151 - [Unedited] Tim Spooner

Published: Jan. 28, 2020, 12:01 p.m.

In honour of Krista Tippett, whose podcast On Being both Tim and Charles Adrian listen to and enjoy, this is an unedited recording of their conversation released in parallel with the edited version that appears in your feeds.

Recorded on the 5th October, 2018.

Speaking to Charles Adrian for a particularly dreamy 125th Second-Hand Book Factory in his own studio in Mile End is artist Tim Spooner. They talk some difficult poetry, the Berlin Wall and rule-bound beauty.

Episode image is a detail from the cover of The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, published by Penguin Modern Classics in 2010; cover image is a detail from The Last Judgement: The Stars Fall And Everything Is Turned Upside Down, Italian School, 15th century/Fol 149va Biblioteca Reale, Turin, Italy (Alinari/The Bridgeman Art Library).

Correction: Charles Adrian talks about the 29th anniversary of the falling of the Berlin Wall, which he says happened on a Wednesday. In fact, he is thinking of the Tag der Deutschen Einheit, celebrated on the 3rd of October, which was a Wednesday in 2018. The 29th anniversary of the falling of the Wall was the 9th of November 2018, which was a Friday. In any case, what is true is that, at the time of recording this episode, about 29 years had passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

If On A Winter\u2019s Night A Traveller is also a book by Italo Calvino, translated into English by William Weaver.

The story from The Cosmicomics that Charles Adrian tries to remember is called The Form Of Space, which is included in this Penguin Classics collection of The Complete Cosmicomics in a translation by William Weaver; the story that Tim talks about, translated by Martin McLaughlin in this collection, is called Shells And Time.

The unedited version of this recording includes a long digression on Mile End Green and environs and a longer discussion of Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov than is kept in the edited version. There is also mention of a show Charles Adrian had recently in Berlin; this was Die Zukunft Von Gestern by Nico And The Navigators. More information (in German) about that show here: http://navigators.de/index.php?id=602&L=54#c2119


More info and a link to a transcript of this episode is at http://www.pageonepodcast.com/


Book Listing:

New Impressions Of Africa by Raymond Roussel (trans. Ian Monk)
Funeral In Berlin by Len Deighton
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
If On A Winter\u2019s Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver)
The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver, Tim Parks and Martin McLaughlin)