YouSaid · the spoken record

Katherine Rundell

lines on the record: 81
first: 2023-01-11
most recent: 2023-01-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yes, it is in some moments I think it is another one, a little like the fairy queen that requires your patience, that requires you to do something to take the edge off your panic at the boredom that will ensue, and for some people that will be resignation, I'm sure for some people that will be, I don't know, alcohol for some people, it will be a kind of exhaustedness, but something that will allow you to give in to being quite substantially bored on the grounds that it will slow down the beat of your heart and it will force your imagination to grapple with something slower and broader. The way that Spencer talks about fashioning his ideal reader, the texts tell you how to read them.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, that's really interesting. How do you approach the Book of Common Prayer, which is, as I agree, not an obviously galvanic text, particularly if you don't happen to believe in Christianity? I think you would have to remember what it was intended to do, the kind of hope and comfort it was intended to give, and you would have to remember the many, many battles that were fought to have it, and that, I think, might make it feel alive.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But wildly underrated, the Book of Common Prayer is more beautiful, I think, than we gravit credit for. And again, I think it's cadences have informed a lot of the poetry that we hold dear. I don't think we would have Seamus Heaney without the rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh very highly because of course that is the version that infuses much of the work I love most, not just obviously done and Shakespeare but also Philip Pullman talks about being an atheist but a King James atheist, someone who was informed by the language of the King James Bible”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, it would be really important to me that somebody had understood that it matters far or as much or far more the way you say the thing as what you say because the thing you want to say is probably a very similar thing that everyone else wants to say, you know, love, love my season, patience, courage, valiance, attention. But there are only some people who have found a way to say those things with such flair and originality that they cut through your interlocutors complacent inattention and cut through time, cut through space, cut through cultural difference and grab you by the wrist. So it would be a sense that somebody understood you are going to have to find a new and better way to say this.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The difficulty with that is your asking an English person that which requires me to accept that I would look for someone like myself I wouldn't, I would look for someone different and better I can't deal with a question that presupposes assuming myself to have excellence but if I were looking for excellence”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My publishers wouldn't let me. I have asked my children's publishers and they say no, you need to write your next book you can't just keep rewriting your past text. Only Henry James.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's also the most frustrating, the fact that I'm not allowed to do that, that they don't allow you to rewrite your books four years later. If they would let us do that, I know it would cause absolute havoc both the reading and writing populations of the world. But my great dream would be to be allowed to look back at super infinite in about three years time, and you know, I think there are already some adverbs that annoy me. I would go back and take them out.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is commercial publishing in my case, there is a great deal that I love. I mean, truthfully, it's the necessity of deadlines. I have never handed in a book without it being clawed from my hands, because I always want to do one last go, and I would love there to be an extra four months built into it so that when it looks like a book, I'm allowed to read it like it's a book, and then make the changes that I would like to make, but I realise that that would be ruinous for the publishing industry.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my mind I think it's that John Dunn's sense of the capacity of language to be something that you shake out of the confines of the day and use in a way that as much as possible fits the rhythms of your own imagination, that he insisted on the necessity of building your own language. I think that I grew up with that and it is why my novels are often referred to as idiosyncratic and literary, that I want language that belongs to me, so I think they refer to each other in that way. Also just, I think a love of poetry. He taught me to love poetry and other poetry as well as his, and I think that probably affects my prose. I think they would note that most of the novels have a John Dunn joke in them, and that's a very obvious through line.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to write a children's book that I am truly proud of, and I'll keep going until that happens. So I'm currently writing a children's novel that I've been working on for five years, and I think I might end up proud of it by the end. I'm not yet. So I think that's what my version of success would look like, something that I didn't read and wince. So that, I think, is my next step.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It used to be something that I would do in a way to offer rich detail and the plots that I was doing. I think that I will stay more put these days, in part because of fears of the burning world and what air travel does to that, and in part a sense that I might be at a period of my life when rhythm and a kind of structure might be valuable, I get much more tired than I used to. The thing about doing a cartwheel every day, that was true when I was 25, but it's not true now I'm 35.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly its landscape is often compared by people from places like Texas or places like South Africa. They often say that it feels the same sort of prairie feel to it.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I would tell them first you need to go to Norfolk, a place that is underrated in its beauties. There's a place called Stiffke, where Rachel Cusk, the novelist used to live. And if you weighed out, it starts to look like you could film sort of Martian like films and indeed several extraterrestrial films have been filmed on that beach. If you go right to the sea, there's a colony of seals who will come to greet you and that feels faintly like being churched.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I think best would be the fact that it is a mix of old and young, often it's thought of as a place largely populated by older white men, but in fact a huge proportion of the fellows are under forty. The thing that I loved about it, sort of coming of age there, I was made a fellow at twenty one was that you would come down to dinner and you would meet people who were unabashedly keen to talk about their work in terms that were not compromising in detail or technicality or passion. And that was a brilliant coming of age. The least good thing we are still struggling with both the overwhelming whiteness and the overwhelming maleness of the place because its inheritance, they only had women in 1980 and that does still show.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I still love Dostaevsky, but I can't read Dickens anymore. I used to be wildly in love with the atmospheres that he conjured of London and smoke and the smog, but I now find very vividly visible the fact that he was getting paid per word.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, in that case, Madame Bovary, which I remember reading as a teenager, and feeling like it kicked the knees from under me was kind of awe at the speed and richness and occasional cruelty and generosity of that narrative, but also Kafka. I have a picture book called My First Kafka, which is a children's book retelling. I didn't write it. I just read it of metamorphosis. And now I give them to all the toddlers I know. I think they need to start young.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kafka was going to be the obvious one that I would say. I was wondering if Madame Bovary counts as a novel of ideas what you think.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly my Irish friends have a form of linguistic dexterity that a lot of my English friends lack. And of course the stereotype that the Irish are witty, I think although my Irish friends find it profoundly annoying, does still push them towards enhancing that stereotype and they are all very funny.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure I really have enough knowledge about that, certainly I think my Irish friends have a deep well of folk stories that they were given in a kind of cohesive body in a way that perhaps English children are not, but I'm not sure about the linguistic portion. What do you think”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it might be that people want to keep their writing as a form of joy and delight, especially if it's not something they do professionally, and that adding those kind of sharp-edged incentives will remove the feeling of luxury that writing often has that it's a luxury to spend time with the imagination.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I no longer need to do it with quite such urgency. A PhD is the hardest form of writing, I think, in terms of galvanizing yourself into wanting to do it.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I no longer really have one when I was younger I used to have many in a bid myself meet deadlines that were broadly my own imagining. I would when writing my PhD have a packed with a friend that if we didn't do the requisite number of words usually a thousand words a day of our doctoral thesis we had to give a hundred pounds to a donkey sanctuary and it was chosen on the grounds that it wasn't harmful to give that money to a donkey sanctuary but it also wasn't particularly beneficial because we picked the richest donkey sanctuary in England where they're kind of bathing in asses milk and covered in diamonds and so you couldn't tell yourself that it was a good but it wouldn't do harm if we screwed up so we wouldn't for instance give money to the British National Party or something like that and it really does work I didn't want the donkeys to have my money I only failed once”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The early stage where there is no imperative toward structural cohesion and you can just write scenes that seem to you vivid and funny and interesting and joyful, and then later when you have to make it coherent where the narrative itself is a form of metaphor, that bits harder and less fun.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same people who stock selfridges with little scorpions and whiskey, there's a big market for that kind of thing, it turns out. I was surprised.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not delicious. I sort of hoped it would be because some children I met in the Amazon rainforest had told me that it was, but I think there's a very real difference between fresh and canned tarantula, and my tarantula was from a canned.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would not be surprised if they did because the forms that that kind of unruly quality takes, mostly spending a huge amount of time outside, might give you a more urgent sense of the necessity of outside, and that might be something that ongoing elites are going to need to hold hard and fast at the center of all their thoughts.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would question the terms of that question because I'm not sure that many people with free unruly childhoods become elites, and I wouldn't class myself as one.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I think it was profoundly lucky to grow up in Zimbabwe I grew up with parents who allowed me an enormous amount of freedom and I don't know if they would have done that now. But we were allowed to vanish for the day without adult supervision me and my siblings and friends and the shining quality of that, of childhood time even quite young, say ten or eleven, spent entirely without the presence of adults, the freeing quality that gives your imagination, I imagine, has something to do with the fact that I became a children's writer.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing I find most interesting would be the radical honesty that he has that you will find in so few other sermons of the time about the difficulty of finding God. So he is a man who writes often with certainty about the idea of reaching the infinite, the divine, that he also writes this famous passage where he says I summon God and my angels, and when God and the angels are there I neglect them for I forget what it is the sound of a carriage, a straw under my knee, a thought, a chimera, a nothing and everything and that sense that even though he had a brain that could control incredibly rigorous poetry, he did not have a brain that would control itself in prayer, and he offered that to his congregation as a vulnerability and a piece of honesty that so few sermonizers of the time who thought of themselves”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, of course, the obvious answer would be not at all because Johnson loathed Dunn and felt that there was something in Dun that was genuinely slightly dangerous because Johnson's vision of poetry still leaned towards the fashion of thinking of it as a monovocal exercise that there was a correct form of poetry, that its correctness was something to be prized, and that the chipping away at that correctness would lead to social breakdown. I think he was wrong about that, but nonetheless remain grateful to him because he did read Dunn and he did think about Dunn. And as such, even if he didn't intend to, kept him alive.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's sadly true that if you were to turn to John Dunn to find images of his lovers and specifically of his wife Anne Dunn who he met when she was very young, fourteen and they married when she was seventeen, you will find no physical descriptor. You will find no sense of whether she was curvy or slim or large or tall but what you will have is an understanding of what it is that physical beauty does to the person witnessing it. I think the poems are more about him looking at her than they are about her. They're more about his startlement and embracing and wariness and bitchiness about love than they are about the specific bodily facts of the women he was with.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“fracturing and human strangeness. You know, he was writing at a time when people were offering a profoundly coherent vision of love, you know, Walter Riley writing about Queen Elizabeth as the rose, or Philip Sidney, constantly iterating this image of, you know, the woman as the white dove. Her shoulders are two white doves and her cheeks are two white doves. And John Dunn stood up in the centre of that fashion and said, no, you are stranger than that, and you deserve poetry that is stranger than that. You deserve poetry that uses the images of fleas and sucking fish and suns rising and compasses to express the vertiginous and labyrinthine quality of human desire, and I don't think that T.S. Elliot had a mindset at the time to recognize that.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really interesting question because, of course, usually John Dunn is rather usually TS Elliot is given the credit of rediscovering John Dunn after the Victorian period in which his fashion ability had really waned. I think he got a lot right about John Dunn when he says he's trying to picture in John Dunn somebody for whom, you know, every element of his life modifies his sensibility that he is able to couple religion and body and the smell of a rose and the cooking of dinner into one great hole. That, I think he got right. I think what he got wrong was he did not accentuate the strangeness of John Dunn. I think he offered to us a John Dunn who was trying to make things whole. But of course, John Dunn's poetry often carries with it a beautiful salute to human”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The railway children is the story of some children whose father has been falsely accused and taken away and they go to live by a railway. And at the end there is a moment in which the young girl, the oldest of the children, who has had to step into the adult world of secret keeping and adult care sees her father return to her and she runs into his arms and she says, oh daddy my daddy. And in that moment she is allowed to return to childhood. And it's a staggering moment of filmmaking. It's so beautiful”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should, of course, get boys to read more stories about girls, the data constantly reports that boys are by and large reading stories about boys and girls are by and large reading stories about both genders. There is a difficulty that there is a self-fulfilling prophecy in saying boys don't read books about girls and I don't know how”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We now compete, of course, with so many other forms of entertainment, and it is a form of entertainment that offers your insatiable hunger for being wooed absolute constant satiety, and so what we are trying to offer to children something slower and richer and ultimately you would hope punchier is vastly harder to sell to”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because Adamantine was coming at a peak moment in the narrative. It was the key showdown between a child and a gangster figure. And I didn't want anything that would slow children. But my general stance is with children's writing you can use pretty much any vocabulary you want because they will either guess or step over or find out the word, and it rarely puts children off as much as we worry that it will.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think I might have had a wariness of the sort of dramatic shifts. I might have been anxious about what might come. But then, again, we would have been completely misplaced.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Belgium probably accurately rated. I am aware that because I spent my teenage years there have an entirely unjustified fury against it and therefore all of my books have one joke against Belgium. But I hope Belgium is strong enough as a nation not to take it too personally.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bear baiting definitely overrated I just don't believe it can have been that exciting, I assume it was partly just faux demure people didn't have much to do, but the theatre, even though madly rated in Britain with gold, still underrated because of what came before, of how staggeringly new it was.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they don't get enough credit for the fact that over long distances they are faster than you say in bolt. So I think we have underrated that.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overrated because we have given him such credit for so many things he didn't do, he didn't bring back the potato that's nonsense.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think she's a writer's writer who is somebody who believed that children should never be spoken down to, and I think a lot of her children's fiction is so weird and so full of the furies and anxieties that are extending from childhood into adulthood that those books would also read as great texts for adults. The obvious one being maybe something like Fire and Hemlock or House Moving Castle.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underrated only because infinite estimation is what she deserves, and therefore no matter how high her stock, it will always be too low.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underrated Because he is no longer red. I think the estimation we hold him in is correct, but nobody reads him, and people should put aside about a week of their lives and read the fairy queen. It's painful, but it's worth it when you come out the other side.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I live very close to a UK bookshop called Primrose Hill Books, which is very close to where Dody Smith lived, the woman who wrote 101 Dalmatians and I Capture the Castle, and it's both beautiful and in the sight of Dody Smith's house.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's certainly true that the demographics of it might well not have the impact that we think it would because children's idealism would be very much tampered by the fact that they would be voting in accord with their parents. But then would they? Would children vote the way that their parents told them to? I don't know. Maybe they wouldn't. I frequently did things my parents told me not to do. Perhaps I would also have voted against their wishes, although I actually vote according to their wishes, you know, what they taught me I still believe.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a very brilliant long read. It's in The New Yorker by someone arguing that six-year-olds should have the vote, and it's very impressive in its sweep of the objections. In England, I would like to lower the voting age to sixteen because I stand quite far to the left of centre, and the youth, of course, and askew more left, and currently Britain skews right.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, to an extent it's impossible because it is the freshness of new discovery that children almost every scene they read feels to them unlike anything they have so few collocates. But my argument I wrote a book why you should read children's books even though you are so old and wise haven't you very kindly have? And my argument would be that reading books intended for people in the process of early discovery can remind you, if not what it feels like, then something adjacent enough to that to remember that it existed, and therefore it might give you a kind of galvanic push toward seeking out other versions of that feeling of discovery. Because of course, although we feel like our discovery time has largely passed, that's fake. That's not real. Your discovery time has not passed. There are still astonishments that await you.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source