Find Page One on APPLE PODCASTS or STITCHER.
(Background noise might make this episode a challenging listen.)
Episode image is a detail from the cover of Cosmos by Carl Sagan, published in 2012 by Abacus; cover photography: © Science Photo Library; cover design: Keenan.
Triggering a brace of songs by Taylor Swift and a song by a group that might contain her boyfriend, Charles Adrian’s guest this week is director and performer Gary Merry. They talk about science and the beginning of things. NB: “Aphora” is not a word in English: please don’t imagine that anybody will be impressed if you use it.
You can find out more about Gary’s company The New Factory of the Eccentric Actor here.
If you would like to find out which songs Rolling Stones’ readers considered Taylor Swift’s top ten songs in 2012, you can find the list here.
Another book by Iain Banks, Walking On Glass, is discussed in Page One 82.
Cosmos by Carl Sagan is also discussed in Page One 43 and Page One 162.
This episode was recorded at the Wilton Way Cafe for London Fields Radio.
This episode has been edited to remove music that is no longer covered by licence for this podcast.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode released: 12th March, 2013.
Book listing:
The Red Cabbage Cafe by Jonathan Treitel
Canal Dreams by Iain Banks
Cosmos by Carl Sagan
Links:
The New Factory Of The Eccentric Actor
Readers’ Poll: The 10 Best Taylor Swift Songs in Rolling Stone
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening... you're listening to London Fields Radio.
Charles Adrian
Hello this is Charles Adrian in Wil... in the Wilton Way Cafe for London Fields Radio. Welcome to the 26th Page One. This is the 17th Second Hand Book Factory. My guest today is Gary Merry. So here to start us off is what Rolling Stone Magazine considers to be the best song by a singer with a similarly adjectival surname. This is Mean by Taylor Swift.
Music
[Mean by Taylor Swift]
Charles Adrian
So that was Mean by Taylor Swift. Hello Gary.
Gary Merry
Hello Adrian.
Charles Adrian
Thank you very much for... for coming into the Wilton Way Cafe today.
Gary Merry
It's brilliant.
Charles Adrian
[laughs] So this is... this is March now.
Gary Merry
Right.
Charles Adrian
Just to let you know.
Gary Merry
Okay, yeah.
Charles Adrian
We're going to start with... Well, I should start by saying: Gary Merry, how do you describe yourself? What...
Gary Merry
How would I describe myself?
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] What are you?
Gary Merry
Performer, director... Yeah, I think I'll leave it at that.
Charles Adrian
Okay. Performer and director.
Gary Merry
Yeah.
Charles Adrian
Yeah, I think... I think it might be...
Gary Merry
[speaking over] Or director and performer. I don't... I don't know which it is.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Right! [affirmative] Uh huh. Yeah, I was... When I was thinking about what you might say, I was wondering if you... which one you would put first.
Gary Merry
Alphabetical order, I think. Director, performer. [indistinct]...
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Okay.
Gary Merry
... would be good.
Charles Adrian
We sh... We need a word that encompasses all of those things.
Gary Merry
[speaking over] There is no...
Charles Adrian
Both of those things, I should say.
Gary Merry
[speaking over] The French will have a word for it...
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] I'm sure. I'm sure.
Gary Merry
[speaking over] There will be a German word for it.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Yes.
Gary Merry
A very long German word for it but not in English.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Yes. Maybe the Swedish might have something.
Gary Merry
Yeah.
Charles Adrian
So let's start... Let's start then with the book that you like. What have you brought to show us?
Gary Merry
I have brought you - and I'm showing it to Adrian now - The Red Cabbage Cafe by Jonathan Treitel...
Charles Adrian
It's intriguing. What... It... What... What is going on on the cover?
Gary Merry
... published by Bloomsbury in 1990.
Charles Adrian
[softly] Oh, amazing.
Gary Merry
And the reason I brought it in is because I really love the book but I'm a... but also in terms of what it stimulated, what happened through this book.
Charles Adrian
Okay. Tell us... Tell us the story.
Gary Merry
Well, a friend was waiting for a train - she was on tour - and went into a bookshop and she saw this book actually in paperback - and this was back in about 1992 - and it has a picture of Lenin on the front.
Charles Adrian
Right.
Gary Merry
She's a bit of a Russophile - interested in revolutionary movements - so picked it up and read a few... the first page and bought it. Loved it so much that she then decided that she wanted to turn it into a play.
Charles Adrian
Aha. Okay.
Gary Merry
I was working with her briefly at the time and she asked me if I'd be interested in directing it. And in fact it was the first... I think it was one of the first times that somebody had actually - as opposed to me saying: “I'll direct this” - someone had come to me and said: “Do you want to direct this?”
Charles Adrian
[laughs]
Gary Merry
So I said... So I said: “Yes”. So Penny, my friend - Penny Dimond - adapted it for the stage with... I should say the author is Jonathan Treitel... She...
Charles Adrian
This is a... This is a novel, is it?
Gary Merry
It's a novel set in the Soviet Union and about...
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Hence the picture of Lenin - the small... it's quite a small picture of Lenin compared to the huge picture of... there's a... there's a woman's face...
Gary Merry
With a pin stuck in it.
Charles Adrian
Yes.
Gary Merry
And there's a reason for that.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Okay.
Gary Merry
That is the... It's set in Moscow at the time of the rise of Stalin, basically - the end of Lenin and the rise of Stalin - and the m... the central character is a guy called Humphrey Veil who meets a woman called Sofia who runs a... a waxworks, a travelling waxworks.
Charles Adrian
I see.
Gary Merry
[speaking over] And in fact the reason for the image of a woman's face with a pin stuck in it is that the first time that Humphrey sees Sofa she's standing in her waxworks. He thinks she is a waxwork and sticks a pin in her, just to check she...
Charles Adrian
[laughs] [speaking over] As you would if you wanted to check...
Gary Merry
[speaking over] ... if she is a waxwork.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] ... whether someone was a waxwork or not.
Gary Merry
[speaking over] Yes. Yes. That's how you tell a human being from a waxwork [indistinct].
Charles Adrian
[laughing] Yes. [laughs]
Gary Merry
So we did in fact do a play based on this book with Jonathan Treitel's permission and it was the birth of a theatre company.
Charles Adrian
Is this... this your theatre company?
Gary Merry
This is my theatre company - The New Factory Of The Eccentric Actor. This was the first play that we ever did...
Charles Adrian
Wow.
Gary Merry
... back in 1996. So it's a very important book...
Charles Adrian
Right. Yes, I can see that. I can see that.
Gary Merry
... and a very interesting story.
Charles Adrian
Why don't you read us the first page of it.
Gary Merry
I'll read you the first page of it:
As they say in Russia, an icon is a window into eternity. It sounds better in the original. I'm not quite sure what this means. Something along the lines of: art shows the world as it should be. Anyway, the Russians have always been chasers after perfection.
When I came to Moscow from New York in December, 1919, I was struck by the beauty of not what had been done but what was dreamed. The Moscow Transport Workers Soviet found me an apartment in the seventeenth-century building which used to be the residence of a sugar millionaire antique collector. The building was very central - just leave Saint Basil's by the exit near the iconostasis, turn left, the first crossing left and left again.
I lived in a round apartment under a turret. When I looked through the oriel window of my bedroom I could almost see down into Red Square where if not for an oblong sugar warehouse the shape of a sugar cube blocking the view... The walls of my apartment were covered in a close tessellation from ceiling to floor with icons. Nowhere else to store them, I suppose. My concierge Nadia Gavrilovna Stepalina, a middle aged ex-ballerina with rabbit teeth, assured me the building would eventually become a museum once the state could afford it.
I tried to avoid looking at the icons too closely. I kept reminding myself that these were only images and the gilt halos over their skulls signified no more than a kind of painterly hoopla but I couldn't dodge the collective stare of their oval Byzantine eyes. They brandished their crosses at me. They were stiff with fanaticism. I felt I was living in the midst of a crowd of religious maniacs. I found myself posing in iconic postures, especially in the mornings when I woke with a start and stumbled giddily around the apartment. I'd flatten my lips and gaze straight ahead through the window. I yawned with my arms spread horizontally, crucifix-wise.
Charles Adrian
Very nice. Thank you.
Gary Merry
Very nice. Thank you.
Charles Adrian
I think my favourite sentence in all that was: “Not what they had done but what they dreamed...” Was that... Is it something like that?
Gary Merry
Yes. And that's about the dream of the Soviets really.
Charles Adrian
Yes.
Gary Merry
And the book does deal with... It's a tragi-comedy...
Charles Adrian
Okay.
Gary Merry
... I would say and it is... it does touch on, well, the rise of Stalin, the end of the Soviet dream.
Charles Adrian
Wonderful. Okay. Thank you for introducing me to that.
Gary Merry
[speaking over] And I can definitely recommend it.
Charles Adrian
Yeah. Now let's... let's have the second track of the day. I've... I've chosen all the music today because, Gary, you didn't...
Gary Merry
Was too lazy.
Charles Adrian
Yeah. [laughs]
Gary Merry
Was too lazy to choose his own music.
Charles Adrian
You didn't... You didn't suggest anything to me so I was... I was sitting at home thinking: “What shall I...?” So this is... this is number seven or eight from the Rolling Stones list of best Taylor Swift songs - “Written and first performed at her ninth grade talent show,” it says, “Swift's massive breakout single, a country classic featured on her 2006 eponymous debut album, reflected the singer's beyond-her-years maturity.” And they quote the line: “‘He's got a one-hand feel on the steering wheel/ The other on my heart,’ she sings.”
Gary Merry
Excellent.
Charles Adrian
So this is Taylor Swift with Our Song.
Music
[Our Song by Taylor Swift]
Charles Adrian
So maybe that could be our song, Gary.
Gary Merry
[laughs]
Charles Adrian
What do you think? [laughs]
Gary Merry
It will be now.
Charles Adrian
[laughs] Forever more.
Gary Merry
Yeah.
Charles Adrian
So now it's my turn to give you the book that I'm going to give to you. I was very tempted to choose a book that I knew would piss you off. I was going...
Gary Merry
[speaking over] Excellent.
Charles Adrian
... I was going to pick you something... a really, really badly written book about acting, for example, or directing.
Gary Merry
Nice.
Charles Adrian
Somewhere in my bookshelf I've got something by Alan Ayckbourn that drove me mad when I... when I read it and I think would probably have the same effect on you. But then I reined in that temptation and I thought: “No, what I'm going to do instead is I'm just going to give you a book that I like.”
Gary Merry
Yeah.
Charles Adrian
Which is quite unusual for me but I saw this and I thought: “Yes, I really want to... I want to give this to somebody” and I think... well, I hope you'll like it. It's called Canal Dreams by Iain Banks. So I'm going to read you... I'm going to read you the first page and I hope that you're going to read this and think of me.
Gary Merry
I will.
Charles Adrian
1
Fantasia del Mer
tic tic tic tic... Tiny noises of compression, sounding through her skull.
She'd been alarmed, the first time she'd heard them, over the noise of her breathing and the tiny [sic] wheeze [sic] of the scuba gear which sat on her back, wrapping its plastic limbs around her and jamming rubber and metal into her mouth. Now she just listened to the ticking noises, imagining they were the signature of some erratic internal metronome; the unsteady beats of a tiny, bony heart.
The noises were her skull's reaction to the increasing weight of water above her as she dived, descending from the unsteady mirror of the surface, through the warm waters of the lake, to the muddy floor and the stumps of the long-dead trees.
So there you go. It's a very short first page...
Gary Merry
[indistinct]
Charles Adrian
... but I... I think it does exactly what a first page should do in the sense that it really sets up the conceit for the whole novel. I mean, this... this steady pressure is exactly what the novel is about. And so maybe... maybe that will inspire you to whole new...
Gary Merry
A whole new theatre company.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] ... direction. Yeah.
Gary Merry
Yeah. A whole new theatre company.
Charles Adrian
Let's listen to the third track that I've picked. So at the time of recording this radio show Taylor Swift seems to be dating Harry Styles from the boy band One Direction.
Gary Merry
[laughing] Now hang on. You've lost me now, Adrian.
Charles Adrian
He's the one with the hair.
Gary Merry
Right.
Charles Adrian
Yeah.
Gary Merry
Yeah.
Charles Adrian
Look him up later.
Gary Merry
He's part of a youth beat combo.
Charles Adrian
[laughing] Yes, exa.... He's part of a... He's part of an X-Factor-formed boy band which is currently ruling the world.
Gary Merry
I see.
Charles Adrian
In ter... Well, you know, that section of the world that is aged between about eight and fifteen.
Gary Merry
[speaking over] I thought that was the plutocrats that were ruling the world.
Charles Adrian
Yeah, I know. I know. I mean, in pop terms...
Gary Merry
Right.
Charles Adrian
... they're doing very well. And this is... this is One Direction singing a song by... oh goodness, I didn't write down his name. Ed Whelan, I think it is. No. Ed Whelan? No, that's not right, is it? He's a... He's a... He's a political advisor.
Gary Merry
Yes.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] What's his name? [laughing] Ed... Ed something else.
Gary Merry
Ed Balls! No that's the wrong name as well.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] No. [laughs] Ed someone.
Gary Merry
[indistinct]
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Ed Sheeran! Ed Sheeran [laughs] is this... is this guy. He wrote this song and... and One Direction is singing it and... and one of those is going out with Taylor Swift and so that's... that's how I've come to...
Gary Merry
Marvellous.
Charles Adrian
... Little Things.
Gary Merry
Yeah.
Music
[Little Things by One Direction]
Jingle
London Fields Radio... it's London Fields Radio.
Charles Adrian
It is, it's London Fields Radio. I'm here with Gary Merry in the Wilton Way Cafe for Page One. Now, the last section is your book for me.
Gary Merry
My book for you. Well, I've chosen some nonfiction for you, Adrian.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Aha. Okay. That's all right, I have Catholic tastes.
Gary Merry
Excellent. I bought [sic] you in Cosmos...
Charles Adrian
[appreciative] Ooo.
Gary Merry
... by Carl Sagan. And I'm not sure how interested you are in...
Charles Adrian
I'm actually very interested in the cosmos.
Gary Merry
[speaking over] ... in this kind of thing.
Charles Adrian
I... When I was a child I had a pop up book of space...
Gary Merry
Excellent.
Charles Adrian
... and I loved it. I loved anything to do with black holes or... suns. Mostly suns. Suns...
Gary Merry
[speaking over] Yup.
Charles Adrian
... and galaxies I found totally fascinating and intriguing and mysterious and wonderful.
Gary Merry
I... There's quite a lot of science in here [indistinct] but not too... it's not too heavy.
Charles Adrian
Okay.
Gary Merry
It's not too heavy. I would point you towards the appendix - the appendices...
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Oh, okay.
Gary Merry
... which...
Charles Adrian
Do they explain all the technical terms?
Gary Merry
[speaking over] ... you really should do. One is about... There's only two appendix. One is Reductio ad Absurdum, which is talking about how you can prove something by that...
Charles Adrian
I see.
Gary Merry
... process. And in this case it's talking about whether the square root of two is a rational or an irrational number.
Charles Adrian
Okay.
Gary Merry
Now, which sounds: “Oh my god no, I don't want to do that” but actually it's the... it's... it's the process that's gone through in that... it's very simple algebra.
Charles Adrian
No, very nice, very nice.
Gary Merry
And the second appendix is about the five Pythagorean Solids. And it's a proof of why there have to be five...
Charles Adrian
Okay.
Gary Merry
... and there are only five. And again, the mathematics... there is maths in it but it's very, very [indistinct].
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] I'm not scared of maths, Gary.
Gary Merry
Well, excellent.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] I'm not at all scared of maths.
Gary Merry
Excellent. Shall I read you the first page?
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Yes. Please do.
Gary Merry
CHAPTER I
The Shores of the Com... Cosmic Ocean.
The first men to be created and formed were called the Sorcerer of Fatal Laughter, the Sorcerer of Night, Unkempt, and the Black Sorcerer... They were endowed with intelligence, they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. When they looked, instantly they saw all that is around them, and they contemplated in turn the arc of heaven and the round face of the earth... [Then the creator said]: ‘They know all... what shall we do with them now? Let their sight reach only to that which is near them [sic]; let them see only a little of the face of the earth!... Are they not by nature simple creatures of our making? Must they also be gods?’
That's “The Popul Vuh of the Quiché Maya”
Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth?
Where is the way to the dwelling of light,
And where is the place of darkness...?
- The Book of Job?
It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.
- Blaise Pascal, Pensees
The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land.
- T. H. Huxley, 1887
So the start... Okay, page one is a little [indistinct]
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Yeah, it's just a deluge of... of aphora.
Gary Merry
Simply quotes. And then it gets into it a little bit more. Can I read you the last?
Charles Adrian
Alright, okay.
Gary Merry
I did think of reading you the last page instead of the first page, which I think speaks about what the book's about...
Charles Adrian
Okay. Yeah.
Gary Merry
... in fact. [indistinct]
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Go ahead. Yeah.
Gary Merry
For we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.
Charles Adrian
That's wonderful. That's exactly the kind of thing that gets me hooked into cosmology.
Gary Merry
It's full of lovely little stories.
Charles Adrian
[appreciative] Mmm.
Gary Merry
Some of... It was written in 1979 so lots of... some of the science...
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Okay.
Gary Merry
... is out of date. And it talks about the Soviet Union.
Charles Adrian
Oh! Right! [laughs]
Gary Merry
But, yeah, it's full of lovely little... little stories - exciting things about exciting... what I regard as exciting people.
Charles Adrian
[appreciative] Mmm. Wonderful. Thank you very much for that. I'm definitely going to read it and enjoy it. I'm going to finish with... with some music but I'm... this is... this is something completely different. This is to cleanse us after that...
Gary Merry
[laughs]
Charles Adrian
... filth that we've sat through up till now. This is... this is by Solomon Burke and it's Don't Give Up On Me.
Gary Merry
Excellent.
Charles Adrian
Thank you Gary.
Gary Merry
Thank you, Adrian.
Music
[Don't Give Up On Me by Solomon Burke]
[Initial Transcription by https://otter.ai]