and in very complicated. But really, it just comes down to, you know, very long standing practices of directing the sexual reproduction of a domesticated species. One of the other things

Speaker2: [00:46:53] I found really great in this book is how you set up this shift from follow the metaphor to follow the species. But then you have this chapter where you basically say species don't exist. Exclamation point. I added that and you know, you talk about how botanists are kind of moving, maybe in some ways towards alter taxonomies or taxonomic thinking. And I thought, that's a really exciting thing for folks kind of in the humanities to think about, too.

Speaker4: [00:47:19] Yes. So, you know, like, you know, I go in there again with this social constructivist sensibility. And so like, you know, I'm I'm looking for that right? And you know, the bodies are the first ones who tell me that species. Don't exist. They're very straightforward. But their job is identifying species, and they're incredibly good at it, and they're immensely knowledgeable about it. They have a capacity to alternate between a kind of constructivist view. A species is a theory, and they're engaged in theorizing species to very meticulously delineating the difference between life forms within a genus such as it's very clear. So taxonomy, it's, you know, fascinating. It's as a field science. Botany is very much like ethnography. We go out there, we try to do these identifications in the field and and theorize them happening in botany. That's very unnerving is the turn to genetics. So you have the increasing dominance of genetic analysis. It gets all the funding. That's the cool stuff. Who cares about herbarium? They're old. But when botanists doing genetic analysis go out and just take little samples of plants, much like they do long a bio. They make no effort to establish in taxonomic terms that they've got the right plant.

Speaker4: [00:48:51] And so the taxonomists are like, you guys are bringing in these things and you're doing these two genetic analysis, but that's the wrong plan. You actually mis identified that. And so it's a precarious moment because this immense knowledge base the capacity to go out and identify a species based on an understanding its form. It's it's it's sexual tendencies, et cetera, is going to dissolve and be replaced with a far less reliable form of identification genetics. And it's one that really is not as transmissible to the rest of the world. The way botany is. Botany is hard. I know that firsthand because I had to learn it and I only have a very cursory grasp of it, but it is something that I actually could acquire, and that's what botanical gardens are designed to do. There's like here are these species that show you not just the the species, but the genus and identifying those and then figuring out species within them. That is something that is eminently transmissible. Genetic analysis of plants is not, and that's where we run a real risk at losing our capacity to to to know plants.

Speaker3: [00:50:13] One of the other themes that comes out throughout the book that I think is really critical is our kind of vague. As humans are rather vague attunement to the the the planto sphere, what can the Erebus sphere? I don't know what could we call it, but

Speaker4: [00:50:32] Yeah, well, we'll plant blindness. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:50:36] Yeah, it's a sort of. And you come to this where, you know, sort of move among plants but don't recognize them or their their living ness. You know, most of the time. And yet we have so much recognition generally around animal species. I should say we in a kind of probably global north hyper modernity, postmodernity kind of mode. I don't want to do a general human universal we and that sense. But but like one of the points you make is that many of us don't really know species of plants like we know. I think it was Genesis, right? So marigolds or tulips or something like that? Right. Our ordering is is of a higher order, a more general order. And in fact, we don't really know species of plant like that kind of intimate difference we don't really recognize. And so all I'm trying to get to a point that you also make, which is around kind of anthropological reflexivity 2.0, maybe a turn towards recognizing a subject's plant. The second wave of reflexivity that encounter with non-human subjects like plants and you spend some time really thinking deeply through how do you engage a plant as subject and how do you maybe interview them or capture them ethnographic without resorting to representation alone? And so I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that. You know that that experience or how how that was to kind of come to that encounter with the non-human interlocutor?

Speaker4: [00:52:10] Yeah, it was a gradual process. I kind of intuited early on as I was giving up on social construction as my main analytical frame. I was like, OK, well, what is there? Then, you know, at some point I was like, OK, I've got to be able to think about these plants. And so, yes, I settle on this sort of interview for. Format, because I'm an ethnographer. That's what you do, and as soon as I get into trying to do this and I draw on a number of really inventive people. Natasha Meyers in particular and Craig Holdridge, you know, like there are these tactics for, you know, basically kind of meditating on a plant where you really let it become part of your of your thinking. And you know, the first thing that happened when I'm trying to do that is like, I realized, Oh, this is so uncomfortable and difficult and it's painful and it's hot and sunny. And and that's where I'm like, Oh, here are all the ways that my species being keeps me from being able to interact with this life form. It's like the things that it craves are really making my life precarious. And, you know, so, so so that was one stage.

Speaker4: [00:53:24] And then, you know, additionally, like, I'm noticing my specifics, you know, here we are in a botanical garden, which is a place given over to a tent to a plants, and every single person just was kind of drifting by and maybe giving a casual look here and there at the plant. But really, you know, just not being able to stop and pay attention to it. So, you know, that's where I started seeing the challenge. So there's a lot going on there. You know, one of these techniques is that you try to draw the plant so you know, you're trying to get your attention fixated on it. And you know, you know, Coleridge, who advocates this, says this is the antithesis of taxonomy. But like, I'm hanging out with these botanists and all of the articles that they're suggesting to me or I'm finding all have drawings because they can actually direct attention. So I began to to realize, wait a minute, this kind of bifurcation about, well, you know, plant thinking and science are antithetical, is ill founded. So it went through this work of learning to describe plants and to draw them. And that gave me this capacity, you know, let this plant kind of grow in my head and wake up and I go, Oh my God, there's the center and this room where it's going there, what's going on? So, you know, it's not like I ever achieve a kind of unmediated proximity with them.

Speaker4: [00:54:56] But I do make use of ethnographic techniques to one change my thinking to make me more reflexive about our species kind of an ability to I think about plants as much as we have what you actually calls a culture of plants. And then thirdly to, you know, write about them in a way that botanists wouldn't. For the botanist, the descriptive work on this rubric is done. You know, they've they are done theorizing it. But what I can see is that, you know, through ethnographic detail, I can engage in theorizing that species in a very local setting as it's vying against the dwarf palm and and the and the horsetail in this little corner of Spain that's designed as an argument around Valencia and Flora. And you know, that just becomes very fascinating and achieves the effect of making me much more attentive to the two plants and not simply dependent on analyzing that area in ideological terms as an argument about regional identity in Spain.

Speaker2: [00:56:15] Yeah, I just have one last point on. We could talk to you about plants for a long time, John, obviously, but. Sure. Last thing I wanted to say is I heard maybe a month ago an ecological philosopher tell this story about the weeping willow tree. And I don't know if you've heard it or not, but you know, we think of, you know, in that kind of in that anthropomorphic way, the story behind the Weeping Willow is that it kind of looks sad because it's all hangdog and, you know, it's hanging down. But in fact, he said that and I'll have to verify this somewhere else. But but that in fact, the reason why the weeping willow is called is because it releases a kind, some kind of compound into the air that that has a kind of effect on humans that kind of inspires affect of some kind. So it actually is, you know, this kind of these these Chemo's ferric transfers between plants and humans were probably just at the beginning of understanding to what extent, you know, we're in a kind of atmospheric way, deeply intimately connected to the plants of the plant through placein.

Speaker3: [00:57:14] Wow. So weeping willows make you cry, huh?

Speaker2: [00:57:16] Yeah. Well, I guess that was the story he told, and I can't verify it, but but I'm

Speaker4: [00:57:21] Interested by it. That was one of the things I struggled with. Like, I'm I'm smelling these plants and the aromas on coming, but I don't have the capacity to sort of objectify and. Analyze it, and that's where I'm like, Oh, geez. A botanist would be very helpful here, right? And I'm able to think about whether I need to in order to advance this kind of ethnographic work. It would really take more collaboration with scientists, basically. And you know, there's an immense amount of sociality to plants, know they're exchanging communications and resources at the level of of roots, certainly, but also they're odorants, the pollens. And I can't really analyze that. I know as long a bio there, there are very good at that. So there's a kind of a limit there. But it's also, I think, an opening to yes, I want to know more about what exactly chemically is going on with the the weeping willow and how that plays into our myths or associations with it. But also, how is that affecting us at the kind of species level? And and that's where I see, I think the kind of real potential here for, you know, working with non-human subjects is that it's an opportunity to tap the expertise of scientists broadly and not just, you know, to kind of deconstruct it as so social costs, but to incorporate it in our analyses.

Speaker3: [00:58:53] Right on. So we've been really avid about talking about the book, and it's amazing and I have like 20 more questions, but I know we don't have time for 20 more questions. So because I think we have three more things we want to talk about, one of them is horses, the other one is bulls and bullfighting. And then, I believe, is it a historical novel that you're working on?

Speaker4: [00:59:12] Historical novel? Yeah. In real quick fashion, the horses. So I did a project in Spain, in Galicia and Rapa Das Bastos, shaving or shearing the beasts. And there are these wild horses. There's about nine to fifteen thousand of them in that northwest Iberian Peninsula, and they live by forage all year, and they're subject to pretty intense predation by by wolves. And then every summer in these villages, people go up and herd up the horses and and then know, take them down and shave off their manes and shave off their their tails and then turn them loose again. And this ritual has been going on for, you know, at least in terms of the historical record five hundred years. But there's petroglyphs in that area that show humans doing this probably three thousand years ago or longer. So it's a fascinating ritual, but I'm like, OK, wait a minute, I want to open up the ethnographic subject. And so I want to do ethnography of the horses, and we have the very powerful model of what ethnography is, and it's basically geared and the Balinese cockfight, right? That kind of, you know, deep reading model and gets it is very clear. You know, the cocks don't matter. What the Balinese care about is their status. The cocks are only there as a medium for culture. And so I'm I asked a very simple question Can I invert that? Instead of saying the horses are only these kinds of representations, can I determine what happens to them socially through the course of this ritual? And it's it's really rather striking because the horses up on these ranges live in indistinct bands and horses are very similar to us, a very social species.

Speaker4: [01:01:12] They develop kind of friend stranger rituals, you know, sorting out greetings, et cetera. And so the band structure is highly developed. But during this ritual, the rapid does best. These horses are forced together, so you will have up to seven hundred horses penned up. And this is, you know, a very disturbing experience and the rapper does business in Sauceda is very distinctive because it goes on for for for several days. And what I found was, you know, so like first, like, OK, I've got to learn how to do horse. And I was able to participate in a survey in that region done by Laura Lagos at the University of Santiago, Santiago de Compostela. And so I got to participate with her going out, you know, observing the horses, learning eat the Grahams like aloe grooming and affiliated behavior and such. And then I got to try it out in the range above Sahibzada. In advance of the the rapa, I observed several bands kind of determine their social dynamics, and then I followed them through this process and it's really quite quite fast.

Speaker4: [01:02:26] And because the social order breaks down, you know, the band structure collapses. There's. The falls are are taken away from the mayors. The males are culled, they're they're kept in a pensive. Their sets are confused and the mayors can't identify them or vice versa. And then in the Curragh in the ring, where the shaving takes place, the stallions are fighting each other and the mayors are biting and kicking it. It's just, you know, that kind of like collapse of the social contract, just violence and mayhem. But then gradually the mayors that I followed do the kind of social work of putting it all back together in the pitch. The kind of big pasture where the horses are kept before and after the shearing. They go and find the stallion and they kind of recreate the the core at least of the band structure. And as well, like during the raw, there's so like I'm using a lot of of golf concepts, face civil inattention line, et cetera. And, you know, horses, it's quite striking. They have a lot of the same facial musculature that humans do. So obviously, the cranial morphology is different, but the muscles around the mouth, the eyes, et cetera, are very similar. So they they use face, you know, quite literally as the medium of social interaction. Gaze is very similar for them.

Speaker4: [01:04:09] Gaze is a conduit for affection and aggression, so they're very sophisticated in managing it. They don't want to stare at each other. And that was one of the first things I learned. Don't stare at them and you hear this with our primates as well. So I'm able to watch their rituals around maintaining the the the social gaze be completely stressed out because they're cramped face to face their faces are crashing into each other at some point about, you know, 20 25 minutes into this, you know, shearing, you see them suddenly tolerating these transgressions. So like one horse has to put its face on the rump of another one, or they're stuck side by side. And instead of attacking or, you know, doing their threat gestures, they really resort to what I think Goffin calls civil inattention. They stop paying, you know, treating that as a threat or as a source of affection. And I'm speculating that this is what Victor Turner talks about as community ties. There's this moment where there's a leveling of all of their social differences and in the front in the face of the kind of species level threat that they're facing from the humans and that they sociality is restored and they can practice civil and attention, but not via the band structure within that tumult of thrashing horses. So I think that's pretty fascinating.

Speaker2: [01:05:48] Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker3: [01:05:50] I love it, and I didn't. I didn't know about the musculature of the face structure. That's fascinating. So you're about to go off to Peru, correct, to do some work on Latin American bullfighting?

Speaker4: [01:06:01] Yeah. So, you know, there's an enormous amount written on it in Spain and nothing that I can find, at least in English, on it in Latin America, but it's very extensive there. So, you know, the through line, there is a couple of through lines like I mentioned, there's Costa and Rosa with the bulls, but you know, this is ritual. It can real fundamental level and ritual, I've learned, is actually, you know, one of these key concepts that transpose is very well across species lines because all vertebrates have ritual. This is what ecologists learn. This is a conventional behavior that is primarily expressive is, you know, it's symbolic. It's conveying a stance rather than simply resorting to to violence, et cetera. So the bulls, I'm curious in Peru, you know, it's the oldest site for the Carita de Toros in the Americas. But over the last decade, it's expanded hugely into the the hinterlands. And I'm wondering what's going on with that. But I'm also seeing it as a way to think about cultural form in relation to ritual. So, you know, the bull and bull rituals go back nine thousand years, at least Chateau Holyoake. And so I want to be able to. You think through anthropologist tradition of doing analysis of ritual at that level and see what I can do differently when I'm thinking about a life form at its core rather than, you know, its symbolic dimension, and I'm hoping that this is going to be a trilogy. Why do the cattle trilogy? I mean, you know, cattle, you get back to the, et cetera. You know, this is a very long standing interest of cultural anthropology, and I want to do a book on Longhorns breed and symbol because of course, you know, we have the Longhorn here and then hopefully end up in Botswana and looking at cattle culture there in South Africa. Cool. Wow. You know, southern Africa. Yeah.

Speaker3: [01:08:23] I'm going to call it the bovine turn, John. The bovine bovine turn. The good

Speaker2: [01:08:29] Turn.

Speaker4: [01:08:30] You know, I don't have much to like, say now because I haven't gone yet. I've just been kind of scurrying to amass what kind of information I can. I leave on Monday, and maybe we can make this the subject of another podcast when I get a little bit more of it under my belt. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker2: [01:08:48] Would you consider the invitation offered open invitation to come back any time? And we'll have you. We're going to have to have you in Houston and our new podcast studio so we can we can all sit around and have have a beer if we want and just chat.

Speaker4: [01:09:03] I love that

Speaker3: [01:09:04] You can sit around and have fun. Have a beer and talk Longhorns and other cows.

Speaker2: [01:09:08] So at least give us the name of your historical novel, though. Yeah. Give us the elevator

Speaker4: [01:09:13] Pitch, you know? You know, I don't have the name yet. That's really horrible. But let me just just say, you know, I didn't expect to write one, but I just did a field trip in Ireland and I was interested in the Connemara ponies because they're supposed to be this cross between Icelandic breed that the Vikings brought down. And these Spanish breeds from the wreck of the armada. And so I get then find out that that's kind of more at the level of legend. But then there's also this very powerful Irish legend, perhaps about the Black Irish, you know, coming out of the the Spanish Armada. And so I decided I've got to write a novel about the wrecking of these ships. So the Spanish galleons are kind of analogous to a seven forty seven, both in terms of who were technologically advanced and carried about, you know, four hundred people. So you had twenty two of these crash into the Irish coast and know late summer fifteen, eighty eight and from the state records, you know, the sheriff's reports, the governors, et cetera. They were just the English were were slaughtering the Spanish on the beach. They were mass executions, et cetera. And it doesn't seem possible that any of them got through. But there's a very strong cultural idea that they did, and it's one that melds with when I, you know, in Galicia, there's a Celtic revival there and the music, it's stunning.

Speaker4: [01:10:48] You're like, I'll be sitting in a bar, hearing a jam session, and it sounds like I'm in Galway. But then like the melody shifts into these quarter tones and I hear this Arabic influence that it's certainly not there in Galway. So I'm trying to figure out how do I talk like this? How do I address it? Because the historical record is insufficient? Well, you know, the answer is to write a novel about it and to do something kind of good ethnographic fashion. I am gathering up all these stories, all the kind of folk and myth tales and then thinking about the poetic forms, the ballads, the melodies and the fact that there were a great deal of exchanges, you know, at least at the cultural level between that corner of Spain and Western Ireland. So the only way to ask this question or to answer, I think this question about the Spanish presence in Ireland is through a novel and I've never written one and I never planned on doing it. But it will probably take me a decade, but that's what I'm going to do in my free time. Oh, that's

Speaker3: [01:11:56] Great. Wow, that's brilliant. Well, that's admirable.

Speaker2: [01:11:59] Yeah, that's it is admirable and inspiring. As far as all, your work is

Speaker4: [01:12:06] Well coming from you to that. That's great praise. I appreciate that it's it's probably ridiculous too, but we'll see.

Speaker3: [01:12:14] I want to read it. It sounds good. It sounds super, super cool

Speaker4: [01:12:18] And complicated drafts.

Speaker3: [01:12:20] Yeah.

Speaker4: [01:12:20] Ok, good. I'll enlist you as a reader.

Speaker2: [01:12:23] Yes, absolutely. I think we should all be committing ourselves to serious amateurism to kind of counteract the the negative sides of narrowing ourselves and focus. Saying I'm just doing a few things, so, John, it's been such a delight having you on the line with us, and so looking forward to the next time we meet, we're going to have to plan a trip out to Austin sometime soon.

Speaker1: [01:12:43] Yeah, I'm going to go to Austin.

Speaker2: [01:12:45] I think we have yeah.

Speaker3: [01:12:47] Yeah, come in.

Speaker4: [01:12:48] I'll try to find it on my own. Yes, I hope so. It would be so much fun. That would be. We'll get that beer.

Speaker2: [01:12:55] Yeah, we'll get that. You read us.

Speaker3: [01:12:57] Yes, I agree. That's exactly. Yeah.

Speaker2: [01:13:01] All right, man. Until then, have a wonderful thank you so much. Wonderful trip.

Speaker4: [01:13:04] Thank you. Thank you. Good luck to you, and thank you for the excellent questions and the wonderful dialogue. I get so much out of it. I just can't express that enough.