So the book Telephone is about some birds sitting on the telephone wire playing the game of telephone, and yeah, for me a book has to both be entertaining, but there has to be some sort of like architecture behind it that I find interesting, and that’s a book that’s, to me, also about communication.
I love communication, language, sort of the arbitrariness of words, and so these birds are passing around – so these birds are passing along a simple message, which is, a mother bird wants to say to her son, come home for dinner. Fly home for dinner. And that message gets just more and more unrecognizable.
Each bird, the way – the way that each bird interprets the message gets inflected with their kind of interests, their biases. Every bird hears the message the way that bird wants to hear it. And they’re predisposed to thinking about things in certain ways so that by the time it gets to Peter, I think we’re worried whether this bird is ever going to eat another dinner again.
Like that is what hangs in the balance. Will Peter make it home in time for this or any other dinner? It’s very serious, that situation.
