Author Philip Hoare will deliver the first lecture of this season’s “Napi’s Lecture Series” at Napi’s Restaurant, 7 Freeman Street, Provincetown, on Wednesday, January 24, at 7 o-clock. The lecture is titled “Leviathan rising: how the whales became what we wanted them to be.” The public is invited. Admission is free. Be sure to arrive early and enjoy a cocktail at the bar or take advantage of Napi’s special Bistro menu, served from 5 – 6 pm.
About the Talk
Taking the recent and astonishing killer whale interactions with vessels in the eastern Atlantic as his cue, as well as his own experience at the centre of just such an event, devoted “whalehead,” author and curator Philip Hoare uses archive images and his own dreams to chart the way the whale has changed in response to our need. If we interrupt their alien culture with our own, what then? Ambassadors of the natural world, apex predators doing their thing, or mutating animatronic future-beings: which whales will we choose next, now that it’s down to the wire and down to the deep?
About the Speaker
Philip Hoare is the author of nine works of non-fiction, including Leviathan, or the Whale, winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson prize. He is co-curator of the Moby Dick Big Read, and professor of creative writing at the University of Southampton, UK, and regular visitor to Cape Cod. In 2023 his reports and essays on orca interventions have appeared in the Guardian, the Observer, and in podcasts for the Guardian, VICE, and Al-Jazeera. Read more in the author’s Guardian profile.
Image: “Whalehead” by Philip Hoare
