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Episode image is a detail of a photograph taken by Charles Adrian.
With the world outside bathed in bright sunshine, Charles Adrian talks about two biographies and a story for young teenagers.
The Moses mentioned at the beginning of this episode is Moses Woldetsadik, who is featured in Page One 156. And you can read some thoughts on Keith Haring’s Radiant Baby here.
Books by David Foster Wallace discussed on the podcast are Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (Page One 51 and Page One 169) and This Is Water (Page One 71).
Books discussed in this episode were previously discussed in Page One 18 and Page One 19
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 23rd March, 2020.
Episode released: 12th May, 2020.
Book listing:
Keith Haring, The Authorized Biography by John Gruen (Page One 18)
Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky (Page One 19)
Krabat by Otfried Preußler (Page One 19)
Links:
Keith Haring’s Radiant Baby on Keith-Haring-100a.blogspot.com
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 160th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and... I was about to say “my guest today is” but I have no guest. I am alone today in front of my bookshelf because this is the fourth Page One In Review, in which I'm going through all of the books that I've been given by my guests over the last eight years and telling you what I think of them. The books, not the guests. I won't be telling you anything about... Well no, that's not true. I might tell you things about the guests but I'm not going to be telling you what I think about them, in that sense. I'm not going to be sharing any frustrations or crushes or... I don't... whatever else I might think or feel about the people that... the wonderful people that I've spoken to... I've had the good fortune, should I say, to speak to over the last eight years. Listen to me flattering any of them who might be listening. Right. So. Yeah. The point is, I'm going to be doing that.
Let me just catch you up with... It's... So it's Monday today. It's the 23rd of March, 2020. Just a little bit of a historical primer for those of you who want to know what it was like to be alive on Monday the 23rd of March, 2020, in London. So: I recorded the previous episode on Friday afternoon. At... at Friday's 5pm briefing, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, finally told pubs, clubs, restaurants and gyms and so on to close - he said “I am telling you to close now” - and then asked people not to go to them between 5pm when he actually announced that and midnight, or whenever it was that they would... they would actually close.
And then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, announced that firms... businesses who keep people on the payroll rather than laying them off during these difficult times will get some government support to pay those people. No information about what might happen for freelancers, for people on zero hour contracts, for anybody who was laid off between this time last week, when things started to look really very difficult, and Friday, when... when help was announced. And also no information about what help might be given to people renting. There's been... There's been help offered to people who have mortgages but, so far, no... no help to people who are... certainly people who are renting privately... no information about that. So we're still... we're still waiting today, Monday, to find out what support might be given to those - and there are millions of people in that situation.
Also on Friday, Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, wrote a piece for The Guardian newspaper asking Londoners not to use public transport unless they absolutely had to...and... and not to... not to leave home. He said: “Please stay at home. Only go out to do essential jobs, to buy food or medicine, or to take a walk.” I was very happy to see that going out to take a walk was still considered something essential. I think, in many ways, it is essential to mental well-being. I think if you asked anybody who was confined for whatever reason for any significant period of time, going outside to take a walk would be very high on the list of things that they... that they need - or would like, at least.
Nevertheless, the weekend... it was very beautiful this weekend and Sunday was particularly beautiful. I went out for a walk with my boyfriend Moses - he's... he's my guest on the 156th Page One, by the way, if you wanted to hear his voice. We went out. We went to the shops to buy some things for my downstairs neighbours who are in complete isolation at the moment and we went for a walk around the park. And we discovered that lots and lots of people were doing both of those things. So it was very difficult to keep the recommended social distance from... from other people. And... So perhaps unsurprisingly, on Sunday evening, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, asked us to stay further away from each other when... when we are outside. Who knows? Perhaps we will soon be prevented from going outside. I think, in Spain, I've been seeing lots of people sharing photographs of the Spanish Army, who are not allowing people to go outside except for very, very good reasons. We'll see.
In any case, that's where we are today. I haven't... I haven't looked... haven't been online for most of today. It's about half past four in the afternoon now. I haven't been online since this morning. I'm trying to restrict the amount of time that I spend looking at... just generally, other people's opinions and anxieties. I think that's... that's also helping me. So I don't necessarily have the most up-to-date information. But then, of course, you, listening to this, will have more up-to-date information than I could possibly have.
Today, I have three more books to talk to you about.
[page turning]
The first book that I want to talk to you about was given to me by John Walter in the eight... in the 18th Page One, recorded, as all the Page Ones up to this point were, at the Wilton Way Cafe in Hackney. He... John Walter is somebody that I met at University. He was a fine art student and is now a professional artist and I've seen quite a lot of his work over the years. And he gave me Keith Haring The Authorized Biography by Jon Gruen. And it... This was a very interesting read, not just because I... you know, I didn't know very much about Keith Haring and it was interesting to find out about him, but also very interesting to shed some light on John's artistic lineage, as it were. I think Keith Haring is somebody that he admires very much and I see some of the same... some of the same interests, I suppose. There are a lot... John also works with a lot of repeated figures, he works with all kinds of patterns and shapes and...
So Keith Haring... What did I know about Keith Haring before? I recognised some of the images. I knew some of the... some of the figures that he likes to use. The dog, for example is a very famous one. There's a child. What's the child... Oh, there's a name for that child, isn't there? The baby. And I didn't... it didn't... The work itself didn't speak to me very much. So I really enjoyed reading his... his account of what it is that he's doing and where he comes from, and also other people's account of his work.
I'm not going to... I'm not going to read an awful lot of this but I just... my eye fell on...
Oh, I... I should say that this book is written as a series of... transcriptions really. It's as if - I don't know whether this is, in fact, what happened - it's as if Jon Gruen just switched on a recording device and recorded first of all Keith Haring and then lots and lots of other people. And so he's... he's chopped up Keith Haring's account and put in little vox pops from various other people - artists, people who Keith knew, other celebrities...
This... So this is a little... a little paragraph - well, a few paragraphs - from Roy Lichtenstein. This is page 124 of the book, which is a... a Simon and Schuster Fireside edition:
ROY LICHTENSTEIN I once met Keith at the Milan, Italy, airport. He was in Milan for his show at the Salvatore Ala Gallery. I stopped by the gallery a couple of days before the opening, and there was Keith creating his show right there, on the spot! I mean, the gallery had stretched all these canvases for him, and he was painting a show that would open in two days! It was extraordinary!
Keith composes in an amazing way. I mean, it's as if he dashes the painting off - which in a way he does - but it takes enormous control, ability, talent, and skill to make works that become whole paintings. They're not just arbitrary writings. He really has a terrific eye! And he doesn't go back and correct - this is in itself amazing - and his compositions are of a very high level.
And he has such wit! His figures are just wonderful - the baby, the dog. I suppose Keith looked at our Pop Art - our cartoon figures - and realized they could be a part of art. Of course, he and I come out of very different backgrounds. I mean, Keith comes out of that whole graffiti school, while I was heavily into Abstract Expressionism. But then, I made a break, and Andy Warhol did too. Of course, the idea of doing cartoons is still something I feel isn't completely accepted. Critical opinion still goes that way. I mean, it doesn't seem intellectual enough, it doesn't seem anguished enough. Criticism of Haring is very much the same.
Keith is a great showman. He likes being on the street and attracting attention - he attracts and likes the media. It's a certain part of what he's about. But he's really not trying to make himself famous through advertising. He might like that, but it's not the primary motive. It's that he really wants people to love what he does. Also, Keith has a very interesting sense of humor. For example, those vases - those pseudo-Greek things, with Magic Marker on them. They're quite convincing and charming and funny. And much of the stuff is quite sexy, yet it's hardly pornographic. It's quite happy sex!
What I like best about Haring's work is that when he's finished a piece, there's nothing that you could think of that you'd want to change, even if he did something all at once - without standing back and changing anything - there just isn't a false move. It's all so beautifully drawn - and there's such a sense of relatedness. The stuff is beautiful! He's really done some gorgeous things!
I think that's... Yeah. It feels like it sums up an awful lot about... well, certainly what I discovered in the book about the way that Keith Haring works, for example, and the way that his work is viewed, and the kinds of things that he's... that he's trying to do. Yeah. I think that's... I think that's wonderful.
[page turning]
The second book that I'm going to talk about today was given to me during the 19th Page One by Christina Scheutz. And it's... it's really the same kind of thing as the Keith Haring book but about David Foster Wallace and by David Lipski. It's called Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace. And, again, it's just... I mean, it's a... there are fewer voices in here.
This is a... this is really a transcript of a conversation between David Lipsky And David Foster Wallace. I think David Lipsky went on a book tour with David Foster Wallace. I don't remember what.... Oh, it's actually the last leg... Here we are... I'm just reading the front of the book here... This is the kind of thing that, obviously, I could do before I start recording and never do.
Then Rolling Stone sent Lipski to join Wallace on the last leg of his book tour for Infinite Jest, the novel that made him internationally famous.
I still haven't read Infinite Jest. I read another book that I'll talk about, probably, later on, in a later episode. Somebody gave me a collection of essays called... just looking for it here on the shelf and I don't see it. Oh! Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. So, yes, I'll be talking about that in a little while. But... it's one of those books... Infinite Jest is one of those books... I'm like many, many people: I plan to read it one day. I suppose I'm less sure that I will read it at this point in my life. In 2012, when Christina gave me this book, I was very sure that I would one day read Infinite Jest but, you know, we all change, don't we? Life moves on.
So. I did enjoy this book Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. I mean, I like... the title is so good because I think it's true. And the Of Course is so brilliant because yes, of course, you end up becoming yourself. But it's one of those things that you don't necessarily realise or that doesn't make immediate sense. And I think, as time goes on, I've... I feel more and more that of course we do end up becoming ourselves, however much we try to become other people - you know, people we've imagined or people we know or people we would like to be.
Again, I don't remember an awful lot of what happens in this book but I remember liking David Foster Wallace's voice very much. What has stayed with me is what is, I think, in the afterword - the... the book begins with a preface and then there's an afterword and then the rest of the book is... or most of the rest of the book is this long, long, long, long, you know, hun... two hundred, three hundred page interview... conversation, really, I should say, between the two Davids. In the afterword, David Lipsky talks a little bit about David Foster Wallace's... the end of his life. And that... Yes, this... that section is... is very strong and very... very sad, quite hard to read. And particularly to read about David Foster Wallace's experience with antidepressants - with different antidepressants - and with, I suppose, mental healthcare. For somebody like me who has taken antidepressants in the past and may feel like I need to take them again in the future, that was difficult but interesting reading, if that makes sense.
The part that I'm going to read for you... There's a little bit that I underlined so these are things that obviously jumped out to me in 2012 when I read this - because I'm pretty sure I read it pretty soon after Christina gave it to me... She didn't give it to me at the time because she didn't have any books with her when I interviewed her - ‘interviewed’ is the wrong word - when I had the conversation with her in Hackney at the Wilton Way Cafe but she sent this to me afterwards. On page 160, I've underlined... David Foster Wallace is talking about this... this generation - his generation - which... he says... So... this generation, which... He says:
I think this generation has it worse or better than any other. Because I think we're going to have to make it up. I think we're going to have to make up a lot of our own morality, and a lot of our own values. I mean, the old ones - the '60s and early '70s did a marvelous job of just showing how ridiculous and hypocritical, you know, the old authoritarian Father's-always-right, don't-question-authority stuff was. But nobody's ever really come along and given us anything to replace it with.
And then he talks about... then he says:
And we're the first generation...
This is... So this is the top of page 160, if you're reading along in the Broadway edition of this book:
And we're the first generation - maybe people starting about my age, it started in '62. We grew up sorta in the rubble of kind of the old system. And we know we don't want to go back to that. But the sort of - this confusion of permissions, or this idea that pleasure and comfort are the, are really the ultimate goal and meaning of life. I think we're starting to see a generation die... on the toxicity of that idea.
And David Lipsky says:
Dying in what ways? I mean, literally dying?
And David Foster Wallace says:
I'm talking about the number of people that - I'm not just talking about drug addicts dying in the street [...] I'm talking about the number of privileged, highly intelligent, motivated career-track people that I know, from my high school or college, who are, if you look into their eyes, empty and miserable. You know? And who don't believe...
And this is the bit that I've underlined:
And who don't believe in politics, and don't believe in religion. And believe that civic movements or political activism are either a farce or some way to get power for the people who are in control of it. Or who just... who don't believe in anything. Who know fantastic reasons not to believe in stuff, and are terrific ironists and pokers of holes.
A bit later on... so on page 161, he talks about how something's going to have to come after this. David Lipsky says:
What do you think it will be?
And David Foster Wallace says:
My guess is that what it will be is, it's going to be the function of some people who are heroes. Who evince a real type of passion, that's going to look very banal and very retrograde and very... You know, for instance, people who will get on television and earnestly say, “It's extraordinarily important, that we, the most undertaxed nation on earth, be willing to pay higher taxes, so that we don't allow the lower strata of our society to starve to death and freeze to death.” That it's vitally important that we do that. Not for them, but for us.
I think that's... that's really been happening in the last few years. I'm not sure... in 2012, I don't remember now whether they were - or how many voices, because certainly there were voices saying that, there have been for a long, long time... but how many voices there were - but certainly in the last three, I would say, three, four, five years in... in US politics, there have been very loud voices and people elected to Congress and so on on that kind of a platform. And in the UK, too, I think, those voices have got louder. There's... It's a struggle, for sure. Here in the U... the United Kingdom, a very... a Labour Party who were saying just that kind of thing lost the election quite substantially just before Christmas last year. But yes. So I feel like there's a certain prescience in what David Foster is saying but it also doesn't feel... it doesn't feel like an extraordinary pres... prescience, it just feels like a sensitivity to what is happening at the moment. Either... Either we change or the whole thing gives. I certainly have that feeling. And I think... well, I feel that that will get stronger.
[page turning]
Right. The third book that I wanted to talk about today - already, as it were... well, I don't have any rules for this particular version of the podcast but breaking a, kind of, unspoken rule - I'm going to read a second book that I have as a result of the conversation that I had with Christina Scheutz in the 19th Page One. So this is just a book that she liked - and she didn't give me this but I... I bought it because it sounded so great. It sounded like exactly the kind of thing that I would like. It's called Krabat by Ottfried Preußler.
I bought it in German, which was quite ambitious of me, but I'd been working quite a lot in Germany. You know, by the time we had our conversation in 2012, I'd spent just over four years working with German theatre companies and occasionally working in German, and my... my German was pretty good. And this is a... this is aimed at teenagers, this book, so it's not too, too complicated to read - or perhaps a young teenagers, even, perhaps younger people than that. So it was about my level. And I really enjoyed it.
Krabat is the name of the main character. And, again, I don't remember it very, very well but I do remember that I loved it.
I'm just going to read you a little bit from this. [laughing] I don't know... yeah... perhaps I'll read it in German and then see if I can translate it. Krabat... Basically, Krabat go... If you... Well, perhaps the best thing to do if you want to know what the book is about, follow the links that will be in the episode notes to this episode to go and listen to my conversation with Christina - so go... go listen to Page One 19 and she explains the story of the book. But this is... So this is page... on the bottom of page 13 of this DTV or [using German pronunciation] D... T V [/deɪ... teɪ faʊ/]... DTV [/deɪ teɪ faʊ/]? DTV [/deɪ teɪ faʊ/]? edition of the book.
Krabat tappte ein Stück durch den Wald wie ein Blinder im Nebel, dann stieß er auf einer Lichtung. Als er si... Als er sich anschickte, unter den Bäumen herzuvortreten [sic], riss das Gewölk auf, der Mond kam zum Vorschein, alles war plötzlich in kaltes Licht getaucht.
Jeztz sah Krabat die Mühle.
I just think that's a really nice little... The... Because the... “die Mühle” is the mill and the mill is the... is really the crucial location in this whole book.
So what... basically what happened is that Krabat's going through the wood... he's making his way through the wood as if he's... you know, as if through the fog - I think it's quite dark - and the moon is covered by the clouds. But something happens - “Als er sich anschickte”... I don't know what... I don't remember any more what that means - under the... I suppose as he... as he made his way under the trees, perhaps, the clouds rolled away and the moon shone out and everything was suddenly bathed in cold light. “Jetzt sah Krabat die Mühle.” Now Krabat saw the mill.
And I think that's a... it's just such a wonderful introduction to the mill, through the dark forest where, you know, nothing can be seen and then suddenly the clouds roll away, the moon shines - not even the sun, but the moon, the cold light of the moon - shines down. And there is this... this mill, where all sorts of scary things happen... scary, magical things happen. I recommend looking out that book if you can find a translation in whatever language it is that you feel most comfortable reading. I think... Yeah, that was really fun. And I think morally quite complex, if I remember rightly. So, yeah. Very good.
Thank you very much for listening. Until next time. Yeah. 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]