The Storytelling Animal: The Science of How We Came to Live and Breathe Stories. By Maria Popova Where a third of our entire life goes, or what professional wrestling has to do with War and Peace.
“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser memorably asserted, and Harvard sociobiologist E. O. Tom Healy Interviews Mike Daisey. Mike Daisey seen performing at the Speakeasy DC event, July 8, 2008.
Photo by Aaron Webb. In late November, I sat down with monologist Mike Daisey at the historic Clocktower Gallery, in downtown Manhattan, to discuss his work in this interview for Creative Time Reports and BOMB. Daisey and I met in the recording studio of Art International Radio, founded and run—like the gallery—by the irrepressible Alanna Heiss, who gave early shows there to Joel Shapiro, Richard Tuttle, Robert Smithson, Lynda Benglis, and countless other great artists from the 1970s to today. Daisey and I discussed the motivating ethos of his work, from his experience of “non-Euclidean” New York to storytelling after the occupation of Zuccotti Park, down the street from the Clocktower.
The radio station and gallery are housed in a Lower Manhattan criminal-court building, which also happens to be the place where Occupy Wall Street protesters were “processed.” ‘The Storytelling Animal,’ by Jonathan Gottschall. These questions animate “The Storytelling Animal,” a jaunty, insightful new book by Jonathan Gottschall, who draws from disparate corners of history and science to celebrate our compulsion to storify everything around us.
There are several surprises about stories. The first is that we spend a great deal of time in fictional worlds, whether in daydreams, novels, confabulations or life narratives. When all is tallied up, the decades we spend in the realm of fantasy outstrip the time we spend in the real world. As Gottschall puts it, “Neverland is our evolutionary niche, our special habitat.” A second surprise: The dominant themes of story aren’t what we might assume them to be.