A RECORDING OF MY FIRST APPEARANCE ON NATIONAL RADIO

I appeared on Australian National Radio two weeks ago.

You can listen to the recording of it here:

 

A RECORDING OF MY FIRST NATIONAL RADIO APPEARANCE

 

I performed the following poems and talked about the meaning of my work.

 

REVELATA DYSMORPHOLOGIA ( A LYRICAL TRANSMOGRIFICATION )

REVELATA SUBTERRANEA ( A POETIC MUTATION )

 

 

 

 

 

The radio station has also provided a transcript of the show and I include it below. As can be seen, I had some illustrious company on the program, including Richard Dawkins and Phillip Adams.

 

 

The Transcript

 

Natasha Mitchell: All in the Mind on ABC Radio National and Natasha Mitchell emerging today from the curious depths of ABC's gene pool project, it's mighty interesting down here.
I'm talking about the gene pool we asked you to contribute stories, sounds and images to earlier this year, exploring the themes of evolution, mutation and change in whatever way you wanted because of course genes mutate but so do bodies, brains and behaviours as do cultures, art forms, languages, relationships, everything is on the move.

And we also asked you to have a go at mutating the contributions of others by remixing them and mashing them up. So to mark this week's 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species, today a bit of an audio experiment really on evolution.

Evolution, it's a word originally derived from the Latin for an unrolling or an opening, so let's open the gene pool to share our remix of some of your pieces. And you can explore further and keep contributing over at our social media site pool.org.au so let's mutate.
Cameron Semmons: In the beginning...
Cameron Semmons

Boris Glickman: I guess basically what I like to do is just change things upside down. When you turn things upside down you get a completely different perspective on things and things that evolve are not usually seen from the normal perspectives become visible. In such a way you can discover very deep secrets. For instance truth about existence, about the world, you don't usually see when you look at things from a normal perspective.
Boris Glickman: So far I have found the right eternal questions.

Steven Gould : Is natural selection of creative force?

Richard Dawkins: You know it survived because its descendants are still with us but I wouldn't be surprised if it survived in that primeval sea only by the skin of its teeth. What matters is that not that it was good at surviving what interests us is its potential to evolve.
ABC open archives

Boris Glickman: Revelata Dysmorphologica: A Lyrical Transmogrification
Boris

Valerie Curtis: Stuff that's sticky and gooey and warm.
ABC open archives

Boris Glickman: Reading Revelata Dysmorphologica: A Lyrical Transmogrification
Boris

It started out inconspicuously,
inauspiciously,
a small pimple
on the lower left of his back,
something that no one
would ever give a second glance at.
It didn't even itch,
so demanded no instinctive scratching.

Valerie Curtis: It's much more likely to harbour pathogenic bacteria than stuff that's cold, or frozen, or stuff that's been cooked in a fire for example or stuff that's dry.
ABC open archives

Boris Glickman: Revelata Dysmorphologica: A Lyrical Transmogrification

But
it grew
and grew,
developing into
a small cyst at first,
then into a larger and larger one
acquiring along the way the powers
of perception, cognition, speech, reason.
It became more and more dominant
in the running of his life til
there came a point
when he realised
he had become
the boil.

Valerie Curtis: We would tend to be because evolution has equipped us with if you like statistical process in the past of people who liked gooey, sticky stuff and liked putting their fingers in poo for example, they died out, they didn't have mates, they didn't pass on their genes.
ABC open archives

Music: AgedMusic Andrews Liver salts
AgedMusic

Boris Glickman: Reading ""Revelata Dysmorphologica: A Lyrical Transmogrification"

He now was the awkward
ugly lump of shapeless,
useless flesh that needed
to be amputated
at the soonest possible opportunity,
discarded with other medical waste,
or better still
pickled and preserved
for eternity as a freakish
anatomical occurrence-
a talking, reasoning pustule
that apparently possessed
all the features of a well developed human being.

Valerie Curtis: People who were a bit more squeamish and a bit more careful tended not to get so sick, tended to as a result be better mate prospects and tended to have healthier kids.
ABC open archives

Boris Glickman: Reading Revelata Dysmorphologica: A Lyrical Transmogrification

He clearly saw how all this time
he'd deluded himself
into believing that he was a real person
who deserved love,
companionship,
all the rights
that every member of society should possess
whereas
he was just a cyst
that somehow grew,
assuming the proportions,
the attributes of a person.

Natasha Mitchell: Boris Glickman, welcome to All in the Mind.

Boris Glickman: Thank you very much Natasha it's wonderful to be here.

Natasha Mitchell: Now tell us about this poem, Revelata Dysmorphologica ?

Boris Glickman: , Revelata Dysmorphologica like many of my poems and short stories came to me in a dream, a big influence of Kafka in particular Metamorphosis.

Natasha Mitchell: What is the Kafka short story - remind us?

Boris Glickman: Well basically it's about a travelling salesman who wakes up one morning and finds that he's become a giant insect. The rest of the story deals with his way of trying to adjust to his new form and how his family reacts to him.

You know he feels pretty bad about himself basically. I think this poem pretty much outdoes Kafka at his own game because it goes even further in a total annihilation of the protagonist ego, identity, and the amount of self loathing that is expressed by the protagonist in this poem I think.
I guess one of the levels I'm exploring is the nature of identity, how all of us have the shadow present, our dark self, where most of our self-loathing and negative emotions come from and this poem materialises that nebulous shadow that we all possess. So yes, as you said on one level he actually becomes the ball.

Natasha Mitchell: It's actually comical on one level isn't it, that it's profoundly despairing at another. Boris you say that this came to you in a dream, a dream or a nightmare?

Boris Glickman: I guess I'm so used to all this weird and wonderful scenarios in my dream that it's no longer a nightmare. Usually I take it straight away as an inspiration and write them down. It is a frightening scenario but for me it's like a mother lode of inspiration.

Natasha Mitchell: You know the gene pool project has been about collecting and is about collecting people's responses to the idea of change, to the idea or concept of evolution. These themes really speak in your work, especially this one.

Boris Glickman: Yes, our chance trans-mutation, those are things that are important to me on the personal level, I'm always interested in growing and changing, reaching for the next layer. And I think that translates into my work.

Cameron Semmons: Let us hypothesise.
Cameron Semmens

Martin Harrison:How crucial do you think this is for poetry that it incorporates I suppose not only biological evolutionary ecological discoveries but perhaps even the more intractable ones such as the daunting theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

ABC open archives

Boris Glickman: Revalata, Subterranea. A poetic mutation.
Boris

Mark O'Connor: It perhaps could be argued that all these great 20th century theoretical and some would argue even mythological constructs should have a place in modern poetry and yet they very rarely do.
ABC open archives

Music: 'Things' by AgedMusic
AgedMusic

Boris Glickman: Reading Revalata, Subterranea

One night
my friends and I descended
into the sewers
underneath the metropolis
and discovered the most unusual eel like creatures
lounging indolently
on the concrete banks of the subterranean river.
There they were
lying close to the river's edge,
only deigning to bestir,
dip their heads languidly
into the passing current,
when a particularly choice morsel
of human waste flowed by.
Their appearance overpowered me
with its repulsiveness.

Richard Dawkins:Now presumably the first segmented ancestor of a centipede and the same goes for our own first segmented ancestor.
Richard Dawkins :Segmented ancestor of a centipede.
ABC open archives

Music: Some thing...by Mandrillus
mandrillus

Richard Dawkins: Would have been a monstrous freak/ It had a double body or a triple body etc where its parents had a nice, tidy single body.
ABC open archives

Boris Glickman: Reading Revalata, Subterranea
How could evolution ever
come up with such a horrible abomination?
I remember wondering to myself
How could Nature ever allow
such a glaring insult against Herself?
to arise and flourish,
such a travesty,
such a betrayal,
such a perversion of the very natural order.

Yet, when I looked closer
at these anathemas,
a most astounding feature
revealed itself to me.

Somehow through some playful whim
of the Goddess who directs and
oversees their evolutionary process,
these overgrown worms developed human faces,
nay, not just human faces
but visages of angelic beauty
such that no earthly woman would ever dare to possess,
lest the gods became spiteful and jealous.
This discovery was so unexpected,
the radiance of their mien so intense,
I stood transfixed
unable to take my gaze
even for an instant
away from these heavenly creatures.
Their eyes looked at me
with all the cognition of a person,
their facial expressions were those
of kindness, serenity, wisdom.

There were two over to the left,
holding their heads close to one another,
gazing deeply,
just like two lovers into each other's eyes.
Suddenly I felt an odd sort of compassion for them

Richard Dawkins : Now presumably, the first segmented ancestor of a centipede and the same goes for our own first segmented ancestor...would have been a monsterous freak. It had a double body or a triple body etc, where its parents had a nice tidy single body...Show and tell.
ABC open archives

Boris Glickman:
And this little poem of mine actually has attracted more different interpretations than any other of my work. But for me my personal interpretation is that this is an allegory, the sewers is a clear symbol of the unconscious mind and the eels are the shadow self, the protagonists by seeing the beauty of these eels is actually able to accept his shadow self, accept himself in all of his different facets. That's the psychological interpretation of it.

Natasha Mitchell: So there's a real process of acceptance.

Boris Glickman: Acceptance of one's self, yes.

Natasha Mitchell: So from self hatred you can evolve in a sense a self love.
Boris Glickman: Yes, that's right, but then again this other interpretations have been in a sense of a spiritual journey, of finding beauty in everything, even in these horrible creatures, of seeing the beauty in all of evolution's creations. There's also been a humorous kind of interpretation where it's a story set in the future of genetic engineering that's gone horribly wrong.

Natasha Mitchell: How so?

Boris Glickman: Well basically they were working perhaps on these kind of creatures and somehow they were able to make them have human faces.

Natasha Mitchell: Chimera?

Boris Glickman: Chimera, chimera creatures.

Natasha Mitchell: An eel with a human face that mirrors our own.

Boris Glickman: That's right.

Natasha Mitchell: Spooky.

Boris Glickman: Also it can be seen as a satire on how we always put ourselves above the rest of the world, the animal world and how we always see ourselves as having the beauty that other creatures don't have. And here are these disgusting creatures that actually, their faces have more beauty to them than any earthly woman possesses.

Natasha Mitchell: Interestingly, change is part of your own life because you were born in the Soviet Union.

Boris Glickman: That's right.

Natasha Mitchell: When did you come to Australia?

Boris Glickman: I came in '81.

Natasha Mitchell: As a kid?

Boris Glickman: As a kid and obviously it's an enormous culture shock coming from a country with a communist government and I would say that I probably am still going through an adjustment process. You can never really adjust, you can gradually adapt to the new surroundings but you always have that past there behind you.

Natasha Mitchell: And Boris Glickman is one of our contributors to Radio National's gene pool project this year on our social media site pool.org.au.

This is All in the Mind with me Natasha Mitchell going global on Radio Australia and as podcast and today a playful remix of some of your contributions to our gene pool project to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Phillip Adams : Do you think it's really possible to reconcile evolution and the absolute of god?
ABC open archives

Gene Pool contribution: "Evolution + GOD =?" by Mandrillus
mandrillus

Emilia: I'm an atheist.
DSI

John Durant : Well there are still great steaming resources of ignorance in biology around.
ABC open archives

Stephen Jay Gould: Now if you want to overturn that I think that in its most radical sense that's exactly what Darwin was trying to do with the theory of natural selection, not to cause us to disbelieve in God but to get away from that argument that all apparent higher order harmony is the direct production of God's benevolence.

Stephen Jay Gould: Evolution from cosmic stardust to human society is a comprehensive and continuous process. It transforms the world's stuff, it is creative in the sense that during the process new and more complex levels of organisation are progressively attained.
It's not that natural selection is a creative force.

Richard Dawkins: It is creative, evolved?
ABC open archives

Cameron Semmons: The Bible meets Origin of the Species in No Man's land for Peace Talks. Written and read by Cameron Simmons.
Cameron Semmons
Cameron Semmons:

In the beginning was a garden and an apple.
In the beginning of religion
Adam ate the apple from the tree resulting in The Fall.
In the beginning of science
Newton sat beneath a tree and was hit by a falling
apple!
Adam discovered the gravity of disobedience
while Newton discovered the law of gravity.
From Adam we carry original sin,
from Newton we value original thought.

Phillip Adams :Do you think it is really possible to recognise evolution and a belief in God?

Cameron Semmons:

Each episode, in its essence,
is a collision with consequence,
a comprehension of constants.
the truth of the word of God
and the truth of the laws of Nature.
In the new beginnings
was a birth in a town called Bethlehem
and a berth on a boat called the Beagle.
The Holy Spirit came down on Jesus like a dove
while natural selection came to Darwin through the
finch.
Jesus defeated death on the Hill of Golgotha
while Darwin deduced origins from the isle of the Galapagos.
Jesus taught us revolution
while Darwin thought up evolution.

'Intelligent design' by Kerry Ashwin

Richard Dawkins: In some senses we are shaved monkeys, we're much more than that but it's Darwin who taught us that.

Kay Ashwin:Scientists today have found the answer to one of the mysteries of the universe.

Does God have power tools? The unequivocal answer is yes.

Are we DIY?

Is our evolution a school project?

But this reporter wants to know where is the power outlet?
Kerry Ashwin

Julian Durant : If there is life elsewhere in the universe we so far know nothing about the details. It may be based on silicone chemistry rather than carbon chemistry, it may flourish near the centre of hot stars or it may flourish near the absolute zero temperature, it may be too small or too large for us to see or apprehend with our senses. But one thing I believe we can already be sure of it will have evolved by a form of Darwinian selection and this is why for me the most important thing Darwinism has to offer is his explanation of adaptation.
ABC open archives

Cameron Semmons : Reading The Bible Meets Origin of the Species in No Man's Land for Peace Talks
Cameron Semmons

But could evolution ever have evolved
without the revolution that Jesus divulged?
Does the Origin of the Species
owe its origin to the Sermon on the Mount?
Let us hypothesise
that from the fruit of the spirit
came the seeds of the fruit of science
i.e. from love, joy and grace
came the space to speculate.
from faith, patience and peace
came the room for research to increase;
from kindness, goodness and gentleness
came ethics, methodology and objectivity.
Within Christendom's Fruit Salad of Virtues...

Emilia:Always searching for an ultimate answer.
DSI

Boris Glickman: Up until a few years back I saw science as the way for me to find the truth that I was searching and I must admit I became disillusioned with science, with formal science.

I thought it was the absolute truth but as I started science, specially physics further and further, I saw that there's a plethora of theories, ideas and I became quite disillusioned so for me writing became the new way of searching for truth that I used to search through in science.

It might appear to be quite yet, there is a kind of disparity between say hard sciences like maths, physics and spirituality and there was always within me this tension.

Natasha Mitchell: It's a friction almost isn't it?

Boris Glickman: A friction pulling in two different directions.

Natasha Mitchell: But your writing brings them together in a very interesting way.

Boris Glickman: Even though inside myself I might not necessarily have been able to resolve those tensions.

Richard Aedy :Did you know Darwin married his cousin?
Gene Pool contribution: FiShHeaD - "Let's eat" by Aged Music
AgedMusic

Stephen Jay Gould: And the only thing that is really happening out there in nature is organisms struggling not for the higher order good but for their personal reproductive success. The most private personal thing and nothing else - now that's a radical argument.
ABC open archives

Geoffrey Miller: Why are people not getting happier showing off wealth and status to others a consumerist culture fosters widespread narcissism.

Work and Shopping. Geoffrey Miller:

Work and Shopping. The narcissist is very focussed on their self interest but they try to achieve their social and sexual goals through display, relentless, relentless display of their personal qualities to others combined with very little empathy for the interest of others. Socially popular, sexually attractive, social status, the unconscious motives that are driving consumption.

Natasha Mitchell: So in a sense what we buy has become a proxy for what you consider to be a fundamentally human nature, this desire to display ourselves to others so that we may reproduce. Gene Pool contribution: Remix of ABC Radio National interview with Geoffrey Miller by Pip Shea
pipshea

Stephen Jay Gould : And that's all. Now if that sounds to you like Adam Smith's economics translated into nature - it's no accident because one of those interesting conclusions of recent historical research has shown the tie of...

Geoffrey Miller :Work and shopping.

Stephen Jay Gould : ...Darwin's development of the Theory of Natural Selection in 1838, to his interest on the particular view of individuality in this thought of Adam Smith and the Scottish economists, it is the same argument.

Geoffrey Miller :Work and shopping.

Stephen Jay Gould : Namely that if you want the most rationally ordered economy you don't get all the smart people sitting around a table and pass laws for higher order, harmony of economies Adam Smith argued, you do something that seems paradoxically opposite, you let individuals struggle for profit.
ABC open archives

Geoffrey Miller :Work and shopping.

Stephen Jay Gould: And the ones that do it well, knock out the others and balance each other out and you get the maximal system to the action of the invisible hand - right. The analogue of profit in nature is reproductive success, it's the same argument.

Geoffrey Miller: Consumerist culture fosters widespread narcissism -- work and shopping.

Music: "Feel the sun in my sign" by Kaoskyane and Apollo
kaoskyane

Music Sweet jobs sport by AgedMusic

Speaker :There are lots of different jobs to choose from.

Many provide a chance to get ahead and there's the job for you for every alert and alive young Australian.
AgedMusic

Old Man:The world stands still as I coreen uncontrolled on down the hill, don't want to die - ain't ready to go, just another dent in some yuppies Volvo

'Princely Musings' by AgedMusic
AgedMusic

Natasha Mitchell: And we're diving into ABC Radio National's gene pool project on All in the Mind this week. As part of their course work this year third year media students from RMIT University also contributed a series of extraordinary projects to the gene pool exploring the theme of evolution they were brilliantly lateral - so let's hear part of a documentary produced by Elizabeth McCarthy, James Thompson and Marian Chan.

It's called the Evolution of Y, it's a story of change and evolution really at its most personal. It explores the themes of gender, nature versus nurture and the evolution of the sexual and social identity of a transgender person they call Y who was born male.
The Evolution of Y

Y: I didn't have modern parents - and you know they didn't ...my father had four brothers and no sisters, my mother had four brothers and no sisters, I have two brothers and no sisters. There weren't a lot of feminine things going on in my world. In my late teens I was certainly cross dressing, actually I was cross dressing in my early teens, actually I was cross dressing probably before my teens but it was just something that I did without thinking about and then it was only later when I guess was exposed to the whole ideas of gender re-assignment that I decided that that might be the way to go.

I wasn't thinking in the classic cliché talk show tranny terms of I'm trapped, you know I'm a cliché trapped in this stereo types body, I wasn't thinking in those terms. Sex was just sort of something that everything was vaguely defined by - Yes, once you start taking hormones you feel like you're on the road, you know it makes changes in your body that are good, you feel more at home so to speak. I sort of had you know the dreams of oh it's beautiful.

I remember my psychiatrist referred to it as the honeymoon period where you think you know it's all possible and once in a while you can think oh yes, look I look fabulous today but yeah usually, I don't know, there's just something about, I became a bit weary of trying to live up to other people's ideals of what being a woman was.

I'm satisfied in my own terms that I am as much of a woman as I can be because there's that sense, particularly now, where people don't like to be fooled. That's the big thing and I think that's where the hate comes from, people think that you're trying to fool them and the transgendered are actively encourage to blend in, to be mousey and demure and live in the suburbs and even to invent histories for themselves as growing up as girls etc. etc.

Natasha Mitchell: And you can hear the full documentary The Evolution of Y by RMIT media students at pool.or.au or head to the All in the Mind website and we've linked to it directly.

Speaker:There she goes, engine running smooth and sweet, sweet -- yeah there she goes smooth and sweet.

Natasha Mitchell: And it seems fitting to wrap up our mash up with an excerpt from a piece by RMIT students Danica Revote, Hannah Valmadre and Meg Wettenhall, they explored the evolution of audio technology in their project and this mash up from it is called "Evolutionism for your Ears".
DanicaR

Female Speaker: Lots of different types of music, normally upbeat stuff if you're feeling in the mood a bit of Presets, Fleetwood Mac...

Male Speaker: And the parents listen to it, the mothers

John Jacobs :The thing that excites me is the collaborative nature and the fact that you can build new ideas out of old ideas. All culture is that way.

Male :Who was Darwin anyway, was he just some guy who thought of a crazy idea that just happened to be accepted as science?

Female:Many people have suggested that humanity is remaking itself through technology.

Female : Audio sound was a natural evolution of the human race, we wanted to capture this sound and share it with others and transport it, sell it, repeat it and so recording audio evolved.

Stephen Jay Gould :Now it was particularly while visiting the Galapagos Island that Darwin made the observation that each island contained a slightly different species of finch. Now he wondered if each species could have derived originally from a single ancestor which led to the idea of new species forming from existing populations.

Female :The world has seen the creation of first the phonograph that evolved into gramophones, telegraphones, megaphones and microphones. From this evolved amplification, high and low fidelity and stereophonic. recording

Natasha Mitchell: And today's All in the Mind mash up also featured sounds from Boris Glick, Aged Music, Kerry Ashwin, Pip Shea, Mandrillus, Cameron Semmons, Kaoskyane as well as gems from the ABC archives which we seeded into the gene pool for you to mutate and mash up. And our thanks to you for your fab contributions to this year's gene pool social media project.

Stephen Jay Gould: Only those individuals who are best adapted to secure that food and reproduce would contribute offspring to the next generation. Eventually those individuals that were poorly adapted to their environment would be bred out of existence and only in the best adapted individual...

Natasha Mitchell: Check out all the works at pool.org.au more details on the All in the Mind website where you can add your comments as ever, now direct on the website too by the way as the All in the Mind blog.

Thanks to colleagues Anita Barraud, The Night Air's John Jacobs and Angie Grant. I'm Natasha Mitchell bringing over the next two shows the forum I'm hosting at the Mind and its Potential Conference next week with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and other guests -- not to be missed.

Female:Striving for improvement is the human condition.

Male:There's nothing that's been found that contradicts Darwin's basic theory.

Female:We all need to be aware of the advances in technology that are directly affecting our greater humanity.

Jonathan Marks:Happy birthday Charles Darwin, thanks for all your hard work.

Richard Dawkins:Would have been a monstrous freak.

Reviews

[thecoolone52]

good job man, im sure youll be very sucessful with your radio career if you want to go in that direction.

[alternative_be]

Congratulations!

[An owl on the moon]

This is so exciting to see, Boris! I am so glad doors of opportunity are opening for you. Loved your comments here...