Amitav Ghosh

Uncanny.

But I think as I take up the idea of the uncanny for the environmental crisis from Amitav Ghosh, and I think that's really a good point.

And what is, I think, in the work with Gwenola, what I find interesting is the way these images can be used to produce an uncanny in a very different way from the text.

And there's, to me, really when we started working on Erebon, one of the most striking experience was how little text you have on the film even on the film that's very talkative and you have an hour long film and you have like the text is you know five pages so you really have to choose what you're going to say very easily very carefully and Because, of course, the images show a lot of things that the text doesn't have to say.

And then it kind of kicked into high gear by the time I was almost done school because the drive to make music was heavier because of my situation.

I just finished this book called The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh.

And it is an incredible book.

It's actually the first book of his that I've read.

And I think one way we can hold this is by shifting the way we tell stories about a life.

And there's a recent book that was written by one of my favorite... climate writers and fiction writers and non-fiction writers, Amitabh Ghosh, called Ghost Eye.

And in it, it's a fictional book set in India and in the Sundarbans, and it's very much about paradigms of reincarnation and how it's impossible to think about climate change and to think about anything when you are stuck within a single species, a single species arc in extinction, or a single life.

And that we need to think with deep time, deep ecology, and think with material reincarnation.

And, you know, the meanings of that image, that match cut, are so endless.

But also, you know, one of the things that a lot of Anthropocene scholars point out is that Amitav Ghosh is one in his book, The Great Derangement, Climate Change and the Unthinkable.

And he's like, the realist novel can't capture the time scale that we're thinking about now in the Anthropocene.

And so I became interested in how well you can capture deep time in a film.

So is there anything kind of additionally extra layers maybe that we might notice that readers then wouldn't have?

Absolutely.

I do talk about Amitav Ghosh's arguments about why the contemporary realist novel is sort of failing the challenge of the Anthropocene in representing unthinkable catastrophe.

And he defines the realist novel.

I could not not say that.

But one of my favorite trilogies is the Ibis trilogy, which is by Amitav Ghosh.

Oh, yes.

It starts with the Sea of Poppies.

And it's set in this really turbulent time in history.

It's amazing.

And Amitav Ghosh's ability to describe things is really beautiful.

And again, it was one of those things.

And then in fiction, you're going to find a million iterations of that as well, let alone people writing about literary theory or writing about philosophy with regards to narrative.

Like Amitav Ghosh has whole essay collections on questions of human and non-human representation in narrative and also the history of narrative.

It sounds like you're saying the very diversity of voices in the field should help alleviate any sense of being an imposter? I guess maybe

check it out and see what moves you because there isn't a way to do it.

Uh, y- well, yeah.

There's some great authors, and there's like Margaret Atwood, and Amitav Ghosh, and the writer David Mitchell.

And yeah, um, but, uh, I'm optimistic, Tom.

Uh [laughs].

And in general, writers haven't done enough.

Amitav Ghosh talks about that really beautifully.

And he talks about how the failure to address the climate crisis is a failure of the imagination.

And again, I think as writers, speaking for myself, it was something that someone else could fix.