Jukebox  (Stripped)- Original

Insect Love Songs - Magicicadas (Magicicada septendecim)

“...warm rain
summons them up
through loam
like Lazarus
after seventeen years” 
(Magicicadas - Fiona Benson)

Part of a series of Insect Love Songs created by award-winning poet Fiona Benson and BBC radio producer Mair Bosworth as part of our 2019 Urgency Arts Commissions.

'From Tennessee we drove 500 miles north through the forests of West Virginia to Pennsylvania. In a dusty parking lot in Keystone State Park, east of Pittsburgh, we met John Cooley and David C. Marshall. John and Dave are cicada chasers; they follow and map ‘broods’ of periodical cicadas - cicada species which emerge only once every 13 or 17 years.  They were waiting beside their Subaru (license plate = CICADAS) to guide us to a forest glade to witness the phenomenon. 

Magicicadas spend most of their lives underground, feeding on xylem fluids from tree roots. In the spring of the thirteenth or seventeenth year they emerge synchronously, in their hundreds of thousands. They have a few short weeks in which to find a mate and complete their life cycle, during which time the Mexican wave of their song is deafening.' Fiona Beson and Mair Bosworth.

Credits
Poems by Fiona Benson. Field recordings and sound design by Mair Bosworth. 

With additional Creative Commons music, samples and sound effects via Freesound; thank you in particular to Dobroide, DomestoPhonics, Patchen, InspectorJ, Janbezouska, Juskiddink, KamilNaidoo, Klankbeeld, MegMcDuffee, Ph4kture, Piggimon, Plagasul, Setuniman, Suonho, Tim_Kahn and Waveplay_Old.

With thanks to: 
Clive Betts, Sarah Campbell, Mike Cooke, John Cooley, Lynn Faust, Naome Glanville, Lara Goodband, Will Hawkes, Gene Kritsky, Eliza Lomas, Michael Malay, David C. Marshall, James Meredith, Holly Morgenroth, Becky Nichols, Phil Rushworth, Jack Skuse, Dana Soehn, Neil Swift, Tom Tregenza, and Karl Wotton.

Insect Love Songs

Insect Love Songs - Magicicadas (Magicicada septendecim)

Last November, I spoke to Christopher E. Forth about his book, Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life (Reaktion Books, 2019), which he describes as a ‘study in the formation of stereotypes’, and in particular the negative stereotypes that have accreted round fat, and fat people, over time.

Those stereotypes may have gone into overdrive in the latter part of the 20th century, but Chris shows that there was already ambivalence about corpulence in the ancient world: the building blocks of later stereotypes were fashioned early.

Christopher Forth on Fat: A Cultural History

An ancient Greek poet once said: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." These podcasts pursue questions large and small in the spirit of the hedgehog and the fox...

Christopher Forth on Fat: A Cultural History

Hedgehog&Fox

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