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Season 2 Episodes

The 59th Page One, and this week the theme is romance. From teen worries to contract shagging, Charles Adrian takes us through some books that he has picked up in a foreign capital. Stay to the end for some Nina Simone.

Another book by Sinclair Lewis, Babbit, is discussed in Page One 4.

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: 2013.

Book listing:

There's A Bat In Bunk Five by Paula Danziger

Partners In Passion by Ann Kelly

One For The Money by Janet Evanovich

Cass Timberlane by Sinclair Lewis

Links:

Page One 4

Charles Adrian

Episode transcript:

Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 59th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian.

I want to give you a bit of backstory to this edition of the podcast. When I recorded this – and I realise that it's a bit strange to use the past tense about something that I'm doing right now. TEFL teachers or whatever they call themselves nowadays will be frowning and tutting. But all this will be in the past by the time anybody listens to it. So: when I recorded this I was working in Graz in southern Austria and suddenly I was given two days off in a row and I decided that I would go to Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, which is three and a half hours away from here by train. This isn't going to be a piece of travel journalism but I want to recommend going to Ljubljana, particularly if you're taking the train from Graz. The journey is beautiful and the city is very attractive. There's a small old town centre with a nicely proportioned river and a nice done-up castle. There are plenty of interesting museums. Major themes throughout the city appear to be street art and shoefitti. I'm not sure why. I was lucky enough to be there at the same time as Eurobasket 2013, which was apparently happening in the city. And in fact on the evening of the day that I arrived Slovenia was playing France so there was a big crowd of people sitting and standing in front of a big screen in one of the squares. Basketball really isn't a game that excites me but it was quite a lot of fun sitting amongst all these Slovenians and then five guys from France in red, white and blue morph suits. I don't know if you've seen a morph suit. I'm not talking about Morph the plasticine figure. If you don't know what I'm talking about Google “morph suit”. Anyway, it was a little confusing because the Slovenian flag is also red, white and blue but it became clear as the game progressed that these guys were definitely supporting France and they weren't afraid to rile the home fans, who eventually lost.

Anyway. Where was I? Oh, yes. So not long after I arrived in Ljubljana I came across an antiquarian bookshop with, outside, a pile of cheap second hand books. Oh, joy. Oh, happiness. That's my idea of a good holiday right there. I'm talking about broken spines, dog-eared pages and authors that you probably wouldn't find in Waterstones. Before I tell you what I bought, though, I'm going to play my first bit of music for today because this was playing breakfast in my two star hotel the morning after I arrived and it was a blast from the past. It's a classic, as far as I'm concerned. It's the Backstreet Boys' hymn to more or less indiscriminate emotion. It is, of course, As Long As You Love Me.

Music
[As Long As You Love Me by Backstreet Boys]

Charles Adrian
That was As Long As You Love Me by the Backstreet Boys. And now to the books.

I bought a little pile of books from this shop – spending, I think, a total of €6. But I don't want you to think that I bought indiscriminately. All of these books have to do with love. And the reason for that is that the first book that caught my eye was one of those teen romance books that was such an embarrassingly large part of my own teenage life. I remember my school librarian saying to me one day, “I see you like Terry Pratchett and Dick Francis” and my first thought was, “How does she know that?” And then my second thought was, “Oh my god, she must have been looking through my records, which means that she knows what else I've been reading.” So not quite an Orwellian level of surveillance but it did give me a bit of a jolt.

Now, for those of you who were not fans of this genre, I'll just explain a couple of things. First of all the protagonist is generally female, that being the target audience, and she's usually around fourteen years old. Old enough to fall massively in love but not old enough for sex to be an issue. I'm not talking about Judy Blume here. I'm not talking about Forever. Although even that isn't a million miles away. The second thing to know is that there are two kinds of men. There's the totally gorgeous guy who comes onto the narrator straightaway and turns out to be a no good lyin' cheatin' dog. And then there's the marginally less good looking guy who hangs around in the background for a moment but turns out to be the right guy in the end – less exciting, perhaps, but more dependable. Oh, and the protagonist has to be surprised at any attention being paid to her because, as far as she's concerned, she's not all that pretty. I realise that I could also be describing Bridget Jones}here. That's the same formula served up for adults.

Anyway, my first book is by someone called Paula Danziger and it's called There's A Bat In Bunk Five. It's apparently “The hilarious sequel to The Cat Ate My Gymsuit”, which I haven't read. It's set on summer camp and has a properly scary cover. Neither of these kids are at all attractive and there's what would now strike us a big gay rainbow stripe as the background to the author's name. I think that's probably not what was intended. In this one the girl gets with the nice boy pretty quickly, actually, having been warned off the heel right at the start. It's from 1980, published by Dell and priced $3.25. I'll read you the pretty short first page.

Chapter One
If I iron or sew one more nametag on my stuff I'm going to scream. There are nametags on my jeans, shorts, shirts, nightgowns, pyjamas, sheets, pillowcases, sleeping bag, socks, sweaters, sweatshirts, underwear and jackets. My mother's having me put adhesive tape labels on my comb, brush and flashlight. There's indelible ink on my fingers from putting my name on my sneakers. She'll probably make me carve my name in the soap bars and on my eyeglass frames.
‘Marcy, can't I help with anything?’ My mother sticks her head into my room.
‘No thanks, I can do it myself,’ I say for the eighty millionth time.
She walks in.
‘Here. I addressed some envelopes.’

It's a fun story. Needless to say, I consumed it on the train on the way back from Ljubljana. There is something that worries me about it, though. Here... So here are a couple of quotations.

Page 13: “She's grinning. ‘You look wonderful. You've lost so much weight but then I always thought you looked good.’”
Page 23: “Funny. I thought sure she'd want to work on a fashion magazine. I've got to remember not to stereotype, not to look at someone and make instant judgments. I hate it when someone does that to me yet it's something I do. Especially when someone's skinny.”
Page 26: “Pizza! I love pizza. Pizza with extra cheese, pizza with mushrooms, with sausage. Pizza with pizza! I've got to be careful, though, not to eat too much of it or within minutes I could probably gain back every lost pound. I take one piece.”
Page 33: “Corinne's still snoring. I didn't think skinny people snored.”
Page 37: “I scrape off the burned parts from my french toast and cover it with syrup – calories that will go straight to my hips.”
Page 50: “Alicia giggles. ‘Oh Kitty, you always complained about the food and then ate four servings.’ Four servings? How can she be so thin?”
Page 62: “I push the hair out of his eyes and say, ‘Friends. At least friends.’ He puts his arms around my waist. I bet he's going to think I have no waste at all, that I'm just a puff ball! Then I remember: I'm not fat anymore.”
And here's the worst one. Page 83: “The saleswoman looks at me. ‘Medium or large? I think you'll need a small. In fact, I'm sure of it.’ She and Ted are looking at me. I can feel myself blush. Always blushing! It's disgusting. And it embarrasses me to have them look. Don't they know that blimps always take big sizes? She puts a t-shirt up to me. ‘I bet you've lost a lot of weight. People who do never have a really accurate picture of what they look like.’ The small shirt fits. One of these days, when I grow up, I'm going to learn who I really am and what I really look like. But it sure isn't easy.”

It sure isn't! Who I really am and what I really look like – i.e. “the skinny one”. Although, to be fair, we do go another forty pages before the next reminder – and that's the last one – on page 123: “Then on to dinner. A lot of camp seems to have centred around the dining room. I hope I'm not gaining weight.” I don't mean that nobody should ever be worried about their weight but this girl's fourteen and I find it a little depressing that the positive news throughout is that she's thinner than she used to be.

Okay. I've spent too much time on this book. Here's some more music. This is something that I was listening to when I was a teenager. Although a little bit older than fourteen if I'm honest. It's Bread with Too Much Love.

Music
[Too Much Love by Bread]

Charles Adrian
So that was Bread with Too Much Love.

My next book looks really fun. I haven't read it yet but I'm planning to. It's called Partners In Passion, it's by Anne Kelly and the tagline is: “When hate turns to love...” There's a photo of a guy in black tie unzipping the back of a woman's little black dress. He has a wedding ring on. Eek! This was published by Scarlett in 1996, was priced £1.99 and it's totally falling apart. Here's something from the back of the book:

Jace appointed himself Tatum's protector years ago and still sees it as his job to keep her out of trouble. What's going to happen now that she's got herself a job which involves carrying a gun, he shudders to imagine!
What neither of them realises of course, is that the best of enemies can become partners in passion... and when Tatum suddenly decides that she wants Jace, his troubles really start!

Now, that second paragraph doesn't make any sense to me. But here's the first page of the book:

CHAPTER 1

December 1987

Feeling thirstier than she had in all her sixteen years, Tatum dragged herself up to the airless stairwell thinking of nothing more than an icy cold drink. The worst thing about trying to escape Sydney's stinking summer heat and humidity by going to the beach was enduring the long trip home – in the same stinking summer heat and humidity. She'd kill for a dri –
Her hand froze halfway to the handle of the door displaying a backward ‘5’. Had anyone bothered to replace the missing screw from the aged numeral it would have read ‘2’, but no one ever had – not in all the years Tatum had lived in the building. Fantasy had asked only once for it to be repaired. The landlord's response was that he'd been meaning to ‘get around to discussing the matter with her. After all what was one little screw between friends?’ To which Fantasy had replied, ‘A matter of principle.’
Recalling the incident Tatum touched a finger to the numeral and set it swinging.
Fantasy and her ironic principles were gone now, and yet Tatum's life still seemed as upside down as the little [...]

I thought about reading that in my Australian accent but then I changed my mind. It would have sounded a little like [in bad Australian accent]: “The worst thing about trying to escape Sydney's stinking summer heat and humidity by going to the beach was enduring long trip home.”

Okay. My next book is by “#1 {NEW YORK TIMES} BESTSELLING AUTHOR JANET EVANOVICH”. According to the San Francisco Examiner, “EVANOVICH IS THE MASTER”. Everything's in capitals on his book. It's called One For The Money and, again, according to the back:

Trenton native Stephanie Plum is out of work, out of money and her car's in repo hell. So who does a hardly working girl turn to when the going gets tough? Meet cousin Vinnie, bail bondsman. Stephanie figures it's nice work if you can get it, shagging bail jumpers for $10,000 a pop. So she joins up.

Apparently there's a whole series of Stephanie Plum novels. Again, I haven't read this one yet, but I think it's probably a little bit sexy. Here's the first page:

Chapter 1

There are some men who enter a woman's life and screw it up forever. Joseph Morelli did this to me. Not forever but periodically. Morelli and I were both born and raised in a blue collar chunk of Trenton called The Burg. Houses were attached and narrow, yards were small, cars were American. The people were mostly of Italian descent with enough Hungarians and Germans thrown in to offset inbreeding. It was a good place to buy calzone or play the numbers. And if you had to live in Trenton anyway, it was an okay place to raise a family.
When I was a kid, I didn't ordinarily play with Joseph Morelli. He lived two blocks over and was two years older.
‘Stay away from those Morelli boys,’ my mother had warned me. ‘They're wild. I hear stories about the things they do to girls when they get them alone.’
‘What kind of things,’ I'd eagerly asked.

Hoo hoo hoo!

Now, my last book – which I'm going straight on to because I've had a look at the time and we need to get to the end of this podcast – is by Sinclair Lewis. It's called Cass Timberlane and is described as “The world-famous, eye-opening novel of American marriage and morals—Sinclair Lewis's great story of a mature, important man who marries a passionate girl [sic] half his age”. According to the blurb on the back, “Sinclair Lewis shocked and educated a whole generation of Americans. He hit this country like a bolt of lightning, ripped the facade from respectable society and showed Americans what they really looked like.”

Ages ago, as some listeners will know, I read the first page of another of Sinclair Lewis's novels, Babbitt, but I have to admit that I still haven't actually read a whole book by Sinclair Lewis. Perhaps this will be the one. Here's the first page:

1

UNTIL JINNY MARSHLAND was called to the stand, the Judge was deplorably sleepy.
The case of Miss Tilda Hatter vs. the City of Grand Republic had been yawning its way through testimony about a not very interesting sidewalk. Plaintiff's attorney desired to show that the city had been remarkably negligent in leaving upon that sidewalk a certain lump of ice which, on February 7, 1941, at or about the hour of 9:37 P.M., had caused the plaintiff to slip, to slide, and to be prone upon the public way, in a state of ignominy and sore pain. There had been an extravagant amount of data as to whether the lump of ice had been lurking sixteen, eighteen, or more than eighteen feet from the Clipper Hardware Store. And all that May afternoon the windows had been closed, to keep out street noises, and the courtroom had smelled, as it looked, like a school room.
Timberlane, J., was in an agony of drowsiness. He was faithful enough, and he did not miss a word, but he heard it all as in sleep one hears malignant snoring.
He was a young judge: the Honorable Cass Timberlane, of the Twenty-Second Judicial District, State of Minnesota. He was forty-one, and in his first year on the bench, after a term in Congress. He was a serious judge, a man of learning, a believer in the majesty of the law, and he looked like a tall Red Indian. But he was wishing that he were out bass-fishing, or at home, reading Walden or asleep on a cool leather couch.
Preferably asleep.
All the spectators in the room, all five of them, were yawning and chewing gum. The learned counsel for the plaintiff, Mr. Hervey Plint, the dullest lawyer in Grand Republic, a middle-aged man with a miscellaneous sort of face, was questioning Miss Hatter. He was a word-dragger, an uh'er, a looker to the ceiling for new thoughts.
“Uh—Miss Hatter, now will you tell us what was the—uh—the purpose of your going out, that evening—I mean, I mean how did you happen to be out on an evening which—I think all the previous testimony agrees that it was, well, I mean [...]”

And that's it. That's all we have time for. Almost! I mean, there's still time for some music. That's why I'm rushing. But as far as the books are concerned this has been the 59th Page One, I've been Charles Adrian, you've been my very patient audience. Thank you very much for listening. Don't forget to look out for all the other Page Ones that exist at pageonepodcast.com. And now to play us out here is Nina Simone with Wild Is The Wind. I've been looking forward to this. Maybe this is what love should be like.

Music
[Wild Is The Wind by Nina Simone

[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]