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Episode image is a detail from a photo by Charles Adrian.
A photo by Charles Adrian of the repaired tea cup he mentions in this episode; this type of repair is called Kintsugi.
Talking about two books he remembers very little about and the only book he was given twice, Charles Adrian continues his journey through the books from Season 4 of his podcast and reminisces about a trip to Japan.
The second image on this page is a photo by Charles Adrian of the repaired tea cup he mentions in this episode; this type of repair is called Kintsugi. You can read about Kintsugi on Wikipedia here.
Correction: Tier 3 of the new restrictions that came into force in the UK on the 14th of October, 2020, is the highest tier, described as “very high risk”. Tier 2 is described as “high risk” with tier 1 being “medium risk”. You can find an explanation of the three-tier system on the BBC here.
You can find some information about the setting-up of the Podcasters’ Support Group in London on Helen Zaltzman’s website here.
You can read about the spread of Anti-Vaxxer misinformation on social media during the 2020 pandemic in the Lancet here, you can read about six common misconceptions about immunisation on the WHO website here and you can read about possible strategies to counteract a reluctance to receive a possible COVID-19 vaccine in the Atlantic here.
Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of the UK from 4th May, 1979, until the 28th November, 1990. She was succeeded in office by John Major, who was Prime Minister from 28th November, 1990, until the 2nd May, 1997.
Clarification: Charles Adrian forgot to say in this episode that Sum by David Eagleman is subtitled Tales From The Afterlives. It was also discussed in Page One 34 and Page One 165.
Also mentioned in this episode are Hell, Purgatory and Paradise by Dante Alighieri.
Books discussed in this episode were previously discussed in Page One 112, Page One 113 and Page One 114.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 16th October, 2020.
Episode released: 17th November, 2020.
Book listing:
How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World by Francis Wheen (Page One 112)
Sum by David Eagleman (Page One 113, Page One 34 and Page One 165)
Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata (trans. Edward G. Seidensticker) (Page One 114)
Links:
Three-tier pandemic restrictions on the BBC
Anti-Vaxxers on social media in the Lancet
Six common misconceptions about immunization on WHO
COVID-19 vaccine scepticism in the Atlantic
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 187th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 29th Page One In Review. Today is Friday the 16th of October, 2020.
London has gone from tier 3 to tier 2 in the latest pandemic… [uncertain] plan. I don't... I... yeah, what... the pa... yeah, pandemic action plan? I don't know what the... how... what... yeah, I don't know [laughing] how that's described at the moment. But I guess we're heading back towards lockdown, is what that means. Tier 3... So my understanding of it was... I... Let's see... Tier 3 was “high alert”, I think - is that right? And then tier 2 is “very high alert” and tier one is just “Stop what you're doing” and, you know, “Drop and roll” kind of thing. So, yeah, tier 2 is... we're no longer in London allowed to - and I think... oh, I don't know where else is tier 2… Liverpool was tier 1, which, as I say, is full lockdown. Tier 2, I think... so we're not allowed to mix households inside but we can hang out outside. So we can go to the pub or a restaurant or a cafe with people from our own household or our own bubble but we can't go with other people. And we can't go to other people's houses unless they're in our bubble. I think that's what that means. I mean, I'm sure that those things are inside tier 2 but there may be other things as well that we have to watch out for.
In any case, I have three books to talk to you about today. Welcome to the podcast if you're new today. This is a book podcast. It's not a pandemic podcast. It's being made during the pandemic but that's purely coincidental. Not... Well, perhaps not purely. I mean, I am at home with not very much to do so that's wh... I guess one of the reasons that I'm making these episodes. Page One 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 making this podcast.
The... So, I have three books to talk to you about today. They're not... Yeah, I'm not super, super excited about these books I'm afraid. I'm going to see what I have to say about them. Two of them I don't remember very well at all and one of them is a book that I've already talked about during this, you know, review... return... revisiting of the... of the books. Yeah, revisiting, I think, is the word I like.
[page turning]
Charles Adrian
The first book that I have to talk to you about today was given to me by Iszi Lawrence during the 112th Page One. We had that conversation in Tilehurst near Reading. Yeah, that was a lovely day and really nice to talk to Iszi. I don't know Iszi very well but we met through the Podcasters' Support Group here in London, which is also where I met various other wonderful people. So that... Yeah, I'm ever grateful to Helen Zaltzman, who set that up - and then various people who have helped her run it and administer it in the years since.
Iszi gave me How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World by Francis Wheen. And I have a feeling that Francis Wheen's name was not unknown to me but I don't... I don't think I know any of his other work. I may have read, I don't know, things that he's written in the Guardian. Apparently he writes for the Guardian or has written for the Guardian. This is subtitled A Short History of Modern Delusions.
What I remember about it is - and I... yeah, my memory is not entirely to be trusted - but I seem to remember that he talks about Margaret Thatcher and the... the influence that she had on Ronald Reagan when he became president. I think some of the ideas and the... I guess certainly the economists that Margaret Thatcher championed were on the fringes of, you know, economic theory of thought and she brought them into the mainstream. And then Ronald Reagan took a lot of those ideas and the... you know, the things that [laughing] Margaret Thatcher, I guess, had promoted and... and [uncertain] made it even bigger. I don't... I don't know. I may be... This is very... I'm very rusty on this book.
But I think... I just have the feeling that he traces the kind of philosophical... the mainstream philosophical situation that we're in now - I don't know if that even makes sense, that sentence. [laughs] The way things are now he traces back to, I guess, a moment in the late seventies or the early eighties when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were coming to power. And I... I don't know, he... I... economics certainly, the... you know, the death of society but other things as well. I think a reliance on non-evidence-based thinking and decision making and maybe...
Because there is a - I mean, this is not from the book but just from, you know, generally being aware of what's happening in the world - there is a growing suspicion of science and scientists and... Not very long ago Michael Gove famously said, you know: “We've had enough of experts”. I think that is the kind of thing that Francis Wheen is talking about. You know, where... where does that thinking come from - the idea that we've had enough of experts, we'd much rather listen to people who don't know what they're talking about but say what they have to say confidently and repeatedly than to people who've actually looked at evidence and what actually happens in the world when you vaccinate an entire population, for example. So yeah, I don't know. I don't... I don't think he talks about Anti-Vaxxers but in any case... Yeah, because this was published in 2004. I don't know when the Anti-Vaxxer movement became really mainstream. But.
Right. So, I mean, I think... I mean, I enjoyed reading it. It was very interesting and I wish I could remember more about what he says. What... I'm going to read you a little bit about Margaret Thatcher because I think... She interests me partly because I was born in 1979, I think either soon... very soon before or very soon after Margaret Thatcher was elected - you know, a matter of weeks - and until I was twelve - is that right? [considering] Mmm. No, maybe a bit younger than that. I can't remember - how long was she Prime Minister for? But in any case, I'd never known any other Prime Minister and I remember hearing on the news that she was no longer going to be the Prime Minister and thinking: “Oh, goodness!” Like: “What will the world be like without, you know, Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister [laughing] of the United Kingdom?” But the... yeah, her legacy is extraordinary, it seems to me. Yeah, I find that interes... There are certain people - Queen Victoria is another of these people, I think - who affect culture - or, you know, they seem to be the people who have that effect - and other people just don't. We're not living in John Major's world, we're very much living in Margaret Thatcher's world, I think - or, yeah, a post-Thatcher world. Still! Thirty years after she ceased to be prime minister.
So I'm going to read... Yes, I... All of that to say I'm going to read a little bit about Margaret Thatcher towards the beginning of this book. This is published by Harper Perennial and it is 312 pages long. I'm going to read you from pages 26, 27 and 28:
By the 1980s, however, God had apparently become a champion of laissez-faire again. Whereas Margaret Thatcher's twentieth-century predecessors mostly kept their Christianity to themselves, her own ‘crusade’ - as she often called it - was thoroughly religious in both content and style. Her father had been a Methodist lay preacher, and in her memoirs she proudly acknowledged the influence of a stern Christian upbringing: ‘I believe in “Judeo-Christian” values: indeed, my whole political philosophy is based on them.’ In 1951, as the prospective parliamentary candidate Miss Margaret Roberts, she told the Dartford Free Church Council that ‘the future of the world depended on the few men and women who were Christians and who were willing to practice and propagate that faith abroad’.
From the moment when ‘Thatcherism’ was first articulated as a distinctive brand of Conservatism, soon after she and her intellectual mentor Sir Keith Joseph established the Center for Policy Studies in 1974, its disciples emphasised that this was not mere materialism but an entrepreneurial theology. Sir Keith's famous Edgbaston speech of October 1974 caused a furore by proposing that low-income women should be discouraged from breeding, but its peroration (scarcely noticed at the time) was no less astonishing, and probably more significant. ‘Are we to move towards moral decline reflected and intensified by economic decline, by the corrosive effects of inflation?’ he asked, his face characteristically furrowed in anguish. ‘Or can we remoralise our national life, of which the economy is an integral part?’
Modern British politicians hadn't previously used such language, but over the following two decades the evangelical message was heard again and again. ‘I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil,’ Thatcher said, ‘and I believe that in the end good will triumph.’ Speaking to the Zurich Economic Society in 1977, she warned that:we must not focus our attention exclusively on the material, because, though important, it is not the main issue. The main issues are moral... The economic success of the Western world is a product of its moral philosophy and practice. The economic results are better because the moral philosophy is superior. It is superior because it starts with the individual, with his uniqueness, his responsibility, and his capacity to choose... Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice, there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.
She explicitly associated her belief in economic freedom of choice with the Christian doctrine of the same name, as a means of salvation. Self-reliance and property ownership were ‘part of the spiritual ballast which maintains responsible citizenship’. (Many Christians, of course, remained unpersuaded that the prime minister was doing God's work. Anglican bishops such as David Jenkins and David Sheppard protested against the mass unemployment which she had created, and the 1985 report Faith in the City, commissioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, blamed the Tories' social Darwinism for the squalor, decay and alienation found in Britain's inner cities. Thatcher reacted furiously to the criticisms, arguing that men of the cloth had no business commenting on her industrial and economic policies - apparently oblivious to the fact that her own metaphysical and religious justifications for the new ‘enterprise culture’ had legitimised these clerical reposts.)
Yeah. Nice. Yeah, I like his... I like the way he writes and I... yeah, I think I am very persuaded... I'm pre-programmed to be persuaded by his argument there. I... yeah, I feel like I've learned to be terrified of people who have absolute moral certainty. It seems to me that they are some of the most dangerous people. Yeah. Anyway. That's How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World by Francis Wheen. It's not all about Margaret Thatcher, that's just the bit that I remember.
Okay. Next book.
[page turning]
Charles Adrian
So Donna Butlin, during the 113th Page One, gave me Sum by David Eagleman. Donna Butlin and I had our conversation somewhere near the Thames Barrier - so somewhere on the banks of the Thames... the southerly banks [laughing] of the Thames in London. Donna gave me Sum by David Eagleman. This book was also given to me by Sarah Le Fevre, who I spoke to for the 34th Page One, and I've already talked about Sum in the 165th Page One. In that episode I read from a story called Metamorphosis. This time I'm going to read a story called Scales, which is... yeah, it's a pretty short one, which is the reason I've chosen it. It's on pages 32 and 33 of this edition of Sum which is much shinier than the edition that Sarah gave me. It's got all kinds of glittery... kind of, almost, yeah, kind, of circular swir... swirls, let's say... swirls of glitter on the front. I guess it's supposed to look cosmic. This is... So this was published by Cannongate Books in 2010. And it's 110 pages long.
Yeah, I don't have much more to say about this book. When I was talking about it before I think I said that I found it a bit disappointing. That's, I think, because I just... I want so much from stories of the afterlife. And I guess... I mean, I... yeah. All writing is writing about what we know, isn't it, and, you know, there are surprising ideas and images but we just... nobody... I don't know if anybody writes well about the afterlife. I was talking about Dante a few weeks ago. I studied Dante at University and I loved... Inferno is great - Hell. Wonderful! Really wonderful, wonderful episodes but it's very earthly in its preoccupations and in its imagery, actually. It's very much stuff that we can imagine. I mean, it... he sites... Dante positions hell inside the earth so there's a... you know, there's a real feeling of... yeah, this is the earthiest earthiness that you can get and all of the cruelty of people sink [sic] down in there and are [sic]... you know, is expressed. But as soon as you start to get out - you know, up - towards the more ethereal realms... I mean, Purgatory is already, for me, a little less compelling and Heaven... I don't even... I mean, I don't really remember very much about it. It was very hard work to read because it was so boring. I mean, what... lots of people just drifting about in different spheres and [laughs] it's kind of impossible to imagine. But yeah, it's also... you can't grasp it.
So. Anyway. Yeah, this is all very graspable. And maybe... [musing] Hmm. Yeah, I don't know. I want something impossible, I guess. I want something that I gra... that I can grasp but that I don't already know, in some way. And I'm not talking about facts. I'm talking about. Just a... like, how can you possibly conceptualise eternity for a start? Or, like, how can you conceptualise what happens to us when we are no longer bound by the ru... you know, the physical rules of our universe? I mean... Anyway. All of those questions, they're not... I don't want to write about afterlives particularly. I just want somebody else to do it in a way that blows my mind.
But this is... yeah, this is quite fun, this story, in... you know, in, kind of, a gross, bodily, slightly uncomfortable way. Yeah, there's talk of disease and ailments - bodily ailments - in this story. But this is... So this is on page 32 and 33, as I said, I think, of this edition of Sum. It's called Scales.
For a while we worried about a separation from God, but our fears were eased when the prophets revealed a new understanding: we are God's organs, His eyes and fingers, the means by which He explores His world. We all felt better about this deep sense of connection - we are a part of God's biology.
But it slowly grew clearer that we have less to do with His sensory organs and more to do with His internal organs. The atheists and theists agreed that it is only through us that He lives. When we abandon him, He dies. We felt honored at first to be the cells that form God's body, but then it became clearer that we are God's cancer.
He's lost control of the small parts that constitute Him. We are dividing and multiplying. God and His doctors have tried to staunch the growth, the tumorous sprouting that makes His breathing difficult and endangers His circulation. But we're too robust. Throw storms and quakes and pestilence our way, and we scatter, regroup, and plan better. We become resistant and keep dividing.
He has finally reached His peace with this and lies quietly in His bed at the convergence of green antiseptic corridors.
Sometimes He wonders if we're doing it on purpose. Are His beloved subjects yearning to know His body, to metastasize throughout His greatness by way of His arterial system? He doesn't suspect that we're innocent of the journey.
Then He begins to notice something. While He cannot stop us or hurt us, there's something that can. He watches us turning to the smaller scales to battle our own leukemias, lymphomas, sarcomas, melanomas. He witnesses His subjects anointing themselves in chemotherapy, basking in the glow of radiation therapy. He watches His humans recklessly chewed up by the trillions of cells that constitute them.
And God suddenly bolts up in His bed with a revelation: everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.
Yeah. I think that is a... Yeah, that's... I like that. I think that's a very successful story. And I've had a revelation reading that that of course this whole book is about us. I mean, that's so obvious, isn't it, but I think I took it at its word that it's tales from the afterlives. I really do.... I want to be told tales of the afterlives. Anyway. [laughing] Yeah, this is about us and it's... I think it's... yeah, it's very good. Okay, I'm maybe shifting my opinion of this book - Sum by David Eagleman. Good that I was given it twice.
[page turning]
Charles Adrian
Right. The last book that I have to talk to you about today was given to me by Satoshi Date during the 114th Page One. We had that conversation here in my flat sitting in my kitchen. Satoshi read in Japanese. I think both of the first pages he read, he read in Japanese, which was... I mean, first of all wonderful to listen to but also a really interesting challenge to edit. That was... yeah, it was probably the most difficult editing that I had to do for this podcast. But I loved it. It was really interesting. And then I had to send it to him to say: “Have I got it right? Does this actually now make sense?”
Because... So Satoshi, like everybody - almost everybody - and certainly like me, went back and reread things and - fascinatingly - changed his mind about what... yeah, what the words actually were on the page. I mean, Japanese is a language that I don't know very much about but I think the books that he was reading from were written in kanji and the individual characters have various different interpretations. And I guess when you look at them on the page you can maybe hold all kinds of interpretations inside your head at the same time and read it fairly fluently but as soon as you have to give sound to a character you have to make a choice. And so I remember that, yeah, Satoshi several times made a choice and then changed his mind and said: “Oh, no, wait, I have to... some... it's something else”. Except that, following my instructions, he didn't say “I'm... I'm going to reread that bit” he just reread it. And so [laughing] I was having to listen so hard for these sounds that are totally unknown to me. I don't know any Japanese. It was... It was like... I don't know. I can't... I don't have a comparison. I mean, it was like listening to music I suppose - listening very carefully for a melody or a tune. It was great. I loved it. Not that I want to do that all the time - it was very hard work but, yeah, it was... it was satisfying.
He... So Satoshi gave me Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata and this is, I'm afraid, another book that I don't remember very much about. I know that it's about somebody called Kikuji. He's been invited to a tea ceremony by his father's mistress - one of his father's mistresses - and he finds another of his father's mistresses at the tea ceremony and I think that's very surprising. And so I'm just... I'm going to read you a little bit about teaware and that's really because...
So I've... Yeah, I've been to Japan. I have a friend who lives in Tokyo and in 2005 or 2006 she arranged for a group of us to go to Tokyo and perform a show as part of a festival. And it was immensely exciting and I loved it. I just... yeah. I was there for three weeks and I had the most wonderful time. And what surprised me was how much I enjoyed going to museums and looking at teaware. Porcelain - or n... yeah, I guess it doesn't have to be porcelain. Some of it's stoneware. What do we call that? Ceramic... Ceramic things that are made for drinking tea out of and for making tea in. There are all kinds of different styles of teaware, different ways of making it, different traditions and I just... I loved it. I... I just... I could walk past... It's a bit like going to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London I suppose. Just walking past, you know, all these displays of different teacups. I would never have imagined that that was something that I might enjoy doing but, yeah, I have very happy memories of just looking at teacups - and... and learning about how they're made and so on. And then... so my friend who lives in Tokyo is called You and one of her friends gave me this beautiful cream-coloured teacup. And I was, kind of, blown away by that. It was really a perfect gift. And I still have it. And I dropped it recently and it broke. And I had it repaired with the, you know... I can't remember what that's called but there's a woman who lives in Oxford who I sent it to and she repaired it. And I still use it and it brings me so much joy.
I love making tea and I... and I love tea and I love the smell of tea. And obviously I don't know anything about - well not “obviously” but I don't - I don't know anything about Japanese tea ceremonies but the... just the experience of making tea and drinking it out of this little cup brings me so much joy. And so I thought I would read a little... just a few paragraphs from here about a bowl, a tea bowl.
So this is... So this is Thousand Cranes. It's published by Penguin Modern Classics. It is 101 pages in this English translation. Okay, this is from chapter three. It's on pages 11 and 12:
Unaware that she was on display, she went through the ceremony without hesitation, and she herself set the tea before Kikuji.
I think “she” is... she's described as the Inamura girl just above that and I think she's somebody that Kikuji is being set up with, possibly to marry. Anyway. I'll start again:
Unaware that she was on display, she went through the ceremony without hesitation, and she herself set the tea before Kikuji.
After drinking, Kikuji looked at the bowl. It was black Oribe, splashed with white on one side, and there decorated, also in black, with crook-shaped bracken shoots.
‘You must remember it,’ said Chikako from across the room.
Kikuji gave an evasive answer and put the bowl down.
‘The pattern has the feel of the mountains in it,’ said Chikako. ‘One of the best bowls I know for early spring - your father often used it. We're just a little out of season, but then I thought that for Kikuji...’
‘But what difference does it make that my father owned it for a little while? It's four hundred years old, after all - its history goes back to Momoyama and Rikyū himself. Tea masters have looked after it and passed it down through the centuries. My father is of very little importance.’ So Kikuji tried to forget the associations the bowl called up.
It had passed from Ota to his wife, from the wife to Kikuji's father, from Kikuji's father to Chikako; and the two men, Ota and Kikuji's father, were dead, and here were the two women. There was something almost weird about the bowl's career.
Here, again, Ota's widow and daughter, and Chikako, and the Inamura girl, and other young girls too were holding the old tea bowl in their hands, and bringing it to their lips.
Yeah. So that was Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata. This has been the 29th Page One In Review. I'm Charles Adrian. I'll be back very soon with more books from guests on my podcast. Looking at my shelf here, I think the next three are going to be books that I remember an awful lot better than the books that I've read from today and, yeah, I'm looking forward to talking about them. Thank you very much for joining me today. I hope that wherever you are, in whatever tier your city is currently placed in, under whatever system your government has decided on, depending on where in the world you live, I hope that you're surviving okay. Yeah. Till next time, all the best. 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]