Find Page One on APPLE PODCASTS or STITCHER.
Episode image is a detail from the cover of Give My Regards To Eighth Street by Morton Feldman, published in 2002 by Exact Change; cover painting: Friend - To M.F. by Philip Guston, 1978, collection of the Des Moines Art Center, courtesy of the McKee Gallery, New York.
For the 34th Second Hand Book Factory, Charles Adrian is with artist and lecturer Hannah Rickards at her home in Clapton. Their discussion touches on travel writing, the fascination of the north, the abstraction of art from reality and a certain kind of self-confidence.
Other books by Italo Calvino are discussed in Page One 116 (Adventures Of A Near-Sighted Man) and Page One 151 (If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller and The Complete Cosmicomics).
Give My Regards To Eighth Street by Morton Feldman is also discussed in Page One 168.
This episode was recorded in Clapton 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 August, 2013.
Book listing:
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez
Palomar by Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver)
Give My Regards To Eighth Street by Morton Feldman
Links:
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening... you're listening... to London Fields Radio.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 48th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is Page One On The Run. I'm recording this week at my guest's studio in Clapton in London. It's the 34th Second Hand Book Factory, this is London Fields Radio and here's my first track for today: it's Simon & Garfunkel's The Sound Of Silence.
Music
[The Sound Of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel]
Charles Adrian
That was Simon & Garfunkel with The Sound Of Silence, which I've played for you Hannah. This is... So my guest today is Hannah Rickards.
Hannah Rickards
Yes.
Charles Adrian
Yeah, how do you describe yourself, Hannah?
Hannah Rickards
I would... I'm an artist. I work a lot with sound, with - now more with, kind of, performers - but with video, text, and variously, I think, works that are quite hard to describe because they're about how difficult something is to describe.
Charles Adrian
[laughing] Right. Yes.
Hannah Rickards
[laughing] As you know.
Charles Adrian
Yes. Absolutely.
Hannah Rickards
But yes, I also lecture at Central Saint Martin's. And those are the, kind of... yeah, the, sort of, two... like, work-wise, the two main things that take up my time.
Charles Adrian
We could talk for hours about this but this is obviously a book podcast so I'm going to come to the book. The first thing is the book that you like that you've brought. What have you brought that you like?
Hannah Rickards
It's a book called Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez.
Charles Adrian
I haven't heard of it.
Hannah Rickards
And it's a book that I, kind of, come back to quite frequently and that I, sort of, turn to to, sort of, read through at certain points. It's a book... It's essentially... Barry Lopez is... I guess you would find this book possibly in, like, a travel writing section or in something... you know, it kind of... [it's] one of those books that sits in a slightly odd place in the bookshop. Or doesn't really seem like it's... It's not just, kind of...
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Doesn't have a... Yeah, it doesn't fit into one of the genres that they put up on the signs.
Hannah Rickards
Although travel writing is quite an expansive, kind of, area., I guess. There's lots of people who write, you know... The works are not... They're not guidebooks.
Charles Adrian
No, that's true. [indistinct] What kind of... So is this a... Is this at all fictive or is it...?
Hannah Rickards
No.
Charles Adrian
No. Okay.
Hannah Rickards
It's a... It's essentially... It's a, kind of... It's a book about the North. It's a book about the Arctic in Canada and Alaska. You know, it's... it's... it's somebody who's spent... who writes a lot, essentially, about landscape as well, which is why it doesn't necessarily, kind of, sit so much in, like, travel.
Charles Adrian
Yes, yes.
Hannah Rickards
It's really somebody who's, you know, spent a lot of time in high latitudes, has spent a lot of time in that landscape and who writes about... about the, kind of, impact of that on his imagination, on his... on his thoughts.
Charles Adrian
It sounds amazing. Read... Read the first page then.
Hannah Rickards
Here we go.
BEYOND A REGARD for the landscape itself, this book finds its origin in two moments.
One summer evening I was camped in the western Brooks Range of Alaska with a friend. From the ridge where we had pitched our tent we looked out over tens of square miles of rolling tundra along the southern edge of the calving grounds of the Western Arctic caribou herd. During those days we observed not only caribou and wolves, which we'd come to study, but wolverine and red fox, ground squirrels, delicate-legged whimbrels and aggressive jaegers, all in the unfolding [sic] of their obscure lives. One night we watched in awe as a young grizzly bear tried repeatedly to force its way past the yearling wolf standing guard alone before a den of young pups. The bear eventually gave up and went on its way. We watched snowy owls and rough-legged hawks hunt and caribou drift like smoke through the valley.
On the evening I am thinking about—it was breezy there on Ilingnorak Ridge, and cold; but the late-night sun, small as a kite in the northern sky, poured forth an energy that burned against my cheekbones—it was on that evening that I went for a walk for the first time among the tundra birds. They all build their nests on the ground so their vulnerability is extreme. I gazed down at a single horned lark no bigger than my fist. She stared back resolute as iron. As I approached, golden plovers abandoned their nests in hysterical...
Charles Adrian
[appreciative] Hmm! It sounds like... It sounds like it's [laughing] just full of animals and birds.
Hannah Rickards
[laughs] It kind of... Well, I mean, may... it's... maybe that... It is, to a certain degree. It, sort of, looks at different aspects in different chapters. But I think one of the things that's always really interested me about the North and has, kind of, influenced the work I've made is somehow this, kind of, idea of there being this... like, it's so difficult to be a living creature in the North.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Yes. Right. Absolutely. Yeah.
Hannah Rickards
In the tropics, it's very... it's, like, abundant, it absolutely just...
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Yes. Everything just happens by itself. Yeah.
Hannah Rickards
... happens by itself. But to see these, kind of, tiny trees that are so old and live, kind of, hidden behind a rock or to see... you know, to, kind of, see something that... Everything is much more reduced and it's necess... everything is necessary but it's in this, kind of, state of reduction. And so I think you can, kind of, then look at certain aspects of that landscape in this, kind of, diagrammatic form almost. Or something. There's a, kind of, necessity to things... of, like, a reduction and a necessity that I find interesting in whatever, kind of, aspect it is. Whether it's in a, kind of, totally, kind of, vegetation-free, kind of, icy landscape or if it's in, like, how a creature survives and evolves and... and, kind of, how that, kind of, balance is maintained in, kind of, how... You know, he writes here about finding encampments from... that could be from, you know, fifteen thousand years ago, you know? Because nothing decays, nothing... Everything's, kind of, there. It's, sort of, written on the surface somehow. And so, yeah, that's... that's why it's, kind of, interesting. Yeah.
Charles Adrian
Oh wonderful. Thank you very much. That's... That was... That was a good choice, I think. And now we're coming to your... your first choice of music, which is also a good choice, but I don't know what it is. It's... So I've taken the track about the Suzuki... Suzuki teaching. Is that right?
Hannah Rickards
Yeah.
Charles Adrian
Yes. So not... not the mushroom hunting.
Hannah Rickards
Okay.
Charles Adrian
[laughing] The other one.
Hannah Rickards
Okay.
Charles Adrian
So what is this? I need to write this down actually. Do you have a pen?
Hannah Rickards
Yeah.
Charles Adrian
What actually is it? Who is it who's...?
Hannah Rickards
It's an excerpt from a work by John Cage called Indeterminacy.
Charles Adrian
Okay.
Hannah Rickards
And Indeterminacy was a, kind of... I suppose it, sort of, has certain aspects of the, kind of, lecture form. But in which he, kind of, delivered ninety stories.
Charles Adrian
So is this John Cage speaking?
Hannah Rickards
Yeah.
Charles Adrian
Right. Okay.
Hannah Rickards
Ninety stories that, kind of, range in subject matter from mushroom hunting to... to, kind of, more, kind of, anecdotal things to do with his friends, to fellow composers, to all over the place, but all that, kind of... You know, there are, kind of, strands to it. A lot of them are to do with, kind of, listening or to do with sound.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Yes. Okay.
Hannah Rickards
And the mushroom one was. But... And this one is also actually.
Charles Adrian
It's a lot to do with listening...
Hannah Rickards
Yeah.
Charles Adrian
... I think.
Hannah Rickards
And at the same time, in a separate space, David Tudor, who's... [who] was a pianist who Cage worked with a lot and who performed a lot of Cage's works, was playing back into the room excerpts of Cage's works but not based on listening to what Cage was saying. So there's this, kind of... this, sort of, layering that's, kind of...
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] I see. Okay, so there's a, kind of, non... non-listening [indistinct]...
Hannah Rickards
… that interrupts. Like, often you can't hear... So, you know, what's described in this thing we're just about to listen to happens in the course of listening to the whole thing. So he, kind of... Yeah, he recorded... he recorded this and the version... this version was released on Smithsonian Folkways, I think, in, yeah, the late fifties.
Charles Adrian
Okay. This is an extract from Indeterminacy by John Cage.
Music
[Indeterminacy (extract) by John Cage]
Charles Adrian
[laughing] I love that. I think that's such a great little story. Now, the second... this second section is my book for you. And I should confess - this is the first time this has happened - I'm not giving you a book that I have already read myself, which is, kind of, against my own ethos. But the reason is that there's... it's a very specific book that I want to give you. It's one that I think you should read if you haven't and I don't have it in English and so I've ordered it and it will come. But I've managed to extract from the internet the first page...
Hannah Rickards
Oh, great.
Charles Adrian
... of this so I will be able to read it to you. This is Palomar by Italo Calvino. Have you ever read this?
Hannah Rickards
I haven't read that, no. [indistinct]
Charles Adrian
Have you read other things by him?
Hannah Rickards
Yeah.
Charles Adrian
What have you read?
Hannah Rickards
[speaking over] Particularly Six Memos For The Next Millennium, which is one of my favourite books.
Charles Adrian
Oh, I don't know if I ever actually read all of those.
Hannah Rickards
[speaking over] It was one of the books I thought about reading something from today.
Charles Adrian
Okay. Okay. I think I must have read some of that but I don't know if I... yeah...
Hannah Rickards
[speaking over] It's, kind of, a series of lectures that he delivered about... There's one about lightness, quickness, multiplicity. they're, kind of...
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Yes. Yes. That rings a bell. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hannah Rickards
And it's, yeah... it's a... it's a wonderful book. I might make a switch in my selection of what to give back to you.
Charles Adrian
Oh, okay.
Hannah Rickards
[laughing] [indistinct]
Charles Adrian
I probably already have a copy of it.
Hannah Rickards
[speaking over] Oh fine. Well then. I'll keep it.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] He was one of my special authors at university, which is why I ended up reading Palomar. And the reason I want to give it to you is because I think what he's trying to... I mean, what he does a lot in his work but what he's trying to do here particularly is to abstract something from the world he... as he experiences it and to find rules, to find shapes, to find how... how it works. And I think that's something that I see in your work a little bit as well. How to take a phenomenon that you can... that you can experience and make it something that you can understand. I think that's, in a very loose sense, what he's doing in this book. I will read... I'll read you the first page. I think it more or less gives you an idea. It's a very math... He has a very mathematical brain, doesn't he, a very scientific way of thinking about things. And Palomar is... it's three sets of three stories. I think that's right. Or nine sets of nine, I can't remember. It might be [laughing] nine sets of nine. It's a long time since I've read it. But this is the first... This is the first part of the first part, if you like. It's PALOMAR ON THE BEACH.
Reading a wave
The sea is barely wrinkled, and little waves strike the sandy shore. Mr. Palomar is standing on the shore, looking at a wave. Not that he is lost in complentation [sic] of the waves. He is not lost, because he is quite aware of what he is doing: he wants to look at a wave and he is looking at it. He is not contemplating, because for contemplation you need the right temperament, the right mood, and the right combination of exterior circumstances; and though Mr. Palomar has nothing against contemplation in principle, none of these three conditions apply [sic] to him. Finally, it is not “the waves” that he means to look at, but just one individual wave: in his desire to avoid vague sensations, he establishes for his every action a limited and precise object.
Mr. Palomar sees a wave rise in the distance, grow, approach, change form and color, fold over itself, break, vanish, and flow again. At this point he could convince himself that he has concluded the operation he had set out to achieve, and he could go away. But it is very difficult to isolate one wave, separating it from the wave immediately following it, which seems to push it and at times overtakes it and sweeps it away; just as it is difficult to separate that one wave from the wave that precedes it and seems to drag it towards the shore, unless it turns against its follower, as if to arrest it. Then, if you consider the breadth of the wave...
And so on. Yes. So when I... when... as soon as I get that through the post, which will happen very soon...
Hannah Rickards
I'm excited.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] I shall pass it on to you. So the next track is one that I've chosen and this is just... it doesn't have very much to do with anything but I thought that, you know, one of... one of Calvino's more famous books is If On A Winter's Night A Traveler and so, with that excuse, I'm going to play Billie Holiday singing Travelin' Light.
Music
[Travelin' Light by Billie Holiday]
Jingle
London Fields Radio... it's London Fields Radio.
Charles Adrian
It is London Fields Radio. I'm Charles Adrian. I'm with Hannah Rickards in her home and studio, I should say, in Clapton. And that was Billie Holiday with Travelin' Light. Now a third section: it's your book for me. Have you decided what you're going to give me?
Hannah Rickards
Well...
Charles Adrian
I don't want you to give me a Calvino book. Because I... I probably have it.
Hannah Rickards
[speaking over] No, I'm not going to give you a Calvino book. But the two books that I'm, kind of, still, kind of, between... betwixt and between... I think, one... This was the one I thought about initially and it's a book that I've read quite recently and that I find really exciting just in terms of... Its the way that the author writes it or the, kind of... the ideas that he's trying to express.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Uh huh. I see. Yes.
Hannah Rickards
And it's Give My Regards To Eighth Street, which is the collected writings of Morton Feldman.
Charles Adrian
Okay.
Hannah Rickards
And, I mean, Feldman was a composer but a lot of this writing is to do with... He's often writing about painting, but when he's writing about painting he's actually writing about music.
Charles Adrian
Interesting. Okay.
Hannah Rickards
And, in actual fact, one of... you know, like, what he seems to be trying to do is to talk about surface in music...
Charles Adrian
I see. Uh huh. Okay.
Hannah Rickards
... and surface in relation to time and time in relation to looking at paintings. And I mean, it's just, kind of... So there are, kind of, passages in it where suddenly you feel like a bit of your brain just blew up. You know?
Charles Adrian
[laughs]
Hannah Rickards
There are these, kind of, astonishingly, kind of, concise, sort of, boiled down amazing thoughts about things. And so that's... that's a book that I've been quite excited about recently and it seemed like a book that I think that you'd enjoy.
Charles Adrian
I think I probably would. I like... yes, I like chasing thoughts of how one medium can... can help us to look at other mediums. I think that's really interesting. Yes.
Hannah Rickards
[speaking over] Yes. And that's what struck me and I thought that's what might interest you about it as well.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Mmm. Yeah. Sure.
Hannah Rickards
[speaking over] So I'm going to stick with this one now.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Okay. Stick with that one.
Hannah Rickards
So:
Sound, Noise, Varèse, Boulez
Recently I heard news from Europe that Boulez is adopting the chance techniques of John Cage and perhaps myself. Like Mathieu, he is going to show us Katzenjammer Kids how an ambitious Frenchman can really do it. It was easy for Napoleon to reach Moscow. And it will be curious to observe Boulez struggling home to Darmstadt.
Boulez has neither elegance nor physicality. His sound consists of a million gestures, all going upward (certainly not to heaven) — an étude, a caricature of our times, a homage to Artaud and Franz Liszt.
Nevertheless, he is a magnificent academician, and it will be thanks to his success that we will be able to hear more of Varèse, John Cage, Christian Wolff and myself.
If one hears what one composes — by that I mean not just paper music — how can one not be seduced by the sensuality of the musical sound? It is unfortunate that when this sensuality is pursued we find that the world of music is not round, and that there do exist demonic vastnesses when this world leaves off.
Noise is something else. It does not travel on these distant seas of experience. It bores like granite into granite. It is physical, very exciting, and when organized it can have the impact and grandeur of Beethoven.
The struggle is between this sensuousness which is elegance and the newer, easier to arrive at, excitement.
You have no idea how academic music is, even the most sublime. What is calculated is for me academic. Chance is the most academic procedure yet arrived at, for it defines itself as a technique immediately.
Charles Adrian
Wow. He's so confident. [laughing] I'm really...
Hannah Rickards
Yeah.
Charles Adrian
... I'm really blown away by... I mean, I... There are various people who write and speak like that, aren't there, and I... I cannot imagine ever being that confident about anything I've done or taking part in. I think that's really interesting.
Hannah Rickards
[speaking over] And that's... it's throughout. You just… Like, “Really? You said that? That... What?” Like, you know. But just that last... I mean, I'd forgotten that... I'd forgotten that that sentence was on this page. You know: “Chance is the most academic procedure yet arrived at for it defines itself as a technique immediately.” I mean, it's...
Charles Adrian
I'm going to have to... Yeah, I'm going to have to let that phrase bounce around my brain, I think, while I'm on my way home. This... I can... Yeah, this book is going to tie my head up in knots but that's amazing.
Hannah Rickards
[speaking over] Yeah. I mean, I read that and I, kind of... there's moments where you go, “Yeah...” And then you're like, “What? I saw it! I could see it! Now it's gone!” And you just, kind of... It's almost, like, an exercise... like, some kind of meditative exercise to, kind of, keep coming back to it and, kind of, reading it and then it's... Yeah, so I mean...
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Oh, beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to enjoy that and...
Hannah Rickards
[speaking over] I've... It's only quite recently that I've read it. When I was on Fogo Island in...
Charles Adrian
Ah right. Okay.
Hannah Rickards
... March somebody said, “Oh, you should... you'd love this book. You know, we have a... keep a copy of it and I think you'd really, you know, enjoy it”. And, you know, I had been reading about film and... or new things about film but, you know, to read his writings is something else completely. So yes.
Charles Adrian
Wonderful. Thank you very much. Now we're going to finish with Glen Gould, which might be very appropriate at this point. So here he is, making his slow and careful way through the Contrapunctus 1 [one] - or 1 [eins] - from Bach's Art Of Fugue. This is... yeah, this is gorgeous. Thank you very much, Hannah, for this.
Hannah Rickards
Thank you, Adrian.
Charles Adrian
This was wonderful. Thank you.
Music
[Contrapunctus 1 from Bach's Art Of Fugue by Glen Gould]
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]