Ep #2 | Anandam Kavoori | The Wild Monkey Chase

The Wild Spectacle Podcast

Welcome to The Wild Spectacle Podcast, a flash-cast series with host Janisse Ray about ongoing and meaningful participation in a world that matters.

Episode 2 | Dr. Anandam Kavoori

Andy is a professor of Entertainment & Media Studies at the University of Georgia, where he coordinates the Environmental Communication Initiative of Grady College. In his writing, Dr. Kavoori, who was born in India, engages with issues of place, identity, and media culture in a transnational context. He spent the summer of 2020 on a Fulbright in U.S. Studies at the Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico. Dr. Kavoori is the author of The Logics of Globalization; Thinking Television; and Global Bollywood. He is also a novelist.

Highlights of the Story

2:14—Where Andy falls on the wild chart.

3:45—He describes the dry, thorny forests of his youth.

3:49—The Hindi word for slingshot is “gulei.”

6:28—What he learned from a wild monkey.

7:15—“Your listeners need to know that I grew up in a world without television.”

7:45—Mimicking monkeys.

8:30—The small spectacles that happen regularly for Andy.

9:25—He marvels at Trichonephila clavate, or joro spider, an invasive that is colonizing the East Coast

10:48—one suggestion for how to rewild yourself.

12:00—how a natural artifact represents a story.

Thank you for listening. If you like what we’re doing here, give this show a thumbs-up, post it on your socials, and/or forward it to your friends.

Janisse Ray’s book Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans inspired the podcast. If you’d like a copy of the book, visit your favorite bookstore or library. Or you may order at www.janisseray.com/bookshop.

Find Janisse on Facebook at “Janisse Ray, Author” and on Instagram @janisseray_writer.

Thanks to Axletree for their beautiful music, “Clothe the Fields with Plenty,” an orchestral piece inspired by a traditional Hampshire folk song, “The Painful Plough,” from Axletree’s project “Music from a Hampshire Farm.” Thanks to the Free Music Archive.

We’re eager for new voices on the show, so if you’d like to come on and tell a story, be in touch at Janisse Ray’s website, janisseray.com/contact.

If we’re going to make a dent in changing our world, we have to understand what kind of amazements it contains. So many people begin to work on behalf of the planet because they see a natural phenomenon, large or small, that infuses them with admiration and wonder. So get out in nature. Take a friend with you. Especially a child. Go see a wild phenomenon. Amaze yourself. Connect yourself. Let’s get wild!

“Think about epiphany. Think about change. Think about the moments that make your face burn, your fingers tingle. Wild Spectacle is about those shocks, encounters that shift the way we see the world and ourselves in it…If the water we drink is maybe older than the sun, then ancient magic pounds inside our skins, too. So speak it. Tell it forth. Cry aloud and call it back home.”

-Joni Tevis, author of The Wet Collection and The World is On Fire