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(This episode is marked as explicit because of strong language and sexual content.)
Episode image is a detail of a photo by Charles Adrian.
In an episode that takes full advantage of the northern hemisphere’s 2020 summer solstice, Charles Adrian talks erotic intent and how seeing and unseeing form part of political white supremacy.
You can read more about the summer solstice on Wikipedia here.
You can see a trailer for Céline Sciamma’s Portrait Of A Lady On Fire here.
You can read an interview with Chris Kraus, talking about I Love Dick twenty years after its first publication, in the Guardian here, you can read Emily Gould talking about I Love Dick in 2015 in the Guardian here and you can read a 2015 profile of Chris Kraus by Leslie Jamison in the New Yorker here.
You can read a 2017 profile of Colin Kaepernick in the New York Times here and a short history of taking the knee by Maham Abedi in Global News here.
Tales Of The City by Armistead Maupin is also discussed in Page One 29. You can read about the series on page and screen, meanwhile, in Vulture here.
Books discussed in this episode were previously discussed in Page One 58, Page One 60, Page One 61.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 20th June, 2020
Episode released: 28th July, 2020
Book listing:
I Like Dick by Chris Kraus (Page One 58)
The City And The City by China Miéville (Page One 60)
Tales Of The City by Armistead Maupin (Page One 61 and Page One 29)
Links:
Portrait Of A Lady On Fire on YouTube
Leslie Jamison in The New Yorker
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 171st Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 15th Page One In Review. I'm recording this on Saturday the 20th of June, 2020, which just happens to be the summer solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere. I had no idea that the summer solstice could fall on different days depending on the year. I mean, I always thought that the 21st of June was the summer solstice and I suppose I'd assumed that the calendar was built around solstices and equinoxes and so on - but apparently not. So this particular solstice, which is the summer solstice, as I say, in the north, can fall on the 20th, the 21st or the 22nd of June. This year it's an early one, it seems.
So. I suppose what I did know - probably because I was taught it and also from observation - is that this is the day on which the sun is at its northernmost point. Over the last few months, I've been watching the sun set at a more and more northerly point of the horizon, which is... you know, it's to the right as you look out the back of my house. So in March it was setting on the left hand side of a tree that I can see and then it started to set behind the tree and then it was setting between the tree and a tall building. And now, in the last few days, it's been setting on the right hand side of that building. And I suppose from today onwards it's going to start its journey back to the left, which is quite exciting. For me, at least. I mean, I find those kinds of things fascinating. I don't know whether you do and I probably will never find out.
The... The other interesting thing about today from my point of view is that it is now three months and one week since I last used public transport and that's probably the longest period I've ever gone without using public transport since I became an adult. So, yeah, that feels like a milestone. I... What I'm finding particularly interesting about that, having realised it only this morning, is how little I miss taking public transport or indeed going into the center of town. Three months and a week ago I took the tube into town with a Swiss friend of mine and we went to see the film Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, which was just wonderful. I loved it. And then, I remember, we came home. And then the next day I started to take the pandemic more seriously and decided not to go to a friend of mine's first boxing match, which she won in my absence. And then the day after that President Macron of France announced that he was going to close the borders. And then the day after that my Swiss friend took the train home. We were a little bit nervous that he wasn't going to make it back to Switzerland but he did. And... And then the day after that I recorded the first of these Page One In Reviews.
But, yeah, I haven't missed taking public transport. I suppose I may find, you know, whenever it is that I take the bus or the train again, that... you know, I'll realise how much I've missed it, but I don... somehow I don't think that is going to be the case.
Anyway, whatever happens, today I'm here talking to you about books. For anybody who is new to the podcast: Welcome! I mean, welcome everybody, obviously, including those of you who are not new to the podcast. But for those of you who are new, you may not know that this is a book podcast and that these Page One In Review episodes are episodes in which I'm talking about all of the books that I've been given over the last eight years of making this podcast. I have three books to talk to you about today.
[page turning]
The first book that I want to talk to you about was given to me by Martin Bengtsson during the 58th Page One. This is a book called I Love Dick by Chris Kraus. Martin and I had our conversation over Skype. I think he was in Sweden - either Stockholm or... I want to say he was in Gothenburg but, yeah, I'm not sure and I haven't looked that up. In any case, we talked about this book and then he sent me a copy and then, quite by chance when he was visiting London and we met up in Hackney and had dinner together, that just happened to be the moment when I was reading the book. I had it in my bag and I told him how much I was enjoying it.
I had heard of the book before he told me about it. My friend Lucy Pawlak, who is the friend of mine who won her first boxing match the day after I saw Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, had talked to me about Chris Kraus several years earlier. She... She was very taken with Chris Kraus's film work and... and very taken with this book I Love Dick.
I do remember a certain amount about this book. I remember that I enjoyed it and it was very... provocative. I mean, it's a... it's... it's... it's rigorous and interesting and challenging. And there are certain ethical questions that I had about the inclusion of this guy Dick - who is a real person, you can find him on the internet and I have a feeling he wasn't at all happy about being included as a character in this book. I think it's impossible to tell how true to life this account is. Obviously it's a subjective account and it's presented as a subjective account and that's one of the interesting things about it, I think. It's a mixture of letters that Chris Kraus and her partner Sylvère write to Dick and then also, I suppose, what you would call memoir: an account of what they did and who they were meeting... what... you know, what happened, you know, during the time that they spent with Dick and what happened when they were elsewhere and conversations that they had with each other.
One of the things that Chris Kraus focuses on is her position in all of this. You know, how she's situated in relation to her partner Sylvère, how she's situated in relation to the world. I mean, even the title is interesting, isn't it? It's... You know: I Love Dick. He's sometimes called Dick, I think, sometimes called Richard in this book, but obviously ‘dick’ is, you know, it's a word for ‘penis’ and... [laughing] I mean, I... you know, it sounds way too obvious to say that but I think it's worth pointing out that the phrase ‘I love dick’ is deliberately provocative in that sense. It is... It's a woman announcing that she likes penis, she likes to have sex with people with penises. Yeah. So that... that declaration of erotic intent, as it were, from a heterosexual woman is a major event. Women - heterosexual women in particular - are so often portrayed as passive in art and that's obviously largely because, you know, most of art that exists in the world - or that is extant in the world - is authored in some way by men. And so, yeah, this is a... there are... Yeah. I'm getting kind of lost in that but the point is that I think she's doing a lot of very interesting things in here, some of which seem perhaps more obvious than they are.
Okay. I'm going to read to you from page 114, 115, 116 and 117 of this 276-page paperback edition, which is published by Semiotext(e). This... this describes a meeting with Dick and the handing over of a whole load of letters that she and Sylvère have written, which... which make up a substantial proportion of the first part of the book. Yeah. You can see, I think, you know, how she feels in relation to Dick and Sylvère and other people that she's... that she's hanging out with. Okay.
January 19, 1995
Sylvère and Chris checked into The Regal Inn Motel in Pasadena Wednesday night. On Thursday afternoon Sylvère called Dick expecting to get his answerphone, but unexpectedly reached him. Mick and Rachel Tausig, two friends from New York, were visiting. Would Sylvère and Chris like to join them all for dinner Sunday at his house?
“By the way, Sylvère,” Dick added before hanging up, “I didn't get Chris' fax the day she sent it. It got mixed up with the Christmas mail so I only read it two weeks later.”
“Ah - a little Christmas present,” Sylvère chuckled.
“Well, it's been some time now,” Dick replied. “I expect the temperature's dropped.”
“Yessss,” Sylvère said uneasily.
On Sunday, January 22 Sylvère and Chris drove out to Antelope Valley in their rental car. She was carrying a xerox of the letters - 90 pages, single-spaced. Sylvère doubted she'd be mad enough to give them to him. But the way that Dick embraced her at the door, a contact that was more than social, that might be even sexual, made her stumble. That was sign enough.
Dinner with Dick and Mick and Rachel, two curators from the Getty, an art critic and Sylvère was very hard. The atmosphere was countercultural-casual. Chris felt like a cockroach beside the poised and glamorous Rachel, who was the only other woman in the room. Dick sat next to Chris, across from Rachel. Perhaps Dick noticed Chris was silent and she hadn't touched the food. At any rate, he turned to her with a slight, complicitous smile to ask: “How's the... project going?” Rachel, also smiling, was all ears. Chris gave up trying to find the right pitch for her reply. “Actually it's changed. It's turned into an epistolary novel, really.” Rachel rose to it. “Ah, that's so bourgeois.” “Huh?” “Didn't Habermas say once that the epistolary genre marked the advent of the bourgeois novel?” Chris flashed back to a breakfast she and Sylvère had once with Andrew Ross and Constance Penley at a conference in Montreal. Constance brilliantly corrected Chris' bumbling appreciation of Henry James, touching every intellectual base. How articulate this woman was at 8:30 in the morning! But still she wondered to herself: Rachel, didn't Lukács say at first?
At any rate the other guests were gone by midnight. She and Sylvère stayed for one last drink. It seemed Sylvère and Dick would never finish talking about new media technology. Chris reached into her purse. “Here,” she said. “What I was talking about.”
Well. Dick was gobstruck and Sylvère for once was speechless. But Dick was generous and kind. He took the 90 pages. “Chris,” he said, “I promise you I'll read them.”
January 26, 1995
Back in New York winter, Sylvère and Chris drove up to Thurman one last time. On Saturday they'd close the house in time to drive down again for Joseph Kosuth's birthday party.
On Sunday morning, January 29, they woke up woozy and hung-over, happy to be back in New York. Joseph's party had been perfect, intimate and large. So many of Sylvère's old friends from the Mudd Club days had been there. They got up slowly and had brunch at Rattner's, heading for the Lower East Side. Sylvère'd be attending his first dinner soon with the [sic] trustees from the MOMA to discuss the Artaud catalogue: surely he should dress the part.
The proprietor of the store on Orchard Street where Sylvère spent several hundred dollars on Italian clothes was a remarkable person, a true light. He lived in Crown Heights and studied Kabbala. Customers drifted in and out as he and Sylvère exchanged ideas about 17th-century Jewish mysticism, Jakob Franck and Lévinas.
It was late afternoon when they left Orchard Street, mild and sunny. They walked with shopping bags back through the freshly landscaped, newly curfewed Tompkins Square Park. Suddenly it hit Chris she was a stranger here and the East Village used to be her home. Her name last night had been missing from the list at Joseph's party and yes, she'd never been part of any glamour-scene here [sic] in 70s New York. But she'd had friends here... friends who'd mostly either died or given up trying to be artists and disappeared into other lives and jobs. Before she met Sylvère, she'd been a strange and lonely girl but now she wasn't anyone.
“Who's Chris Kraus?” she screamed. “She's no one! She's Sylvère Lotringer's wife! She's his ‘Plus-One’!” No matter how many films she made or books she edited, she'd always keep being seen as no one by anyone who mattered so long as she was living with Sylvère. “It's not my fault!” Sylvère yelled back.
But she remembered all the times they'd worked together when her name had been omitted, how equivocal Sylvère'd been, how reluctant to offend anyone who paid them. She remembered the abortions, all the holidays she'd been told to leave the house so Sylvère could be alone with his daughter. In ten years, she'd erased herself. No matter how affectionate Sylvère'd been, he'd never been in love with her.
(The first night they ever stayed together in Sylvère's loft, Chris asked him if he ever thought about history. At that time Chris saw history like the New York Public Library, a place to meet dead friends. “All the time,” Sylvère replied, thinking about the Holocaust. It was then she fell in love with him.)
“Nothing is irrevocable,” Sylvère said. “No,” she screamed, “you're wrong!” By this time she was crying. “History isn't dialectical, it's essential! Some things will never go away!”
And the next day, Monday, January 30, she left him.
Okay. So, yeah. I think that passage demonstrates that there is a lot inside that book. Yeah. I certainly... I don't have the brain power to untangle it just at the moment, which is one of the reasons I got so lost talking about it before I started reading but...yeah, I'm remembering that it's a book that unfurls in many, many interesting directions.
[page turning]
The second book that I want to talk to you about today was given to me by George Lewkowicz during the 60th Page One. We had that conversation at what was then his office in Victoria, in central London. This was... So he gave me The City & The City by China Miéville. I'd never come across China Miéville but this book, not that I make lists like this, but it's certainly in the top ten books that I was given and may even be in the top five books that I was given by guests on my podcast. I just... I loved this book. I loved the ideas in the book and I loved the way that those are explored and described and I loved the story. I mean, it's a... it's a... I suppose what's called nowadays a police procedural. So very close to murder mystery, which is, as I think I've said before, a genre that is close to my heart.
But... Yeah, what is magical about this book is the setting. It's... It's a setting - I think George might have said this - that sounds sci fi. It's set in two cities that occupy the same geographical space and China Miéville brings this to life in an absolutely real way. It's not a science fiction novel, it's a... it's a realist novel, I think you'd say. It relies on human being's capacity for attention and inattention. And, yeah, it hits something absolutely fundamental about the way we are as political creatures. And, you know, in this... at this time when we are - I mean, as at so many times - thinking particularly about racial injustice... I think attention and inattention is at the heart of that as well. I mean, I'm struck by government ministers talking recently about the Black Lives Matter movement in ways that must surely deliberately set out to misrepresent what the Black Lives Matter movement stands for and what it hopes to achieve and the ways that it is hoping to achieve that. This week Dominic Raab said in an interview that he thought maybe that the kneeling which has become such an important part of the protest and the imagery of the protest, that that kneeling, he thought, may have come from Game Of Thrones. It doesn't take long to find a history of kneeling in black protest. I mean, most recently Colin Kaepernick is the man who used kneeling incredibly effectively to draw attention to police violence and the way in which black people are treated by the police.
So this information is very easy to find and the fact that, as I say, senior government ministers are either not looking for this information or pretending that they don't know this information is a... is a deliberate act of inattention. And this is... this is I think what China Miéville captures so perfectly here. And he... This is also, of course, about a form of authoritarianism - the inattention here is as a result of the law in this particular pair of cities - but what, you know, becomes very interesting is that as soon as you start to break that law all kinds of things become possible.
I just wanted to read you a little bit about the main character, the... the investigating officer... There has been a murder at the beginning of this book and the circumstances of that murder make it very difficult to investigate in this particular place. I wanted to read you a little bit in which the investigating officer crosses from one city to the other. And I love it because, I mean, it.... I don't know if this passage alone creates the image that I have in my head but perhaps it was in conjunction with other passages. It's such a simple idea: to cross from one city to another you have to go through the checkpoint and the checkpoint is inside this building but once you come out into the other city you're on the same roads you were driving on just a few minutes ago when you were in the city you've come from. So I'm just going to read from pages 157, 158 and 159 from this Pan Macmillan paperback edition of the book, which is 373 pages long.
COPULA HALL HAD OVER CENTURIES SPREAD, a patchwork of architecture defined by the Oversight Committee in its various historic incarnations. It sat across a considerable chunk of land in both cities. Its inside was complicated - corridors might start mostly total, Beszell or Ul Qoma, become progressively crosshatched along their length, with rooms in one or other city along them, and numbers also of those strange rooms and areas that were in neither or both cities, that were in Copula Hall only, and of which the Oversight Committee and its bodies were the only government. Legended diagrams of the buildings inside were pretty but daunting meshes of colours.
At ground level, though, where the wide road jutted into the first set of gates and wire, where the Besz Border Patrol waived arrivals to a stop in their separated lines - pedestrians, handcarts, and animal-drawn trailers, squat Besz cars, vans, sub-lines for various kinds of passes, all moving at different speeds, the gates rising and lowering out of any phase - the situation was simpler. An unofficial but ancient market where Copula Hall vents into Beszel, within sight of the gates. Illegal but tolerated street hawkers walked the lines of waiting cars with roasted nuts and paper toys.
Beyond the Beszel gates, below the main mass of Copula Hall, a no-man's land. The tarmac was unpainted: this was neither a Besz nor an Ul Qoman thoroughfare, so what system of road markings would be used? Beyond towards the other end of the hall the second set of gates, which we on the Beszel side could not but notice were better kept than our own, with weapon-wielding Ul Qoman guards staring, most of them away from us at their own efficiently shepherded lines of visitors to Beszel. Ul Qoman border guards are not a separate wing of government, as they are in Beszel: they are militsya, police, like the policzai.
It is bigger than a coliseum, but Copula Hall's traffic chamber is not complicated - an emptiness walled by antiquity. From the Beszel threshold you can see over the crowds and crawling vehicles to daylight filtering in from Ul Qoma, beyond. You can see the bobbing heads of Ul Qoman visitors or returning fellow countrymen approaching, the ridges of Ul Qoman razorwire beyond the hall's midpoint, beyond that empty stretch between checkpoints. You can just make out the architecture of Ul Qoma itself through the enormous gateway hundreds of metres off. People strain to see, across that junction.
On our way there I had had the driver take us, to his raised eyebrows, a long way round to the Beszel entrance on a route that took us on KarnStrász. In Beszel it is an unremarkable shopping street in the Old Town, but it is crosshatched, somewhat in Ul Qoma's weight, the majority of buildings in our neighbour, and in Ul Qoma its topolganger is the historic, famous Ul Maidin Avenue, into which Copula Hall vents. We drove as if coincidentally by the Copula Hall exit into Ul Qoma.
I had unseen it as we took KarnStrász, at least ostensibly, but of course grosstopically present near us were the ligns of Ul Qomans entering, the trickle of visitor-badge-wearing Besz emerging into the same physical space they may have walked an hour previously, but now looking around in astonishment at the architecture of Ul Qoma it would have been a breach to see before.
Near the Ul Qoma exit is the Temple of Inevitable Light. I had seen photos many times, and though I had unseen it dutifully when we passed I was aware of its sumptuous crenellations, and had almost said to Dyegesztan that I was looking forward to seeing it soon. Now light, foreign light, swallowed me as I emerged, at speed, from Copula Hall. I looked everywhere. From the rear of Dhatt's car, I stared at the temple. I was, suddenly, rather astonishingly and at last, in the same city as it.
‘First time in Ul Qoma?’
‘No, but first time in a long time.’
Right. Yeah, I wanted to read more but I think that's probably enough. Please, please read that book. It's just... It's great. I love it. I love it so much.
[joint cracking]
Crack goes my elbow.
[page turning]
Right. The last book that I have to read for you today was given to me during the 61st Page One by Chella Quint. I say “during”… this was also a Skype conversation. The... So, yeah, Martin Bengtsson and Chella Quint both sent their books on after the conversations that we'd had. This is Tales Of The City by Armistead Maupin. Chella sent me a delightfully battered copy of this book. This is a Corgi edition of the book. It's 269 pages long.
I've read many but not all of the books in this series. The city here is San Francisco. Also... I mean, it's just the one city but Armistead Maupin is also interested in divisions and where different... perhaps versions of the city overlap, sometimes invisibly. This book was first published in 1976. I... Yeah, I love these books. They're... They're very light. But I suppose one of the things that I found in them was a gay character, Michael Mouse, who [laughing] believed that he deserved love. And there are just so many narratives of gay life in which, you know, the protagonists either don't find love or they find love and it's wrenched away from them or, you know, somehow or other they end up miserable. And, you know, as you make your way through this series that also happens. Armistead Maupin... he... yeah, he deals with the AIDS crisis, he deals with heartbreak in general. I mean, he's a... he's a hopeless romantic, Armistead Maupin - or, at least, that's my reading of things, because I think he puts a lot of his own feelings into Michael... oh I don't remember what Michael's surname is. Michael Mouse, anyway, is [laughs] what Michael's friend Mona calls him. And then, yeah, he's just known as Mouse for some of it.
Yeah. There are various television adaptations of Tales Of The City. I've seen a little bit of the... the first series that was made, which has Armistead Maupin appearing as a... as a nosy neighbour peering out of a window next door. And then there was a version that came out on Netflix either last year or the year before in which the house, which is the, kind of... the talismanic location for the whole series, in... the house in Barbary Lane where Anna Madrigal lives is suddenly completely isolated. It's quite interesting, the difference. That, you know, earlier in the... in... I don't when they first made... probably in the [uncertainly] nineties they first adapted these books, the house has nei... has neighbours, and then in this, you know, 2018/2019 adaptation, the house suddenly has no neighbours. It's alone and it's a ki... it's a kind of magical unreal place. A haven, really. And... Yeah, it's a place that Mouse ends up living and Mary Ann Singleton, who is the first character that we meet, and Mona and Anna Madrigal, of course, lives there. And Brian lives there and, you know, all sorts of important people live there at various times.
The friendship between Mary Ann Singleton and Michael is important and so what I thought I would read - I'm not going to read you an awful lot - but [laughing] I just wanted to read a very few lines which are... so Michael's first entrance. Mary Ann Singleton is at a Safeway. She's there with her friend Connie and they're there to flirt with guys. And Mary Ann Singleton has started talking to somebody called Robert.
He extended his hand. ‘My name is Robert.’ Not Bob or Robbie, but Robert. Strong and direct. She gripped his hand. ‘I'm Mary Ann Singleton.’ She wanted him to remember it.
‘Well... at the risk of sounding like Charlie Manson... how about a little culinary advice for a hapless male?’
‘Sure. No, snow peas?’
He laughed. ‘Not snow peas. Asparagus.’
Mary Ann had never found the subject so exciting. She was watching Robert's eyes respond to her hollandaise recipe when a young man with a mustache approached with his cart.
‘Can't leave you alone for a minute.’ He was talking to Robert.
Robert chuckled. ‘Michael... this is Mary Ann...’
‘Singleton,’ said Mary Ann.
‘This is my roommate, Michael. She's been helping me with hollandaise, Michael.’
‘Good,’ said Michael, smiling at Mary Ann. ‘He's awful at hollandaise.’
There you go. [laughs] So. Yeah. Little would you guess at that point that Michael would go on to be one of the central figures of the whole series.
Okay. So that was Tales Of The City by Armistead Maupin. This has been the 15th Page One In Review. I'm Charles Adrian. I am very hungry and a little bit lightheaded. I'm going to go and remedy that now. Thank you so much for listening to this. Yeah. Speak to you all very soon. Bye.
Jingle
Thank you for listening to Page One. For more information about the podcast, please go to pageonepodcast.com.
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]