A Conversation with John Hughes: Part I

In February, Advocate member Alex Wells sat down with Australian writer John Hughes and recorded the following interview. Part I is published here: stay tuned for Part II. You can find John Hughes’s work published in the Advocate’s latest issue, Origin.

 

Alex Wells: The two stories you’ve given us for the Origin issue come from your newest book, The Garden of Sorrows, a collection of reverse animal fables that will be published by University of Western Australia Publishing later this year. How did the idea for this project come about?

 

John Hughes: The idea had been with me for quite some time. Largely, I think, it came about during the period when I was working on a couple of my earlier books, from experiences working in foreign countries where I wasn’t terribly familiar with the languages. I found that what I began to notice in places where lots of people gather are the things we don’t usually notice when we understand the language, that is, the whole range of nonverbal communication that goes on between people. And it struck me that when I was doing this, what I was looking at was a series of different kinds of animal behavior, really. (I don’t mean to put myself outside that: my own was a kind of animal behavior as well, being more predatory, or at least observing the others.) And so it made me start thinking for some reason about how close to animals we really still are—because basically we are animals, aren’t we? So that got me thinking about fables and the way that animals have been used to tell stories, simple stories with a kind of moral, and then I began thinking about the metamorphosis and the classical tradition of transformation.

What I’m giving you here is a cluster of things, and eventually they all sort of came together in terms of thinking: well, given our Antipodean context here, it might actually be quite interesting to turn the metamorphosis around in a way and so to start with animals—but animals which have already distinctly human qualities. To start with animals, but Australian animals, which aren’t romanticized at all—they’re not cute and cuddly and they’re mean and nasty animals in many instances—and to present these animals in dramatic situations and to look at the transformation, but this time with animals turning into human beings.

Origin: Editor’s Note

In Werner Herzog’s wild film Aguirre: The Wrath of God, which we recently screened upstairs in the Advocate, the main man Aguirre goes mad in pursuit of the fabled city of gold, El Dorado. He co-opts a royal expedition on the Amazon and presses madly on down the river, drunk on pride and the scent of immortality.

One scene brings a pair of natives to the raft; they have come to tell about a prophesy. But Aguirre sees a gold necklace on one of them, and loses his composure. Where did you get that? he growls with crazy eyes, Klaus Kinski eyes. Where does this gold come from?

Brood

The Harvard Advocate’s winter issue, Origin, has officially been launched. Now, Notes from 21 South Street is thrilled to bring you the entirety of “Brood” by Oliver Luo ’13. Stills from this multimedia piece are printed in Origin; subscribe at www.theharvardadvocate.com.

Picture This: Photographic Media in the Harvard Advocate

The history of photography in the Harvard Advocate is an ongoing and rich one, a confrontation of the enduring question: How does the image find its place in a literary magazine? To commemorate the launch of The Harvard Advocate’s Winter 2013 issue, “Origin,” we have traced the emergence and changing role of the image in the Advocate and the ways in which the photographic image has been read on the page.

Although photography had emerged in print in the early twentieth century, photographs only first began to appear in the magazine during the fifties and sixties as illustrative content and as advertisements.  A portrait of T.S. Eliot was included in the centennial issue, used as a visual reference to one of the Advocate’s most esteemed alumni. All of these examples speak to the then secondary, supplementary nature of visual media to the magazine.

Origin is Here

The Harvard Advocate is proud to announce the launch of its winter issue, Origin. Below, photographer Finbarr O’Reilly tells the story of Origin‘s cover photo. Origin launches today; you can subscribe at www.theharvardadvocate.com. Learn more about O’Reilly’s photography at www.finbarr-oreilly.com.

From 2,000 feet above the flats of Senegal’s Sine Saloum peninsula along Africa’s West coast, shallow circular holes scooped from the earth by salt miners resemble craters punched into a lunar landscape. Brackish water seeps into the troughs from the surrounding ocean and, tinted by bacteria, mirrors the midday sun in pools of red, yellow, blue and green — a jumbled planetary Damien Hirst spot painting.

My vantage point is from an Ultralight “plane,” which is more like a bicycle with floppy canvas wings and a propeller on the nose. There are no doors, just a motorbike-style windscreen and the noisy rush of air shaking the frame of this flimsy sky machine.

From this height, tiny stick figures can just be made out, bent laboring at their tasks beside the swimming pool-sized holes. Smaller white mounds of salt dry under a blinding sun that burns black skin even blacker. From up here, I can’t see the sweat on the brows of the workers – mostly women, some with babies strapped to their backs – nor the cracked skin of hands and feet rubbed raw by millions of tiny, jagged crystals. The corrosive power of the salt eats through metal pans used to scoop the saline water, turning them first to rust, then flakes, then dust.

The women down there gather salt by hand into 110-pound sacks, which sell for about $2 or are traded for sugar with neighboring Gambia, where salt is mainly used to preserve fish in areas without electricity. Trade is informal and vendors elude corrupt tax and customs officials by slipping through the maze of mangrove swamps along the liquid border, exchanging goods between wooden canoes in the hidden shallows.

The scale of my aerial view dwarfs such toil on the salt flats leading out to sea, a view interrupted only by clusters of ragged palm trees that shade thatched village huts dotting the coastline. Out there, the sea, too, reflects the sun, glinting hard and white over a vast, rippling emptiness. But far below my feet, in those murky pools, color glows from the earth. And people scratch a living from it.

By Finbarr O’Reilly

Origin: Katherine Damm

Vivian Maier, Self Portrait, 1959. Image courtesy of www.vivianmaier.com

In our third installation of Origin supplements, Katherine Damm reads and discusses her short story “The Tour.” Look for the Harvard Advocate’s winter issue to read the work in print.

Click here to listen to “The Tour.”

Snippets of:

1. Inman Square, Béla Fleck

2. Who’s Got Three?, Béla Fleck & The Flecktones

Origin: Keoni Correa

In anticipation of the Advocate’s upcoming winter issue, Origin, we present a week’s worth of supplemental material to the magazine. Keoni Correa’s photograph, Arc, is featured in Origin, which will launch on Saturday, March 2. Here he describes Arc‘s creative process. Subscribe to the magazine to see the final version.

This piece resulted from an assignment to make a collage. I was interested in finding a way to combine newspaper cutouts into one pictorial space, and the idea of using a liquid suddenly occurred to me. So I borrowed a dining hall tray and started taking photos while pouring liquids into it and moving the cutouts around.