At the Paris Review, Molly Crabapple and British author Warren Ellis discuss how the thousands-strong armada of dead pigs that descended on Shanghai in March helped inspire his new Kindle Single, Dead Pig Collector:
[… H]ow did you research Dead Pig Collector?
The honest truth? Maybe five hours. I tripped over the phrase “dead pig collector” in a Foreign Policy story about pollution in China, and the whole idea occurred to me. Then it was just a case of getting on yet another PRISM watchlist by doing online searches for people talking about getting rid of bodies. Which was very easy to find. And then maybe ten minutes when I had the notion that the Chinese, of all people on Earth, must have invented a cellphone with a built-in cigarette lighter. Which of course they had. And then it was just four days of writing—the whole thing, as I say, was in my head, and it was just a case of getting it out. [Source]
See the inspirational Foreign Policy story, the cigarette-lighting Seabright SB6309—”Defend wind, No gas, Never blew out … Suit for high altitude areas”—and more on Shanghai’s porcine tide via CDT.
