Backlisted - Heart of the Original By Steve Aylett

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

Joining us on Backlisted this week is writer John Higgs, whose fascinating new book William Blake Vs The World is out now. We were thrilled John chose Steve Aylett's guide to originality, creativity and individuality, Heart of the Original, first published by Unbound in 2015 and as original, creative and individual a book as we have ever featured on this podcast; be prepared to experience a "small-particle tulpa storm" of ideas. Also in this episode, John enjoys the waspish melancholy of Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, while Andy introduces a reading from Black Teacher by Beryl Gilroy, a trailblazing Guyanese woman's memoir of post-war London.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)09:46 - Black Teacher by Beryl Gilroy14:52 - Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick19:46 - Heart Of The Original by Steve Aylett* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us recording the Backlisted podcast in July 2021 for distinct consciousnesses connected by sound and electronic image discussing one deceptively small book that tackles the biggest ideas. Look up from your screen and you'll see a chicken walking backwards on a dry stone wall and the puzzled look on the face of a trout. What can it mean? To find out,

leave behind the Goldilocks zone of tolerated zaniness and join us as we navigate complicated moralities as though we're walking across a polished mosaic floor. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today is John Higgs. Hello, John. Hello. Hello. Thanks for coming. John Higgs is an English writer, novelist, journalist and cultural historian whose books include

The KLF, Watling Street, as discussed on this podcast, Stranger Than We Can Imagine, and his latest, William Blake vs. The World, also discussed on this podcast very recently. Yeah, you were very kind about it. It was most appreciated, as was all those sound effects you were doing for my my book titles i like that i kind of want them to always be there now

that's that's the next one is that oh yeah yeah um well i've got a question for you john higgs and uh you know you've got an enviable portfolio of titles there, the range of books. And I was going to ask you, you know, how do you decide which one you're going to do next? But then I realised that in terms of, this is supposed to be a podcast about originality. That is a question on the level of where do you get your ideas from?

Yeah, yeah. Which is, as Alan Moore points out, a very good question. Is it? Yeah. Is it? It's just, do you become over-familiar, do you think? Well, all right, I'm going to ask it to you straight. Where do you get your ideas from?

It's weird. When I'm writing a book, I tend to have about four or five booklets for one of a growing, sort of in the back of my mind and I they sit there and I'll I'll sort of be thought about just in the background for about four or five years at which point one of them will just go right I'm cooked I'm now cooked and I present myself as the next one and they just sort of march and there's this weird way in which it's all very polite and all the other little books that are brewing and cooking at the same time they don't argue about this they're just like yeah it's that one's turn you know maybe in a couple years it'll be me but and they just this one will step forward and you know yeah i'm not so daft as i would argue

with this this process because it seems to work we know what the next sort of book one is. Although the Blake was interesting because the idea of doing a Blake book wasn't there for a long, long, long time. But it just sort of appeared fully formed and went, no, it's me. I'm next. It's necessary. I'm needed. It's me, which I thought was very Blake.

You know, that sort of wilfulness. But you did a little Blake book first, like a little sort of a smelt. Yeah, that's right. I was, it was because there was that great exhibition at Tate Britain, which was a wonderful, wonderful exhibition that they had, that the publisher suggested, well, why don't you take out a few chapters from this book and we'll put them out? And of course you can't do that because it wouldn't it wouldn't be a book it just wouldn't work so you had to

basically go away and write something completely different so i'm slightly tricked into writing an extra book but i'm really glad i did because it got all the stuff about blake now like in the modern world how you see him now it's hived that off into that little book. And so it just left Blake's mind alone for the proper book, for William Blake versus the world. I could just go straight into his head without being distracted by the modern world. I kept thinking while I was reading

William Blake versus the world, John, just on a professional level, I almost, I was sort of dazzled by it because in my admiration for how many books you must have had to read and throw into the pulper to get the material, to be able to talk about some of the subjects that you talk about as quickly and in such focus as you do requires loads of research and loads of work. So I felt I was really the beneficiary of all your hard work in that book. I felt I was being given a whistle-stop tour of all sorts of concepts and ideas. God bless you, Andy, because there's so much reading around things just to get the context right that needs to be done for these sort of things. And no one ever really notices it.

You just have to put the hours in, essentially. John and I feel your pain because of doing this apart from anything else. The context, though, is the key. That's what I love about it, is it's a book about Blake. And as you say, Blake now. I mean, a lot of the stuff that's been written on Blake is, even the stuff that does tackle the prophetic books books is sort of a form of literary criticism. But you don't do that, which is what I think he sort of restores Blake as this revolutionary kind of original artist and thinker.

Yeah, because he was such an original thinker that it's almost impossible to label him or to find a box that he fits in. I talk about this in the book quite a bit. He saw himself as a Christian, but his definition of Christianity was so different to any other Christians that they might not accept him in that box. There's arguments that you could say that he was an atheist, his notion that all God and demons and heavens or internal states. You can make that argument quite well. He would have hated it. But there's bits of Taoism in there.

There's Indian thought. There's Gnosticism. There's no real way to sort of say he's this. That's the label. You put him in there. So you can't. Higgs, shut up about William Blake. I've promised you. I've promised you,

I've promised you a shop window later. We will circle back to William Blake later in the programme. But Mitch, do you want to give us a run in? The book that John has chosen for us to discuss is a small hand grenade of a text called Heart of the Original by steve alet published in 2015 by unbound now we've made 142 episodes of bat listed and this is the very first time that anyone has chosen a book published by unbound or we have featured uh as the main book

a book published by unbound and john higgs would you like to, have we ever met before? I know we have, but you know what I mean. Would you like to reiterate? Yeah, I haven't been paid, if that's what you're suggesting. I haven't been paid. No, I hadn't realised when I went to, I had a list of a few books, but I decided that the, as a one rule I'd have, is that I can't choose any book by someone that I know, like a friend, because writers do that an awful lot.

And it's just annoying. It's just wrong, isn't it? It's just, yeah, it's everything wrong with publishing. So a book by C.J. Stone, Fierce Dancing, was one of the books I was considering choosing, which is a brilliant, brilliant book. I know Chris, I couldn't quite bring myself to choose it, or Selina Godden's book, Mrs. Death, Mrs. Death. That was another possibility. So when I scratched those off the list, a strange book I hadn't read for sort of five years and was still sort of calling to me.

I hadn't quite got my head around it properly, but I just knew that it just needed to go back to. Well, fortunately, we're joined today by the publisher of that book, John Mitchinson, so who I will be, we can pump for information. Well, let me give you a little bit of background on the book. Its subtitle is Originality, Creativity and Individuality, and it assumes the form of a long essay. Steve Aylett's one of contemporary sci-fi's most interesting singular talents and it manages to be simultaneously both a satirical jeremiad against the stale and fear-filled state of contemporary culture

and a seductive invitation to explore the infinity of unexplored creative possibility. the infinity of unexplored creative possibility. Some of the rich and complex tessery of questions it assembles are why the same ideas are repeatedly hailed as breakthroughs, how to locate ideas in space, why obvious outcomes are so often regarded with surprise, and how and if humanity will choose to survive. It's a manual, a hammer, a feather, a lube, and an accelerant all at once. It's like nothing else. It also, I have to say, it attracted the best quote of any book I've ever published,

maybe of any book ever published ever, of which more a bit later. Because before we turn to the beautiful, fertile vistas of things that haven't yet been expressed, Andy, what have you been reading this week? I've been reading a book called Black Teacher by Beryl Gilroy, which was originally published by Cassell in 1976 and has just been republished for the first time by Faber and Faber. This book was very difficult to read or find a copy of before Faber republished it. Beryl Gilroy is probably better known as a novelist.

She had a late career in the 80s into the 90s, and she published novels including Frangipani House, which I think I remember, and Stedman and Joanna was published in 1991. But she originally came to Britain in 1952 from British Guyana. And she worked as a teacher and worked her way up to being a head teacher by the late 1960s and early 1970s in North London. And this is her memoir of that process and that time. And as such, it's an incredibly valuable and rare account by a black British first generation woman of what it was like to come to the UK and what she had to deal with while she was here. It won't surprise you to learn it has an introduction by Bernadine Evaristo in which she describes Britain as uncomplicatedly a racist

country. And certainly in Beryl Gilroy's account of the ignorance, specifically the ignorance that she had to deal with rather than the malicious intent, clearly those things overlap. But the general condition of poverty in the areas in London that she was teaching in resulted in a general condition of ignorance, resulted in a general condition of prejudice, and so on and so forth. So I'm not going to read a bit from this book because there is a terrific audiobook read by Deborah Michaels, and this is a part that gives you a sense of the unflinching nature of this memoir, where, like a proper writer, Beryl Gilroy is happy to identify positive things without sugaring the pill and negative things without over-egging the pudding. There's two horrible metaphors I've

managed to stir together. Anyway, here is Deborah Michaels reading from chapter 12 of Black Teacher. Back with the class, the children told me dramatically, Miss, Lena's come. That was the day also when we suffered one of our relapses into more traditional racial controversy. There was a touch of drama here since Lena's father had adamantly refused to send her to school if she was going to be taught by me, a black teacher. I knew that an argument about this had been going on for weeks between this man and the divisional office. The staff hadn't told me of it, but the children did. Now young David laid it on the line again. Lena's daddy don't like black people. He told her she could hate them too. While I looked at Lena sitting there, tense and ill at ease, a hearty discussion on color brewed

up in no time at all. There seemed quite a lot of support for Lena's dad. So strong, perhaps, that soon some of the brown children felt constrained to say they didn't like the blackish ones. This got the black ones concerned and before long we'd reached the point where even the blacks were saying they didn't like black. or rather the lighter shade of black began looking around and condemning the darker gradation. I like humans, I said. Have we got any humans here? Nobody answered. You're all humans, I said. Human beings. Poor Lena. None of this helped her. Straggly haired and tight-lipped, she clutched her dinner money and whimpered about her mummy. She could find no calm or comfort anywhere.

Every day I watched the little Lina struggling, as it were, in some dark tunnel of the mind. Later, she struggled with books. There was a quiet and brave determination about her that impressed me. But I still got the occasional whiff of gun smoke from the home front. I had a caterpillar in my salad, she informed me after one dinner time. My dad says you eat them. So we started a book club for them. Children's books, paperbacks, and we were delighted by the response this won from the parents. Mothers and fathers of all races would chatter excitedly as they examined the books. They would stroke them, even smell them, and invariably they would purchase one or two.

I think they even read them. I knew the simple pictures amused them. My mum read that book what I bide, one little girl told me. A West Indian mother explained, you see, the body gets old but the heart never gets gets old. It gets sometime-ish, but never old. My heart always tell me to buy books for the children. And then she added, but me, I like romance books, man. Barbara Cartland. You see, books, there you go. Books do build empathy after all.

And not only that, Barbara Cartland builds empathy. So there you go. So that's Black Teacher by Beryl Gouraud. That is a terrific book. I strongly recommend that. Mitch, what have you been reading this week? I've been reading a book first published in 1979 called Sleepless Nights. I guess you would call it a novel by Elizabeth Hardwick, one of the founders of the New York Review of Books.

She was, I think, one of the most interesting, a brilliant literary critic, famously married to the poet Robert Lowell for 23 years. But this is her fiction. And I'd never read her fiction before. And I completely fell for this book. She famously said, if I want plot, I'll watch an episode of Dallas. So what you're not going to get from this book is plot. It is broadly, it's autobiographical, although she did say the main character is called Elizabeth, and it's about a girl who was born and grows up in Lexington, Kentucky, and then moves to New York. And it's about her, basically, episodic account of her life in New York and Boston. She later said that she didn't think

it was as autobiographical as people thought it would, thought it was, but then writers always say that what it is, is just exquisitely written. And she writes not just about her own life, her own relationships, but about the people she meets.

There's a famous portrait of Billie Holiday in the book. And I was, I was going to read a bit of that, but I think I'm going to read something. It's not the most typical passage in the book. A lot of the book is about women and women's relationships to each other and to men and the struggle of women to retain dignity. You know, the sexism and racism and deep conservatism that's still affecting and still affects America is kind of what she's trying to get under the skin of. I mean, if you're interested even remotely in trying to understand the intellectual and emotional development of a

woman in the second half of the 20th century, this has got to be one of the, I think, one of the most beautiful attempts to do that I've ever read. I'll read you a little bit. This is about her relationship with a man called Alex. I slept with Alex three times and remember each one perfectly. I was honoured when he allowed me to go to bed with him and dishonoured when I felt my imaginative, anxious, exhausting efforts were not what he wanted. His handsomeness created anxiety in me. His snobbery was detailed and full of quirks, like that of people living in provincial capitals or foreigners living in Florence and Cairo. Worst of all was my ambivalence over what I took to be the inauthenticity of his Marxism. In my heart, I was weasel-like, hungry,

hunting with blazing eyes for innocent contradictions, given to predatory chewings on the difference between theory and practice. This is what I'd brought from home in Kentucky to New York, this large bounty of polemicism stored away behind limp, light, southern hair and not quite blue eyes. In those years, I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought back to me, a youth of fascinated, passionless copulation. There they are, figures in discoloured blur, young men and not so young, the nice ones with automobiles, the dull ones full of suspicion and stintiness. By asking a thousand questions of many heavy souls,

I did not learn much. You receive biographies interesting mainly for their coherence. So many are children who from the day of their birth are growing up to be their parents. Look at the voting records, inherited like flat feet. Casanova said, the great exhilaration to my spirits, greater than all my own pleasure, was the joy of giving pleasure to a woman. my own pleasure was the joy of giving pleasure to a woman. Some reason to doubt the truth of that. Still, reversals and peculiarities fall down upon those too proud of their erotic life. Even sacrifice may be a novelty. Alex's vanity was like that of the dubious Casanova at the falsifying moment of composition, trapped in the belief that he had a special power, or perhaps a special duty to please women.

Having more charm than money played its part. So love was a treadmill like church going, kept alive by respect for the community. Many have this evangelical view of lovemaking. There, I've done it once today and twice the day before yesterday. and twice the day before yesterday. Orgasms of 20 years ago leave no memory. Better to be handsome and leave, like Alex, the image of lean Egyptian features, a sloping skull,

and conversations about the inability of the ruling class to imagine, to experience. It's just a brilliant book. Oh, I love that. It's such a good book, that. It's such a good book. i love that that's what a good it's such a good book that it's such a good book who is republished that it used to be virago didn't it uh the very i have to say i didn't notice it but it is the very excellent faber who also published the beryl gilroy so um we are we are getting behind them favor and favor okay the book chat will continue on the other side of this message well why don't we turn our attention to the main book under discussion uh heart of the original by

steve aylor and let's listen to an original this is an original i'd like you to listen to this carefully please and identify it after you've heard the clip. Once again, I try to make these shows as accessible as I can. What was that an original of? Some sort of shamanic chanting. John Higgs? I'm just flashing to a thing Vic and Bob did, where Bob had this long tube over his nose,

and he was swirling it around and sort of blowing down this thing. But it's probably a 1920s Dada version of exactly that. Someone with a big pipe over their nose swirling it around. I'll tell you what that was. That was the original of what we are doing today. That is the very first known recording of the human voice. Is it? Whoa. So that was recorded.

No, it's before Edison. Wow. It was recorded on the 9th of April, 1860 by Edouard Léon Scott de Martinville, a French painter and bookseller in Paris who sought to make daguerreotype

of sound. And he invented the earliest known sound recording device before Edison which was called the phonautograph which he patented in March 1857. It was recorded recorded wave shapes on stove blacked paper and in order to decode it what you've just heard no one could work out how to play it until about 10 years ago it took technology 150 years to catch up with the this buried recording so it is listeners if you want to if this this podcast is now probably haunted if you go back and play that that is um That is Edouard Léon-Scott de Martainville singing Claire de Lune on the 9th of April 1860.

So like I say, in a sense, an original of what we're doing today. That would be a hit podcast if you put that out now. So originality. John, when did you originally read Heart of the original by steve aylert or a book by steve aylert um well yes well i came across steve aylert's work in a really sort of odd way in that literally a couple of minutes from my house there's a community center and i saw that they were having a film being shown uh a film called lint the movie which meant nothing to me but that it included um alan moore and stewart lee and josie long and all these good people and because it was just so close

i just thought well i should go to that obviously And it was, you know, it was like being a young kid going into a community centre and paying your 50p to get in. And I'm sure there weren't little sort of little glasses of orange squash or things like that. But that's how it was in my head. Yeah. And there was a big TV and they showed us this film. And I was tempted to say that it looks like it was made on a phone,

except now things that were made on a phone could be like really quite impressive. This was, it's like, he'd got all these amazing people, but he hadn't like got a microphone, you know, or any lights or anything like that.

And it took me a while to work out that it was a people talking about an entirely fictitious character with a straight face and they had on that there was a merch table and um had like this comic which i'm waving at the screen which is no use to any listener but um it was it's a comic written by this fictitious character this lint that i feel is the most strange thing i own. It's entirely meaningless. It's wonderful. It's like, it looks like a 1970s comic. Exactly.

Like the attention to detail is amazing. And there's people and there's words, but like there's no story. There's no coherence. It's just entirely random things put together in a way that should be, you know, utterly indulgent and just awful. But it just feels glorious to me. And in fact, I was a little bit worried after I'd chosen the original and reread it. And I was thinking about what I know of Steve's work and how it appears to me and stuff like that.

Everything I wanted to say about it just made it sound terrible. everything I wanted to say about it just made it sound terrible. And I'd hate it if people were going, oh, yeah, it was a bloke on a podcast talking about Steve Aylor. You know, it just sounds awful. Because that's really not what I want to get across. Well, I read Lint pretty close to publication because friends of mine were raving about it. And I didn't know what to make of it at all.

And actually, I think Steve Aylitt is one of those writers who you do have to spend some time in his um aesthetic universe to begin to see the patterns of it um and certainly going back to heart of the original which i read again around publication i got a lot more out of this book on the second go-round, actually. But I think that's built into the design of how he works. I mean, Mitch, you published Heart of the Original in 2015, is that right? Yeah, I mean, it went onto the site the year before, I think. yeah i mean it went on to the site the year before i think it was maybe launched in in um it was published in 2015 but i think it had gone up maybe sort of at end of 2014 so fairly early on in in in unbanned's um uh kind of kind of history and, I remember Steve just, he had, I think, gone through Pledge Music,

the now defunct crowdfunding site for music and funded one of his albums. And he had a very kind of, like a lot of writers, you know, had a fairly jaundiced view of the traditional publishing industry. And being a man, he was interested in originality. He was struck by the fact that, two things, I think. One is that we made really nice really nice hardback books and also did an ebook bundled up and you could he

could put all his crazy comics and interesting goodies up for uh for sort of rewards as well so he was i mean it funded it funded really pretty i mean i had a vague idea who he was but i hadn't read any of his work until he came onto the site and then i did go on and read linton i just remember being incredibly excited when the manuscript came in and we had we didn't know how long it was going to be and it's obviously it's a short book it's it's a but it's one of the longest short books i mean it it it is it is it is like a it's like it is antimatter. And, you know, I would imagine a lot of people who casually just pick it up and read it would find their brains beginning to melt. First of all, we're going to

hear Steve Aylett himself introduce Heart of the Original. And then we're going to hear our former guest Stuart Lee talking about what it is that appeals to him about Steve Aylit's writing. Part of the original is about creativity, originality and individuality. The way that people claim to want originality, but then the obscure discomfort and even revulsion that they feel when actually confronted with it, despite the fact that real originality is a beautiful thing. Of course it's in the nature of the original that people won't have encountered it before and so won't have a sort of slot designed to receive it. Some people will even pretend to be less intelligent than they are in order to evade it. So we'll be looking at why the

same idea is repeatedly hailed as a breakthrough, why obvious outcomes are met with surprise, why almost any situation is improved by a berserking hen, why the best way to get into something is to think of it as mischief, and how you can locate new ideas by thinking spatially. Steve Aylett uses adjectives and adverbs in ways he manages to find adverbs and adjectives that are not appropriate to the nouns and use them over and over again. They're often describing words that convey qualitative judgments on things that cannot be qualitatively judged. Each sentence you have no idea how it's going to end. I find it completely disorientating and exhausting and really, really funny. But I find

it so funny that it then wears me out and I'm just bored and confused by it for about three pages. And then it starts to get under my skin again. It's like a virus of language that kind of has that effect of briefly when you're in its throes, it seems to make the world around you ridiculous. Its primary objective, I think, is disorientation, confusion, and he's not so much about meaning with language as the pleasure of the rhythms and how the consonants fall together. And in that way, it's got a musicality that reminds me of a lot of musicians and lyricists alike,

like Dylan or Marky Smith in The Fall or Guided Boy Voices or certain poets where it's not so much the sense of it as the sensation of it that is what gets you. How nice to hear both those gentlemen, one of whom is the author, one of whom is a fan, describing what Steve Aylitt does. John, how many times have you read Heart of the Original, do you think? Oh, just twice, just twice now.

Still getting my head around it. It's like it's got this grasshopper quality, you know, a grasshopper. It's over here. Then all of a sudden it's over there and you haven't seen it move. It just sort of leaps so quickly. And then it's over this distant place. And you slowly realize that it's not quite random. It is sort of marking out a territory.

But there's a bit in here where he talks about how you should write three sentences and delete the middle one. And I do wonder if that's a trick he does quite a lot. It has that sort of aspect to it, very much so. That's of a piece with his theory. We will talk about this a bit, I think, later on. But his theory that putting the two wrong words together creates a space between the words that wouldn't exist, which is the wormhole through which you can follow a thought. And that piece with that idea pulled out a bit,

that two sentences, do you need the middle sentence? But at the same time, John Higgs, when you say that, it made me laugh reading that bit, because I'm not sure if you mean that or you don't mean it. Right. Not you, Steve Aylor. I'm not sure if if that is a parody of a creative writing idea or does it matter? It doesn't matter, does it? It's still a different way of thinking about how you how you write something. I'm not even convinced this is a book about originality. The thing about Steve Aylor, I think, and I have met him,

and I think he's genuinely a very funny person, and I think he would be delighted that we were puzzling over this. I mean, I love what Stuart Lee says. He's exactly experienced of reading this book. It's just you have to keep stopping and putting it down and rethinking. I mean, just picking up what Stuart says there, there is something that will make your teeth itch as well about this book. It's sort of like, you know know one of the reasons you might put it down is because after three pages you're full up right it's so compressed and the ideas and the bombardment of jokes is so intense that it as as mitch said it's like the longest short book around but we've sort of heard

steve ayler introduced the concept of it and we've talked a bit about the idea that it's about originality how can we push ourselves and how can we push our readers and listeners towards finding and thinking about original ideas so we don't really need to read the blurb especially as mitch has got the uh the greatest quote of all time to to read this what have we got instead this is from alan moore and as I say, it's just such a brilliant quote. I'll read it in full. Force-fed with ideas until its liver explodes, this staggeringly brilliant book has scarcely a line in it

that won't make you wish you'd thought of it first. Raising the bar to the point where it's a hazard to migrating birds, this is a sizzling and hilarious manifesto where its author means every blazing word and which makes a case for the caged animal repetitive behavior of our culture that cannot be argued against by anyone with an honest bone in their head. Written in his own brains, part of the original should be tattooed on the backs of all the limp reimaginers currently crowding our TV screens, our multiplexes, and our surviving bookshops. Probably the most astonishing thing that you will read

during this otherwise lacklustre incarnation. Alan Moore. Yo! Suck on that, booksellers. I mean, you know, how could you want for a better quote for your book, right? John, have you got a bit from the actual text that you would be brave enough to read us? Yeah, I will.

I found a page that seems coherent to my eyes as a standalone piece it's from chapter six it's when he's talking about the risks of um of being seen publicly to be original he says those who burst out thinking in public encounter not only sarcasm and physical aggression but a total lack of legal recourse then he goes on to um to write about this problem here, which I shall now read. It's been said that the tree is known by its fruit and that this has become a world where it is a risk to be known. Keep the light behind you and they won't see you thinking. You might also pass off an original notion by prefacing it with it's an old idea that or it's a cliche that. You've shunted it into the past, rendered it

presumably banal. Hoaxers used to pass off narwhal horns as those of unicorns. A greater gift would be a unicorn horn passed off as that of a narwhal, and that the subsequent realisation of its worth as it turns gold over the fireplace. Another strategy is to adapt a standard issue boiling the bag wackiness such as pink spiky hair. This will be accepted and people will feel that they've done their dutiful work of scanning for individuality and found nothing. You're hiding in plain sight. You can even out die them by agreeing fiercely enthusiastic to the brink of assault. Such ferocious assent is startling and will disconcert long enough for a getaway. But remind yourself that benevolence may create an initial fight-or-flight response in others, followed by long-term suspicion and hostility. These

consequences are the source of legends about curses incurred by meddling with a mummified cadaver. Take fear as when an insect starts to bulge. It's better to bring 20 invisible things into the room than nothing at all. Oh, it's so good. The thing about it is, here's the thing that is totally counterintuitive about this book. Like, when you read it out loud, magical thing stuart lee was talking about about the rhythm of it suddenly becomes totally present right so when you were reading that out john i was thinking this is great i can't even follow the flow of ideas because it's one idea of after

another so fast that if we were to stop and which we might do shortly, we would stop and pause and unpack one of those sentences. But actually that sense of the rhythm of it and the music of it and the flow of it is part of the magic there, I think. He would be appalled at my use of the M word, but that's sort of the sensation. Definitely. But that's sort of the sensation. Definitely. And I mean, there are, I'm sort of philosophically different to Steve Aylett.

There's, you know, there's things we sort of disagree on in the way the things are. I find it quite a misanthropic sort of book at times. It is quite nihilistic. It views everything through the lens of the individual. It's quite 20th century in that sort of route and that's no way to understand how originality enters our culture and the resistance it faces and then how it's taken up and things like that you do need to look beyond that there's no sense of what um brian eno calls seniors the opposite of genius is one person

but seniors is when a group of people, a network sort of starts producing. All these things are missing from it. But I don't care because what it is, is just marvellous. And I love Stuart Lee just admitting how angry and annoyed he gets by reading certain pages of it because that's i'm sure everyone feels that but it but when it when it sort of sparks into light for you it's just worth it there's a little interview with steve aylert here where he this is from about five six years ago the interviewer says to him how do you feel about censorship and political correctness do you think this behavior

is a way to weed out dissenting opinions or do you believe that there is a genuine reason to censor ideas that are considered to be offensive and do you believe that there is a genuine reason to censor ideas that are considered to be offensive? And this is sort of relevant to what you're talking about, John. Steve says, I think most people can field and filter their own perceptions, but there's nothing wrong with being caring around a friend who you know has a sensitivity to something. There's no need to be a dick.

Very good, yes. There's how we should map our way through the culture we're living through at the moment, everybody. There's no need to be a dick, right? I partly approve of that sentiment. Well, okay, so we've had the rational, clear, you know, making an argument. Now, I would hate people to go away from this podcast

thinking that part of the original was full of carefully thought through, crisply expressed kind of how to live a creative life. What I love about this book is when Steve decides to turn up the burners, you get a paragraph like this. like this. It's inevitable that upon those rare occasions of encountering an original notion externally, you will start drooling amid blowing fuses, the abyss at your side intermittently visible and scaring the unwary. The rest of the time, it's all you. People will be happy or stricken to see each hacking cough release a green butterfly with the body of a stuntman, arrive in a stupid badger-faced biplane with five adrenaline pangs hanging off your forehead. Arrange for your arms to be already windmilling as you enter a room, if possible knocking out the teeth of a spoilt child. Retrieve a hemisphere of

flowing mercury from your inside pocket and gaze at it in an attitude of ferocious 12-ball self-pity. Leave unacknowledged your coffee-coloured antlers and wings like the ghostly bones in the x-ray plastic used to press Soviet Samizdet records. Stand, pelted with angry finches, ash-envisaged in a moth-shot coat, thoughtfully scratching someone else's chin. Go, accompanied by a man-sized chef with a parabolic face, carrying something which appears to be a torpedo. parabolic face carrying something which appears to be a torpedo. When asked your opinion, squander all goodwill in a blast of neutrality. Start your case from a position extrapolated way forward as if deliberately to annoy. Release a scuttling thing found in an undersea volcanic vent. Count backwards with increasing volume looking tense. Whisper spookily of the buoy in the floor. Use

your own blood to scribble valence values on the wall while visibly taking on the distance colours of a mass card. Is it anything more than childish honesty? The preening dead can inspire, just as the spaces between packed spheres are more compelling shape than the spheres themselves. Listen to them attentively, carving a quick wooden rendering of their gobs in action.

Cradle a hapless shad which looks them in the eye during the full hour it takes to gasp its last. Push their oblique strategy cards into a dimensional pocket in the air, your face wrinkled as a flower. Point easily at the blue gold ceiling as it becomes transparent to reveal a clambering unis of an infinite madcaps. Disappear in every direction or rise in a smack of black feathers, leaving them with simultaneous frostbite and sunstroke. At the very least, claim that your father made a living wrestling with a medical skeleton as upward of 70 people bet money and roared at him in a boiler room.

Oh, it's so good. I mean, it's, I mean, right, here's the thing, right? Totally original, but, you know, also, if you have a love of the word, you know, Le Mojus, or just an accumulation of delightful words, there's something like Flann O'Brien going on in there as well. I mean, I know he's compared to Flann O'Brien in the fiction. This is from an interview that Steve Aylitt did just, I think, probably a couple of months ago. It's well worth looking up.

There's a full hour of it on YouTube with Adam Savage. But I thought this was worth exerting. This is Steve Aylit talking about something called idea space. I believe in what I call idea space. If we say, OK, this idea is here and this idea is here, then I can see what's in between those two ideas. If we say, okay, this idea is here and this idea is here, then I can see what's in between those two ideas and get a whole bunch of other ideas that way. But what's much more interesting is for me to triangulate off of those

about 5,000 miles in that direction and see what idea is over there because there are ideas in idea space somehow. I think you need to learn quite a lot about what ideas already exist in order to set up a bit of a topology. But then you can triangulate away from that into something completely new. You know what?

That's about the sixth time I've heard that. And every time I listen to it, it seems more and more profound. That it that's a classic alit thing isn't it every time i think about it i think god there's so much um depth in that what he's what he's saying though isn't it is that idea that we are we are kind of kept in these tram lines that our bandwidth our cultural bandwidth is very narrow you know we're all we're sort of tuned into the radio four bit of the of the of of the dial and actually our consciousness is is you know is is if not infinite it's huge a lot of the time the creative stuff that we we do is is very

repetitive at one point he kind of goes off on one about the fact that there are only seven people say there are only seven plots this is nonsense i mean he's you know he's he's a great polemicist but he does it with a sense of humor i think i i think the two significant things about steve ape from my point of view are in terms of heart of the original you know he spent 20 years prior to that more than 20 years writing this kind of hyper concentrated science fiction and in a sense heart the original is an extrapolation of or a slight not an extrapolation of his ideas it's a slight raising of the curtain on his ideas if you go back to lint i reread lint for this and there are ideas about originality in lint so he had already worked out his aesthetic pretty thoroughly, I think, quite early on.

And so in that respect, Heart of the Original is sort of giving some of the tricks away. But the other thing about Steve Aylor is, just to do the biography very quickly, he was born in 1967. He worked within a publisher, John Mitchison. Did you know that? I worked for a legal publisher, so there's a kind of knowledge of the process at its most bleak, which seems to inform his work. But also, he comes from Bromley.

From Bromley, Croydon's deadly rival, Bromley. Can't believe he does. Well, Bromley. Can't believe he did. You know, well, it's true. You know, Bromley is the Croydon that didn't get to be Croydon. It has to settle for being Bromley. They had the contingent though, Andy. Bromley did have the contingent. They did.

Bromley's where you get David Bowie, you get HG Wells, you just get those sparkling originals, those people who Steve Aylip. What are you doing? What are you doing? This provocative anti-Croydon rhetoric from John Higgs. Well, we're all suburban together.

That's the point, aren't we? We're all suburban together. Also, this is a bit that I think our listeners will enjoy. This is from early in Heart of the Original. Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is about how ideas are recycled. And this shows you that if Steve Aylett wants to indulge

in a bit of straightforward, catty criticism, he is also capable of doing that. This is on page seven. Repetition is now rife and instantaneous, but in the past there were pauses, perhaps out of courtesy. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut has a time traveller watch bombs sucked intact into planes from city explosions below, then flown backward into factories where they are dismantled and their constituent minerals placed in the ground. Impoverished by his inability to copy other people's work,

Richard Brodskan finally succeeded by using two sentences of Vonnegut's reverse gag in So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, then blew his brains out. A few years later, Martin Amis, a popular romance writer, inflated the idea into an entire book. Many defend Amis, claiming he stole the idea from Counter-Clock World by Philip K. Dick. The thin spreading of a short idea is standard practice and it helps if the original author has died. A page or two of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, massively dilated and diluted, makes Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Many books are stolen vehicles with new plates and zero torque. Now, what I like about that, apart from the sheer reckless

unkindness of it, is the way stylistically it mixes up something Steve Aylor is really brilliant at, which is a development of ideas and a non-development of ideas, an accumulation of epigrams and a single epigram. It is an extremely strange way of structuring an argument because it isn't structuring an argument, right? I mean, is that one of the things john that you you find when you read him like stewart was talking about how it can become irritating and get out of irritating and come through the other side into something else that you're being

challenged to read in a different way yeah very much so um he he can do so much with so little. Well, here's an example. At one point he says, he had a face like a wet kestrel and more worries than a shaved lion in a rental car. Now, this image of having more worries than a shaved lion in a rental car, you start thinking, well, someone must have rented the car. Can't have been the lion. There's a figure involved here and someone shaved this lion. You know, it's probably the same guy. So he seems sinister because he's got a rental car and he can shave a lion. And this scenario just starts building in your head. And the fact that he said that the lion's worried just casts a whole other side to the thing. And also, though, more worries than a shaved lion in a rental car.

That is a sentence or image or phrase that is running on the fumes of its own rhythm. Right. That is. So you're unpackaging it imagistically but actually to me that's a kind of i can hear the beat in that there's stuff coming in from from music and repetition i mean it's it's marv it's mar it's just marvelous writing you know there's another passage later in the book where he's riffing on artists arrive warped from fantasies of civilization destroyed by flood asteroid or the right idea and he goes in he says hg wells would later he was talking about richard jeffries after london in 1885 and he says hg wells would later draft in some aliens with three shoulders and no mercy and then he goes on no mercy the cause of

jeffries apocalypse is far in the past and the world has become Stalker's zone. Some scenes have the creepy strength of 40 beaked elephants. It's great. The thing is, it's great, but it's that willingness to move in and out of absurdity and move in and out of traditional focus to a more disorientating way of writing, I think is all part of the strength of it. Yeah, he often doesn't go for the gag. He often deliberately seems to avoid, you know, a climax or a pleasing sort of thing

when there's one for the taking, when there's sort of an open goal. He'll just, if there's an open goal, he just sort of turns around and ambles vaguely in a completely different direction. And it's clearly willful. There's this willfulness. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Why don't we, here's another bit from that interview we listened to earlier. This is how Steve Ellick describes the process of making sure you remain open to original ideas. If there's someone who is open to this stuff, and can kind of get out of the way enough to let it through his ideas. They want to come through. And like if they see that there's someone who is actually open to them and is writing them down. It's like

they're kind of like, Hey hey this guy's actually listening this guy we can get through we can get through here these other guys are writing superhero movies this guy we can get in we can get through this way come come through here so all this stuff comes through because they know that it's they know that they're welcome you know what i mean more and more i'm sort of putting it into i mean i like i like to use forms that can concentrate as many ideas as possible in the shortest space and at the moment um comics are know, that's the latest good way of doing it for me. Yeah, so A-Lit has just published, he's the first in a series of comics, and that's the first thing that he's published

since Heart of the Original in 2015. And I found an interview with him where he was saying, well, actually, I'm going to be quiet for a few years. He felt it feels like Heart of the Original is the end of a phase. And he needs to let the ground lie fallow for a while. And he stuck to it. That was an interview back in 2015, but he stuck to it. He hasn't written anything since. I want to play a little game, which is I would like you to get your copies

of Heart of the Original, open it at random, and just read the first sentence that you encounter. Because one of the things that's always said about A-Lit's work is that each phrase, each sentence contains so much extra stuff. And every time I've done this in quote unquote rehearsal, it has been amazing to me how well this has worked. So let's start with you, John. Give us a sentence at random and we'll see what it suggests to us. At random from the book. Okay, we'll see.

suggest to us at random from the book okay we'll see many buildings in helsinki have the color design and perforation pattern of a rich tea biscuit which was presumably what the architect's eye happened to fall upon when trying to think of something new that is superb that is superb i i haven't been to helsinki so i i don't know the truth of that thing but i like to think there's but you we recognize we can all acknowledge the truth of being inspired by the pattern of a random object even a rich tea biscuit yeah i mean that that and you know the truth of that is i'm if i go to ever go to Helsinki, that's not going to leave me. I mean, he's very good at making these little sticky insights that you kind of throw in. That's kind of sort of brilliant, isn't it?

Some things really do stick with you. There's one point he says, there are thousands of so far unnamed emotions. And boy, that stuck with me. That's that's a thought yeah that's a big thought wow yeah but that's of the piece with the idea that there are all these unclaimed ideas he he says you know it's not like there are an infinite number of ideas, but there are billions more than we have identified so far. And so it falls to us to go looking for them or be open to them or a mixture of the two. Mitch, open the book randomly and...

The best writers of fairy tales understood that life is bones in treacle and that treacle is expensive that's pretty good oh that's very good i've got one here right i opened it ready those who speak of the golden age of community overlook those ages when it was possible to be left alone. That's two Andy Miller words.

It's brilliant. I told, but I told you, didn't I? We've just picked three at random and they're all golden because, because I mean, he, I would love to know.

I, I, I'm not going to pretend I could work it out. And Mitch and John, i don't know if you if you are able to elucidate this but steve aylitt suggests that he does structure his books and he structured that book in a very specific way now i've read this two three times i can't you know i can't see the pattern that he can see but maybe i can feel it right that's the there's a there's stuff going on i don't understand um it do you have a sense of how

he's put it together i i can't see any structure in it at all i mean i i i can't can't even claim that one chapter is about a thing and another chapter is about another thing. No, right. They all start off seemingly about something, and then they turn into a free association of brilliant epigrams. Yeah. I'm going to ask, we're going to talk in a moment about our nominations for truly original artists.

But I thought it would be good. This was written in 2015 or before. And this is page 75 of Heart of the Original. And I just ask listeners to think, especially if they're in the UK, if this has any resonance with their lives at the moment. Some Native Americans had a practice of considering important issues once sober and once stoned, from which a conclusion would be averaged. The closest politicians get to this is a Borisian blizzard of cocaine through which neither black nor grey are visible. This can make it easy to take malice for stupidity or stumble amid their variants. In cases of obvious simplicity, a stance of falsely cautious delay is adopted,

as if to perceive all the subtleties of the affair. In the face of complicated peril, a traditional rack of mistakes is called up for quick selection. a traditional rack of mistakes is called up for quick selection. These are not the short-term stupidities they seem, since a closer look will usually reveal that they profit one or other special interest. It's in the long term that their idiocy spreads into dismal flour. It has been argued that it's pointless to consider future consequence because the future doesn't exist, a position held by most corporate governments and a few religions. In politics,

money and bones are what's left after the tide goes out. This blend has saved commerce the annoyance of government bodies asking questions while the grown-ups are talking. That's one paragraph written in 2015. I think you'll struggle to find a more perfect extrapolation of what's been happening in this country over the last couple of years than something written six years ago or before. So listen, our producer Nicky Birch, I asked you to nominate your choice of an original artist or original artist. Do you want to give us your shortlist and who you decided was a true original? It's a very difficult thing to say, Andy.

You know, you could say Homer was a true original. So I went for Nina Simone You know, she felt like a true original In all that I've known and I've seen about her Incredible I also went with Prince It's a musical It's a true original

John Higgs came up with Prince as well, didn't you? Yeah I was just trying to think about Blake and Prince For the quietest Really? There's a lot to compare between Blake and... Give me one of them. We can't...

Is that permission to go up on one? Yes, please, just one. Well, the way that they sort of mixed sexuality and spirituality and religion, these were, you know, all the same thing. Obviously, Blake saw angels. Prince said that an angel cured him of his epilepsy as a child but it's mainly just that need to constantly create for no one other than themselves the way that prince would have you know an engineer at paisley

park 24 hours a day and they just make a song record it put it in the vault no one would hear it make a song put it in the revolt no one would hear it was just the same as blake who had no audience just painting and painting and writing and writing and just that that sort of sense of redemption that they got from creating uh yes uh concordances between jerusalem and purple rain strikes me as a fertile ground for comparison and nikki who but who was your choice for the uh for the heart of the original? It was the musician and many other things. Maybe there's something as well in common is it was Sun Ra, another musician, who is also an angel of sorts as well. Absolutely.

The Sun Ra orchestra. Nina Simone and Sun Ra both take sort of developments in popular song and in jazz and then just turn it upside down and inside out and do something totally different with it. There's this fantastic interview that, well, in fact, it's a fantastic animation that Jez Nelson, the BBC have done with Jez Nelson, the broadcaster,

where you can have a look. If you Google Sun Ra and Jez Nelson and it's there's an animated a sort of version of Jez when he interviewed him in 1990 so he went but he interviewed him in 1990 and now he's reflecting on that and on that interview so it's really kind of nice him chopping and changing how he met him and he sort of says he walked in and he was wearing a proper robe you know kind of for a normal radio interview on Jazz FM and he and he starts the interview and he says, so you're a man who's had a prolific life, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then Sam Rao stops him and says, I'm not a man. I'm an angel. Yes. Never, never off duty.

Amazing. John Mitchinson, who have uh nominated for your heart of the original well i would yeah i had i mean you know not easy but i'm gonna go with angela carter because i think she has this she has i mean again that it's that imagination thing that she's able she's she did all kinds of different things. She was obviously, she was a critic. She was a novelist. She wrote some realistic novels and she wrote some incredibly imaginative. The Bloody Chamber is still, I think,

one of the great modern collections. It's that thing of seeing things in folk tales and in traditional stories, the latent content, she called it, which is, she kind of, that fired her imagination. So you find yourself being taken into situations and to, you know, she always hated when people would call it, you know, adult fairy tales. That's not what they are.

They're completely remixed original works based on traditional material. And then when she went on also, she did the circus with Knights of the Circus and a music hall with Wise Children. I think she's kind of plugged into a very deep vein in English culture while also being this incredible kind of feminist. But she was a feminist. She wasn't coming out of that sort of,

the great explosion of Araga, although she obviously was published by Carmen Kahlil and was part of that. She was her own creative artist. She would never felt like anyone else. And I'm still shocked. You know, she died at 51. I still feel that there would have been amazing Angela Carter novels had she lived. You know, it's still incredibly rich and totally original. She's not like anyone else who's written in the last 40 years. I mean, it's become a bit of a cliche to say on here, most books are like other books, but certain books aren't like other books, which is why we like them.

And it's certainly true of Heart of the Original that that isn't like any other book. I can't think of anything to compare it to. It's not like anything. But, you know, but yeah, Angela Carter. So, and John, who is your choice? Well, obviously I thought William Blake because I've spent the last, you know,

18 months of my head deep in William Blake during a pandemic. I think that's what got me so interested in originality because his way of seeing the world, you know, he didn't go to school he created this whole is this this whole mythology and philosophy that nobody understood hence died very poor uh and had a pauper's burial and had an unsuccessful career um but now with it's taken us 200 years but we've just all that time we've just been slowly catching up.

Things like the countercultural 1960s will sort of have a leap forward, or every time we sort of progress as a culture or get our heads around a new way of looking at things, we tend to find that that reveals a little bit more about what blake was was talking about it's it's like he's so far ahead of us um with this way of looking at the world it was so original that it didn't have a label it didn't have a name we didn't have any context for it we couldn't sort of um process it because we didn't know what it was because it was so new and it's taking us all this time to get there one of the things i loved about your book, John, is the point that you make near the end, I think, where you say,

it's okay readers, if you're struggling to keep up with some of this, you know, we're still, people are still, what I am presenting to you is the fruit of 200 years of people attempting to decode what is going on. and we still haven't got there yet you know that blake is such a visionary and so original we are still playing catch up with his ideas yeah yeah definitely definitely um other than blake though the the the afternoon when george lucas met david lynch to see whether he should direct a Star Wars film. I'm obsessed by it because they're both visionary geniuses,

original, amazing people, but in completely different ways. There's this massive disconnect between the two. And like George Lucas, he basically took the world he grew up in. He sort of grew up in a town in california and he was dreaming of going away and he was racing cars and fixing cars and he was watching flash gordon and he was reading joseph campbell and he basically took his entire life and he formed it into this this thing um star wars which then changed the entire film industry and changed what the imaginative life of eight-year-old boys all around the world.

Just a huge, huge sort of impact in a way that, say, all the other films afterwards don't, because they're just about Star Wars, whereas Star Wars is about his life. You know, the world was no different before or after the release of The Rise of Skywalker, whatever the last film was, it was no difference before or after the release of the rise of star skywalker whatever the last film was it made no difference but but star wars was an act of proper imagination as collage defined it he talked about the difference between fantasy just sort of moving

stuff around just like the last star wars film and imagination which is when something new enters the world and the world has to adapt and has to sort of shape it and it can be violent and there can be resistance and and so forth whereas david lynch he totally minds himself internally where george's lucas has taken the outside world lynch goes internal and he taught and he talks a lot about you know transcendental meditation and about how ideas are like fish and if you want to catch the big fish you have to go deeper than other people and stuff that that's similar to what um steve aylert was was talking about earlier that you mentioned earlier completely different approach um and david lynch's work doesn't

affect the world in the same way that George Lucas's did. You know, it affects people who see it very, very, very deeply. And so the contrast between these two coming together just is just, I don't know, you could read a lot into that afternoon. Lynch and Blake, the thing they have in common as original artists is the sense that they have a sense of the universe, a way of looking at the world, a vision that you might not be able to discern, but you can discern their confidence in it. And certainly Lynch is someone who appears to have made up his own, you know, the Lynch cinematic universe is a set of rules invented only by David Lynch that only he has access to, it seems to me. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And it's fascinating because the word Lynchian is an established, you know, film criticism term and everyone knows what it means, but no one can do it except David Lynch. Whenever someone tries to do something Lynchian, it's terrible.

It's always awful. You know that incredible black and white episode halfway through Twin Peaks, The Return? You're talking about episode eight, I believe. Episode eight, the great one. But watching that, what that felt like to me was David Lynch saying to everyone, had I wanted to make a film like Eraserhead again,

I could have done so at any time in the last 40 years but i didn't want to but let me show you what it would be like if i did watch and learn nothing you know i can i just give you my quick example of the so my my two originals i'm i'm putting them together because they they didn't make music anything like one another, but they do have something in common. And mine, my two are Nico, as in the, who sang briefly with the Velvet Underground and then went on to have a controversial career. A book, a biography has just been published about Nico, which I've been talking about a lot, which I absolutely enjoy very much. And also Kate Bush is my other true original. And the thing that you can tell why they're originals,

they're female artists working in a medium which cannot keep up with what they want to do. That pop music in its respective eras of the late 60s and the mid to late 70s is barely able to keep up with the innovations that those two female artists want to make both sonically and in terms of the things that they're writing about and the other reason why you know that they are true originals is because they both have to put up with blokes laughing at them because they don't understand what they're doing right it's it took years for for those artists in their own way

to achieve respect from the establishment which in terms of rock music is obviously quite a a male infused environment um so uh i but like you nikki I actually found this quite a tricky, you know, to think of people who are original rather than people who are reconstituting things in an original way. That's a distinction. And I try to think of people that I could make a genuine argument for saying, no, that hadn't been done before. It wasn't just a rebuild in an exciting way. It was built from the ground up. That success conflated with influence. So she may well have got her influence from a folk singer who sang something similar like that.

And that's sort of where music and art is, though, isn't it? It copies and takes in bubbles over. So it's very difficult to say somebody is truly original. They may not have got success with it, and that's the difference. I do think we're kind of nudging something when you say you couldn't imagine it being, I mean, when you say Lynchian,

you can't imagine anyone, you know you're in a Lynch film fairly quickly. I think you know you're reading Blake. I think you know that you you know i don't think anybody could have written angela in the way that angela carter many people have tried i don't think that that that is a kind of or sun ra you know it's it's a um you know we haven't talked about beau we haven't talked about miles davis we haven't talked about those artists who are continually reinventing themselves it's it's um it's i suppose there's two ways there's

either you have your own idiom or you just keep changing that idiom and changing it and changing continually reinventing themselves it's it's um it's i suppose there's two ways there's either you have your own idiom or you just keep changing that idiom and changing it and changing it and changing it there must be a lot of people who just aren't successful and because we can't understand it a bit like the music that was recorded like like van gogh yeah we do we just don't understand it now or blake for a long time. Yeah, definitely. I mean, the process of when a new idea appears and there's a resistance to it, because as I say, we don't have a name for it. We can't have a framework to understand it.

There's no sort of context for it. It does need sort of a group of supporters. It does need a sort of a tribe sort of build around it it's like the culture it's like the immune system it doesn't want new things coming into it because they might be bad so it sort of tries to sort of fight them off uh and it needs new things need to sort of prove their worth almost they're initially just rejected and dismissed um but if there's something there there's something there then enough people will sort of form around it and become cheerleaders and advance it and give it

a framework give it a way of thinking about it and so that eventually it can enter the bloodstream of the culture and enrich everyone uh and just have a name and become normal and then and we just accept it as part of part of how things are after eventually that's the sort of process of it well let's hear a recording now to take us out the main chat let's hear a recording of um william blake no not william blake i'm afraid not let's hear a recording from steve aylitt to take out. So as well as a secret history of where and when certain ideas first appeared in art, science and philosophy, heart of the original is a creativity manual and a good bit of satire. It's a book that behaves like a liquid but explodes like a solid.

I'm Steve Aylit and if you go to unbound.co.uk We'll explore this crunchy terrain together, sometimes holding hands, sometimes pointedly ignoring each other and covetously guarding our scarce supplies of Kendall mint cake. Join me. Brilliant. So, okay, now it's time for us to return to our own lives ready to dive into fizzing pools of rediscovered self-respect huge thanks to john for having the chops to choose this book to nikki birch for making it work in four oral dimensions and to unbound for pelting us with the angry finches i'd like to thank steve alip for helping us deliver an episode which may or may not be a parody of a normal episode of Backlisted. I don't think any of us know. God, I loved it.

You can download all 142 previous episodes, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website, backlisted.fm. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook and now in sound and pictures on Instagram too. you can also show your love directly by supporting our patreon at patreon dot com forward slash backlisted we aim to survive without paid for advertising so your generosity helps us do that all patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early and for considerably less than you'd make betting on a man wrestling with a live skeleton, lot listeners get two extra lot-listed a month,

our version of an island where we three own the only taxi, and open the lush jungle of our hearts to share the sights, sounds and words that rain down on us. Lot listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. And this week's batch are... Maserali? I'm going to say Maserali, do you think, John? Yeah, I reckon. of our thanks and appreciation. And this week's batch are Mazarali. I'm going to say Mazarali, do you think, John? Yeah, I reckon.

Mazarali. Let me know if I got that wrong. Mazarali. Suzanne Justine. Sam Wigglesworth. Matthew Beattie. Caroline Mann. Before I hand over to John Mitchinson,

let me ask John Higgs, is there anything else you wish to say on the topic of Heart of the Original, Steve Aylit, originality, or anything else? I've just, well, got to leave the last words to Steve Aylit. My favourite sentence from the entire book is not mentioned by any of you in all of that, which I'm shocked by. I thought you'd have all leapt on it, so it gives me an excuse to read it out. But thanks for doing this.

I've really enjoyed this. It was just a great time. My favourite sentence from the book is, it's less disturbing to have a spider climb into your mouth than to have one climb out. Oh, thank you. On that brilliant note, we have to go. That's all, folks.

Thank you for listening and for your support. We'll be back in a fortnight. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted which is Andy, me and Nicky

talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight