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Ron Broglio, "Animal Revolution" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
00:49:03
An interview with Ron Broglio
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- [00:01]
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Callie Smith
Hello everybody and welcome back to New Books Network and Animal Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Callie Smith, host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Ron Broglio about his new book, Animal Revolution. Animal Revolution is a gathering, a chorus of evidence of animal revolutionaries like Santino, a rock throwing chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo, the radioactive wild boar invading southern Germany, and the thousands of jellyfish that clogged the engine of the USS Ronald Reagan, one of the largest naval vessels in history. In this smart and fervent book illustrated by Marina Zirko, Broglio requests that we human animals pay attention and ask, can we care beyond ourselves? Ronbroglio, welcome to the show.
- [02:23]
Ron Broglio
Thanks. Great to be here.
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Callie Smith
So would you begin by giving us a little bit about you and how we came to the animal Revolution.
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Ron Broglio
Right. Thanks a lot. So I began with a PhD in British Romanticism, so 18th and 19th century. It's a time where a lot of authors, Wordsworth in particular, are writing about landscape and landscape aesthetics and beauty, the idea of the picturesque, the sublime, or coined during that time. And I became interested in animals Looking back, when do the animals have agency rather than us simply scripting or writing poetry and ideas about them? And so I wrote about, you know, these kettle portraits you might. If you go into British pub, or you see these 18th century portraits of giant cows, they're huge. And so I was researching how did this strange phenomena come about, which was the beginning of contemporary breeding practices. And it's also the time that Edward Jenner invented vaccination. So he used cowpox to inject people to prevent smallpox. So vodka, meaning cow, of course. So vaccination. And there were huge anxieties, much like today, over vaccination issues. And so studying a lot of the pamphlets about that. So these. Both the commodification of animals and the commodification of cattle. But then the anxiety of injecting them. It's okay to eat them, but not inject them. So then the kinds of questions I was asking weren't. Drove me into contemporary art. And there were a lot of contemporary artists who are asking similar questions about animal engagement and agency. So I started talking a lot with them during that time. This is around 2005, I started gathering incidents, noticing that animals were pushing back against us. And I was working with this surrealist philosopher, Frederick Young at the time, and we were gathering these incidents, and then I thought, well, maybe they're in revolt against us. They're just not telling us because it's their revolution, not ours, right? So that kind of play of humor and seriousness, like, how serious is he about this revolution? How humorous is it? Is part of the trope of the whole work, right? How. How are we to take it? And so it's that kind of interplay that became interesting to me. It was a problem of style as well. So I'd been writing a lot of academic stuff, and this is more of a crossover book, as you know. And so it's this question of how do you move from a very academic style into something that is more like something you'd see in the Atlantic or the New Yorker or Orion or something like that. And so crafting something that felt true to the material and brought it out took actually several years.
- [05:47]
Callie Smith
That was actually one of my questions, because your previous books, like you're saying, are more traditionally academic. But I feel like with this one, the pace of it, the inclusion of illustrations, which I would love to hear about, even things like beginning with a manifesto. And I love that you actually write like, a mock letter from the animals or being all polite, like, please, you know, please stop poisoning our water. Sincerely, the Animals. And you're like, no, this is absolutely not what the revolution is going to look like. They have their own way of doing it. So I guess in the spirit of that, it's a gorgeous book, it's fun to read and which is not something that I often say about works and animal studies, because, of course, it's always laden with our mistreatment of animals, that long history, our current mistreatment of animals. And that doesn't mean that that's not included in this work. It certainly is. But I think, like we were saying, with that interplay between the humor as a way to really access these larger questions about what the animals are doing. So let's go ahead and touch on that. The collaboration with the illustrator Marina Zirko. Did you give her a complete manuscript at the end and say, here, go after it, or was it an ongoing thing over the years?
- [07:03]
Ron Broglio
Great, thanks. Yes. I've known Marina's work for a while, and anyone interested in questions of ecology and art, her work is excellent in this, and her work often will play between. It is playful, sometimes even humorous, other times dark and really sad. So I thought. And she's a wonderful person to collaborate with. So it's not just that her work is good, it's that we had this connection where, oh, yeah, I could see collaborating with you, which is, of course, key. So I did give her the full manuscript and I said, hey, have you heard of the animal revolution? And so she read through it and she got it right away because it was a similar kind of style to her art, and said, yeah, I'm in. So this is in the middle of the. Or even early pandemic, or middle of the COVID pandemic. She flew out to Phoenix, where I am. I got her some studio space at Arizona State University Studios, and she just started illustrating. And she put a few things together, showed it to me and said, like this or like that. We had figured we wanted a model. Kind of like if you remember the old Hardy Boys novels, there's these illustrations at key moments, and you look at the illustration, you think, wow, I wonder what's going to happen in this key moment. Right. And keeps you reading. And in the same way, when you open Animal Revolution, you see these quite quirky images, you know, like, well, what is happening here? And so immediately you want to start reading to find out what's going on with this image. And the wonderful thing is, while it's illustrative of the action, it also takes it in a new direction. So it's not simply A one to one correspondence. It's playing with what's in the text in an interesting way and becomes almost a visual commentary on the text and really opens it up. So it was really great working with her on that.
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Callie Smith
As you were talking. The illustrations very much are their own thing. And I have to say I love the inclusion of illustrations because when we think of the illustrated animal, we often think of children's books or potentially thinking about what we grew up with and how animals are anthropomorphized. It's really exciting to see that use of illustration in this context. 1 Just to provide our listeners with sort of a visual description. There is a macaque with many human hands coming out of its head and there's a fist punching right out of its mouth at the reader. And the hand at the top, in the center of the macaque's head is like giving you the bird slipping you off. So that of course sort of corresponds with an incident where this macaque takes a camera, right, from a photojournalist and it takes a selfie. And so it's this moment where we see this animal out there doing its own thing. Do you have a particular illustration that. I know you love all of them, I'm sure, but that especially sticks out to you, right?
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Ron Broglio
That one's really great. And I have it pinned up in my study copy of it because it motivates me to write in a lot of ways. And it is that kind of punching back in defiance. So and the other thing about that image, it's interesting is we think of portraiture as such a human thing. And so for an animal to co opt this idea of portraiture puts in a whole other register of meaning. But for me there are several I particularly like. I like the fauns, the that are dancing because of the Dionysian aspect of that. So like this kind of drunken Dionysian. There's another one with a bear patting a little bear.
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Callie Smith
Yeah.
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Ron Broglio
And it's so sweet. And it illustrates, it's illustrates a chapter about myself and hair and human hair. So there's the human hair and the bear's hair and that the bear has human feet, awkwardly drawn human feet. So is it bear or a human? And that kind of relationship between human animality and not the non human is particularly interesting to me. A lot of the advertising used the jellyfish with the nuclear reactor because that is so evocative. And of course the bore with the radioactive sign as well. So there, there are a few. I mean, it's hard to pick. And I think she's actually. We did some copies, some prints of these, so we're selling them at a gallery because we just felt like people should have these. You know, they should be out in the world. They're just. They're super fun to. To engage with.
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Callie Smith
You know, they're great. I. Yeah. I think one thing that comes to mind is whenever people hear Animal Revolution, and this is something that you address in the book, they may think of George Orwell's 1945 novella Animal Farm, where animals are know. In revolt against their master and attempt to make their own society. But you write that Animal Farm is still too human. And so I'd love to hear. How can we talk and write about Animal Revolution without making it about ourselves?
- [13:05]
Ron Broglio
Right, right. So in that example, Orwell writes an introduction to Animal Farms saying he saw a young boy whipping. That he got the idea for Animal Farm by seeing a young boy whipping a cart horse. And he thought, wow, if that horse knew its power, it would revolt against or kick against the small boy. And then thought, well, that's just like the proletariat, and they should be revolting. So he immediately moves to the human and leaves the animal's plight and it's being whipped out. And so he again is whipping the animal because it never has its own agency. Right. Instead, he moves it to the register of allegory. So I. I think there's this opportunity for the animals to, you know, at. Animals have their own worlding. They have their own. I like to say that humans and animals, we each have our own worlds, but we live on a shared earth. And so what we're seeing is these moments where there are frictions. The whole of the book is a series of frictions where the two are jamming against each other.
- [14:34]
Callie Smith
Right. As a complement to Orwell's horse, you have a different scene where it's actually Nietzsche who sees a horse, cart, horse being beaten. Right. And it's in the last decade of his life and he goes and embraces this horse. And so is that what we just have to do sometimes? Like, maybe revolution isn't necessarily this big, loud banging action, is it? Can it just be an embrace where one being sees another?
- [15:08]
Ron Broglio
Right. So it's this affective relationship rather than allegory, Right. That opens the sort of doors to radical generosity or from. To move from a restricted economy of humans in the human world to a general economy of humans in a more than human world. And so that kind of gesture of embrace of the more than human world is Gorgeous, right? It's that I'm an animal, I know pain. You're an animal, you have known pain. We're in this together. Solidarity, right? And so a lot of the, A lot of the work is trying to find these portals that break through our cultural barriers that say that keep us on one side and animals on the other. This is what I've called the exploit, which is where the animals kind of hack into our systems. So much of culture is designed to keep animals at a distance and to keep our own animality at a distance from us. And examples I use are things like eating. We eat with a knife and a fork and a plate, so we keep the messiness of food at a distance. Or rather than walking, if you're driving a car, the friction of the Earth is at a distance from us, right? So everything becomes frictionless. What animals do is they realize, well, even though we have these technologies to keep. To keep the Earth at a distance, we're still animals within the world. We humans are animals within the world. And they hack into that element of us, right? They hack into whether it's the jellyfish who are jamming the gears of a military ship, or it's things like the COVID coronavirus that realize, oh, we're human too. You know, we're animals too, and we'll hack into our systems. So no matter what it is, it's realizing that again, we're on this shared Earth.
- [17:37]
Callie Smith
Something you said made me think about your really poetic analysis of George Washington's teeth. And you call him a cyborg and you say, contrary to what we may believe, that he had wooden teeth. Actually, his teeth are made of teeth of enslaved people, cadavers, whale bone, animal teeth. And you speculate at other sources too, in different metals. And I was wondering, bringing objects in to this reading of the human and non human relationship, I think you did that so well in that moment. And I was wondering if you could maybe speak to the value of including objects in this discussion.
- [18:21]
Ron Broglio
Right, thanks for that. So I really liked a little bit about George Washington.
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Callie Smith
And.
- [18:31]
Ron Broglio
It started as just two paragraphs, just a small kind of speculation about the state of the Union, where all these things are in his mouth, animals and minerals and slaves and all this in his mouth. And then my writing coach, Matt Bell, who has a gorgeous novel out, Appleseed, about a human animal, fawn, and across generations and the problems of the Anthropocene. In any case, he told me, he said, this is good, but there's more here, keep writing. And he did that with a Lot of my work. So he really pushed me to layer it and make it more dense and that prompt to push it further. Right? So as academics, often it's like, okay, we've said this thing, good, onto the next thing. But this prompt to note, go deeper into this allowed me to really focus, fill out a scene that then became much more haunting and spectral where the. All these things that are in his mouth, the. The slaves, the animals, the mineral extraction, become specters. That is, they. They're. They go unrecognized and unmourned. And so in the dark moment late at night, he is haunted by them and realizes that without them, he's incomplete. And so. And that speaks a lot to the role of prosthetics, right? That we use objects as a way of extending ourselves into the world, but at the same time, they then provide a different kind of agency that can speak back to us. So while we're using them, they also. There is this opportunity for almost a kind of animism where they can return and speak otherwise.
- [20:36]
Callie Smith
And this happens in a different moment. I'm curious what your writing mentor said about your use of the personal. Was that something that he pushed you towards? And this is, of course, you reflect on your own body hair, and you see in Neanderthals, I think it was at the Met, and you're like, hey, I'm actually really hairy too. And then this leads to. You share that you were in a time of mourning and you shaved your head and. And then it's just this lovely sequence, really, reflecting on your body, your life, your hair, kind of this animality within us as well. So is there anything you'd like to say about that personal turn?
- [21:16]
Ron Broglio
Right. So it was at that same time where Matt. Matt Bell said, look, you can. This is a good book. It's fine as it is, but you only get to write Animal Revolution once. And then that's, I think, a great advice to any author, is the book you're writing. You only are writing that book once, so go all in. And so I started writing. He says, you know, so in fact, what's the revolution mean to you? How are you engaged in the revolution? And of course, as an academic, I thought, no way. I'm writing about myself. This is terrible, right? And so I started a little bit, wrote maybe a few paragraphs, said, hey, kind of. Because it felt like, this is out there. I'm very vulnerable. Then putting that out there, sent it to Matt, and he said, you know, keep swimming and save nothing for the return. Just keep going out there. And that kind of vulnerability, which, again, fits with this idea of hospitality, of opening to animals, was really important. It was important that I actually display that myself as well. So it was hard to write about. It's very hard to write about oneself. And so I wrote it, and it's kind of humorous, as with much of the book, but also incredibly serious. One of the takeaways within it is my use of myth and my fashioning of new myths or legends around hare and goats and my affinity with goats. That becomes this idea that we have to craft new stories, we have to craft new myths, and we have to occupy and live within them. And those should. Should be myths and legends and stories that are with animals rather than keeping animals at a distance. Right. So there are many cultures in which there are animal totems and one lives with animals or origin stories related with animals. But within the European and Western tradition, much of that has been lost. And so. And we need to craft that and recover that in ways that allow us a more just relationship with animals.
- [24:01]
Callie Smith
You write that makes me think of. You write that you've adopted the Sasquatch as your comrade. And what makes the Sasquatch a good comrade is are they this kind of mediate, mediator for you between yourself and the animal world? What is the Sasquatch to you?
- [24:21]
Ron Broglio
Right. Yeah. So this is that moment. So the role of humor is that it plays with boundaries between what's acceptable and what's not acceptable within a culture. So good humor is actually always political in some way. So in saying, hey, Sasquatch, you're my friend. I haven't met any yet, but when I do, I know I will have this affinity. Is this idea that, yes, they speak to. I think even if Sasquatch does not exist, it's the idea that we want to find a link that can speak to what it's like to be animal. It is human enough to speak to humanness and animal enough to speak to animal. And it becomes. I come from a Catholic tradition. It's like a sacrament, the external sign of an internal meaning or symbol. So it becomes this externalization. Something is meaningful within us. So I think this Sasquatch is actually quite an interesting figure within our own kind of mythos. And. Or my entry point is through hair, which is an externalization of an animality.
- [25:53]
Callie Smith
So good, so good, so good.
- [25:55]
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Ron Broglio
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- [26:52]
Callie Smith
Yeah, you mentioned Catholicism and it makes me think of your first chapter where you talk about these six escapee cows from an Omaha slaughterhouse and they end up in various places. It's almost kind of absurd how, you know, this police force comes to try to manage the situation, but one of the cows ends up in the parking lot of a Catholic church that, as you highlight, happens to be named St. Francis, the St. Francis Assisi Church. And then you then transition to this peace ceremony at the Vatican where these children release these, like, you know, genetically bred ultra white doves into the sky, only for those doves to be intercepted by a raven and a seagull. And then what I love is you follow up in the next year instead of doves, because that didn't go so well, they release helium balloons. So that's just hopefully for our listeners, that's a glimpse of the kind of excellent lyric weaving together of sources that you bring there. I'm curious about these chapters because they're so. They read really quickly. Every sentence packs a punch. Um, did you have a bunch of post it notes layering over each other? Like, how did you decide what gets with wits? Which is just. Was it just a kind of intuitive process?
- [28:15]
Ron Broglio
Right, right. So I'd read Giorgio Gambin's the Open, which is a philosophical work on human animal relationships and our human animality. It's super short chapters. Each one is kind of curious in itself and kind of leads to the next, but could be read on its own. And I was also influenced by Alfonso Lingus, this philosopher who writes very poetically in a way that like, even if you know nothing about philosophy, you're like, wow, this is just beautiful. But it was those short chapters that intrigued me because of something that people are busy, don't have a lot of time, but it's These little things you can chew on just a bit and leaves you hanging and you wanting the next one. These little potato chip chapters. So it also allowed me to condense a lot, as you said, into these short pieces. So as I said, I'd been researching this for almost 15 years or more, and so I had a lot of stories and I had to kind of start to pick through some that. And all of a sudden you begin to find resonances, really. And sometimes really strange resonances. So the example you give, there's the cattle seeking sanctuary at the Church of St Francis of Assisi, and then a contemporary Pope Francis, really, with the kids releasing doves. So I was able to use this leverage of a Francis there. And as well as the transcendental relationship with a divine. So, yeah, it became a series of sketches. Just trying to sketch out pieces. Like, okay, this one works. This one works. There's a lot of stuff left on the table, right, that you just, you know, I could have gone. We can go on and on about squid and the intelligence of. Of cephalopods, right? And we've all probably seen my octopus teacher and, you know, realized the sort of beauty of these other creatures. And of course, Fleshier's vampire, Teuthis infernalis, which is a great book. Imagining the life of a vampire squid and its way of being in the world. Or does it have da sign, is the question, which is Heidegger term. Does it have a being in the world? And so there was a lot of stuff like that there. I was like, wow, this is all great, but you just can't include it. At the same time. There are other moments where by including something, I had to, as I was saying, try to layer it and add more texture to it. So, for example, when talking about radioactive boar and saying, you know, they are the Godzilla of our time, if we. We have these stories, we have these legends, like Godzilla, but these are the living examples. So in using Godzilla, then I started reading up on Godzilla myths, right? And. And Mothra and Banga and all these, like, other creatures and what they do. And I can introduce them. And they only might be a few sentences, but that might be in days of research to get those few sentences, but that adds a certain texture that wouldn't be there otherwise. Yeah.
- [32:01]
Callie Smith
One thing I have to say for. For listeners and just another reason that I encourage everyone to read this is I was taking notes of, like, things I needed to watch and things I needed to read, philosophers I needed to revisit. I mean, it's. It's so full of. Of references and things. You know, it's a peek into your mind of all the different research that you bring together, but you do it in a way that it doesn't feel overly erudite or inaccessible. And this brings me to Derrida, actually, and your idea of hospitality. I love how you start introducing him as a young person who wants to be a soccer star. And I think. And, you know, earlier we talked about Nietzsche with the horse, and I think by reminding us of how human our great thinkers are is such a great entrance point. And I guess I don't necessarily have a question for that, but I guess it would be a good moment to then talk about hospitality and Derrida's concept of the radical hospitality. And one of the stories that you pair with that is this bull who goes busting through a china shop. And once again, I think law enforcement are brought in to try to contain the situation. But you say, what if we would have just invited the bul and had tea? And there's a great illustration of this large teacup on top of the bowl. So, yeah, I'll let you say a little bit about hospitality and this idea of the boundary between the human and how hospitality can be used for that.
- [33:35]
Ron Broglio
Right. And thanks for that introduction to that chapter, because one of the things that's interesting about Derrida is, you're right, these are figures and legends in our time that seem very intimidating, but when you realize they're human and they have their stories helps inform some of their thinking. So when we realized that he. That he's an Algerian Jew who ends up in Paris and felt estranged, that didn't feel hospitality in relationship to the world around him. Right. We always see him as this highly accepted philosopher and major figure, but getting the backstory allows us to see how these ideas of hospitality affected him and then how that can affect the world. So. Or affect these concepts. So in the same way, I'm interested in how we craft our own narratives to look out to a bigger world, right. Where the things in our own lives, the vulnerabilities, the openness, the hurts, the pains, the traumas that have then shaped the way we might have an outward face or comportment to the world around us and allow for particular kinds of engagement. In the case of the. The bull in the china shop, but was striking to me, was the owner of the china shop, this large market, saying, well, someone might have got hurt, so we had to kill this bull. And you think, well, someone did get hurt. The bull got like that. Is really bloody scene, it's really painful scene. And there is no mourning there. Again, when these things happen, specters or hauntings happen when there's not recognition in mourning. And there will be a return of that repressed. So in this case, it's just recognizing there were other ways of handling these situations. We see that in the United States with police, relationship with citizens sometimes where it's like there are other ways of handling this, but we. They've been trained or they're put on a. A certain mentality that frames a scene. And in the same way we have these particular mentalities that frame a scene for us. So I'm saying is, let's go back to look at how Derrida's own life informed the way he framed a scene to think about some radical hospitality. And the other one there, the other one that's illustrated is the bunny with a whole bunch of pants that's running through pants. And this was about a woman who just adopted all these rabbits so that eventually she realizes it's their house, not hers. And she lives according to their design principles and how they use furniture and push things around rather than her design principles. And I often, when I'm working with architecture and design students, tell them that story so they can think about perspectives outside the human.
- [37:09]
Callie Smith
I'm curious, like in your own life, as you've been working on this, I think you said the Idea first came 18 years ago. In what ways have you maybe been more mindful of being hospitable? If there's a, like wasp nest in your garage or something, do you leave it? Or how do you accommodate or try to practice this hospitality?
- [37:30]
Ron Broglio
Yeah. Yes. So I live in the desert of the Sonoran Desert in Phoenix, Arizona. And Arizona has the most species of bees in north or South America, which I had no idea until I moved here. And so I have just outside my. My house on the patio, this stump with. It has a whole bunch of holes in it. And it's for carpenter bees. So they'll just. I see them, you know, while I'm writing. In fact, while I was riding Emerald Revolution, you know, see these bees just kind of popping in and out and doing their little carpenter V thing. And then in my father's place, we put up some. Some bat. Some bat houses. So I think creating these architectures for animals and allowing them to sort of have a space co. Substantial with the human space is really important. And a lot of animal theorists have written about this. Erica Fudge has a great story about her and a mouse in London. Nicole Anderson, or Dr. Idian, has stories about her and Opossum in Australia and of course Haraway's dogs and so forth. So we can find these kind of affinities with animals. And what's interesting about a lot of animal studies scholars is they're not just doing this abstractly, but they're actualizing it in different ways in their own lives. Kerry Wolf and vegetarianism. So it's another example of that. And also his relationship with his long staying relationship with dogs.
- [39:17]
Callie Smith
In the book you mentioned, the name is escaping me, but this proposed idea of the half world, or like giving half the world to animals, would that be, you know, an imagined ideal future, Right?
- [39:32]
Ron Broglio
That's yo. Wilson's half, half world. Rest in peace Wilson. He recently died, an incredible biologist. So I love, you know, if Animal Revolution is almost an absurd proposition. Wilson says, well, here's something that's not going to happen, right? And yet by proposing it, it expands what we think might be possible, expands the Overton Window. It makes us realize that more is possible than the confines within our particular practicalities and reason. So several years ago I wrote a essay on not zoos, but Shaman, right, that we instead of zoo. I was asked to give a talk at a conference on zoos. And I said, no, I'm. I wrote Animal Revolution. They're like, it's okay, we want you included. And you know, I just thought a lot about it. I said, you know, we have these Linnaean categories that create barriers and bars between animals and create these scientific nomenclatures and creates an us versus them, right? They're in one, they're kind of behind the bars or behind the moat or scene. We're on the other side. How can we break those down? How can we lose ego? How can we transcend our own barriers? And this is of course what Shaman do, right? Is they transport between the animal world and the human world and bring something back to us so that we have an affinity with these animals. So my proposition is that we need less zoos and more Shaman. We need and to take that very seriously within culture, rather just as we've taken zoos very seriously, we need to take these other affinities seriously. And you see this in strange ways. And culture manifests itself in strange ways, right? It's like people watch cat videos, they, you know, do all these other things. They spend a lot of time funds on their pets. We want those affective relationships. And so it's just we, we've lost a lot of the apparatus to realize them. So yes, so these big propositions are, I'm all for them. Let's, you know, let's imagine ones that are impossible because they can change or swerve the direction that culture is moving.
- [42:22]
Callie Smith
So is that one way that you see the humanities or arts being able to join the revolution or help the revolution by, as you say, creating new stories, by helping make. I came across this really great talk that I think you gave in 2016 for a graduating class. And you say that the humanities allow us to imagine the future's future, particularly to learn an ethics of care and vulnerability. So, and I love that, like you, you have to learn vulnerability, learn this ethics of care. Is that what the role of the scholar and the artist could, can be to join the revolution?
- [43:03]
Ron Broglio
Absolutely. We, we totally discredited ourselves. We're aiming, our questions are aiming too low. We can aim higher. And the humanities has that capacity. So in that quote, and thank you for mentioning that, and doing that kind of research is often the future is co opted already. So the role of the stock market is to plant flags in the future. It's speculation on what will make profits and how we will produce things and the widgets we'll make, et cetera. And so that drives the directions the culture will go. So the flags have been planted in the future. But there is, and this is what Deleuze calls the virtual. There is the futurist future, which is a future that doesn't belong to what we've already planted, but is its own thing. It's unpredictable. It's an event that will rupture our ideas of the future. And so the space to think is in this feature's feature, in this really speculative direction. Right. This is done in Ray B's book, Speculative Everything. It's why science fiction is so compelling, I think, these days, because it takes us into radically new places and from that opens new possibilities. And in terms of the question then of vulnerability, it was a graduating class and universities teach mastery. We taught to master things. And so the question becomes, well, we learn to master things, but have we learned how to be vulnerable? Because then again, rather than closing things down and creating barriers between us and the rest of the world, much like zoos create barriers, rather than creating barriers, things become more porous, we say yes to the world. It's that radical yes that becomes so important.
- [45:22]
Callie Smith
I cannot wait for more people to get their hands on this book. So I think you've given us so much to think about, especially if you're writing a book or you're working on something do it fully. What. What did your mentor say? Don't. Don't save anything for the swim. What did he say?
- [45:38]
Ron Broglio
That's right. So like, save nothing for the return.
- [45:42]
Callie Smith
Save nothing for the return. And if you imagine, you can imagine so much more. Don't limit what can be imagined.
- [45:50]
Ron Broglio
Absolutely. No, no. Push it. You know, as academics, we often say, okay, this is enough, and we say we keep within a sort of safe space. Right. I can defend this. I can buttress it. I can fortress it. How can we push beyond what feels safe? Right, Right. Way. Be way beyond that. I mean, you can always cut some of that back, but. But who knows what it might open up?
- [46:21]
Callie Smith
I love that. Well, where is your imagination taking you next? Are there any current projects that you're working on?
- [46:27]
Ron Broglio
So thanks for asking on that. And I have several. So I run a desert humanities initiative here in the Sonoran Desert. And so we're doing little pamphlets about different desert animals to inform a broader public. So I'm doing a lot of work just that is more outreach kind of work in order to get people engaged. And then the next kind of book project is drawing off of the affinity with the Sasquatch. And I've really become interested in ways of knowing that rational knowing keeps the objects of knowing at a distance and risk little in itself. It transforms knowing, but it doesn't transform the self. But then we've all had experiences that are personally transformative, and those personally transformative experiences are a different way of knowing, almost an ecstatic knowing and also corporeal. It's felt in the body and with the body. So I'm writing about this other way of knowing, about ecstatic knowing where we risk our bodies in the world to. To engage with something larger than ourselves.
- [47:54]
Callie Smith
And I love that. And it's something that I forgot to touch on when talking about the book. But animals, often their revolution is with their body, often to their. It can be to their demise. Right. Like with these cows that we talked about, the bull. We didn't mention the geese in the Hudson river emergency landing situation. So I'm looking forward to that work. The ecstatic knowing with the body.
- [48:19]
Ron Broglio
Great. Thank you.
- [48:21]
Callie Smith
Well, we have taken a lot of your time today, but I want to thank you so much for being here. And Animal Revolution is out with the University of Minnesota Press. So please, everyone, go get your coffee. And I thank you so much for your time.
- [48:34]
Ron Broglio
Thank you.
- [48:48]
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