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(This episode is marked as explicit because of strong language.)
Episode image is a detail of a photo by Charles Adrian.
His hair longer, perhaps, than it has ever been in his life, Charles Adrian talks art, bad people and bookshops.
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch is discussed in Page One 174 and, before that, in Page One 72.
You can read all about the National Poetry Library – which is, in fact, on level 5 of the Royal Festival Hall in London’s Southbank Centre – on their home page here.
Correction: during this episode Charles Adrian calls the Bill Drummond book For Sale $20,000 because that is what is written on the cover of the edition he was given by Katrina Crear but its title is in fact $20,000. You can read more about Bill Drummond on Wikipedia here and you can read about Duncan McLaren’s book Personal Delivery on his website here.
Another book by Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley, is discussed in Page One 53 and Page One 170.
You can hear Helen Fielding, the author of Bridget Jones’s Diary, among other things, on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs here.
Ben Walters was also a guest on Bernadette Russell’s podcast How To Be Hopeful, which you can listen to here.
Books discussed here were previously discussed in Page One 74, Page One 76 and Page One 77.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 21st July, 2020
Episode released: 25th August, 2020
Book listing:
$20,000 by Bill Drummond (Page One 74)
Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith (Page One 76)
Three Things You Need To Know About Rockets by Jessica A. Fox (Page One 77)
Links:
Personal Delivery by Duncan McLaren
Ben Walters on Bernadette Russell's How To Be Hopeful
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 175th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the [pause] 19th - sorry [laughs], a little pause while I checked my cheat sheet. It's the 19th Page One In Review. I... [laughing] I usually write those things down on Post-It notes and put them where I can see them but I've put it today... I don't know whether I'm standing in a different place but it's just covered by the shelf on which the recording device stands. I put it on the shelf underneath that and normally it's in my eyeline as I flick my eyes down but for some reason today it isn't. Anyway, [laughing] you don't need to know that.
Today is Tuesday the 21st of July, 2020. Thank you very much for joining me today. If you want to try and imagine me as I stand here, I thought I might share with you that my hair is now longer than I think it's ever been in my life. I haven't had a haircut since the beginning of March probably. And I was thinking about, you know, just shaving my head like so many people have done in lockdown and I went to find the clippers that I have from when I used to shave my head... I don't... when I was in my mid twenties, but that's well over ten years now - fifteen years probably - ago and needless to say they didn't work. I mean, they switched on but there wasn't much enthusiasm [laughs] left in the motor. So instead of going [makes high functioning motor sound] or whatever, it was more like [makes dying engine sound] and I thought: “No, I'm not going to... I'm not going to risk that.” I just imagined it getting, kind of, fully entangled in the hair and then giving up but, kind of, with its teeth, kind of, gripping... and I thought: “No. Nope. It's going to be painful and difficult to... to sort out.”
Right. For anybody who's new to the podcast, I should explain: Hello, welcome. I am not always this... No, I'm very often this scattered, aren't I, in terms of my concentration and my focus. But not always. [laughing] I think it's important to say that. Sometimes I'm really on it. But today I have a... I have a time limit, which is... it's making me feel a little bit pressured. I know I need to get this done by three o'clock this afternoon. And it's now... I mean, it's only just after two o'clock but sometimes it takes me over an hour to record a twenty minute episode. So let's... I'm just going to [blows air out]... I'm just pushing through today. I'm going to get it done.
What I... Oh yeah, what I should tell you if you are new to the podcast... So first of all: hello. Secondly: it's not always like this. Thirdly: what it is always like is that it is a book podcast - Page One - and the Page One In Review episodes are always me talking about books that I've been given by guests on the podcast. The podcast has been going for about eight years now and we've reached books... we're, sort of, in the middle of books that I was given during the second season of the podcast. So these books were given to me - oh, I haven't actually looked up the dates but probably March, April 2014. Something like that. Oh, actually, sorry, no. That'll be when the episodes went out but... well, the episodes were probably recorded early 2014 let's say.
Now, I did want to say... For anybody who has listened to the last few episodes, I wanted to apologise because having made so much of getting or not getting to the first book on the second shelf of the... I've got all the books on three bookshelves here in front of me and I did talk quite a lot about the fact that we were going to get as far as the first book on the second shelf and I was very excited about that. And then I forgot to announce it when it actually happened. So, yeah, I'm very sorry about that. The Sea, The Sea was that book. That was... That... It sits right on the left hand side of the second shelf - which is the shelf, in fact, that my recording device sits on. I don't know.... anyway... whether that's interesting to you but... So it's right... [laughing] it's... that is right in my eyeline. But I suppose because it was off the shelf because I was getting ready to read it it didn't occur to me while I was recording that episode that... anyway... that it was the first book. So now we're talking about the second, third and fourth books that sit on this second shelf.
The first book that I want to talk to you about today…
[page turning]
… was given to me during the 74th Page One by Katrina Crear. We had that conversation, I think, sitting... I think on the floor outside the Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall. It's up on the... I don't know which floor. Third or fourth floor? I... They're all, kind of, half floors, aren't they, but somewhere... you, kind of, go up on the left hand side - so the, kind of, down-river side - of the Royal Festival Hall. So left hand side if you come in from the riverside entrance, [laughing] if that makes sense. Yeah, I'm really [laughs self-deprecatingly] challenging myself not to stop and start again today and re-record from the beginning if I feel like I'm not doing it well enough.
This book... So Katrina gave me For Sale $20,000 by Bill Drummond, which is a super interesting book. I didn't know anything about Bill Drummond before. This whole book is about him wanting to do something with a print of a photograph that he has. The photograph is by the artist Richard Long and the print is A Smell Of Sulfur In The Wind. It's a photograph of a stone circle in Iceland that Richard Long came across when he was walking from the north to the south of Iceland. And... So Bill Drummond really likes Richard Long's work but he has started to get a little bit bored of this particular print and he... rather than just sell it he wants to do something with it.
Now, reading this book makes me realise that... I mean... So art... There's a lot of art that I don't understand. This is... You know, we talked - we - I talked [laughing] about art in the previous episode and... I talked about, kind of, art and criticism and so on. And this... this book is more about the art world, which is something that I really don't understand. I don't understand art as a commodity at all. I understand artist as an experience, if that makes sense, but not as a commodity. And this... I think Bill Drummond is quite interested in art as a commodity and disrupting the idea of art as a commodity. But he... Yeah, there is... there is this... the question comes up of whether what he is doing really disrupts the art world or whether it is just part of it or whether... you know, whether it's a stunt, whether he could be doing it in a different way, whether he could be doing it in a less [laughing] destructive way. Because what he ends up doing is quite destructive. If you're... You know, if you're fond of art objects it might be quite upsetting to read about.
But what did I want to read for you? Okay. Yeah. Let me just read. So this book was published by Beautiful Books Limited and this edition of the book was published in 2010. But it looks as though there were 2002 and 2006 editions of the book and each time it, kind of, grows outwards. So there's a... there's a, kind of... there's a new prologue to the 2006 edition and then there's an epilogue, I think, to the 2010 edition. I'm going to read you from pages 68, 69 and 70. The whole book is 155 pages long. And I think this... I don't know. I think this gives you a nice feeling for Bill Drummond himself and also, I think, a glimpse into the art world that he is on the periphery of.
In late 1998 I got sent a book in the post. It wasn't from amazon.com or a birthday present from my mum. There was no covering note, no explanation whatsoever. On its cover was a pizza delivery boy, his helmet visor still down, obscuring his face. In one hand he was carrying the pizza box wrapped up in a towel to retain heat. In his other hand was the chit. On his feet were a rather retro-looking pair of Adidas trainers. Its title was Personal Delivery, its author Duncan McLaren. I'd heard of neither before. I turned it over and read the blurb:
Duncan McLaren - Gallery visitor, fiction writer, pizza delivery boy. He never/always compromises. In Personal Delivery he adds his own garnish to the deluxe pizza of contemporary art. Baked for eighteen months, 10-12 minutes and one terrifying second in the author's skidlid, at temperatures red hot to cool black, this book is a taste sensation - both an avant-garde concoction and a classical feast laden with Bonnes Bouches. Looking at the work of a variety of artistes, from the internationally acclaimed to those fresh out of art school, McLaren teases out the underlying ideas, often letting events in his own life - relations with the artist Jo Bennett and his experience as a writer - throw light on the artists' concerns.
His uninhibited and imaginative responses go far beyond the academic or critical. Filled with lucid images, deadpan humour and challenging perspectives, Personal Delivery entices you into a thriving humane, multifarious world. Choose a shit sculpture. Follow a [sic] bearded baby around the Isle of Sheppey. Live ‘For Love Of Today’, wear a chastity belt for two months, inhabit a row of translucent polycarbonate cubicles, order a pizza, pret a lire style... Cover design by Namara and the author. Cover photography by Oliver Zabat. ISBN 07043 80919. Fiction/Non Fiction.
And then in brackets...
(Autobiography, Contemporary Art) £12.
There was nothing else on the cover to read, so instead of going to the library to get on with my writing I sat down and read as much of this book as I could. My initial fear was that I had written the book under a pseudonym and forgotten all about it and here was the author's copy being sent to me.
The opening chapter of the book began with the line. ‘To the Richard Long exhibition at d'Offay's.’ This was getting scary. How could one write a whole book and forget you have done it? I read on:
Three stone circles made from blocks of slate have been installed. One can be stood inside; I step into it but don't linger. Another has a perimeter which is several blocks thick and would require at leap to be entered, a leap that would disturb the calm ambience here so I don't make it. The third is entirely infilled, jagged edges pointing upwards, and must be viewed from without. I walk round it, considering the red slate - some edges sliced straight by quarrymen or the artist - before turning to the gallery walls.
Stone circles also appear in most of the half-dozen large, framed photos. I stand in front of a wide, flat New Mexican landscape; a lightly clouded sky over miles of featureless, scrubby desert. The circle of wayward stones in the foreground hardly dominates the scene. Does the presence of stone circles over the gallery floor encourage me to engage more with those the artist has assembled and photographed in New Mexico, Australia, Dartmoor and Iceland? Oh, I think it does.
Relief! I obviously hadn't written it. If you have already read my story ‘A Smell Of Money Underground’ in 45 or elsewhere you will know that I am very much of the opinion that the presence of the stone circles over the gallery floor destroys any engagement I may have with the assembled photographs from Iceland or any other part of the world Long has gone to do his making.
Okay. Yeah. That's from For Sale $20,000 by Bill Drummond.
[page turning]
The next book that I want to talk to you about today was given to me by Ben Walters during the 76th Page One. This is the second of the Tom Ripley novels by Patricia Highsmith that I've been given by guests on the podcast and quite by coincidence the episode in which I talk about the first of those - The Talented Mr Ripley, which was given to me by Paul Varjack - that episode - which is the 170th Page One, it's the 14th Page One In Review - went out today. So, yeah, strange. That wasn't... It wasn't planned that way at all. Now, I haven't listened back to that episode yet and it's a little while since I made it but I seem to remember that I did announce that I was going to be talking about another Tom Ripley novel in the future. And here we are in the future, which is rather exciting.
This... So this one is called Ripley's Game. It's the third of the Tom Ripley novels - the second one is called Ripley Underground. So you've got The Talented... I mean, Patricia Highsmith wrote a lot of novels but of the Ripley story you've got The Talented Mr Ripley, Ripley Underground and then Ripley's Game and then The Boy Who Followed Ripley. I think those are the four. Oh, there's... Oh, and then there's Ripley Underwater. Okay. Anyway. Anyway... yes.
So Ripley's Game. This is... yeah, just... it's really a lot of fun this book. Whereas The Talented Mr Ripley is about Tom Ripley doing awful things this one... I mean, it's interesting because he needn't get involved at all in what's going on. His friend Reeves Minot [/mn̩əʊ/] or Minot [/mɪnɒt/] - or Minot [/mɑɪnɒt/]... who knows? - asks him right at the beginning of this story if he can help him out with... with something that Reeves needs doing and Tom Ripley says: “No, I just... I don't need to get involved in that.” At this point in his life he's... he's doing really well for himself. He's got quite a lot of money coming in from various dastardly schemes that he's been involved in as well as a wife who is quite wealthy in her own right and they live in this lovely house with a garden somewhere outside Paris. I think towards Fontainebleau... Is that right?
Anyway. So, yeah, he has a very nice life. And he's... he's forging pictures and just, you know, getting on with things. So he doesn't want to do the job himself and he suggests this other guy. And he does it out of spite. But what is so wonderful about Tom Ripley is that just as the guy is doing the job - I won't tell you anything about what it is in case you want to read the book - he turns up and, kind of, helps out. And I think that's... [laughing] it's lovely. I mean, sorry, that is a bit of a spoiler so I apologise. But, yeah, I don't think I can talk about Ripley's Game without talking about that side of Tom Ripley's character. He's a... He's not a nice man in lots of ways and then in some ways he is a very nice man. And I think that's... I... I don't know. It makes him fascinating to me.
Okay. So yes. I mean, as... and as I said before when I was talking about The Talented Mr Ripley Patricia Highsmith is just... she writes wonderfully. It's just... It's a pleasure to read. And I've read this now three times because I read it before Ben gave me his copy, then I read his copy and then a little while ago I reread his copy. This is actually... Yeah, having said in previous episodes that I'm finding it difficult to read books, this is one of the only books that I have managed to read since the pandemic hit.
Right. I'm going to read... I'm going to read from the very beginning of this book. So, this is a Vintage... Sorry, this is a Vintage Paperback edition of Ripley's Game. It's 256 pages long. The story starts on page 5 and I'm going to read you from pages 6 and 7. So Reeves is really just introducing the thing that he needs doing. And this gives us Tom Ripley's reply and also a little précis of the previous Tom Ripley book, which I haven't read. And so this whole paragraph is just intriguing to me and... yeah... I don't know... I want to say rather wonderful but in a... in a grim way. Okay. So here we go from page 6:
‘You wouldn't,’ Reeves said with a last-minute urgency and hope, ‘consider taking it on yourself? You're not connected, you see, and that's what we want. Safety. And after all, the money, ninety-six thousand bucks, isn't bad.’
Tom shook his head. ‘I'm connected with you - in a way.’ Dammit, he'd done little jobs for Reeves Minot, like posting on small, stolen items, or recovering from toothpaste tubes, where Reeves had planted them, tiny objects like microfilm rolls from the unsuspecting toothpaste carriers. ‘How much of this cloak and dagger stuff do you think I can get away with? I've got my reputation to protect, you know.’ Tom felt like smiling at that, but at the same time his heart had quickened with genuine feeling, and he stood taller, conscious of the fine house in which he lived, of his secure existence now, six whole months after the Derwatt episode, a near-catastrophe from which he had escaped with no worse than a bit of suspicion upon him. Thin ice, yes, but the ice hadn't broken through. Tom had accompanied the English Inspector Webber and a couple of forensic men to the Salzburg woods where he had cremated the body of the man presumed to be the painter Derwatt. Why had he crushed the skull, the police had asked. Tom could still wince when he thought of it, because he had done it to try to scatter and hide the upper teeth. The lower jaw had easily come away, and Tom had buried it at a distance. But the upper teeth - Some of them had been gathered by one of the forensic men, but there had been no record of Derwatt's teeth with any dentist in London, Derwatt having been living (it was believed) in Mexico for the preceding six years. ‘It seemed part of the cremation, part of the idea of reducing him to ashes,’ Tom had replied. The cremated body had been Bernard's. Yes, Tom could still shudder, as much at the danger of that moment as at the horror of his act, dropping a big stone on the charred skull. But at least he hadn't killed Bernard. Bernard Tufts had been a suicide.
Tom said, ‘Surely among all the people you know, you can find somebody who can do it.’
There you go. A little bit of Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith.
[page turning]
And now on to the last book that I want to talk to you about in this episode. This was given to me by Bernadette Russell during the 77th Page One, a conversation that we had at her office - in Deptford, I think. A lovely office space. I don't know whether she still has a desk there but it was very nice to sit and talk to her there. This is Three Things You Need To Know About Rockets, A Bookshop Love Story by Jessica A. Fox - which already... So you, listening to this, probably won't know this but Bernadette Russell is very fond of foxes and at around the time that we recorded that episode she used to post pictures of foxes on Twitter. And I [laughing] remember writing to her afterwards and saying: “Oh my, I've just realised how appropriate it is that you of all people should have given me a book by somebody called Jessica, a fox.”
So. Anyway, the story of this book - Three Things You Need To Know About Rockets... I don't remember what those three things are, by the way. I hope I won't find that I need to know those things.
Jessica Fox…
… as it says on the back…
is living in Hollywood, a 26-year-old filmmaker with a high-stress job at NASA. Working late one night, craving another life, she is seized by a moment of inspiration and taps “secondhand bookshop Scotland” into Google...
and this is the story of her experience coming from L.A. to Scotland to the... oh, which bookshop is it actually? It's Wigtown. It's the Wigtown bookshop but I can't remember if it has a special name. I don't think it does. I think it's just called The Bookshop. In any case, it's the site of the Wigtown Book Festival which Bernadette Russell was a guest at one year.
It's a... So it's a memoir. It's a true story - it's the story of Jessica meeting Euan - but it's written in the style of, I would say, Chick Lit. It's written as a piece of Chick Lit. And that's... It sounds so dismissive when I say that but what I mean is that it really has some of the key components of that genre. And I think there's really a... I don't know, I would say there's really an awareness of that in the book. I think the promise of Chick Lit - and I think this is really important - the promise of Chick Lit, it seems to me, is that you will feel some emotions reading this book but nothing very bad is going to happen and ultimately the protagonists will get what they want. So it's a comforting read. It's very much like Murder Mystery in that sense, I think. The stories change but the shape of the stories are always essentially the same. You're not going to get a horrible surprise. You're not going to get to the end of the book and find “Oh actually they don't love each other [laughing] after all.” There are going to be obstacles in the way and then things are going to work out. And that's the story that we're told.
And it's... I would imagine it's adjacent to the truth but it's a it's a lovely way of telling the story. And this is a very, very pleasurable read. It's beautifully written and it does all of the things that Chick Lit does. And I think one of the important things - one of the crucial things about Chick Lit is the apparent relatability of the heroine and in fact I'm going to read you a little bit here which I think typifies that. This just... It makes me think of Bridget Jones, which is, you know, the Chick Lit book par excellence. Bridget Jones by Helen Fielding, who was just recently on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs if you'd be interested in checking that out.
So what should I say? This book is published by Short Books. It is 383 pages long. So I'm going to read you a little bit from the beginning of chapter six. This is on pages 66 and 67. Jessica has just arrived at Glasgow Airport.
In the long mirror, under the electric lighting, I looked at my reflection. Staring back at me was a pale, disheveled, sleep-deprived, mid-twenty-year-old with dark circles hanging under her eyes - I hardly recognised myself. It was not the look I was going for to start my new adventure, and the ambience of the airport's public bathroom wasn't doing me any favours either. I tried to put on a brave smile. I was one floor above the arrivals hall, where Euan would be waiting for me. Despite appearances, I felt awake, alive and extremely nervous.
“I'm not going to hold up a sign like an idiot,” he had written. “I don't need one. You'll recognise me. I'm tall with a mass of curly ginger hair. I stand out in a crowd.” I detected a note of pride in his words.
It was my first clue as to what Euan was really like. He was wittily self-conscious and a bit of a contradiction. I had once taken a workshop with the great performer and clown, Bill Irwin, who had asserted that character equalled contrast. While Euan didn't want to stand out in a crowd by holding a sign, he was happy to let his appearance set him apart.
I brushed my teeth and felt instantly refreshed. Dabbing concealer to hide my dark circles, I went through my make-up ritual: light eyeshadow over my lid, a darker shade in a thin line around the eye and a dusting of gold in the corners. In less than a minute, I felt like myself again.
I also want to read a description of Euan, which is on the following page. I think that's... yeah, it's important to get both main characters physically present in your mind.
As Euan grabbed my bags and paid for parking, I took a moment to study him. He was tall, 30-something and slim, with wire-framed glasses on a round, good-looking face, big hands. On glancing down, I was delighted to see brown, suede shoes. Everything about him was neat and tidy, except for his hair, which rested like a nest of chaos on his head.
Why... [laughing] I don't know why the brown suede shoes are so delightful. I mean, very nice. [laughing] I think brown suede shoes are nice. But I feel like there's a judgment in there, which fascinates me. What... What does it mean about him that he's wearing brown suede shoes? I just... yeah, it's so foreign to me. Perhaps that's part of my fascination - or the fascination that this book and other Chick Lit books have for me. I just... I read about these people and the way that they look at the world and I think: “Gosh, people must be looking at me like that. I wonder what my choices say about me.” Okay. Not that I'm in the middle of a bookshop love story.
Thank you so much for joining me today. Just in case you're interested in knowing all of the more sordid details of the process of making this podcast, I've been recording for nearly fifty minutes. I'm on forty-nine minutes and forty-two, three, four seconds right now. So in case you're worried about me hitting my deadline I have hit it with ten minutes to spare. So you can all breathe out. It's certainly what I'm going to be doing as [laughing] soon as I press the button to stop the recording. Thank you and speak to again 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]