The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Author: Justin Hopper

  • Hello, World: Making Nature at Wellcome Collection

    Hello, World: Making Nature at Wellcome Collection

    Karl Reich’s 1913 recording of a nightingale – among the world’s earliest extant recordings of bird song – feels like a bottled metaphor for modernity. Trapped in shellac, this sweet twittering turned stand-in for nature, poetry and sex all at once, becomes a ghost of its living and mythical self, haunting us with questions of…

  • Phytology

    Phytology

    “And though thou seemst a weedling wild – Wild and neglected like to me – Thou still art dear to nature’s child And I will stoop to notice thee For oft like thee, in wild retreat, Arrayed in humble garb like thee, There’s many a seeming weed proves sweet As sweet as garden flowers can…

  • To Solve Such An Equation

    To Solve Such An Equation

    Seven Counter-clockwise Turns Around Ruin Lust   Have you ever known a place which seemed to have no beginning and no end? Paul Nash, Monster Field     1. The first time I walked to Chanctonbury Ring, it was whole. A proud bristle of beech trees sprouting from an Iron Age fort atop the West…