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(This episode is marked as explicit because of strong language and sexual imagery.)
Episode image is a detail of a photo by Charles Adrian.
Having taken a short change is as good as a holiday, Charles Adrian returns to his wooden IKEA steps to talk about the first three books given to him by guests on the third season of the podcast.
Correction: The word Charles Adrian was looking for in relation to the cover of The Clown by Heinrich Böll is “monochrome”. And it is, of course, Heinrich Böll who won the Nobel Prize in 1972 not this particular novel.
You can find out more about The Radio Collective here.
You can find Phoebe Reads A Mystery here.
Varna is here in case you would like to explore the area yourself. Galatz, which is the other place mentioned towards the end of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, is now called Galați and is here.
Correction: In 1993, when Nicholson’s London Mini Atlas was published, the East London line ran to Shoreditch at “Peak hours and Sunday mornings”. Also, Charles Adrian should have pointed out that Aldwych station, now disused, was still possible to reach on the Piccadilly line from Holborn at “Peak hours only”. You can find out more about Aldwych station on Wikipedia here.
Books discussed in this episode were previously discussed in Page One 90, Page One 91 and Page One 92.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 27th August, 2020.
Episode released: 22nd September, 2020.
Book listing:
Cunt-Ups by Dodie Bellamy (Page One 90)
The Clown by Heinrich Böll (trans. Leila Vennewitz) (Page One 91)
London Mini Atlas published by Nicholson (Page One 92)
Links:
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 179th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 23rd Page One In Review. Today is the 27th of August. It's a Thursday. I... Yeah, it's been a while since I stood at the microphone. I've taken a week or so off. Probably more than a week - I haven't... I don't remember when I recorded the previous episode. Yeah, they say change is as good as a holiday, don't they? So happy holiday me.
Instead of recording new episodes I've been transcribing old episodes. I would like - as I think I mentioned before - to have all of the Page One episodes available to read as well as to listen to online and so far I have transcribed... so all of the episodes from this season, Season 6, because I transcribe as I go - that's thirty-one episodes so far - and I've also transcribed now twenty-six, I think... yes, twenty-six of the episodes from the first season. So I've transcribed all of the episodes from Page One 1 to Page One 24, which is actually twenty-five episodes because there's one - I think it's the third episode - which is called Page 30, which for some reason isn't part of the general numbering system. I don't... I don't remember why I decided that. I think I didn't particularly want to record that episode. I was persuaded to do it. And now I like it - I'm very... I'm very fond of it - but at the time, because I wasn't reading the first pages and because they weren't all second hand books, I felt like... yeah, I was, kind of, breaking the rules of my own podcast and I wasn't ready to do that at that stage. It was, as I say, only about the third episode.
Anyway. That aside. So, yeah, I've... And I've also transcribed, for some reason, Page One 29, which I did out of order. I don't now remember why I did that. But. So: twenty-six of fifty-two episodes from Season 1 have been transcribed. And then I just have the episodes from Seasons 2, 3, 4 and 5 to do, which is... I mean, it's a lot and it's taken me six months to do as many as twenty-six from the first season so... Well, who know... I mean, I did three last week so it c... You know, I go in spurts... fits and spurts or spurts and jumps or whatever the phrase is. Anyway. The point is eventually - hopefully - that will get done.
The first season is definitely the longest season. S... Season 2 only has thirty-seven episodes. Season 3, which we're starting to talk about in this episode today, only has seventeen episodes. It's the shortest season of all. It went out fortnightly on what was then called iTunes and is now called Apple Podcasts from the 6th of January to the 10th of November, 2015, and my first guest, as always with all of the seasons of this podcast, was Vera Chok.
[page turning]
So Vera and I had that conversation - it was the 90th Page One - we had that conversation at her flat somewhere in London. I don't remember where exactly she was living at that point. But she gave me a book that I feel as though I should give you a warning about. So: language warning. There is some fairly strong language in this book and it starts with the title, which is Cunt-Ups. And this is by Dodie Bellamy.
These are... I mean, I suppose they're... are they prose poems or...? I don't really know how to describe them. They're... They're pieces. There are twenty-one cunt-ups. And let me tell you right now that this is... this is published by Tender Button Books and it is 67 pages long. Oh and this one is signed! That's very nice, isn't it? It looks like Nodine or Nadine Bellamy but I assume that's Dodie Bellamy. This... So it says:
A first edition of 1300 copies were printed.
Typeset in 11 point Perpetua.
26 copies are lettered A-Z and signed by the author.
Wow. Oh, this is U. Gosh! So this is one of the first twenty-six copies. What's... What number is 'u' in the alphabet? U... So: u, [laughing] v, x... u, v, w - [laughing] sorry - u, v, w, x, y, z. So this is the twentieth. Is it? Or the twenty-first? Something like that. Gosh! Oh, this is a very special copy. Well, I shall look after it more carefully than I have been thus far. Well, no, what am I going to do other than put it on a shelf? It's on a shelf already. In any case... so, very [sic] special book.
These are... These are fun and... I mean, I find them challenging because they are non-narrative. They're just... You know, it's... it's a whole, kind of, mishmash of images and ideas and some of them are quite exciting, some of the sentences are very satisfying and produce all kinds of wonderful ideas and effects. I do... Well, let's say, I am suspicious of cut-ups as a technique. I'm suspicious of all, kind of, automatic writing as a way of producing a finished product. This is entirely my own prejudice and I know a lot of artists enjoy using automatic techniques as a way of, kind of, shifting their perspectives or opening up new ways of doing something or, you know, showing them things that they hadn't necessarily thought of or wouldn't have thought of. And I think, you know, making cut-ups is a way of doing that.
And... I mean, and here... So Dodie Bellamy at the end of the book writes some notes on Cunt-Ups and I just want to read this actually because I think it's... she's... she... what she writes is very interesting. And for anybody who doesn't know what a cut-up is - and I wasn't really sure exactly how it worked - I think this is a good description:
Cunt-Ups is a hermaphroditic salute to William Burroughs, and Kathy Acker. I started the project as cut-ups, in the original Burroughs sense, as delineated in The Job. I used a variety of texts written by myself and others. Per Burrough's rather vague instructions, I cut each page of this material into four squares. For each cunt-up I chose two or three squares from my own source text, and one or two from other sources. I taped the new Frankenstein pages [sic] together, typed it into my computer and then reworked the material. When my own source text was used up my cunt-ups were finished. The body with all organs slithers and lunges through netsex, psychic oozings, alien invasion, and serial murder. In ecstatic peristalsis the lover endlessly re/turns to life.
I think [laughing] those... those last two sentences there are wonderful. They... They just erupt out of nowhere, don't they, but they actually are... they do contain quite a good description of what is in the... in the book. And then... So then there's a second paragraph here which is also very interesting:
Is the cut-up a male form? I've always considered it so - needing the violence of a pair of scissors in order to reach nonlinearity.
That's a difficult word to say: nonli... nonlinearity.
Oddly, even though I've spent up to four hours on each cunt-up, afterwards I cannot recognize them - just like in sex, intense focus and then sensual amnesia. They enter the free zone of writing; they have cut their own ties to the writer. She no longer remembers these disembodied shreds of desire as her text.
So, yeah, I think in the 90th Page One - which you can listen to if you follow the links on the episode page at pageonepodcast.com - Vera reads the first of these cunt-ups which is also the shortest. I'm... Yes, I'm also going to read that one because it's the shortest and because it's very pleasing and... yeah, I don't know if I will read it as well as Vera does. I re-listened to Vera's reading of it and I think she reads it beautifully. And all kinds of things sprang out of it when I listened to her reading it that I hadn't got from reading it myself from the book. But I... yeah, I flicked through all of these when I was preparing this episode and it's... I mean, yeah, there's a lot of repetition, which is interesting and not interesting [laughs] depending on, I guess, how I was feeling at the time when I came across it. But ther... Yeah, there's some really good stuff in here. There's... There's some really nice ideas and some really nice strange, fruitful juxtapositions.
I'm going to... Yeah, I'm going to read the first cunt-up, which is just called One. It's on pages 13 and 14 of the book. And, yeah, you can see for yourselves what you think of it:
Without its shell, but it's tubular, like most and I was raised there and attended and we fall asleep together. I'll wake up when you pinch my nipple, I'll look back at you when you tell me to rub cum juice on my living. Will you accept my pussy for your subject states? I was raised - think of it as yours. Would you do it? I consider myself to be an atheist, I admit I pussy weep. Would you feel okay about states? I am currently on probation for thoughts mushy and oozing like runny yolks, thoughts about age and ass. Would you prefer me to suck your clit, hiker, whom I described as a male with lips? Yes, I would fuck you back, yes, you had homosexual sex with me and states sexy. You are such a romantic. You can state we got into a physical fight, you can hang there with my balls, you can, and during the fight you stated your cock could slide up anything you want blow of the barbell 'cause you can't help it now, it's magic, you've got to blur, I'm moving so fast. You don't know how infinite the course of my humiliations for you, singing actually - torch songs of nullity of being/being outside my kind of love, the kind of love the top of the wall carved a hole in. The rock. They opened the door and tied me down, a runnel of water/a returned letter. They tied me down, and I let a turd, the hard absolute hostility of slaves, the infinite partition of waiting because my eyes were too wide. I was Jesus, see the dark figure in the empty room alone, all fours tied, cakes, one arm out of the leather. Then I got a foot out and I couldn't decide whether I had turned in the electric symbols. I knew you were there outside in black black black cell of rock. What else do you want to know about me the rock well walls of rock I'm yours. Chinks of light. When I was in SF I again thought I was your wall of light, UFOs set up a landing near the wailing wall, cement pads. I painted pictures because I reached the hall of the Double Rhino, I walked around a government building, ripped leaves from the trees and wrote down that I had so many choices.
Yeah. There are s... I just... There are so many sentences in there which I love. “Will you accept my pussy for your subject states” - and then the next sentence starts: “I was raised” and then there's a break and then... and then it's: “think of it as yours” as if it's, kind of... yeah, a break back to the previous [laughs] idea. “Will you accept my pussy for your subject states? I was raised - think of it as yours, by the way.” [laughs] I think that's really nice. Yeah... “whom I described as a male with lips”. Great description. “Yes, I would fuck you back, yes...” [laughing] Yeah, there's s... There are so many... Yeah: “They tied me down, and I let a turd”.
Some of it is, I think, the joy of saying things that I wouldn't normally say in my everyday life - I wouldn't normally give myself the freedom to say - and I think that... I suppose that is... Part of the beauty of cut-ups is that they perhaps circumnavigate some of the... the blocks that we put on our own... on our own expression.
[page turning]
The next book that I want to talk about was given to me by Richard Purnell [/pɜːnˈel/] during the - or, yeah, Richard Purnell [/pˈɜːnl̩/]? Purnell [/pɜːnˈel/], I think - during the 91st Page One. We recorded that here in my flat in West London,. He gave me The Clown, a novel, by Heinrich Böll. This won the Nobel Prize in 1972. It has a... I was going to say a black and white cover but that's not quite right. It's... It's, kind of, a creamy colour - although it may... I suppose it may originally have been white and turned cream. In any case, it's... [tuts] what do you call that when there's no... there's just black and grey and...? Oh. Anyway, the words gone out of my head.
I... yeah, I don't remember an awful lot about this book. I remember that the main character is a professional clown and I think either not a very good one or someone who continually self-sabotages. He may also be an alcoholic. What else? He's not... Yeah, he's not doing very well for money and he's... the jobs that he can get are g... are becoming less and less prestigious and they are paying less and less well. So it is... yeah, it's the story of a descent, I think, and, in a way, quite difficult to read for that reason. I... Yeah, I think it was enjoyable. I think it... I mean, it's written with, kind of, verve. Yeah, there is a lot of bitterness in here. There is a lot of [laughing] resentment - feeling that other people are doing better, feeling that other people have, you know, done him down or treated him badly.
It's an interesting one to flick through having also flicked through Cunt-Ups because [laughing] some of it reads like a cut-up. I'm going to read you from pages 99 and 100 of this 247-page book. It's published by Marion Boyars. Yeah, this is the beginning of chapter 11. And I... I mean, it'll give you a sense of the... the... kind of, the storytelling, the tone of the book but, yeah, I think it's... I don't know, it's quite fun, I think, to read it with the idea that it might also be the product of a cut-up process:
I went into the bathroom, poured some of the stuff Monika Silvs had put out for me into the tub and turned on the hot water. Having a bath is almost as good as sleeping, just a sleeping is almost as good as doing “the thing.” That's what Marie called it, and I always think of it in her words. I simply could not imagine that she would do “the thing” with Züpfner, my imagination just hasn't got [sic] room for such ideas, just as I was never seriously tempted to poke around in Marie's underwear. I could only imagine that she would play parchesi with Züpfner, and that infuriated me. There was nothing I had done with her that she could do with him without seeming like a traitor or a whore. She couldn't even spread butter on his toast. When I imagined her picking up his cigarette from the ashtray and smoking it I nearly went out of my mind, and the knowledge that he didn't smoke and probably played chess with her was no consolation. After all, she had to do something with him, go out dancing or play cards, he had to read aloud to her or she to him, and she had to talk to him too, about the weather or about money. Actually the only thing she could do for him without having to think of me all the time was cook, for she did this so rarely for me that it would not necessarily be treason or whoring. I felt like phoning Sommerwild straight [sic] away, but it was still too early, I had made up my mind to wake him up about two-thirty in the morning and have a long talk with him about art. Eight o'clock in the evening, that was too respectable an hour to call him up and ask him how many principles of order he had fed Marie with already and what commission he would get from Züpfner: a thirteenth-century crucifix, or a fourteenth-century madonna from the Rhineland. I also considered the method I would use to kill him. Probably the best way to kill esthetes is with valuable objets d'art so that in death they can still get mad over an act of vandalism. A madonna would not be valuable enough, it [sic] would be too solid, he could die happy in the knowledge that the madonna had been saved, and a painting is not heavy enough, although the frame might be, only then again he would find consolation in the thought that the painting itself might be spared. Perhaps I could scrape the paint off a valuable painting and suffocate or strangle him with the canvas: not a perfect murder but a perfect murder of a esthete. It wouldn't be easy, either, to send a healthy specimen like that into the next world, Sommerwild is tall and slim, of “dignified” appearance, white-haired and “kindly,” a mountain-climber and proud of having participated in two world wars and winning a medal for athletics. A tough opponent, in tiptop condition. There was nothing for it but to dig up a valuable metal objet d'art, made of bronze or gold, perhaps marble would do, but I couldn't very well go to Rome first and make off with something from the Vatican Museum.
There you go. That, I think... yeah, it gives you a sense of the... the mental processes of the narrator, the main character here, [sound of pages being turned] whose name I've completely forgotten. I don't think I'm going to be able to find it just by flicking through. In any case - or maybe he doesn't have a name. Yeah, he's obsessed with this Marie, who I think has broken up with him and who is now going out with Züpfner. As I say, I don't remember the details of the story but, yeah, his brain zips from one thing to the next in a rather [laughing] exhausting manner. But I think when you read the whole novel it comes together and makes more sense.
[page turning]
The last book that I want to talk to you about today was given to me by Lolie Ware during the 92nd Page One. This we recorded in her radio studio, which was set up in her garage. She lived in those days not far from where I live here in West London. She lived just outside London and owned a radio station called The Radio Collective. I did a couple of weekly shows for The Radio Collective for... Oh, I don't know how long we did those for. I did one weekend show - I think it was... was it a Saturday or a Sunday show? Oh. Memory, memory. Sunday... I think was a Sunday morning show. I did that just as me, Charles Adrian, and I did a Monday and Tuesday evening show as Ms Samantha Mann, my alter ego. And I used to go in and... yeah, do that from her garage and one day we took the time to record an episode of my podcast there. So it is beautifully produced, that episode. I recommend that you go and listen to it. And Lolie's wonderful.
She gave me a Nicholson Mini Atlas of [laughing] London. It's subtitled “LONDON IN YOUR POCKET” and it is indeed very much pocket-sized. I can even... let me just try. I can even - yes - fit it into the pocket of the jeans that I'm wearing today. And in fa... I'm wearing a hoodie as well. It pre... yeah, it fits int... they're small pockets that... in the hoodie but it fits into one of those as well. So, yeah, definitely pocket-sized.
I love maps. This was a very good [laughing] choice. I don't know if she knew how much I like maps. I'm the sort of person who every now and then will just go to Google Maps and look up a place and, you know, find out what is near it. I've been... I've been listening to the podcast Phoebe Reads A Mystery, which I absolutely recommend, and she's been reading Dracula by Bram Stoker and they got to... all of the characters - or most of the characters - got to Varna in Bulgaria and I had to go and look up Varna on Google Maps and find out how close it was to places that I'd heard of and, you know, how you would get there in a ship and where... what was it called? Golantz? Can't remember the name of the other place they mentioned. But anyway, how far away that was because they need to go there by train. I just... I love it. I love that. And so this is... I haven't flicked through this very much but I did the other day, as I say, when I was preparing this episode and it was, perhaps... yeah, perhaps surprisingly - to those of you who don't like maps - surprisingly entertaining.
One of the things that occurred to me about it is that as soon as you have a paper map - and I suppose the same must be true of online maps - but certainly when you have a paper map it's a historical document as well as a geographical document. This booklet was published in 1993 and it has a Tube map on the back - a map of the London Underground. Very recognisable, you know, the... If you just glanced at a map today in an Underground station in London it wouldn't look so different but, you know, I can see all kinds of things that have changed. I... yeah, I love that.
The Circle Line in 1993 was a continuous - it's a bottle shape but it does a continuous circuit of the center of London. That's no longer the case. It does more of a spiral or a, sort of... a, kind of, snail shell shape in and out. The Hammersmith & City Line runs alone from Hammersmith to Paddington, which is no longer the case. And then from... in the east, from Whitechapel onwards, it only runs... where's the key here? It only runs... yeah, “Peak hours only” it says. I think now it runs at any time of... you know, until the whole service stops. The Overground - which is the line that runs past the back of my house here - which is now a, kind of, orange colour on the maps is still white on this map and is described as “Network SouthEast”. So presumably that wasn't then owned by London Underground, which it is now. What else? Oh yes, the East London Line still exists. That's now part of the Overground network. That line stops at Whitechapel and then goes on to Shoreditch... when does it say? Yeah: “Restricted service”. [laughing] So there is restricted service to Shoreditch in those days. Nowadays you can go all the way to Dalston Junction and perhaps beyond.
Oh, and the Jubilee Line still stops at Charing Cross in 1993. That was a huge change. When the Millennium arrived - or in preparation for the Millenium, should I say... the year 2000 - there was a whole refit of the Jubilee Line and it now goes via Westminster and Waterloo... Southwark - which isn't even on this map - London Bridge and then goes out east and ends up in Stratford. And then similarly all of the building that happened around the Millennium is not on the maps here. You know, when you flick to the page where North Greenwich is shown - which is page 27 - there's just a big blank white space where the Millennium Dome is now. And that cable car that goes over the river from there is not on the map. On page 25, just above where it says Southwark, it... the... what is now the Tate Modern gallery is... is described as “Power Sta[tion] (Disused)” and there is no Millenium Footbridge going over towards St Paul's. The London Eye is not there. Yeah, there are... there are all kinds of things that have changed and I imagine there are new roads... roads might have disappeared...
Yeah, so I [laughing] find that... I find that all very enjoyable. The only perhaps major downside to this map - or the only, kind of, big... the big hole in it - is that it doesn't go quite far enough west to reach where I live. I would have to walk for... yeah, about five minutes to arrive on the very left hand corner of page 22. But [laughing] in any case, yeah, the Nicholson Mini Atlas of London - a wonderful gift from... from Lolie.
And, I mean, I haven't even talked about other things that I've read about mapping and how difficult it used to be to map. I don't know... I suppose nowadays maps are done from the... from space - are they? - but, of course, at the beginning of mapping people would have to walk around and map things and it took a long time and, you know, things were being built all the time. So, yeah, I don't know. It's a philosophical question: is it possible to produce an absolutely accurate map? I think probably not. But that doesn't stop them being... yeah, wonderful documents and... and occasional lifesavers.
Okay. That's it. Thank you so much for listening this week. I will... I don't know when I'll record the next episode. I've been feeling weirdly comfortable about my stockpile of episodes dwindling and dwindling and dwindling but that feeling may change. So perhaps I will record the next episode very soon. In any case, I hope you're all doing all right and I hope you continue to do all right until I speak to you again. Yeah. Thanks and goodbye.
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]