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Episode image is a detail from the cover of Shopgirl by Steve Martin, published in 2000 by Victor Gollancz; jacket photograph: Photonica.
Joining Charles Adrian for the first of the new-style iTunes-hosted Page One podcasts is Vera Chok, who makes things and connects people. Almost exactly a year after their previous interview (Page One 6), they discuss the joy of tight prose, optimism in the face of disaster and whether comedians can compete with poets.
Another book by E. M. Forster, Maurice, is discussed in Page One 21.
Shopgirl by Steve Martin is also discussed in Page One 170.
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: 1st October, 2013.
Book listing:
A Passage To India by E. M. Forster
The Drought by J. G. Ballard
Shopgirl by Steve Martin
Other episodes featuring Vera:
Page One 149
Page One 127
Page One 107
Page One 90
Page One 6
Links:
Episode transcript:
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the all new Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and we're now here on iTunes for the foreseeable future. It's all very new and different. I don't have a jingle. So if anybody listening would like to make me one, just go to my website, charlesadrian.com. Follow the contact links, write to me. Or send me a jingle. It just has to say “Page One” essentially. It would be quite good to have two jingles. Maybe a Page One jingle and a Second Hand Book Factory jingle. Ah, that might be good. This is a Second Hand Book Factory podcast. So this is the 52nd Page One and the 37th Second Hand Book Factory. I'm going to kick us off straight away before I talk to you, Vera, with Memory Lane by McFly.
Vera Chok
Oh, I don't know this one.
Charles Adrian
You will.
Music
[Memory Lane by McFly]
Charles Adrian
So that was McFly with Memory Lane. And here we are again: Vera Chok.
Vera Chok
Yes. Hi.
Charles Adrian
This may be the first iTunes version of Page One but this is the second time that we have met. We met almost a year ago.
Vera Chok
On this show not, like, in life.
Vera and Charles Adrian
[laughter]
Charles Adrian
No, obviously. Yes, exactly. So, this is the second time that we've met across this microphone. No, not even, because we had a different microphone. It's the second time that we have done...
Vera Chok
Yes, the one where you could hear yourself and I had to lip read.
Charles Adrian
Oh, that's right. It was very noisy. So check out the 6th... I think the 6th Page One - it's the 1st Second Hand Book Factory - online, listeners, for our previous interview. All my previous podcasts are available on my website. The details will be somewhere at the end of the show and you'll be able to read them somewhere. So it's about a year since we did that. That went out, I think, on the 9th or the 10th of October 2012 and this is going out on the 1st of October 2013. And so much has changed since then.
Vera Chok
Has it? I was thinking about this.
Charles Adrian
A lot has changed. This time last year you described yourself as an actress and performance maker.
Vera Chok
Oh, yeah, I did.
Charles Adrian
How would you describe yourself today?
Vera Chok
Oh. I wouldn't describe myself as an actress and performance maker. I make things and I connect people. And I have a lot of amazing friends. There. I've thought about this.
Charles Adrian
That's nice. I like it. Make things, connect people, amazing friends. I think they're all amazing qualities. And they're definitely things that I can... like, the amazing friends I think is also a quality of yours. But let's talk about the book that you like because this is a book podcast. So what book... Because this also, I think, is a useful way of describing oneself incidentally.
Vera Chok
This is a book - oh gosh, my voice is gone. It's Passage To India by E. M. Foster, which you must have read.
Charles Adrian
Yes. And I love it.
Vera Chok
I thought about this book last year and I read the first page and I think something about the first page, I went: “It's not good enough.” But I like... Shall I talk about it first?
Charles Adrian
Yes, yes.
Vera Chok
I like how structured it is. It's got movement. It's like a piece of music. And you can see - well, I suppose I studied it - but you could see the phrasing. And you could see things building and coming away into focus and out of focus or amplifying. And I just... And there's certain books that are like music or like films. And I think what I really mean is I like technical... writing that's really well written and not floppy prose. Because if you're talking about big things... What do I mean? Yeah, it needs something to hold it all together. You can't just... Because, you know, when you have an existential crisis, it's overwhelming. It's like big things and you don't know how to articulate stuff. But when you see it done really well in a book or a piece of music... It's that craft. It's that putting it together. Yeah. So that's... yeah. And the other reason I love this book is this line - and I'm paraphrasing badly - this idea of the Indians confusing hospitality with intimacy. Something like that.
Charles Adrian
Oh really? I don't remember that. That's interesting.
Vera Chok
And the whole clash of cultures and people... how people don't understand each... Oh yes and of course “only connect”. That idea of how do we ever connect? And I think I find that's a question that I really ask. You know, because language gets in the way, culture, history. And I still haven't read the book you gave me about irrationality but I listened to the podcast and it's all this, you know, how do you ever understand other people? You know, you get to the stage where you think, “Am I mad or is everyone else mad? Why is there this difficulty in understanding?” So this book is very much like that.
Charles Adrian
Read us the first page.
Vera Chok
First page. Right. I hope I don't mispronounce too many things. Right. Chapter one:
Except for the Marabar Caves - and they are twenty miles off - the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathing-steps on the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be holy here ; indeed there is no river front, and the [sic] bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited guest. Chandrapore was never large or beautiful, but two hundred years ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then imperial, and the sea, and the fine houses date from that period. The zest for decoration stopped in the eighteenth century, nor was it ever democratic. There is no painting and scarcely any carving in the bazaars. The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving. So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life.
Inland, the prospect alters. There is an oval maidan, and a long sallow hospital. Houses belonging to Eurasians stand on the high ground by the railway station. Beyond the railway - which runs parallel to the river - the land sinks, then rises again rather steeply. On the [sic] second rise is laid out the little Civil Station, and viewed hence Chandrapore appears to be a totally different place. It is a city of gardens. It is no city, but a forest sparsely scattered with huts. It is a tropical pleasance, washed by a noble river. The toddy palms and neem trees and mangoes and peepul that were hidden behind the bazaars now [...]
Charles Adrian
Mmm. Thank you.
Vera Chok
Mmm. I mean, I know I didn't choose it the first time around. It's because it's so detailed in its description and if you're not in the mood for that kind of thing... [laughs]
Charles Adrian
But it's a very... like you say, a finely honed introduction. I mean, E. M. Forster is a craftsman of the pen . You see this place. It's exotic but not beautiful. It has a beauty, but it has a very particular sort of... it's not romanticised at all. Or it feels like it's not... he's not romanticising it.
Vera Chok
I like the... Immediately you feel... You know, he doesn't talk about the heat. You know, when you think about exotic places, you think about the heat, the smells, the colour. What he talks about is mud and that's like a harkening back to a previous state of being... of human beings or something like that. So it's alien in that way. And then the second bit, it just shifts perspective. And I think that's an intimation of the idea of shifting perspective of its meaning. How meaning is so different depending on where you're looking at things from.
Charles Adrian
Definitely. Which I think is an important theme probably in this book.
Vera Chok
Yes.
Charles Adrian
Let's play your first music choice. And this is, in fact, you. I'm going to play... So you gave me a whole list of tracks to choose from and I know some of them were asterisked. And I didn't choose any of those tracks.
Vera Chok
Didn't you?!
Charles Adrian
I'm very sorry. I chose two I really like that don't have anything necessarily to do with your preferences but... This first one is great. It's by your band Friends of Friends.
Vera Chok
Yes. I was a bit shy to suggest this one and I thought...
Charles Adrian
I'm glad you did because I should have put this on anyway so this is by Friends of Friends and it's called Victor Lou, the Sequin Edit.
Music
[Victor Lou (Sequin Edit) by Friends of Friends]
Charles Adrian
So that was Victor Lou, the Sequin Edit, by Friends of Friends with Vera's voice and also Vera's writing.
Vera Chok
Yes. And the rest of the band are Stephen M. Caines and Pascal Baras.
Charles Adrian
Wonderful. Now, the next section of the podcast is the book that I think you should have.
Vera Chok
[laughing] I'd forgotten about that bit [indistinct] get a book.
Charles Adrian
Yes, you get a book. So just to explain for anybody who hasn't listened to the podcast before, the point of the Second Hand Book Factory podcast, which is a kind of sub genre of podcasts within the global family of Page One podcasts, is that we create two second hand books. So I'm going to give Vera a book that I have already read that she will hopefully read...
Vera Chok
[laughs]
Charles Adrian
... and she's then going to give me a book. And so what I say is that it could be anything at all. It could be something that you think the other person should specifically read or something that you just think everyone should read or something that you're enjoying. And this book is something that is not so specific. It's just a book that I like by an author I really like and I think you might enjoy it. It's The Drought by J. G. Ballard.
Vera Chok
Ooo! Okay.
Charles Adrian
Which I probably read a long time ago. I'm a bit sad to be giving this to you because I would also like to be rereading it but I will probably get hold of another copy.
Vera Chok
It's got the sticker still on it.
Charles Adrian
It has the sticker. It was £2.99 in a sale from somewhere. I read it because I'd already read The Drowned World, which is... These are his, kind of, disaster novels...
Vera Chok
I don't know any of his work.
Charles Adrian
There may be other disaster novels as well, I can't remember. This is imagining a situation in which it stops raining. So you're in the States and it just hasn't rained, and it hasn't rained, and it hasn't rained. And it... you know, to the point at which it becomes catastrophic. And one of the reasons that... I like him because I like his... again, I like his prose. I like the way he writes. And I love the images he creates. I love the world that he sees. He was interned in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during the Second World War as a child. And actually I have just read The Empire of the Sun, which is a kind of novelised account of an experience like his, and you can see where some of his worldview comes from, I think. Because he sees the world around him falling apart, society no longer functions, and yet people survive. And that's what you see in this book, for example, The Drought. You see there's a point at which society as we know it cannot function. We don't have water. And so people revert to a kind of previous state, as it were. But that's not the end of it. And so that's another reason why I think it's a good book to read because he's... I think he's a very optimistic writer.
Vera Chok
Interesting, because I was talking to Natalie Clarke yesterday and we were talking about when people misbehave in our daily life and they're rude, or they... Yeah. And you think, “Hang on, that's completely unsettled my worldview and my moral compass or my understanding of everything.” This rationality/irrationality thing. And so in that way the universe kind of crumbles for a bit until you surround yourself with your reasoning or people who reason like you again. So it's interesting. Because we don't really face extreme situations.
Charles Adrian
No. And certainly not right now in the country that we live in.
Vera Chok
Not in this country.
Charles Adrian
No, that's right. But it is something that I am definitely... I've been scared of for a long time in a very vague way. You know, what would happen if all of the things that I rely on are no longer there tomorrow? Would I be able to... You know, I'm not very handy. I couldn't kill and skin a rabbit.
Vera and Charles Adrian
[laughter]
Charles Adrian
And so, yeah, it is something that I think about occasionally and I like the idea that not everything disappears when you take away certain props. You know, it is still possible to adapt and to live. Let me read you the first page.
1
The Draining Lake
At noon, when Dr Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in [sic] the entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot son of the old woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below his feet. The reflection of his swollen head swam like a deformed nimbus among the limp plumage. The caking mud-bank was speckled with pieces of paper and driftwood, and to Ransom the dream-faced figure of Quilter resembled a demented faun strewing himself with leaves as he mourned for the lost spirit of the river.
Ransom secured the bow and stern lines to the jetty, deciding that the comparison was less than apt. Although Quilter spent as much time watching the river as Ransom and everyone else, his motives would be typically perverse. The continued fall of the river, sustained through the spring and summer drought, gave him a kind of warped pleasure, even if he and his mother had been the first to suffer. Their derelict barge - an eccentric gift from Quilter's protector, Robert Foster Lomax, the architect who was Ransom's neighbour - had now taken on a thirty-degree list, and a further fall of even a few inches in the level of the water would split its hull like a desiccated pumpkin.
Shielding his eyes from the sunlight, Ransom surveyed the silent banks of the river as they wound westwards to [...]
There you go.
Vera Chok
Super.
Charles Adrian
Read on.
Vera Chok
Thank you. Mud banks. Rivers.
Charles Adrian
[laughs] That's right! That's right. Weird. The Oversoul is keeping us on the straight and narrow, making sure that everything fits thematically. Let's... I don't have a track here to split up the sections and normally I would play a jingle but there's no jingle. So we're just now going to move smoothly through into the third section of the show...
Vera Chok
Which is me...
Charles Adrian
... in which you give me a book that you think I should have.
Vera Chok
And... I don't know if I've lent this to you before or... Anyway. It's Steve Martin's Shopgirl.
Charles Adrian
No, but I remember you talking about it possibly.
Vera Chok
Okay. Yes. Right. So Steve Martin. Yes, the actor, the comedian. He wrote this book. [laughing] I'm sorry. That's his face on the back!
Charles Adrian
I recognise it.
Vera Chok
Do you remember what I said about it?
Charles Adrian
No.
Vera Chok
Okay, I'm just going to read it. Okay.
When you work in the glove department at Neiman's, you are selling things that nobody buys anymore. These gloves aren't like the hard-working ones sold by L.L. Bean; these are so fine that a lady wearing them can still pick up a straight pin. The glove department is adjacent to the couture department and is really there for show. So a lot of Mirabelle's day is spent leaning against the glass case with one leg cocked behind her and her arms splayed outward, resting on her palms against the countertop. On an especially slow day she might lean over the case on her elbows - although this position is definitely not preferred by the management - and stare through the glass at the leather and silk gloves that lie on display like pristine, just-caught fish. The overhead lights reflect in the glass countertop and mingle with the grey and black of the gloves, resulting in a mother-of-pearl swirl that sometimes sends Mirabelle into a shallow hypnotic dream.
Everyone is silent at Neiman's, as though it were a religious site, and Mirabelle always tries to quiet the [...]
Charles Adrian
Wow. Did you notice gloves like just caught fish?
Vera Chok
Yes.
Charles Adrian
Amazing. The river winds its way onwards.
Vera and Charles Adrian
[laughter]
Charles Adrian
Mmm. Interesting.
Vera Chok
I don't remember when... how... May... Oh, yes! Perhaps I bought this when I worked in a bookshop, which was one of my happiest jobs ever. And so this is when I was a student and I worked at Pumpkin Books and it was very happy and there was a dog called Pip. And I was surprised at how beautiful and delicate it was. And it's written from the point of view of Mirabelle. And you kind of... you know, when you think of Steve Martin, you think: goofy, comedian. And more recently... So... Yeah, so this is what... oh god, twelve years ago? More recently I've been thinking about comedians and I was talking to Tim Wells about poets versus comedians. And I don't remember what he was saying to me because I probably wasn't paying attention but it was about range. You know, who... whether poets and comedians look at the range of things that human beings go through - emotions and stuff. So I suppose in retrospect it's not that surprising that a comedian like Steve Martin - and I think it takes a lot of intelligence and insight and sharpness to be a comedian, a good comedian - has written this pretty beautiful book. So I hope you like.
Charles Adrian
Thank you very much. I think I probably will. It seems like a very beautiful book.
Vera Chok
[speaking over] It kind of reminds me of your writing a little bit. I mean, I haven't read it for a while. But it's this quiet beauty. And I think also, some E. M. Forster also. Your writing also reminds me of E. M. Forster. Like, different bits of your writing.
Charles Adrian
That is the nicest thing you could possibly say to me.
Vera and Charles Adrian
[laughter]
Charles Adrian
Thank you Vera. That was wonderful. That's the end.
Vera Chok
[squeals] That was my squeal of disappointment that it's the end.
Charles Adrian
I know. It's finished already. It's so short. But thank you so much for being my guest again. I'm going to play us out now with a track that you introduced me to originally. And I love... There are various videos to this on YouTube and I love one of the videos but I wouldn't know how you find that specific one. This is... how do you pronounce it? Thao [/taʊ/]? Thao [/θaʊ/]?
Vera Chok
Thao [/taʊ/]?
Charles Adrian
Thao [/taʊ/] & The Get Down Stay Down. So listen to this and look it up, people. Thank you so much for listening. This has been Page One, I've been Charles Adrian and I have been in conversation with Vera Chok.
Vera and Charles Adrian
[laughter]
Charles Adrian
Thank you Vera.
Vera Chok
Thank you.
Music
[We The Common (for Valerie Bolden) by Thao & The Get Down Stay Down]
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]