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Episode image is a detail from a photo by Charles Adrian.
On a lovely sunny day in West London, Charles Adrian talks about two ghost books, a book that never was and two other books, one of which he does not want to read from and one of which he does. Keep listening to the very end of the episode to hear the sound that is keeping Charles Adrian awake.
You can find Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher’s crowdsourced art project Learning To Love You More online here; Assignment #58 is this one. You can find the web page for the reading of The Swim Team from No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July on BBC Radio 4 Extra here (at time of publishing, this programme is still not available to listen to).
You can listen to The Iron Curtain, which is an episode from the Snap Judgement podcast about a woman called Ulrike Poppe who accessed her Stasi files after the reunification of Germany, here.
No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July is also discussed in Page One 115.
The Red Tree by Shaun Tan, mentioned briefly here, was previously discussed in Page One 84.
Books discussed in this episode were previously discussed in Page One 82, Page One 83 and Page One 85.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 5th August, 2020
Episode released: 8th September, 2020
Book listing:
No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July (Page One 82 and Page One 115)
The Quest For Christa T by Christa Wolf (trans. Christopher Middleton) (Page One 83)
Germany, Memories Of A Nation by Neil MacGregor
Little Miss Hug by Roger Hargreaves (Page One 85)
The Art Of Fielding by Chad Harbach (Page One 85)
Links:
Learning To Love You More Assignment #58
The Swim Team on BBC Radio 4 Extra
The Iron Curtain from Snap Judgement
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 177th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 21st Page One In Review. Today is the 5th of August, 2020. It's a Wednesday. It's a lovely sunny day here in West London if you want to imagine the situation around me as I record this. Just down the road from where I live there are some quite serious roadworks going on. I think they're repairing gas pipes somewhere underneath the road but, yes, that's been quite noisy. I'm hoping that here at the back of the house, away from the road, we won't be disturbed by that but yesterday there were some, you know, proper drilling going on. I mean, yeah, I think listeners to the podcast are quite used to hearing trains in the background. Perhaps if you're very sharp eared you might hear the planes that occasionally go overhead depending on which flight path is being used into Heathrow. There's sometimes noise of children playing next door, people stamping up and down downstairs, hammering - all kinds of noises intrude into the pristine silence of my back room here. [laughs] Obviously not all pristine given that I'm filling it with the sound of my own voice.
For anybody who's new to the podcast: hello and welcome. This is a book podcast and these Page One In Review episodes are episodes in which I'm going through all of the books that I've been given over the last eight years of doing this podcast. We're talking at the moment about books that I was given during the second season of the podcast. We have two ghost books to talk about today, one book that never was, and two books that I have here with me, one of which I don't want to read from and the other of which I do. So. Yeah, without further ado, as [distant train horn] people tend to say...
Oh, yeah, there's a noise of some... That was a train by the way, just in case you... [faint sound of train going past] Yeah, a Deutsche Bahn train carrying some kind of... don't know... Lots of goods wagons. Anyway. Yeah, I was going to s... I thought I could see grit but I don't know that there is grit in the wagons.
Anyway. [train sound fades] What was I saying? Oh yes: Without further ado, which is what people say when they are the kinds of people who make much ado.
[page turning]
The first book that I want to talk about today was given to me by Dave Pickering during the 82nd Page One. He gave me No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July. This is the first of the ghost books and by ghost books what I mean is that I was given the book but I have given it away so I no longer have it and the memory of the book now haunts my bookshelf. Dave, I think, needed his copy of No One Belongs Here More Than You back so I returned it to him.
It was an excellent choice, though. I really enjoyed that book. I loved the stories. It's a collection of short stories by Miranda July. I don't know when it was published, I'm afraid. What I can tell you is that I first came across Miranda July in 2011. I was working in Switzerland and somebody that I was working with mentioned Learning To Love You More, which was a project that Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher created, I think between 2002 and 2009. It's a website - and also, I think, a book but I think initially it was a website - in which there are a list of assignments. And I think... It's a sort of crowd-sourced art project. The idea was that people could do the assignment and then send in documentation of them having done the assignment or whatever. So the website... in 2010 it was acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art so you can still visit it. I think it's learningtoloveyoumore.com. It's unbelievable, isn't it. Having done all this actual research this week I didn't actually write down the web address - but it will be part of the episode description. In any case, you can go to the website and you can see, archived, all of the assignments. And then if you click on the assignment you can read the assignment itself and then also click on some of the responses. And yeah, it's just... it's gorgeous. It's well worth a visit.
The assignment that jumped out at me when I visited the website the other day was assignment number 58: “record the sound that is keeping you awake”. Which struck me as particularly appropriate because this week the 16th Page One In Review came out in the real timeline as it is... you know, as I'm living it - rather than this timeline that you're... you know, because this episode will come out in a few weeks time so when you're listening to this it won't be the same week that that episode came out but when I'm speaking it is - and in the 16th Page One In Review, which is the 172nd Page One, I talk a little bit about the sound that is keeping me awake. Or that... yeah, that was keeping me awake that day and does occasionally keep me awake. It was keeping me awake a little bit again last night so I did record the sound that is keeping me awake. I recorded it this morning, in fact, and so there are other... there's a kind of general hum of London which diminishes a little bit overnight. But, yeah, if that recording is any good - and I haven't listened back to it yet so I don't know - but if it is any good I'll add it to the end of this episode and you also will be able to hear the sound that is keeping me awake.
In any case, that's... so that's Learning To Love You More, which, yeah, as I say, I absolutely recommend. I think you should all go and have a look at that. The other Miranda July thing that I had come across was You, Me And Everyone We Know, which is a film that came out in 2005 but which I must have watched a lot later than that. But, yeah, I loved it also. Yeah, I think it's a beautiful film full of many many beautiful moments. Just very tender and delicate and very funny.
From No One Belongs Here More Than You, the short story collection that Dave Pickering gave me, the... the story that I most remember and, yeah, which I would, kind of, pick out and would have read from is The Swim Team. And I was very disappointed today because I remember hearing a reading of that story on the radio and I thought: “Oh, that would be nice. I could... You know, I could add a link to that in the episode notes and then at least you could go and listen to The Swim Team.” And I'm... So I'm pretty sure that the version of that I heard was on BBC Radio 4 Extra and it's no longer available. For rights reasons a lot of their programs are only up and available to listen to for a limited amount of time. But perhaps that will come back - Radio 4 Extra tends to recycle their programs regularly - so if I see that that has reappeared as available to listen to I will add a link to the episode webpage on pageonepodcast.com.
Okay. So that was No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July.
[page turning]
Liz Chan, during the 83rd Page One, gave me The Quest For Christa T by Christa Wolf. That was... That's the second of the ghost books that I have to talk to you about. Liz also needed her copy back so I returned it to her.
Oh, I didn't say: Dave and I had our conversation at his house, I think. It was the second time we'd tried to have that conversation. The first time I either didn't record it or the file was corrupted. I can't remember. Liz and I had our conversation at FARM:shop in Dalston. In my memory we're sitting, you know, among the bubbling fish tanks there but I don't know whether that's actually true. I... Yeah, I don't... That memory isn't a very clear memory.
I also don't have a clear memory of The Quest For Christa T by Christa Wolf, which she gave me. Yeah, I d... I mean, when I say I don't have a clear memory... I don't remember anything about it at all. So what I thought I would do instead, just to have something to talk about, was read you a little bit from Germany, Memories Of A Nation by Neil MacGregor, which I... which I read recently. I realised as soon as I thought of reading from this... Yeah, I have talked during these Page One In Review episodes about not being able to read anything during this time of global pandemic but it's... that's not true. As I said a couple of episodes ago, I've read Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith and I made my very, very slow way through this book, which is... which is excellent. Neil MacGregor has a very beguiling voice and tells a really interesting story about Germany, German culture, German history, what makes Germany Germany - you know, how do you define the the borders of Germany... I think that's a very interesting question... and, of course, they've fluctuated over time - and also the ways in which the modern German state is different from other European countries. I think he tells a very interesting story about that.
But he... So the reason I wanted to... the reason I picked up this book is that he mentions Christa Wolf. There's a chapter in here about the time when Germany was split into two states - East Germany and West Germany - you know, from just after the Second World War until 1989 and he talks about Christa Wolf because she writes about what it is like to live in a divided Germany. She apparently stayed in the East. He says here on page 21 of this Penguin edition of Germany, Memories Of A Nation:
Christa Wolf, like her heroine Rita, decided to stay in the East.
Rita, apparently, is the heroine of Der Geteilte Himmel - Divided Heaven - which was published in 1963 - “two years,” he says, “after the Berlin Wall went up”. Anyway:
Christa Wolf, like her heroine Rita, decided to stay in the East. As a famous writer she was comparatively well treated and allowed to travel. And although she did criticize the regime, and her works were censored, she retained an abiding loyalty to the state's ideals, or at least to what she hoped it might achieve. Her faith in the regime was stretched, but she remained, and she remained committed.
There you go. She also, apparently, in the nineties, accessed her Stasi files - the Stasi was the East German security service or security force - and... so he... yes, Neil MacGregor says on page 34:
Having spoken, and indeed written, about her dislike and disapproval of the GDR state surveillance system...
... the GDR is the German Democratic Republic, which is the name given to the East German state...
... in the early 90s [sic], Wolf began studying the forty-two volumes that the Stasi had compiled about her and which were now open to inspection in the state archives. There, to her great surprise and even greater dismay, she discovered a number of reports that she herself had delivered to the Stasi between 1959 and 1961. She had been an informant, part of that great network of citizens reporting on each other to the authorities. She had had meetings with Stasi agents. And she had forgotten about it completely.
I find that fascinating - not at all surprising. I don't have any illusions about my ability to resist the mechanism of an authoritarian regime. I suspect that I would also become an informer [sic]. And not at all surprising also that that memory was then suppressed. I think that must have been quite a shock. And that... yeah, it's part of the story of Germany that these sorts of experiences have to be processed in some way.
I was listening to something the other day - and I don't remember what it was - in which - it was a podcast episode... I'm going to try and look it up... it's just come in to my head, which is why I didn't look it up before now - but it was somebody talking about looking through her Stasi files and finding that people that she knew... she was an activist and people that she knew were informing on her. And she confronts some of those people. And then she talks also about the difference in degree between, you know, the people who gave some information here and there and the people who really made it their business to inform on her. Yeah, I... I'm... I will try to find that, whatever it was. I suspect it was Snap Judgment. But... yeah. Anyway.
[page turning]
Page One 84 was my conversation with Caroline Horton. We sat down during her lunch break in Exmouth Market. She was working in a space just over the road from where we ate. I didn't prepare her well at all so she didn't have any books with her but she would have given me The Red Tree by Shaun Tan, which I have definitely read at some point in the past. I don't own a copy of that but, yeah, it's a beautiful book and an excellent choice. But, yeah, I can't say any more about that because I don't and never did have that book.
So, moving on, the last books that I'm going to talk to you about today were given to me by Gary Powell during the 85th Page One - also recorded in Exmouth Market on the same day as my conversation with Caroline Horton. I just went - again - over the road. I can't remember... We sat outside a coffee shop, I think, to have that conversation. And Gary gave me two books.
So the book that he thought I should have was Little Miss Hug by Roger Hargreaves. It was the most recent of the Mr. Men and Little Miss series. I think it's not in fact written by Roger Hargreaves. It's... Roger Hargreaves's name is on the cover but it was written and illustrated by Adam Hargreaves, who I'm assuming is Roger Hargreaves's son. Certainly some relative of Roger Hargreaves. I don't want to read from this book, partly because it's too short but partly also because I don't think it's terribly good. And it's not terribly good in... in a way that I think is quite interesting. It made me think a lot about the Mr. Men and Little Miss series. Obviously I... well, I say ‘obviously’, it's not obvious but I did read a lot of those when I was a child. And now, of course, yes, they are... there are all kinds of problems with the series. The... The, kind of, insidious enforcing of the gender binary is a problem. The... The fact that there are thirty-five Little Miss books including Little Miss Hug - although in fact I think there might be more Little Miss books... In any case, thirty-five against something like fifty Mr. Men books is also a problem.
But what I think is very good about the original books - having, you know, this as a comparison - is that... what I think they do is that they take a character and they, you know, for a few p... I mean, they're very funny first of all but they show you page by page ways in which some inherent quality of that character makes it difficult for them to live in the world - you know, either they're... they're too small or they're too neat or they're too happy or they're too nosy or whatever it is that... that... you know, some defining characteristic of them means that they... they don't quite fit in the world - and over the course of the story some way of enabling them to fit in the world is discovered. And I think that's lovely. I think it's a really lovely message. The… The message is not: ‘You have to change’ but: ‘You have to work out how to live with who you are and, you know, what you do and how that interacts with other people. You may need to make adjustments, people around you may need to make adjustments, but that doesn't mean that you need to fundamentally change who you are.’
And this book is different in that Little Miss Hug is somebody who gives hugs and everybody loves it, one person doesn't, and he learns to love it. That's the story of this book and I think that's a very different story. And not nearly as interesting, first of all, but also not nearly as useful and inspiring. So there you go. Quite critical of Little Miss Hug.
The other book that Gary gave me I am not at all critical of. I loved it. It's The Art Of Fielding by Chad Harbach. Gary chose this as a book that he liked and then decided that he wanted to give it to me. And I was very unenthusiastic about it. It's a book about baseball essentially. It says on the back:
At Westish College, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for the big leagues until a routine throw goes disastrously off course. His error will upend the fates of five people.
And I just... I was like: “I don't... I'm not interested in baseball. I don... I mean, I don't... I don't know how the game works. I don't particularly enjoy watching sport anyway - I mean, apart from tennis. I do... I do really enjoy watching tennis. But, apart from tennis, not a big sports fan. I have watched a bit of baseball and didn't [sic] make sense. It seemed very boring to me. [laughing] It wasn't something that I wanted to get into.” And Gary said: “Oh, yes, I know. No, me too. Don't worry. It's... It's a great book even if all of that is true for you.”
And he's absolutely right. It's a great story, it's gripping, the characters are wonderful, it's emotionally engaging. I... yeah, I loved it. This is the kind of book that you can get lost inside. It makes baseball seem much more interesting but it also is not just about baseball. It's about... It's about doubt. It's about somebody... So Henry Skrimshander - this baseball star - he's a... he's a prodigy - he can throw and catch perfectly and effortlessly - and what happens - and I'm going to read you the little section in which it happens, it's fairly early on in the book - is that he makes a mistake and someone gets hurt and from then on he... it's as if he's lost his ability to do what he used to do. And, yeah, I think it's a really interesting problem: What do you do about something that has always come naturally to you and now is no longer coming naturally but that you need to be able to do? And this is... So this is the experience that Henry Skrimshander has at this moment.
So we have Henry. We have Affenlight, who is the president of Westish College. We have Mike Schwartz. We have some agents - so L.P. and... who's the other agent? Dwight, I think. L.P. and Dwight are the agents. And then we have Pella mentioned, who is Affenlight's daughter - the president's daughter. And then... And then Owen, who is Henry Skrimshander's roommate. He's a wonderful character and Affenlight, the president of Westish College, has a crush on him. Yeah. Okay. So this is on pages 67, 68 and 69 of this Fourth Estate edition of The Art Of Fielding. It's 512 pages altogether. So they're... yeah, they're playing an important game and some agents have come to watch Henry. They're scouting, I guess, to see if they were to give him a professional contract.
Affenlight didn't glance back into the dugout, as if it might diminish the sensation to indulge it again. Or maybe he was just afraid. Either way, he turned his attention to Henry Skrimshander, who was back in the field. His pinstriped uniform was baggy, but somehow it [sic] suited him perfectly, suggested his entire existence, like the uniforms of the rowers and doctors in the Eakins lithographs that hung in Affenlight's study. His navy socks were pulled to midcalf. His shoes were dirty white. Before the pitch he stood at ease, glove on his hip, his face round and windburned and open, delivering instructions or encouragement to his teammates with a relaxed smile. But as the ball left the pitcher's hand his face went blank. The chatter stopped midword. In one motion he yanked his navy cap with its harpoon-skewered W towards [sic] his eyes and dropped into a feline crouch, thighs parallel to the field, glove brushing the dirt. He looked low to the ground but light on his feet, more afloat than entrenched. The pitch was fouled back, but not before he had taken two full steps to his left, toward the place where he anticipated the ball to be headed. None of the other infielders had moved an inch.
“Prescience,” L.P. said again.
In the bottom of the eighth, Henry batted for what would almost certainly be the final time. He'd already hit two doubles since Affenlight's arrival, and the Milford pitcher looked reluctant to let him hit another. He walked on four pitches and sprinted down to first. Dwight and L.P. rose in unison and bagged their laptops. “That's enough for us,” Dwight said. “We've got a flight to catch.” Affenlight offered warm presidential handshakes as the two men departed. The pumpkin sun had impaled itself on the spire of Westish Chapel and begun to bleed. He was so glad Pella was coming, overjoyed, but he dreaded it too - it had been so long since they'd seen each other, and so much longer than that since they'd gotten along. He glanced towards the Westish dugout one last time and felt himself growing sad. O me, O life. Perhaps, he thought, with a touch of melodrama, this whole thing was merely an old man's last gasp. A late-life crisis, a doomed passade.
The half inning ended, and the Harpooners took the field for the top of the ninth. On his way out, Affenlight returned to the first-base bleachers to say hello to the last few shivering fans and to congratulate them on the valor of their sons and lovers. He was facing the field, buttoning his topcoat, when the Milford hitter slapped a grounder towards short. Henry closed on it quickly, absorbing it into his glove with the thoughtless ease of a mother being handed her newborn baby. His feet shifted into throwing position, his shoulders torqued, his arm became a blur. The ball left his hand on what looked, to Affenlight, like a true course.
But then, for whatever reason - a gust whipped up off the water, to be sure, but could even the strongest gust do this? - the ball, having already covered a third of its path, veered sharply. It tailed inland, tailing and tailing until Rick O'Shea, the first baseman, could only usher it by with a halfhearted lunge. Affenlight's left hand jerked towards his tie's half Windsor, where the twist of the knot made the little spearmen lie supine, as the ball sailed with frightening velocity into just that corner of the Westish dugout where he'd been directing his attention. The gust gave way to a hush. Mike Schwartz, who'd tossed aside his mask as he hustled down the baseline to back up the throw, stopped dead and swiveled his head in Affenlight's direction.
And then all Affenlight saw were faces, Mike Schwartz's big and nearby and twisted in a suffering grimace, Henry's beyond it round and distant and blank, revealing nothing, as there came from that corner of the dugout, a muffled but nonetheless sickening crunch, followed by a thud.
Owen.
Yeah. I won't tell you what happens to Owen. So, yeah, The Art Of Fielding. I... yeah, I don't know if I... if I did a good enough job of explaining why this book was so enjoyable to me and why that particular thing about doubt creeping in and stopping you being able to do a thing resonated so strongly. Just to... yeah, full disclosure: I had several goes at it and [laughing] I still don't think I did it justice. But I'm... Yeah. This is... I've talked for long enough today.
And... yeah, that's it. So thank you very much for joining me for this, the 21st Page One In Review. In the next episode we're going to talk about the last three books from the second season of the podcast. Yeah. They're three really good books so tune back in then. Stay as well as you can in between times. Be nice to yourselves. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. 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]