Friday 26th April 2012, Bridport Town Hall DT6 3HA,
8pm, (adults £6, under 18s –free)
The whale is perhaps the most mysterious animal known to humanity. For centuries it inspired awe and fear, and was hunted for its oil, blubber and whalebone. Now it is seen as a symbol of an ecological threat, a barometer for a world out of kilter. It is even more remarkable that the transition from an age of whale-hunting to an era of whale-watching has happened within living memory. In his lecture, Philip Hoare sets out to explore that extraordinary distance – between human history and natural history.
Using as his starting-point Herman Melville’s 1851 classic, Moby-Dick – which he has recently co-curated in a free-to-access, international digital rendition –www.mobydickbigread.com – Philip will trace our vexed relationship with the leviathan, from uncanny monster, a creature beyond comprehension, a spiritual symbolic and a magical being, to industrial resource and near-extermination, and now natural wonder. His lecture will be illustrated with images from a decade of watching the animals themselves, from Cape Cod and the Azores to Sri Lanka,Tasmania and New Zealand. In the process he will tease out the metaphysical qualities of these animals, which even now hover between myth and reality.
Philip Hoare is the author of biographies of Stephen Tennant and Noel Coward, Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the First World War, Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital, and England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia. His last book, Leviathan or, The Whale, won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. He is Visiting Fellow at Southampton University, and Artist-in-residence at The Marine Institute, Plymouth University. His latest book, The Sea Inside, will be published by Fourth Estate in June 2013.
